Household Gods
The Religious Lives of the Adams Family
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Reflecting on his past, President John Adams mused that it was religion that had shaped his family's fortunes and young America's future. For the nineteenth century's first family, the Adamses of Massachusetts, the history of how they lived religion was dynamic and well-documented. Christianity supplied the language that Abigail used to interpret husband John's political setbacks. Scripture armed their son John Quincy to act as father, statesman, and antislavery advocate. Unitarianism gave Abigail's Victorian grandson, Charles Francis, the religious confidence to persevere in political battles on the Civil War homefront. By contrast, his son Henry found religion hollow and repellent compared to the purity of modern science. A renewal of faith led Abigail's great-grandson Brooks, a Gilded Age critic of capitalism, to prophesy two world wars.
Globetrotters who chronicled their religious journeys extensively, the Adamses ultimately developed a cosmopolitan Christianity that blended discovery and criticism, faith and doubt. Drawing from their rich archive, Sara Georgini, series editor for The Papers of John Adams, demonstrates how pivotal Christianity--as the different generations understood it--was in shaping the family's decisions, great and small. Spanning three centuries of faith from Puritan New England to the Jazz Age, Household Gods tells a new story of American religion, as the Adams family lived it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Georgini considers American religious history through three generations of the family of John Adams (1735 1826) in this expansive but jargon-heavy debut. The changing nature of American Protestant belief is skillfully illustrated in Georgini's close study of the religious evolution of the well-educated, well-traveled Adams family. The first section comprises a mini biography of 17th-century English emigr Henry Adams and his deep Puritanism. In the second section, Georgini looks at the moral activism of John Quincy Adams particularly his legal advocacy for the slaves involved in the Amistad slave revolt. Finally she considers the scholarly writing of Henry Adams on churches, which she finds to have Buddhist influences. The subject is fascinating, but Georgini's prose is often overly dense and verbose, and those unfamiliar with the denominational labels of American religious history will struggle. Showcasing Georgini's copious research, this religious biography of the Adams family will appeal mainly to academics working in 18th- and 19th-century Christianity.
