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9780199843114

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This fascinating, original, beautifully written account deals with how ministers formulated threats of Hell and how lay people responded. We read a multitude of introspections by men and women of every race and social station, Christian and non-Christian, sometimes leading them to belief in Hell, sometimes to its rejection. Throughout, the author takes the debate over Hell seriously. Her concluding section applies her analyses to the slavery controversy and the Civil War. Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Damned Nation is damned good and its contributions are legion. We enter American labyrinths where fears of hellfire singed souls and heated political discord in the early republic. We encounter abolitionists who damned the souls of black folk in order to free their bodies. We witness leaders and laity bickering as if rehearsing the conclave of fallen angels that began John Miltons Paradise Lost. And we march into a Civil War where the destruction drove new approaches to damnation. This book signals a new and evocative voice in the realm of American religious history, one that is not afraid to entertain its dark sides. Edward J. Blum, co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. In this brilliant reassessment, Kathryn Gin Lum shows that the idea of hell, far from withering away under the weight of Enlightenment rationalism, was a fixture of the antebellum religious marketplacea doctrine calculated to win converts both through attraction and aversion. Americans took the notion of eternal hell torments with deadly seriousness, and Gin Lum reveals just how central the doctrine was. An essential and compelling account. Peter J. Thuesen, author of Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine.

Damned Nation offers worthwhile insights about the durability and usefulness of hell-talk in American meaning-making. Gin Lum gives students of US history another body of evidence for understanding the unique hybrid character of the nation, rooted in both reason and revelation... Gin Lum's book, so richly sourced, may even contribute to a better understanding of why and how our contemporary public conversations have become so raw. She teaches us readers that extreme rhetoric constitutes nothing new under the sun; she also may prompt us readers to peer beneath the edges of our own and others' cosmicized speech to see what very earthly terrain we are actually trying to defend. --Anne Blue Wills, Religion Damned Nation is a heavenly book. It is beautifully written, deeply researched, and clearly argued.... Kathryn Gin Lum meticulously examines one of the least noticed yet most pervasive and powerful forces in the culture: the conviction that people who died outside the faith would endure everlasting damnation in hell.... [R]ich with insight and scholarly achievement. --Journal of American History This fascinating, original, beautifully written account deals with how ministers formulated threats of Hell and how lay people responded. We read a multitude of introspections by men and women of every race and social station, Christian and non-Christian, sometimes leading them to belief in Hell, sometimes to its rejection. Throughout, the author takes the debate over Hell seriously. Her concluding section applies her analyses to the slavery controversy and the Civil War. --Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Damned Nation is damned good and its contributions are legion. We enter American labyrinths where fears of hellfire singed souls and heated political discord in the early republic. We encounter abolitionists who damned the souls of black folk in order to free their bodies. We witness leaders and laity bickering as if rehearsing the conclave of fallen angels that began John Milton's Paradise Lost. And we march into a Civil War where the destruction drove new approaches to damnation. This book signals a new and evocative voice in the realm of American religious history, one that is not afraid to entertain its dark sides. --Edward J. Blum, co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America In this brilliant reassessment, Kathryn Gin Lum shows that the idea of hell, far from withering away under the weight of Enlightenment rationalism, was a fixture of the antebellum religious marketplace-a doctrine calculated to win converts both through attraction and aversion. Americans took the notion of eternal hell torments with deadly seriousness, and Gin Lum reveals just how central the doctrine was. An essential and compelling account. --Peter J. Thuesen, author of Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine A superb book. --American Historical Review

Author Information

Kathryn Gin Lum is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She received her PhD in History from Yale and her BA in History from Stanford. She is an Annenberg Faculty Fellow (2012-14), is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the Department of History (by courtesy), and organizes the American Religions Workshop at Stanford.

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