When Americans Tried to Become Gods: Why I’m Researching 19th-Century Apotheosis

Something remarkable happened in American religious thought in the early nineteenth century: instead of emphasizing human sinfulness and dependence upon divine grace, more and more preachers, essayists, and religious innovators began to speak as if human beings were, in some sense, divine, or at least capable of becoming so. That shift in how Americans understood what it means to be human and the relationship between humanity and divinity is at the core of my dissertation research.

Five Major Research Questions

This blog post grows out of five major research questions I've developed for my dissertation work. Together, they trace a story that runs from respectable Boston pulpits to radical utopian movements, from liberal theology to secular humanism, and finally to the evangelical backlash that tried to slam the door on the "deification of man."

The Big Picture: From Liberal Protestantism to Secular Humanism

My project begins with early nineteenth-century Unitarian figures like William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, who articulated new visions of humanity and divinity that broke sharply with an older orthodox Protestant anthropology. Instead of emphasizing depravity and the necessity of supernatural regeneration, they stressed moral improvement and human dignity, along with the reality of a benevolent God whose character was mirrored in the rational, ethical self.

One of my central questions is, How did these Unitarian ministers redefine the nature of humanity and divinity between 1819 and 1850, and in what ways did those definitions depart from traditional Protestant views? Through close readings of sermons, pamphlets, and letters, I trace a theological move from "saved by grace" to "perfected by character," a subtle yet profound shift in what it means to be human in relation to God.

From there, the project follows the story into Transcendentalism, led by figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But they didn't just argue that humans were morally improvable. They pushed toward something even more radical: the idea of a divine self. Essays such as "Divinity School Address" and "Self-Reliance" are not just literary monuments; they are key texts in the emergence of a philosophy where the human soul is understood as fundamentally continuous with the divine.

So another question I pursue is: In what ways did Transcendentalist writers extend Unitarian moralism into a philosophy of human divinity? Here I'm interested in how Emerson and Thoreau turned moral reform into ontological elevation. How being good shades into being godlike.

New Religious Movements and the Radicalization of Apotheosis

The story doesn't end with genteel New England intellectuals. New American religious movements started to codify and radicalize these apotheotic ideas in the mid-nineteenth century. Mormonism, Christian Science, and Theosophy all take the notion that humans might be divine and turn it into a main doctrinal pillar. A third research question, therefore, is: How did movements like Mormonism, Christian Science, and Theosophy incorporate or radicalize earlier Unitarian and Transcendentalist conceptions of human divinization into their own scriptures and doctrinal texts?

What I am doing here is taking sources like the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants, Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health, and Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and comparing them to earlier liberal Protestant and Transcendentalist writings. I'm not simply asking, "Did X influence Y?" in some sort of reductionist fashion. Rather, I am asking:

-Where do similar patterns of thought and language occur?

-How do these new movements systematize or push further ideas which were more tentative or metaphorical in earlier writers?

-What happens when the "divine self" ceases to be rhetoric and becomes formal doctrine?

From Theology to Secular Humanism

The project then crosses what many people assume is a hard boundary: the line between religion and secularism. A key question here is: What specific theological and intellectual channels transmitted these apotheotic ideas from liberal/metaphysical religions into late-nineteenth-century secular humanism?

I am particularly interested in periodicals such as The North American Review and The Open Court, as well as early humanist manifestos. By following citations, repeated phrases, and shared themes, I seek to demonstrate that secular humanism did not spring into existence as a negation of religion. Rather, it often perpetuated a transmuted theological anthropology-one in which the human is elevated, free, and implicitly or explicitly "godlike," yet now cast in naturalistic or philosophical, rather than religious, terms.

This has big implications for how we talk about "secularization." Instead of a clean break between a religious past and a secular present, we see a continuity of ideas about human exaltation, traveling from sermons and scriptures into essays, lectures, and philosophical programs that no longer invoke God but still exalt humanity in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier orthodox contexts.

The Backlash: Evangelical Critics and the Defense of Biblical Anthropology

Finally, my project looks at the pushback. Evangelical theologians and revivalists did not stand idly by. Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and D. L. Moody among others realized that doctrines of human self-deification were both theologically dangerous and socially destabilizing.

