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Spreading the Puritan Inheritance: The Machinery of Exceptionalist Belief Spreading the Puritan Inheritance: The Machinery of Exceptionalist Belief
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Identity Formation and Moral Reform Identity Formation and Moral Reform
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The Limits of Christian Republicanism The Limits of Christian Republicanism
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4 Lyman Beecher, Personal Identity, and the Christian Republic
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Published:December 2021
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Abstract
This chapter focuses on the voluntary civil society developments molding the American republic through voluntary association. It pays particular attention to the role of the first mass moral reform movement, the temperance societies, and to the evangelical reform leadership of Lyman Beecher who articulated the idea of a Christianized republic. It emphasizes how exceptionalism was made through self-activity, assisted by a providentialist interpretation of individual action. This making of exceptionalism highlights the key role of individual agency buttressed by Arminian doctrines of personal responsibility for conversion. This process entailed a coalescence of personal and national identity formation. Evangelical reform and its connections to the so-called Benevolent Empire are assessed as integral to the machinery of this self-making exceptionalism, including the creation of a national imaginary presented by national-level reform as an aggregation of individual and local reform; the chapter also discusses the limits to evangelical leadership of a Christian republic represented in the challenges of Catholicism, secularism, and minority sectarianism to Northeastern Christian dominance through moral reform organizations.
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