Studies in American Fiction

The secularization thesis is dead. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman

As Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman jocularly point out in their reference to A Christmas Carol, for all the claims that we need no longer attend to the secularization thesis, like Jacob Marley's ghost, it refuses to die, haunting American literary studies even though there is "no doubt" that we have moved beyond its parameters. This helps explain why many scholars continue to frame Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel The Minister's Wooing (1859) as a critique of Calvinism and Stowe herself as an anti-Calvinist. Critics such as Nancy Lusignan Schultz, John Gatta, and Joseph Helminski—whose articles on The Minister's Wooing span a swath of twenty years that, ironically, saw the rise of postsecularism—all invoke the secularization thesis when they argue that Stowe's novel moves Calvinist doctrine away from strict Puritan ideology and toward a softened, "feminized" (i.e., less legitimate) version of itself. Even scholars who rightly differentiate the secular from concepts like secularism and secularization make this argument, such as Kristin Wilkes, who maintains that "it is possible for a novel to be both fully secular and fully religious" but also claims that Stowe used The Minister's Wooing to criticize and move away from the Edwardsian and Hopkinsian version of Calvinism in favor of her own experiential and sentimental version.¹ From all angles, Stowe's novel seems irrevocably tied to the secularization thesis's progressive narrative that, in the United States, dogma-heavy religion gave way to sympathetic secularity over the course of the nineteenth century. [End Page 151]

To be sure, Stowe puts a maternal, feminine, and domestic face on Calvinism in The Minister's Wooing that places it firmly within the parameters of the secular, or worldly. Her arguments that religion should pervade one's everyday life and that it is essential to balance one's theology with one's innate human nature prove as much. However, I find that many critics overestimate The Minister's Wooing's role in the supposed secularization of Calvinism due to a sweeping application of the term "secular," overreliance on Stowe's biography, and a continued belief that sentimentalism was the harbinger of nineteenth-century secularization.² I contend, instead, that Stowe redeems Calvinism for her nineteenth-century readers through the playful changes she makes to the genre's form and stock characters, illustrating that Calvinism makes room—and has always made room—for secular aspects of life like motherhood and fellow feeling. Indeed, when read this way The Minister's Wooing allows us to contemplate the secular outside the sticky bounds of the secularization thesis and opens new avenues for future approaches to the novel.