Epistemica

In the 19^th century, churches remained formidable, but books, lectures, newspapers, and poems increasingly competed with them for authority. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman in some ways offered secular alternatives to Christianity, but, more importantly, they actually translated, challenged, and redistributed religious ideas through forms shaped by self-reliance, liberty, conscience, and expressive pluralism. In doing so, they drastically helped determine what divine authority, moral obligation, freedom, and even “being American” could mean. Decades after, even after Stowe, I. A. Richards claimed that poetry and literature could at least partially replace religion in the ordering of society.

What of today, where people read less and religious participation in some ways may be having a comeback? At the very least, more directive and institutionally curated forms of religion are re-entering public life in the US. At this point, it clearly is not a Christian revival nor a simple return to the past. It is more akin to a struggle over which language will organize American attitudes when fewer citizens inhabit literature’s slow, ambiguous moral worlds. And perhaps such ordering or organization will not be as centralized as it has been in the past.

Richards’s Wager

Richards formulated his wager in Science and Poetry in 1926, amid what he saw as a collapse of inherited authority. Scientific explanation had weakened many traditional beliefs, but people still needed ways to coordinate desires, fears, loyalties, and obligations. For Richards, poetry’s value was not dependent on proving theological propositions. After all, poetry could preserve the ethical functions of older belief by arranging conflicting impulses into a more inclusive equilibrium. Its “pseudo-statements” need not be accepted as facts to remain instruments by which people “order our attitudes to one another and to the world”. Literature could replace religion only in a qualified sense. Instead of installing a creed or priesthood, it would, instead, cultivate habits of response such as holding rival claims together, testing sympathies imaginatively, and resisting simplified experience. Richards’s literary order is procedural unlike the dogmatic foundations of religion. Literary order, here, pushes a society to remain coherent without requiring everyone to affirm the same metaphysics.

A Rival Pulpit

Nineteenth-century America was a time in which evangelical Protestantism had expanded, reform movements drew Christian energy, and biblical language saturated public speech. Yet moral authority was becoming unstable. Because the republic lacked an established national church, print could offer a portable moral forum across regions, denominations, and increasingly contested identities. Print expanded, lyceum lectures attracted large audiences, and a national market carried arguments beyond denominations. Literature became a rival pulpit and a filter through which religious messages acquired legitimacy. A Christian claim expressed only as ecclesiastical command could appear sectarian. Recast as autobiography, novel, essay, or poem, it addressed readers as moral agents whose assent had to be won through identification and judgment. The competition was growing, and becoming much more prominent and academic and intellectual circles. In fact, church and literature borrowed one another’s rhetoric, while authors increasingly claimed the right to evaluate churches themselves.

Emerson was quite explicit in his challenging of church dogmas and their roles in society. Trained for the Unitarian ministry, he rejected dependence on “historical Christianity” and located revelation in the living individual. “The Divinity School Address” converts the sermon into a critique of inherited sermons where religious truth becomes immediate moral perception rather than obedience to miracle, institution, or clerical office. “Self-Reliance” in this context promoted the “Trust thyself” perspective. Religion was, thus, partially reformatted through literature at this time. Providence and intuition often became at odds, as vocation shifted towards self-culture, and spiritual independence was becoming more of a national style. Emerson promoted an ordering of society by sacralizing the autonomous person. Its ruggedness is more psychological than economic, but it joins the liberal suspicion that government, custom, and majority opinion can corrupt conscience. Dissent reflected a fidelity to a higher law discovered within rather than through a religious text or even worse for Emerson through the words of clergy.

