Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America.

This thought-provoking book pursues the theme of religious melancholy in the American Protestant experience from the colonial settlement to the present. Melancholy here refers to a mourning over the absence of God's love and anxiety over how to attain the assurance of salvation. In Rubin's telling, when the Reformation repudiated the Catholic belief in the forgiveness of sins through confession, Protestants such as Martin Luther and John Calvin became obsessed with discovering whether or not they had been saved. Many converts sought proof of their salvation in the hard work that, ironically - as Max Weber teaches - led to the growth of capitalism. Others, who are the subjects of Rubin's study, looked inward and involved themselves in intensive self-examination. And so this is a study of "the Protestant Ethic and the Melancholy Spirit" that proceeds in a manner similar to Weber's classic study yet in a direction Weber did not pursue. The analysis is additionally informed by the "spirit of Michel Foucault," who sought to uncover the culturally specific aspects of mental illness amidst the multi-layered historical archeology of knowledge. Focussing especially on spiritual narratives and the case histories of patients admitted to the early nineteenth century Hartford Retreat (a mental hospital), Rubin follows Foucault's approach in seeing religious melancholia as a culturally and historically specific form of depressive disorder, a special variety of melancholy.

As the argument unfolds, religious melancholy is traced from the Reformers through such colonial Puritans as Cotton Mather to an acute form of this psychopathology, which Rubin terms "evangelical anorexia nervosa," that emerges within evangelical piety from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Through such popular religious tracts as "The Memoirs of the Reverend William Tennent" and Jonathan Edwards' The Life of David Brainerd the author unveils a tragic form of evangelical piety that encouraged excessive fasting, mortifications of the body, and melancholy as necessary elements of a "true religion" that would lead ultimately away from the sins of self-love and the experience of religious conversion. By the Second Great Awakening some of the more rabid Millerites, Fineyites and other participants in this new form of piety are admitted to the Hartford Retreat where the first psychological diagnoses describe religious melancholy as a form of "religious insanity."

The treatment provided by nineteenth-century asylums anticipated the secularization and medicalization of the "disease" in the twentieth century. Many evangelicals suffering from religious melancholy embarked on spiritual pilgrimages away from revivalism and toward the salvation promises of hydrotherapy, Graham's dietary reforms and other healing cults. By the early twentieth century religious melancholy was neither a diagnostic category in psychiatry nor a sickness of the soul within pastoral theology. Rather, the new developmental psychologies of Edwin Starbuck and G. Stanley Hall explained away crises of conversion as simply one manifestation of the life transitions of adolescence. At the same time, the activism of the Social Gospel created a cure for souls that directed the melancholy to "adjust" themselves to their social world. Lost in this translation were the piety and inner pilgrimage of evangelical Protestantism. And yet both liberal and conservative believers continued to suffer from religious melancholy. Indeed, Rubin holds, American Protestantism's longstanding inward preoccupation with rebirth and conversion was transformed into a secular psychological piety; and, at the same time, the new psychological world view remodeled the older Protestant vision.

This fascinating book has created a fresh new perspective on the Protestant experience. Rubin moves easily between social science theory and an intriguing array of case studies. And yet the book is not wholly persuasive. Part of the problem is the author's narrow focus. A wider range of spirituality, Catholic, Jewish, and non-church going, would also appear to fall under his rubric. Catholic concerns over the purity of the self, in particular, have resulted in the condition Rubin seeks to explain. And so it is not clear to whom the term applies and how much it explains. Moreover, several of Rubin's subjects can hardly be seen as "representative" of evangelical Protestantism. Mary Moody Emerson, who slept in a coffin and wore funeral shrouds, is one example. More serious is the causal relationship the author persistently sees between evangelical Protestantism and morbid, suicidal states. At times the study verges on becoming a diatribe against conservative Protestantism rather than documenting the history of religious melancholy. Rarely does the author shed light on the psychological hope, identity, and security that Protestantism also offered its followers. We learn far more about Susanna Anthony's inner torment and self-torture, for example, than we do about the ways in which Protestantism empowered her to move beyond the limitations of her cultural world. Nor do we hear alternative explanations, such as the traumatic sexualization of childhood, that may have had an impact on the evangelical anorexia nervosa that appears to have been most frequently experienced by female converts. Unlike his twentieth century psychiatrists who separate religion from its underlying psychological cause, Rubin never quite disentangles himself from the conviction that Protestantism is the cause of religious melancholy. Certainly he is right in seeing religious beliefs as a cause for many pathologies, but wrong in assuming that they have had primarily negative consequences for their adherents.

Given these reservations, this is nevertheless an important interdisciplinary study. Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America sheds new light and will inspire considerable debate on the relationship between psychology and religious experience in the American Protestant past.

David G. Hackett University of Florida