To Walk the Earth Again: The Politics of Resurrection in Early America

Summary

The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. By reading histories, poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, Trigg challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism's rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality.

Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities' prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. Their belief that political identities and religious duties did not expire with their mortal bodies shaped their positions on a variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. By taking early modern Protestant beliefs seriously, Trigg unfolds new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence.