released 7/4/2025

Thomas Albert Howard, author of God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford, 2013), discusses European perspectives of eighteenth-century American religious life. Howard suggests that for many American writers and thinkers, Alexis de Tocqueville is the be-all and end-all of European observers of the relation between American religious and public life. However, to get at and understand some of the darker and more negative opinions of American public life, Howard notes that other European sources may prove to be more fruitful. Philip Schaff was one of those sources who, from a Protestant perspective, noticed some of the dangers and problems with religious life in America. For many Europeans, the exuberant and untrammeled sort of freedom on display in America was disconcerting. For example, while they paid far greater attention to the industrial and French revolutions in their immediate vicinity, the German Romantics were also disturbed by the lack of idealism that seemed to them a consequence of the highly-practical and commercial orientation of Americans. As time went on, European thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment gradually came to focus on the recalcitrance of American religiosity, which seemed an aberration with respect to what they saw as a historically normative process of secularization. This interview was originally published on Volume 108 of the Journal.

21 minutes

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