My fifth key question is: How did these evangelicals respond in print to doctrines of human divinization, and what does their opposition reveal about the persistence of biblical anthropology in nineteenth-century American thought?

By looking through systematic theologies, journal articles, and sermon collections, I am seeking to understand:

-How they identified and critiqued apotheosis within liberal and “heretical” movements.

-How they reasserted a biblical view of humanity as created, fallen, and dependent on grace.

- How their arguments shaped the boundaries of what could count as “orthodox” Protestant belief in an age of expanding pluralism.

The tension between apotheotic and anti-apotheotic visions of humanity constitutes an integral part of the nineteenth-century American intellectual and religious landscape.

Where This Fits in Professional Discourse

This project is located at the juncture of American religious history, intellectual history, and the history of ideas about the self. Overlapping fields include:

-Scholarship on Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

-Studies of new religious movements and “alternative spiritualities.”

-Secularization and secular humanism: historiography.

-Work on theological anthropology: namely, how different traditions define what it means to be human.

Where I try to make a distinctive contribution is by threading these areas together through the single thread of apotheosis, or human divinization. Instead of taking Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, Mormonism, Christian Science, Theosophy, and secular humanism in isolation from one another, I trace the flow of a particular idea through and across them: the belief that human beings can become, or already are in some sense, divine.

The project is methodologically self-consciously rigorous as well. With the help of David Hackett Fischer's Historian's Fallacies, the research questions were designed to avoid pseudo-questions, post hoc fallacies, misplaced concreteness, and overly simplistic binaries. In other words, this is not a speculative "history of vibes," but rather a close, source-driven analysis of texts, networks, and debates.

What's Exciting About This Research

There's a lot to be excited about here, both intellectually and culturally:

-Recovering forgotten pathways: We can find astonishing lines of continuity between genteel Boston sermons, radical utopian movements, and secular humanist manifestos.

-Reframing secularization: Instead of a flat story of “religion declines, secularism rises,” we see a more dynamic genealogy of secular humanism that grows out of specifically theological debates about human nature.

-Illuminating today's spiritual landscape: Many of today's spiritualities, from the self-help and wellness culture, to "manifesting," and even to some tech utopianism, echo the nineteenth-century ideas of self-divinization. Understanding the nineteenth century helps us understand ourselves.

-Complicating categories: The project pushes us to question simple labels like "religious" and "secular", "orthodox" and "heretical", by showing how much traffic there was across those boundaries.

To put it briefly, this is no narrow denominational study. It is the story of how a great many Americans learned to talk about themselves as potential gods, and how others fought to stop them.

Why I'm Qualified to Do This Work

Preparation by the researcher is a crucial part of any serious research project, and that is an area where I bring significant background. I have pursued extensive research related to apotheosis in multiple traditions for over two decades. In that time, I have examined:

-Classical and early Gnostic ideas of deification, including so-called Jewish and Christian groups who embraced Gnosticism.

-The role of apotheosis within early American civic religion and political rhetoric.

-Nineteenth and twentieth century American movements which flirt with or embrace the idea of becoming godlike.

In addition to apotheosis, I have spent a serious amount of time studying Gnosticism, Western esotericism, and alchemical traditions-all traditions where concepts of hidden divinity, spiritual ascent, and transformation are central. That background gives me a finely tuned sense for:

-How claims about "hidden" or "higher" selves function within religious systems How, for example, symbolic and metaphorical language about divinization can transmute into more literal doctrinal claims.

-How esoteric and heterodox traditions have intersected with and sometimes infiltrated more mainstream Protestant and Catholic settings throughout history.

In addition, I have already compiled substantial bibliographies, research prospectuses, and methodological frameworks for the subject, including rigorous engagement with the primary sources and familiarity with the related historiography. I am not approaching this project as some kind of casual observer, but rather as someone who has been immersed in the source base and conceptual world of apotheosis for quite a while. Finally, my training in historical method, especially through such seminal works as Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, ensures that I am not merely chasing interesting parallels but am committed to making claims that are historically provable, clearly framed, and grounded in evidence rather than speculation.