Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination

by Robert H. Abzug

In the forty years before the Civil War, America was awash in political and social reform movements. Abolitionists stormed against the cruelties of slavery. Temperance zealots hounded producers and consumers of strong drink. Sabbatarians fought to make Sunday an officially recognized sacred day. Woman's rights activists proclaimed the case for sexual equality. This colorful text brilliantly reassesses the religious roots of these antebellum reform movements through a series of penetrating profiles of key men and women who sought to remake their worlds in sacred terms. Arguing that we cannot understand American reform movements unless we understand the sacred significance reformers bestowed on the worldly arenas of politics, society, and the economy, Abzug presents these men and women in their own words, placing their cherished ideals and their often heated squabbles within the context of their millennial and sometimes apocalyptic sense of America's role in the cosmic drama.
Tracing the lasting impact of what began as a peculiarly Protestant, largely New England, style of social action on the uniquely American traditions of activism that flourish today, Cosmos Crumbling is invaluable for helping students of American and religious history understand the myriad ways in which the quest for enlightenment and salvation continues to shape American politics.

Genres: History, Religion, American History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 1994

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work on the role of religion in the nineteenth century American reform movements. Abzug refuses to relegate religion to the periphery as an authentic driving motive in American public life, unlike other historians, who, according to Abzug, engage in “psychological reductionism” by attributing movements to angst or existential dread.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cosmos Crumbling is an interesting study of religion and reform in the early 19th Century US. Abzug's main point is that religious understandings of the cosmos and the moral order of the universe were central to the views and actions of temperance, health, Sabbatarian, and anti-slavery reformers. In some cases, profound religious experiences corresponded with conversion to a cause such as anti-slavery. In other cases, reformers reimagined religious texts and ideas to support their positions on reform. For example, the Grimke sisters examined the Bible and concluded that God had made man and woman equal in moral responsibility, legitimating their quest to assert women's roles in the abolition movement. Finally, many reformers put political and social issues in terms of a cosmic war. Temperance reformers did this to reinforce their authoritarian tendencies, but Garrison formulated slavery as the national sin which had to be purged before God punished America with a race war. Putting things in terms of a cosmic war between good and evil alienated some, but rallied many passionate supporters to these causes. This framework of sin and punishment recalled the Puritan jeremiad and framed the way many Americans wrestled with the suffering of the Ciivl War. Strangely enough, behavioral psychologists have found recently that such appeals to emotion and grand moral visions are often more effective than appeals to self-interest or rationality. On the other hand, they risk fostering radicalism and division within the movements.

The figures who emerge most starkly from this book are William Lloyd Garrison and the Grimke sisters. I frankly found both of them to be inspirational and admirable figures, if a bit nuts. Garrison's writing on slavery is absolutely amazing, and his moral stance clear and uncompromising. He envisioned America as a bad place because of its accommodation of slavery and called out the gap between its professed values and the reality of slavery. The Grimke sisters were equally admirable for seeing through the circumstances of their upbringing to embrace both women's rights and abolitionism. It's always a bit of a mystery as to why some people rise above the moral paradigms of their times. Abzug helps us understand these outliers by linking their transformations to their radical reconsiderations of the cosmos and religion.

[Kristi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abzug examines the religious roots of antebellum reform, focusing on intellectual elites, primarily in the context of the Protestant north-east. With an interest in how ritual and symbols reshaped everyday life, many of the reforms implicated the physical body. Beginning with Benjamin Rush, and moving temperance as liberation from alcoholic slavery (epitomized by reformers like Lyman Beecher and Timothy Dwight), to the economic boycotts of Sabbatarianism (challenged by pluralism), the manual labor movement, abolition, dietary and sexual reform, and, finally, women’s rights. It seems that Abzug was hinting at the fracturing of a Protestant cosmos into social reformism, but the book ends rather abruptly, without benefit of a synthesizing conclusion, which undermines any narrative cohesion and renders any argument ineffectual.