De-sanctifying affairs of state: the politics of religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

This essay explores the relationship between politics and religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s nineteenth-century antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). More specifically, the article aims to show that although Stowe’s novel breaches the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ written into the American constitution by demanding that Christian values determine government policies, her work ‘sacralizes’ the political realm only to a limited extent. Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not condone the ‘sacralization’ of politics that, as Emilio Gentile’s work on political religion points out, imbues political institutions and representatives with religious qualities: Stowe produced neither a political religion that can be denounced as totalitarian, nor the civil religion for which the United States has been presented as a model. Whereas Gentile’s work highlights the dangers of donning politicians and political institutions with a religious aura, Stowe’s efforts to introduce religious values into the public sphere do not aim to imbue the political domain and its representatives with a religious halo. On the contrary, Stowe’s distrust of, and distance from, politics bolster her religious qualms to consider anything earthly truly sacred. At the same time, Stowe undermines fears about the relationship between politics and religion best expressed by Hannah Arendt, who often complained that Christianity’s two-world perspective undermined Christian political involvement. Arendt was very much afraid that Christians would shy away from involvement in the public sphere of politics because they deemed this domain of relative importance compared to life after death.