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Protestant Relics in Early America

Online ISBN:
9780197670583
Print ISBN:
9780197669709
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Protestant Relics in Early America

Published online:
25 April 2025
Published in print:
13 June 2025
Online ISBN:
9780197670583
Print ISBN:
9780197669709
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Protestant Relics in Early America upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. It chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered on collecting the supernatural memory objects of their dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends from the 1740s to 1860s. These objects materialized the real physical presences God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth. American Protestants of nearly all denominations and all walks of life—including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, writers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people—sought embodied, supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics from the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, postmortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the ordinary dead became Protestant relics. Protestant relic practices were so pervasive in early America that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women’s education to Protestant–Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in this life and afterlife. In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, the book demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather diminished embodied presence. Moreover, it reveals how the modern historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the early American Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down.

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