Religion and the American Experience: A Social and Cultural History, 1765-1996

A Social and Cultural History, 1765-1996

Donald C. Swift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315293271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Religion in the USA manifests itself in many forms and this book examines them, from religion in the early republic, to early African American religion, reform, nativism movements, and fundamentalism, up to the contemporary culture wars, in a study that spans almost 250 years.

One
Religion in the New Republic

Religion played a major role in the revolution, and the revolutionary experience had a great impact upon American religious life. At the least, the revolution led to significant changes in ecclesiastical organizational arrangements. Support for the revolution did not come in equal measure from all the religious communities. The revolution was not only a political struggle, but it had a strong religious dimension. Religious considerations influenced the political views and allegiances of many Americans. Sometimes the relationship between religious affiliations and positions on the revolution reflected socioeconomic and geographical factors. The revolutionary emphasis on liberty and equality fueled the growth of some denominations, such as the Baptists and Methodists, and would also affect theology and the ways people worshiped.

Loyalists charged that the American Revolution was the result of a Calvmist conspiracy to sever the connection with the Mother Country and create a republic. The "conspiracy" existed only in the minds of the revolution's opponents, but the involvement of Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the patriot cause was great. It is possible to question whether the war of independence would have occurred had Calvinists not been present in large numbers in eighteenth-century provincial America. Through annual election sermons, Congregationalists had learned to fear abuses of governmental power, valued natural rights and constitutionalism, and understood the citizen's responsibility to resist tyranny. The revolution was more than a Calvinist uprising, but these heirs to the radical Protestant tradition played a central role in shaping it and winning independence. There were more Calvinists than other Protestants in revolutionary America, and their religious mind-set proved fertile ground for the development of a revolutionary mentality.

Impact of the Great Awakening

Among the American Calvinists, those whose views were shaped by the Great Awakening were often the most fervent supporters of the patriot cause. The Awakening was a great evangelical movement that stressed revivalism, personal religious experience, and orthodox Calvinism, and it crested in the North in the 1730s and 1740s. It became an important force in the South in the latter decade and lost force there in the 1770s. Because it was directed at leading people to orthodox Calvinism, it affected mainly Calvinistic denominations. It led to the fracturing of denominations, with Congregational supporters of the revival being called New Lights, and its Presbyterian adherents being called New Sides. Adherents of the Awakening were called New Lights—a term that will be used here to describe the awakened—because they insisted that the individual must experience a conscious conversion that marked Christ's illumination of the soul of the saved. Frequently finding it necessary to leave settled and tithe-supported congregations, the New Lights were also called Separates. The Separates frequently became Baptists—or Separate Baptists—after they concluded that infant baptism was wrong and that God ordained that a believer's baptism was necessary for the purity of the church. For them, immersion in water fully represented the complete rebirth of the believer.

In the South, there were clear class divisions between the awakened—poor and modestly situated farmers of the backcountry—and planter-led Anglicans who were frequently found in coastal areas. In New England, these socioeconomic divisions are less easily found. There were wealthy people among the New Lights, but to the converted, status was based on religious experience and not wealth and birth.

The awakened supported religious toleration for Protestants. Their advocacy of religious freedom would blossom into a somewhat democratic political philosophy that emphasized both the ability of the individual to make political judgments and God's concern that people live in freedom. Their voluntarism in religion led to the conviction that people should decide for themselves how they should be governed. These evangelicals believed that the saved were guided by the Holy Spirit, and the awakened emphasized the community's general will rather than simply the consent of the governed. Religion was rooted in personal experience rather than in doctrine; similarly their notions of the will, virtue, liberty, equality, and fraternity were founded upon their own experiences rather than reasoning. Their desire for unity and liberty of all believers made it possible for them to overcome a tendency toward religious tribalism and to focus on larger objectives. Through revivalism, the awakened had acquired an aspiration for unity of believers that provided a basis for demanding unity of Americans and separation from sinful Britain.

In the revolution, Old Lights and New Lights would stand together in resisting British tyranny, but the New Lights were inclined to be more radical. Rough treatment at the hands of Old Light civil authorities made New Lights reflect deeply on the rights of minorities. In the ante-revolution years, New England politics centered in the competition between the New Lights and Old Lights. These groups shared the fear that the Crown would establish Anglican bishoprics in America. Dread of this prospect was an important factor in leading to the revolution.

