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This dissertation argues for the centrality of an evangelical philosophy of disinterestedness to early American reform literature. Scholars have long considered disinterestedness to be a keyword in the study of the American Enlightenment, describing it as a civic republican ethic whereby elite white men exercise their purportedly unique capacity for rational reflection that in turn permits their entrance into politics. Yet evangelicals offered an alternative—and more inclusive—conception of the term: they theorized disinterestedness as an affective propensity for benevolence that all persons can obtain once they abandon their will in favor of God’s in the conversion process. In arguing that persons of all race, gender, and class positions are capable of becoming disinterested through conversion, evangelicals were able to promote the rights of those whom the civic republican conception of disinterestedness meant to exclude: free and enslaved African Americans, women, and impoverished persons. The dissertation’s first chapter traces the origins of evangelical disinterestedness to the sermons, moral philosophical treatises, and conversion narratives by “New Divinity” theologians Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins, and shows how this evangelical ethic departs from Scottish Enlightenment aesthetics and theories of sympathy. In the dissertation’s remaining three chapters, I demonstrate how marginalized early Americans employed this evangelical philosophy of disinterestedness in their reform writings—how Phillis Wheatley’s shifting conception of disinterestedness informed her decision to write against slavery in the 1770s, how Lemuel Haynes formulated an evangelical brand of republicanism that he used to protest slavery, and how Catharine Sedgwick promoted impoverished persons’ rights by integrating evangelical disinterestedness into her new Unitarian theology and philosophy of benevolence. With its emphasis on radical selflessness and devotion to God, evangelical disinterestedness allowed for marginalized early Americans to not only validate their reform philosophies as divinely ordained but also base their critique of unjust institutions like slavery entirely on others’ suffering. In attending to this alternative evangelical history of disinterestedness, the dissertation recovers a diverse set of early American writers who mobilized their theology into a crucial instrument of sociopolitical reform.

ETD_10289

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-jgaw-d494

ETD doctoral

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