The Hymnal: A Reading History. By Christopher N. Phillips. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018. xv + 252 pp. $39.95 hardcover (original) (raw)
As Kselman points out, anticlerical writers like Sue and Michelet hated priests so much because they viewed religious meddling as destructive of family life.) It might be fruitful, then, to place Kselman's findings in conversation with Camille Robcis's work on "familialism" in French history. According to Robcis, political theorists after the Revolution sought to overcome republicanism's inherent individualism by privileging the family as the fundamental building block of society, the school where future citizens would learn "to reconcile social solidarity and individual liberty" (Robcis, 18). This suggestion only serves to sharpen the paradox studied by Kselman: perhaps the postrevolutionary, secular age invests the family with greater social meaning and anxiety at the precise moment that it also makes rejection of the familial faith possible. Kselman's book is also sure to be of interest to historians and theorists of secularism, although his evidence and analysis are too complex and nuanced to fit neatly into any one camp. On the one hand, those (Talal Asad, Joan Scott, and others) who have criticized secularist governments for the ways they circumscribe, surveil, and intervene in religious matters will find some confirmation. For example, the liberal July Monarchy, precisely in order to guarantee religious liberty, found itself in the business of evaluating the sincerity of deathbed conversions in state hospitals (46-47). On the other hand, in the early days of the French Revolution, it was not overly aggressive secularists but Catholics who first demanded that religious liberty be constrained by "public order"-enshrining the state's "right to monitor and control the public expression of religion" (14).
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