Early American Literature

When I teach Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, students often respond with a cynical decoding of Rowlandson's words: Rowlandson invokes a biblical phrase at every turn of her captivity, they argue, in order to justify her own selfish interests. She does not believe what she is saying, they insist; she only uses religion to make herself look good, particularly in relation to her Native American captors. At this point, I ask the students to engage in a thought experiment: imagine, for a moment, that there is no outside to religion. Rowlandson, I suggest, inhabits Puritanism as a kind of ether, outside of which she cannot conceive of existing in any coherent way. Certainly she can and does use the resources offered to her by Puritanism as a means to help herself live, but there is no alternative to Puritanism for her, only life lived through it. For students who understand religion as a choice, and a choice from which one may just as well demur altogether as not, this thought experiment has something of the fantastic about it. The strangeness of such an all-encompassing religious faith—a faith that requires little faith because it is simply a fact of life, a faith that is a great faith because it determines everything—is worth pausing over.

The essays in this special issue partake in an effort to use religion as a means of making strange key premises, narratives, and methodologies in the field of early American literary studies. They marshal the force of religion as a category-disturbing category to reexamine fixed lines of scholarship in the field. In the introduction to the issue, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine S. Murison stress the need to understand the methodological force of a focus on religion with respect to the field of early American literary studies; specifically, they argue that a focus on religion will enable new framings and new avenues of thought for the field as a whole. As such, Stein and Murison do not view religion as a subset of early American literary studies (as a content category), but as a historically determined framework that may, or may not, shift the ground of the field altogether when we look closely at it. [End Page 193]

Why should religion have this tectonic force attached to it? Why is religion so potentially unsettling or paradigm-shifting for scholars working in early American studies? I would argue that the answer lies in the relation between religion and global geopolitics. Because we live in a world shaped by a Westphalian imaginary, we conceive of a globe mapped in terms of the geopolitical category of the sovereign nation state; most any contemporary map of the world will demonstrate as much—Brazil is yellow, South Africa green, Malaysia orange—the entirety of the globe is carved into discrete, color-coded nations. The Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648 between the warring crowned heads of Europe, is normatively taken as the origin point of this geopolitical order, one in which nation states agree to sustain a balance of power based on a principle of independent territorial sovereignty. This Westphalian order is now cited in the language of international politics as the guiding principle of state sovereignty that underwrites, for instance, United Nations policies of noninterventionism and multilateralism.¹ However, I use the term Westphalian imaginary here to point to the extent to which this geopolitics is an epistemic fiction—a story of global import that catches at some, but by no means all, of what occurs on the grounds of the geopolitical. Significantly, moreover, the actual Treaty of Westphalia included another important shift in world politics that tends to disappear from current references to the Westphalian order—namely, the eradication of religion as a suprastate authority. From 1648 forward, the signatory states of the treaty were able to institute religions of their choice, without such an act being considered a declaration of war against the Catholic Church. In effect, then, the Treaty of Westphalia sought to replace an earlier map of the world on which religion, rather than the sovereign state, served as the organizing...