ambitious and thought-provoking book that challenges common understandings of the earliest stages of American nationalism.
Carl C. Creason, Reading Religion
Haselby's elaboration of the meaningful conflict between popular frontier evangelicalism and the elite, northeastern missionizing establishment is an important contribution.
Seth Perry, Princeton University, The Journal of Religion
His research is meticulous, and the argument is ... Read morecompelling...In Haselby's careful hands... [Andrew] Jackson represents... a new Protestant nationalism that would conquer the West and soon to rise to imperialist notions of manifest destiny.
American Historical Review
The Origins of American Nationalism is a thoughtful book. It will spur further research on regionalism, nationalism, frontier religion, and northeastern missions efforts.
Journal of American History
A historian's history executed with tremendous concrete specificity about the gradual emergence of American national identity.
Journal of American Academy of Religion
[A] very fine, fresh reinterpretation...of protestant and kindred movements across the fast growing new nation... it recalls other sweeping narratives... a subtitle of 'an intellectual history'...would describe well the richness of his assessment. This is a very important and readable volume.
Church History
The Origins of American Religious Nationalism is an important contribution... it shows that westward expansion was not merely the logical result of nationalist ideas held by people such as Jefferson but...[that it] transformed nationalist thought in fundamental ways. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the religious and political histories of America's early Republic are best understood in tandem.
William and Mary Quarterly
[An] impressive and powerfully argued book [showing]... that in the decades following the American Revolution it was American Protestantism and not any sort of classical republicanism that was most important in shaping the development of American nationalism.... Haselby's argument... has a convincing power. He brings together so many loose ends and ties them up in such a neat package that the reader cannot help being persuaded to accept it whole... he has written a book to be reckoned with.
Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books
Like the works of [Perry] Miller, [Sacvan] Bercovitch, and others in their tradition, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism traces the geneses of a set of ideas, a way of thinking. Unlike those authors, Haselby writes in a precise and restrained scope, and... recognizes that discourse about 'origins' itself is a particular sort of political strategy and, indeed, at the same time a component of the ideology he is tracing. There are lots of books about religion, politics, missions, and nationalism in the early American republic. Haselby's is the best one.
Religion in American History
The Origins of American Religious Nationalism defies easy categorization. This is a clear asset: by blurring...old lines of debate, Haselby invites the historical community to reimagine the religious and intersectional struggles that quickly followed upon American independence....Origins of American Religious Nationalism provides a new narrative of faith and nationhood that will likely earn it a place on future graduate reading lists and further stimulate engagement with American Protestant history.
H-Net
...[A] provocative study...
CHOICE
In this revelatory narrative, contrasting the competing visions of itinerant frontier preachers and institutionally-based New England evangelicals, Haselby brilliantly illuminates flashpoints of political as well as religious history. While tracking the progress of American Protestantism toward nondenominationalism and missionary enterprise, he tells a suspenseful political story deeply interwoven with the success of nationalism and dynamically rife with sectional and class tensions.
Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University
This book provides a fresh, creative, and persuasive account of religion in the early American republic and the relation of religious movements to national politics. It is particularly good on the fierce competition that developed between populist revivalists on the frontier and nationally-minded Christian leaders on the eastern seaboard-and on how that competition led eventually to the national acceptance of slavery. This study is particularly important for charting the impact of religion on politics and vice versa."
Mark Noll, author of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
This important book explains how the early United States became a battleground for competing visions of Protestant Christianity. Through incisive analysis of the separation of church and state, competition for souls on the frontier, and the rise of evangelical missions, Sam Haselby shows that the question is not if America was originally a Christian nation, but if it was a nation at all, and whose Christianity would rule."
Adam Rothman, Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University
Although Haselbys story is most relevant to nineteenth-century U.S. history, the legacy of his story again with Trump in mind is far from finished ... Haselby may hold the key to explaining what so far has escaped most scholars and pundits who are still scratching their heads about the 2016 presidential contest namely, Trumps appeal to evangelical voters for whom his flagrant flaunting of Christian morality should be repugnant.
Darryl G. Hart, Politics and the American Soul
Show Less