SOURCE: “Exit Religion,” in A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age, Stanford University Press, 1971, pp. 167-85.

In the following essay, Tomsich discusses the “genteel” authors of the Gilded Age, whose religious faith faded with the influence of evolutionary theory and gave way to a sometimes fatalistic moralism.

For all their disillusionment with the real world, the genteel authors were never much interested in turning toward the supernatural for solace. They were sentimentally nostalgic about the religious certainty of past generations, but they cared only that much. Religion was always just an appurtenance of the comfortable and cultured world in which the genteel group moved. In youth they had had their brush with orthodoxy, but later they found it irrelevant. In maturity they forgot it and rested easy in the superiority of their own religious liberalism. They occasionally worried over religious issues, but their worries...