Passing Transcendental: Harvard, Heresy, and the Modern American Origins of Unbelief

Dismissed in some quarters as “infidels,” the so-called “transcendentalists” of greater Boston in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s articulated an alternative faith that was rooted in their principled commitments to liberal spiritual renewal, philosophical idealism, and social reform. However we reckon with transcendentalism today, in our current post-secular moment, we might take seriously the charge that the transcendentalists were indeed representative “infidels” in their day and in their way. Some would say New England’s historical transcendentalists were idiosyncratically spiritual; others would call them symptomatically secular. This project asks if we might also say that transcendentalism’s unique worldview constituted not only a kind of unorthodoxy, but outright unbelief.