My dissertation narrates and interprets the way that changing talk about the Kingdom of God played a critical role in the reshaping of 19th century American religious and political imagination.

Around 1830, a diverse group of social reformers and religious dissenters began, independent of one another, to use language of the Kingdom of God to describe the American religious future. These innovators were self-consciously marginal to the revivalist evangelical mainstream, united only by their shared desire to distance themselves from traditional American Protestant millennialism and articulate practical new theopolitical visions for the growing republic. Framing religious conceptions of American identity in “secular” time and space, they concerned themselves with questions about what a pluralized society built around God’s laws would look like, over against (what they took to be) tired theological narratives about America’s eschatological significance.

By the 1860s, this once radical talk about the Kingdom had found its way to the Protestant mainstream. The Kingdom captured the imagination of many self-consciously centrist American Protestants, providing the primary metaphor for their post-war rearticulation of their dual mission to convert and to “civilize.” By the postbellum years, the Kingdom of God was a “religious” concept that had become deeply woven into the fabric of the Protestant rhetoric of “secular” modernity.

But this is more than a Protestant story. Simultaneous with the rise of Kingdom rhetoric in the Protestant mainstream, the Kingdom of God also began to function as a pluralized normative language of American religiousness. In postbellum America, discourse about the Kingdom enabled Americans of all faiths — particularly Catholics, Jews, and “post-Protestants,” — to articulate and contest visions of national religious ethics in a Protestant-inflected common tongue.