Christian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition — Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church — and two clergymen — Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral
teacher, the didactic role of art in society more generally, and a God who acts in history. The author finds that the art of Allston, Cole, and Church expressed and served the dominant middle-class religious ideology of the time — Christian Romanticism. This distinguishes their work from more elitist and
regional work.