Business of the Heart, by John Corrigan

In this delightful look at Americans' penchant for public displays of religious emotion, John Corrigan proposes that American revivalism helped turn emotion into a commodity. Emotion is, after all, our innermost possession. Culture's role is to provide strategies for controlling, conserving and surrendering this possession in ways that serve both our own and society's interests.

Nineteenth-century revivals constructed patterns for the proper transaction of emotion. They taught middle-class Protestants how best to trade this commodity with one another and with God. Corrigan opens his book with a quote from Karl Marx's Capital: "A commodity appears at first sight a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties."

Corrigan focuses on the religious revival that unfolded among white, middle-class Boston Protestants in 1858. Because an inordinate number of businessmen participated in it, this outburst of religious excitement came to be known as the Businessmen's Revival. Corrigan uses diaries, journals and public records to show how the daily prayer meetings taught people how to meet subtle expectations concerning the public display of emotion. While understood as a subjective state, emotion was nonetheless viewed as an object, a thing that could be acquired and then prudently surrendered. Thus revivalgoers learned to have seizures of conscience, to cry out and to weep while engaging in prayer. Emotion was offered to God in exchange for divine favor.