by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
The Erie Canal: Main Stream of American Spirituality
Jody Bottum invited me to make a guest appearance (via the web) in a class he was teaching in the “Fastterm” at Houston Baptist, and the appearance led me to go back to his book An Anxious Age and look at it simply as a pice of writing. Strong writing abounds: vivid portraits of James Pike, Avery Dulles, and William F. Buckley, among others – and a piece of interpretation he calls the Erie Canal thesis.
First he sets out the grand story of the canal’s beginnings:
The Erie Canal winds through the narrative of Protestant American history, lock after lock, from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, from the East to the West, from the world left by the American Founders to the Poster Children of today. It created the country’s original boomtowns, and its successful land speculators helped fund generations of American public life, even while the easier travel the rail offered – ten days from New York City to Buffalo – expanded the nation, drawing American west from the Atlantic coast.
Next comes the canal’s first transformative effects on American religion, beginning with the Scots-Irish Orange Protestants it brought across New York state:
One could even make the case that the opening of the canal in 1825 cause the expansion of religious feeling into what became the Second Great Awakening. At the very least, threading its way through what came to be called the burned-over district, the Erie Canal surely watered the growth of that awakening. The tale of American spirituality, the stream of our essentially Protestant history, proves to be a tale set much more accurately in Rochester than in Boston – a story, particularly after the Civil War, much more clearly about Upstate New York than about old New England in the aftermath of the long-departed Puritans.
He then follows this “strange and vibrant Protestant progression” along the canal out “into the wilds of New York State” – through the Mormons, the Millerites (later the Seventh-Day Adventists), the Shakers, the Skaneatales and Oneida utopian communities, the women’s suffragists of Seneca Falls … all the way to Christoper Lasch, who identified the still-strong currents of American Protestantism in our society in the Eighties and Nineties from his position as an historian at the University of Rochester.
From Lasch Bottum takes the impulse to see the legacy of American Protestantism, however diminished, as an interpretive key to the age:
Call it the Erie Canal thesis of American history: We cannot understand the flow of American history unless we have a sense of the successes and failures of American Protestant religion. Every plausible social, cultural, and political account of history must trace this mainstream of national experience. And every attempt to explore the condition of the nation today – to explain how we live now – must do the same: recognizing that our shared understanding of social classes, moral feelings, political possibilities, and methods of education continues to be shaped by the long spiritual journey from pilgrims to post-Protestants, from East to West, from past to present.
I think Jody overstates the case – all those “musts” — but as an upstate New York native (I rode my bike to Lock 7 nearly every week in my teens) I more than suspect he is on to something.
