Abstract
In Chapter 2, Cortés describes Brownson’s early biographical and religious struggles in Vermont, as well as his conversion to the Christian Connection in the context of the Second Great Awakening (1800–1830). The chapter then proceeds to chronicle Brownson’s relocation to New York and subsequent adoption of Universalism in the midst of religious confusion. After experimenting with Presbyterianism for a short time, Brownson returns to Universalism, becoming a minister in 1826. The chapter concludes by noting Brownson’s marriage to Sally Healy and their subsequent geographic mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
P. Jeffrey Potash, Vermont’s Burned-Over District: Patterns of Community Development and Religious Activity, 1761–1850 (New York: Carlson, 1991), 39.
- 2.
Ibid., 48.
- 3.
Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 2.
- 4.
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 161.
- 5.
For an extensive list of the typical contents of family libraries, see ibid., 64–67.
- 6.
Ibid., 130.
- 7.
For a brief synopsis of this religious movement, see David Millard, ‘History of the Christians, or Christian Connection,’ in John Winebrenner, ed., History of All the Religious Denominations in the United States (Pennsylvania: John Winebrenner, 1848), 164–170.
- 8.
Quoted in Carey, Orestes Brownson, 6–7.
- 9.
Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America: 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic, 1977), 64. The first psychological portraits of conversion emphasized the importance of youth. See Edwin D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911).
- 10.
Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (New York: Octagon, 1950), 6.
- 11.
Potash, Vermont’s Burned-Over District, 145.
- 12.
Quoted in Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 64.
- 13.
Orestes Brownson, The Convert; Or, Leaves from My Experience (New York: E.J. Sadlier, 1876; originally 1857), 8–9.
- 14.
Quoted in Richard T. Hughes & C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875 (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008), 136.
- 15.
Orestes Brownson to Rev. Edward Turner, July 17, 1834, Orestes Brownson Papers, University of Notre Dame Archives (hereafter ND archives). Brownson was here referring to the theological concept of restoration—union with God after death.
- 16.
In the 1820s, the Universalist confession was in the throes of a major crisis. See Peter Hughes, ‘The Restorationist Controversy: Its Origin and First Phase, 1801–1824,’ Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 27 (2000): 1–53; Peter Hughes, ‘The Second Phase of the Restorationist Controversy: Disciplinary Crisis and Schism, 1824–1831,’ Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 28 (2001): 28–91.
- 17.
Brownson, Convert, 13.
- 18.
Hatch, Democratization of Christianity, 169.
- 19.
See, for example, Orestes Brownson, ‘A Notebook of Reflections (1822–1825),’ February 28, 1823, Orestes Brownson Papers, ND archives.
- 20.
A thorough study of Brownson’s journal is supplied by William J. Gilmore, ‘Orestes Brownson and New England Religious Culture, 1803–1827’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1971).
- 21.
Quoted in Carey, Orestes Brownson, 11.
- 22.
Ibid., 13.
- 23.
Brownson’s mobility was consistent with a transient New York population. See Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004; originally 1978), passim. Also, see the discussion of transience in Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, eds., The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 102–130.
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Cortés, Á. (2017). An Age of ‘Crisis and Discontinuity’: Brownson’s Early Religious Confusion and Mobility. In: Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace. Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51877-0_2
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