![]() In “Eulogy,” Apess constructively reworked the contemporary historical understanding by proposing his own nation-building heritage. Apess did fight to restore Native Americans to their place, both geographically and politically. Apess, however, criticized the old project in order to offer up a revised one. Nevertheless, there were some native born Americans who recognized the mythical portions of the new national history.īecause of the jeremiad of Apess’s preaching and lecturing it becomes tempting to read Apess as a strident voice for some sort of innovative Indian Nationalism. He, a foreigner, was convinced of the veracity of this new national narrative. 3 Tocqueville’s commentary on America demonstrates how this new history was gaining traction. As Fea makes clear in his work, America was not founded as a Christian nation the attempted construction of such a nation was advanced during the early Republic by evangelicals (, pp. ![]() Mark Noll, John Fea, George Marsden, George McKenna, and Nathan Hatch are a few historians who have revealed the building process behind America as a Christian nation. Taken together, these four pillars form the backbone of Christian nationalism in the early Republic. The success of these three pillars was credited to and codified in the fourth pillar: Divine Providence guiding the nation (, p. Working their same interpretive magic on America’s heritage of religious and political liberty, second-generation Americans identified the third pillar, American common law tradition, as having emerged from Christian principles. The second pillar was constructed by the Christian nationalist movement through the composition of countless hagiographies of the supposedly great Christian leaders of the newly-founded nation, the Founding Fathers. 220–21).Īs historian Steven Green has recently explained, the establishment in the early Republic of the Pilgrims as American’s religious forbearers forms the first of what may be termed the four key pillars of Christian nationalism. Outspoken Christian nationalists like Justice Joseph Story joined Tocqueville in solidifying the Pilgrims and the Puritans as the foundation of religious and political liberty present in antebellum America (, pp. As a cultural and political project emanating from the second Great Awakening, as well as the fears of political division, numbers of lettered men and women were “reinventing” the United States as a Christian nation 1. By highlighting this democratic national heritage established in Protestant faith, Tocqueville illuminated one aspect of a greater early Republic campaign to reimagine colonial and revolutionary American history. Tocqueville identified the settlement of New England by the Pilgrims and Puritans in the 1620s as demarcating the beginning of a social trend toward democracy. In the opening chapters of his monumental work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed how “the social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic this was its character at the foundation of the colonies, and it is still more strongly marked at the present day” (, p. This essay concludes that Apess should be read as advancing his own revised form of Christian nationalism his plan for the future of America and national unity embraced establishing a more perfect Christian union. ![]() Apess’s solutions actually rest on revising and enforcing, not destroying, the main components of Christian nationalism. Analyzing Apess’s critiques and his proposed solutions in depth, however, shows that his main problem rests with faulty implementation of genuinely good ideals. Apess is fiery in his critique of Anglo American society and religion he questions the integrity of Christians who treat Native Americans with a double standard. Extensive readings of Apess’s works, scholarship on all aspects of Apess’s life, and analyses of Christian nationalism during the early Republic initially revealed severe conflict. This essay began by inquiring into Apess’s relationship with the Christian nationalism of his day. Pequot Native and Methodist Minister William Apess has received growing recognition among historians as a unique voice for Native Americans-and minorities in general-during the early Republic.
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