Thoreau radicalized Emerson’s literary theology into a broad social conscience. His Walden reframes withdrawal from the market into an experiment in simplicity, attention, and deliberate living. “Resistance to Civil Government” moves the experiment outward by showing that a citizen must not serve injustice merely because the state commands it. Its preference for the government that governs least is less a full program than a hierarchy; after all, conscience precedes law, and moral agency cannot be delegated as Thoreau argued. American ruggedness and classical liberalism here meet a prophetic structure inherited from Protestant dissent. Thoreau sounds solitary through much of Walden and various other writings, but it is largely framed as public instruction and one that promotes a social ordering (or disordering). The literary persona reinvigorates civil disobedience largely by dramatizing refusal as spiritually dignified. Religion can still supply the higher law for people but literature frees it from church supervision and turns it against governmental and social conformity, separating it from dogma and the dependence on clergy.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin translated evangelical abolitionism into sentimental narrative, confronting readers with slavery through suffering bodies and domestic affections rather than policy alone. Douglass’s Narrative separated the “Christianity of Christ” from the slaveholding Christianity he witnessed, using autobiography to indict institutions claiming biblical sanction. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass dispersed the sacred across bodies, occupations, regions, and voices, imagining democracy as a poem capacious enough for contradiction. Collectively, the works in their range and effect helped to produce an expressive pluralism. It was an American Expressionism with a preference for situated voices over strict ideology. Christian language was often still central, such as evocation of God-given rights, but literature compelled religious to pass through sympathy, testimony, embodiment, and difference, allowing for a more pluralistic ordering.

Literature as a Pluralist Order

Literary ordering differed quite drastically from ecclesiastical rule and governmental control. A doctrine is intended to promote assent and a law is intended to promote compliance. But a literary work asks the reader to inhabit an experience. Of course, novels can preach and poems can become dogma, but literature’s strongest social power lies in indirection and the mere occupation of another’s perspective in a specific context. slows judgment, multiplies perspectives, and reveals the attraction and cost of incompatible goods. Richards believed poetry could answer fragmentation by composing conflict, instead of simply resolving it by decree or Biblical interpretation. Nineteenth-century literature created a provisional world in which biblical morality, liberal conscience, national myth, racial violence, bodily freedom, and democratic aspiration could be contested in shared language. Its authority is participatory in that readers rehearse judgment instead of receiving a settled verdict, and the resulting order remains revisable by later voices. In fact, it tended to mediate between private belief and public authority in a diverse republic. So religion could easily remain as foundational sources of truth and morals for many people, but no longer dominated ordering.

When the Reading Public Shrinks

An institution of shared literature depends on literacy education, libraries, affordable books, periodicals, time for attention, and the assumption that imaginative reading matters to citizenship. Unfortunately, such supports have been weakening for a long time now. The National Endowment for the Arts data show that the share of adults reading a novel or short story fell from 45.2% in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022, the lowest level in more than three decades of the survey. The American Time Use Survey data showed that daily reading for pleasure declined by more than 40% from 2003 to 2023, especially among younger and less advantaged groups. Americans still experience narratives through film, television, games, podcasts, and social media, but the research showed that Americans tend to retreat from the sustained, self-paced encounter with language on which Richards’s approach relies.

A Concentrated Religious Return

The evangelical research organization Barna reported in 2025 that adults describing a personal commitment to Jesus as important had increased since 2021, with gains concentrated among younger men. Gallup later found that 42% of men ages eighteen to twenty-nine said religion was very important in combined 2024–2025 data, compared with 28% in 2022–2023. There is currently no broad generational conversion as some may suggest. Pew’s Religious Landscape Study found that only 46% of adults ages eighteen to twenty-four identified as Christian, far below older cohorts, while the national decline in Christian identification appeared to have slowed rather than reversed. There is evidence of some concentrated renewal within an otherwise secularizing generation.

Even so, religion can gain institutional visibility, political leverage, and emotional intensity while affiliation remains historically low. In 2026, Pew found that 37% of Americans believed religion was gaining influence in public life, up from 18% in early 2024. Support had also grown for government promotion of Christian moral values, although most Americans opposed an official Christian state and large majorities resisted church electioneering. “Controlled religion” here simply describes beliefs that are curated into clear doctrines, identity boundaries, gender scripts, political priorities, and repeatable media messages. Transmitted through congregations, campus ministries, influencers, podcasts, and partisan institutions, they can supply an external architecture of meaning with an efficiency a difficult novel cannot match. And there can, of course, be pockets of influential religious ordering throughout the country.

