Religion, Melancholia, and Virgin Land

In 1921 a Pennsylvania preacher hauled his four teenagers from a prosperous Pennsylvania farm to a bleak and arid spot on the Saskatchewan prairie. The young people had to cope with unexpected economic devastation, October blizzards, the mental illness of their mother, and the inability of their aloof and inept father to attend to anything other than leading a tiny fellowship of Pietist-Anabaptists. This book tells the story of the foursome’s enduring mutual support as each struggled to survive emotionally and materially, and tried to retain fragments of the culture they had absorbed in Gettysburg. One of the four, the father of this book’s author, decided at the age of thirty to begin an education so he could become a minister. His siblings supported his journey though adult high school, college, and seminary, but Albert Hollinger, Jr., found the urban society of the early 1950s alien. Unable to function in it as a minister, he became a house-painter. Always haunted by his failure to achieve voice, he took comfort from a poem prophesying confident speech in afterlife, “When this mask of flesh is broken.” He and his siblings were all determined to be childless for fear of mental illness, but there was one by accident. This book’s author eventually learned that he was the result of an unintended pregnancy. All four came together again in their last decades, living near one another in the church-intensive town in Southern California where the author’s father had attended college in the 1930s.

David A. Hollinger is the author of seven books, including Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017), After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013), and Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995, 2000, and 2006). He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former President of the Organization of American Historians. He is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and earlier taught at the University of Michigan, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Oxford.