An American Mission

Though liberty and individualism were important in colonial America before the Great Awakening, the Awakening placed more emphasis on these values; individualism, over the long term, would contribute significantly to the decline of deference in American society. No one had given more thought to the rights of minorities than the Separate Baptists who fought many battles with the entrenched Old Lights over tithing and religious freedom.

Some evangelicals saw the revolutionary struggle in terms of millennial theology. Millermialism, the belief in the second coming of Christ and his thousand-year reign, would be a major theme in nineteenth-century American thought. Through the revolution, they believed, God was assisting the United States, an elect nation, in winning Christian liberty. The divinely ordained nation that would be blessed by brotherhood, peace, liberty, and justice would play a major role in battling evil and bringing about the thousand-year reign of Christ and the second coming.

Those influenced by the Awakening thought it necessary to sever the linkage with sinful Great Britain in order to obtain this status. Evangelical laymen were familiar enough with millennial imagery that they could interpret historical events in this way without explicit sermons laying out this scenario. Popular religion and culture were so steeped in this thought that application of these ideas to historical events resulted in a form of prophecy. During the French and Indian War, New England evangelicals had grown accustomed to thinking of themselves being locked in a massive struggle with Satan, whose agent was Catholic France. Now, they saw an acceleration of the struggle, and this time the devil's surrogate was Great Britain. For them there was no question whose side God supported. A popular hymn by William Billings makes it clear that the patriots were certain God was on their side:

Let tyrants shake their iron rod,
And slavery clank her galling chains;
We fear them not, we trust in God—-
New England's God for ever reigns.

When God inspired us for the fight.
Their ranks were broken, their lines were forced;
Their ships were shattered in our sight,
Or swiftly driven from our coast.

What grateful offering shall we bring?
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud hallelujahs let us sing,
And praise his name on every chord.

New England clergymen most closely in touch with the thought of Jonathan Edwards avoided civil millennialism, spoke about the sinfulness of slavery in America, and argued that a society cannot prosper if its citizens are not virtuous. God governed the world and nations through moral law. However, they saw British rulers as embodying political corruption and sinfulness, the very opposite of government based on divine law. They also insisted that Americans would win the great struggle against degenerate Britain's tyranny because the patriot cause was consistent with God's laws. Anglican efforts to obtain advantages from government and bishops in the colonies led New Englanders to interpret their history in a new manner. New England's founders were cast as men deeply committed to religious and political liberty. They came to the New World when they saw that these liberties were in peril in Great Britain.

During the troubled years prior to the Revolutionary War, writers outside of New England would view the American past in the same way. In the poem Liberty Song, John Dickinson wrote that "Our worthy forefathers ... for freedom ... came, And, dying, bequeath'd us their freedom and fame." Another Pennsylvanian, Benjamin Rush, proudly claimed that his passionate attachment to liberty had been "Early cultivated by ancestors." Dr. Rush had been a convinced republican since his student days in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In an address to King George III, the Continental Congress expressed its gratitude that God permitted them to be heirs to freedom. A myth of liberty-took shape, embodying a people's vision of its origins, highest values, and place in history. In it, Americans traced their devotion to freedom to their ancestors' attachment to liberty of conscience. A symbol of these beliefs was the liberty tree from which effigy figures were often hung. In European folk belief, a tree represented creative and renewing forces; by touching the sky it linked the divine and human realms. In this tree, life forces were identified with liberty, and it sometimes needed to be fertilized with blood. The myth of liberty would become the basis of a civil faith or civii religion that allowed Americans, who lacked a single religious heritage, to explain their past and present in religious terms. A religion located "at the boundaries of the denominations and the state," it was based on the idea that God planned for Americans to lead others in the pursuit of liberty.

rhe liberty myth possessed great vitality and commanded the allegiance of many Americans, whereas the Loyalists lacked a cogent myth that could explain the American experience and attract similar numbers to their cause. Years later, in his first inaugural address, George Washington offered a classic restatement of American civic religion: "Every step, by which [the people of the United States] have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency."