Robert Bellah’s concept of American civil religion can be viewed as a kind of middle category between church doctrine and secular literature. Bellah argued that the US developed a public faith expressed through founding documents, presidential rhetoric, sacrifice, providence, and national destiny as a tradition related to Christianity but not reducible to any denomination (Bellah 1967). Literature helped compose and contest that civic theology. Emerson’s representative individual, Thoreau’s principled dissenter, Stowe’s redeemed nation, and Whitman’s democratic body all offered scripts for belonging that could be treated almost as sacred. Bercovitch’s account of the American jeremiad presents the danger that prophetic criticism often renews confidence in the nation rather than breaking down its mythology. National identity is a constant source of ordering, but it too is being influencing now by religion, and Christian nationalists in particular. Ideally, any ordering from American national identity should help sustain democratic aspiration, but it is now being used to make America (and a certain president) an object of faith, turning political disagreement into a contest over who most authentically embodies the nation’s providential story.

What Literature Still Does

Literature at its best orders through complication and pluralism of experience as it asks people to tolerate uncertainty until competing motives become visible. Curated religion orders instead through dogma and certain clarification, as it names the good, identifies the community, and supplies practices of belonging. Amid loneliness, political distrust, and informational overload, the certain clarification offered by religion can be more attractive to some individuals (and quite simply easier). The major issues arise when religious language reaches the public without interpretive cultures able to test it against other lives. Stowe’s sentiment, Douglass’s witness, Thoreau’s dissent, and Whitman’s plurality exposed conviction to imaginative resistance. But with an eroding literary understanding in America, religious identity can more easily become a technology of alignment, such as to a MAGA agenda.

Richards obviously could not have foreseen the current changes in literature or religion. He also failed to at least explicitly recognize that literature can be an indoctrinating force that rivals religion. Canon can nurture sympathy, sure, but it can also romanticize conquest, racial hierarchy, or possessive individualism. Bercovitch showed how the American jeremiad could convert prophetic criticism into renewed national confidence, absorbing dissent into the story of America’s special mission. Emersonian self-trust can become courage or be used to fuel American exceptionalism and xenophobia Thoreauvian suspicion of the state can defend conscience or evade obligations to vulnerable strangers. The nineteenth-century literary public was also heavily inequitable as enslaved people, women, Indigenous writers, and workers fought for entry into institutions that presented elite taste as universal.

Pluralism and empathy may be among the prominent factors dictating how the decline of literary reading and the rise of religion will influence the ordering of American institutions. As noted at the beginning, the authors discussed tended to carry personal religious assumptions, but did not enforce dogmatic ordering on others. In being openly pluralistic and demonstrating empathy, neither the decline of literary reading (which itself is an inherent tragedy) nor the rise of religion is likely the lead to the highly exclusive, damaging orderings of the past.  

References

Barna Group. 2025. “New Research: Belief in Jesus Rises, Fueled by Younger Adults.” April 7, 2025. barna.com/research/belief-in-jesus-rises

Barna Group. 2026. “Insights on Tech, Media and Faith in 2026.” July 8, 2026. barna.com/research/state-of-the-church-2026-trends

Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96 (1): 1–21. JSTOR 20027022

Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1978. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bone, Jessica K., Feifei Bu, Jill K. Sonke, and Daisy Fancourt. 2025. “The Decline in Reading for Pleasure over 20 Years of the American Time Use Survey.” iScience 28 (9): 113288. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288

Douglass, Frederick. 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office.

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Iyengar, Sunil. 2024. “Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump.” National Endowment for the Arts, October 3, 2024. arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump

Newport, Frank, and Lydia Saad. 2026. “Rise in Young Men’s Religiosity Realigns Gender Gaps.” Gallup, April 16, 2026. news.gallup.com/poll/708410

Parrales, Luis. 2026. “The Real Religious ‘Renewal’ Happening in Gen Z.” The Atlantic, March 31, 2026. theatlantic.com/culture/2026/03/christian-revival-generation-z

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Rotolo, Chip, and Gregory A. Smith. 2026. “How Americans Feel About Religion’s Influence in Government and Public Life.” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2026. pewresearch.org/religion/2026/05/14

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Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. Boston: John P. Jewett.

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Thoreau, Henry David. 1854. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

Whitman, Walt. 1855. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, NY: self-published.