Sky God: Remaking the Heavens and Divinity in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, the “cosmological revolution” reached Americans with no special education or astronomical expertise. New ideas about the scale and nature of the cosmos, some of which had been gestating among elites for centuries, forced ordinary people to reevaluate traditional associations between higher places, higher beings, and higher meaning. As the old “heavens” became more like the modern “space”—larger, emptier, less morally alive—God and his kingdom became more abstract. This trend often mattered to people in ways that esoteric doctrine did not. It divided Americans. A placeless God and “state of being” afterlife found readier acceptance among educated people accustomed to thinking in abstract, immaterial terms and pursuing abstract, immaterial goods. Among nonintellectuals, the new heavens caused unsettling debates between people, and within them, about the locality and reality of higher things. Well before better-remembered disputes over Darwinism and geology, these cosmological debates opened foundational divisions in popular ideas, as some laypeople reluctantly accommodated the new heavens while others turned to defiant cosmic conservatism. On balance, Americans moved toward reformed conceptions of God and heaven, rebuilding divinity in the image of the new cosmos.