Belier in this myth of liberty made it possible for large numbers of Americans to accept the political arguments of the True or Real Whigs, a small group of radicals who believed that the Crown and its supporters were conspiring against constitutional government and the liberties of Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Calvinistic political thought, which emphasized natural law and the idea that rights were conferred by God, prepared Americans for the ideas of the True Whigs. Two of the earliest and most important of these radical Whigs were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato 's Letters. Their political philosophy was rooted in the traditions of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, which were shared by English Calvinists in America. These radicals believed that place-men—those enjoying the patronage of holding government positions—were motivated by greed and the desire for more power. Though essentially republicans, they did not call for the abolition of the monarchy.

1 rue Whigs defended individual liberties, called for the curbing of executive power, and often advocated reforms quite radical for Britain but not too far in advance of actual practice in many colonies. They believed that God would support oppressed people who found it necessary to defend their rights against tyrants. Trenchard and Gordon argued that when civil authorities refused to act justly, "we must have recourse to Heaven." The embattled patriots were to echo this theme. The True Whigs' fear of the Church of England and call for toleration of dissenting Protestants appealed to American dissenters, and the political reforms they advocated were often close to American practices. New World Calvinists also heartily endorsed the argument that the people are the ultimate source of political power and, given significant justification, can opt to alter forms of government. Rooted in both their secular and religious outlook was their common belief that men tend to be corrupted by political power and that it was dangerous to give the state too many powers.

The New Lights were particularly inclined to accept the view that there was a massive conspiracy against liberty and that debauchery and sinfulness had weakened England to the point where tyranny could not be resisted. The argumentative style of the True Whigs was forcefully clear, unadorned, and directed at the common man, very much as was preaching in the tradition of the Awakening. Doubtless the Awakening's rhetorical style made Americans particularly receptive to Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which applied radical or True Whig principles to the American situation in 1776 in a manner that especially appealed to the ordinary reader. These radical theories were rooted in both classical republican and Lockean thought. New England clergymen nurtured their congregations on frequent doses of John Locke's Christian liberalism. Locke maintained that it was God's will that each individual study Scripture for himself and make his own judgments about salvation. The English philosopher found this position in St. Paul's Epistles to the Romans. If the individual had the duty of making judgments about salvation, then the free Christian was also obligated to evaluate the performance of government and decide whether or not to obey it. Based on this thinking, New England ministers were to see liberty as God's cause and conclude that free Christians had the obligation to take up arms in defense of liberty.

With the decision for independence, the belief in a providentially guided quest for liberty became the basis for identifying liberty with God-fearing Americans in a republic. Separation from Great Britain and independence were necessary steps toward the realization of a thousand-year reign of Christ. Collective salvation had a political dimension. The republic was identified as the collectivity of God's people in America; patriotism was considered a response to the commands of God; and virtue was defined in terms of both republican ideology and Christian theology. Evangelicals, seeing freedom in a moralistic framework, spoke of the problems growing out of governance by an unconverted king and Parliament. They believed that a good society was one in which all of the saved enjoyed equality and brotherhood and were ruled by men who observed God's ordinances. In their view, George III became the Antichrist and the Tories were the enemies of God. The American patriots emerged as the people of God.

Revolutionary Americans came to see independence and the establishment of a republic as part of God's plan for America. The patriots, likening themselves to God's chosen people in holy scriptures, saw their cause as "a protest of native piety against foreign impiety." New England Calvinist clergy had long focused their congregations' attention upon a covenant between God and his or her people. By the mid-1770s, patriot ministers in that region stretched the covenant to include all Americans. They spoke more frequently about the prospect of the millennium. After independence was declared, they saw the breach with England as a ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Religion in the New Republic
• 2. Early African American Religion
• 3. Native American Religion
• 4. Societal Change and the Second Awakening
• 5. Women, the Churches, and Empowerment
• 6. Reform, Political Divisions, and Disunion
• 7. Postbellum African American Religion
• 8. Beyond the Mainstream: Immigrants, Nativism, and Cultural Conflict
• 9. Socioeconomic Change and Politics
• 10. Fundamentalists Versus Modernists
• 11. The Contemporary Scene
• Index
• About the Author