Awkward Rituals

Sensations of Governance in Protestant America

Dana W. Logan

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226818498
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America's Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

1

Uncomfortable Rites in Early Republican Freemasonry

Freemasonry in the early republic was a club for powerful Protestant men. It is understandably surprising that the Christian—and more specifically Protestant—northeastern United States was such a welcoming atmosphere for men practicing arcane rites; but in northeastern cities after the Revolution, Freemasonry was a popular voluntary association for white Protestant ministers, mayors, esteemed businessmen, and other less famous but propertied white men, especially artisans.1 In 1807 New York City’s Holland Lodge membership included men such as John Jacob Astor, the trade and real estate magnate; De Witt Clinton, the city’s mayor and the senator and governor of the state; and Garret N. Bleecker, founding member of the New York Stock Exchange and future member of the Board of Managers for the American Bible Society.2 Since the earliest years of the United States, communities excluded from white civil society adopted Freemasonry as an opportunity to author their own identities, provide mutual aid, and critique social norms. White male masons did not, however, see these Black, female, and Native American masons as legitimate masons.3 White masons exemplify a key thread in the history of American associationalism: the inherent promise of inclusion evoked by fraternity, and the actual marginalization of non-elite, non-white bodies from the normative body of civil society. Within white masonic ritual, these contradictions bent the white normative body into awkward positions.

White Freemasonry’s position in the early republic did not, however, go unchallenged. A few critics in the post-Revolutionary early republic pointed out the absurdity of masonry’s comfortable role in a Protestant-dominated civil society. One critic cited the similarity between masonic “rites” and the idolatry of heathens as well as the liturgy of Catholicism. In an anonymous pamphlet from 1807, he complained that the masonic ceremonies involving vestments, sacred objects, and “grandeur” were oddly out of step with the supposed aesthetic values of Protestants. Musing on the pervasive practice of masons consecrating every public building in American cities, he asked, “Is this rite borrowed from Rome Pagan, or Rome Papal? Or from both?”4 Invocations of Temples during these consecrations seemed to discount the New Testament’s de-materialization of the Lord’s temple, the author observed, and if masons truly believed they could consecrate courthouses and other civic buildings, “we see evidence breaking forth, as it were by accident, that the leading characters do not believe in this holiness of chapels, which they would have the common people believe in.”5 At the core of the author’s shock was a sense that American Protestants were not upholding the basic sensibility of the Reformation. “Why all this pageantry and parade?” the critic asked.6

The author pointed out a distinction that would shape masonic and anti-masonic positions into the 1820s: how was it possible to reconcile theatrical ceremonies with Protestant values? And secondly, did masons’ interest in theatrical and hierarchical spectacle belie an anti-democratic impulse? The same critic wrote, “Should we see the same multitudes, with [musick], pomp and [fantastic] ceremonies, even lighted candles at noon day, march to lay a corner stone of a building dedicated to the saint whose day they were keeping—a building to be consecrated, with an altar, and a mortal priest to officiate at it, should we not see them countenancing idolatry?”7 All of the accessories and mythical stories that accompanied masonic ceremonies reminded him of Catholics. He wrote:

I heard a [gentlemen] lately describing a Romish chapel, and the ceremonies, with the impression, they made on the mind of him a stranger. He described in a few words, but in a lively manner, the leader or master of the ceremonies; his appearance and manner, the Latin prayers, the [chauntings], music from the [orchestra], or organ loft; burning of incense, sprinkling of holy water, &c. And added, that for a moment the question forcibly struck his mind,—Can these people seriously believe in all this pageantry?8

With all this sensory overload, with all the props and costumes, these men could not be serious. And if they did believe they were actually the characters that they played in these ceremonies, what did that say about their capacity for civic leadership? In published ritual manuals, promoters of masonic rites answered that they were indeed serious. So serious, in fact, that they were prohibited from laughing while performing the rites of the lodge. But masons did not necessarily “believe” in their own pageantry. Masons argued for rites as a category distinct from church liturgies and their own public “ceremonies,” and they argued that this distinctive category shared more with theater than with liturgy because rites cultivated artificiality.

Freemasonry formed a crucial bridge between post- and pre-Revolutionary ideas about the social body. Unlike the aristocratic habits of courts, eighteenth-century masonry encouraged men to be equal, restrained, friendly, and socially minded, and in turn these virtues allowed them to be better capitalists and agents of representative democracy. Despite embodying these hallmarks of democratic sensibility, Freemasonry also inherited many of the ritual functions of royal sovereignty: processions, sumptuous costumes, and monument-building. Just as Protestants were never as disembodied as Calvinist ideology would have us believe, the story of sovereign ritual shows that American civil society was never as egalitarian or as liberal as democratic theory would suggest. Freemasonry preserved the fleshy and decorated body of a sovereign often assumed to be relegated to the pre-Reformation and pre-Revolutionary era within American Protestant corporate life.

Masons’ ritual costumes, blocking, and enactments—as opposed to their published oratories—demonstrate the multivalent meaning of civility as both dramatic aggression and quiet restraint. Practicing civility might invoke an image of men rehearsing their table manners, but in fact masons terrorized each other during secret rites by acting out artfully staged violence. Rites that became popular in the post-Revolutionary era were surprisingly nostalgic for royal symbols, accoutrements, and regimented social order. In an era when democratic culture defined itself through the equal access to sovereign power, the temporary mimesis of masonic rites invoked hierarchical sensations. Masonic rites demonstrated that the “royal remains” of the king’s sovereignty that linger in all corporate bodies could take quite literal form behind the closed doors of elite fraternities. Mixing the repertoires of religious ritual and theatrical acting, rites were serious and thus sacred, but also not quite believable pageants.

The World of Early Modern Freemasonry

The history of Freemasons illustrates the shift toward corporate sovereignty in the early modern period. As the historian Philip Stern argues, the tendency to describe Western history as a direct shift from kings to nations misses the role of corporations as bodies invested with sovereign power. Further, corporations’ capacity for ritualization played a key role in this inheritance. Stern writes that “corporations possessed and employed distinct forms of franchise, ceremony, privileges, and overt and secret rituals that created social bonds and shaped institutional cultures. Such practices inevitably generated their own allegiances and identities, compatible but also potentially in competition with others, including the Crown.”9 Corporations produced, in other words, their own courtly rituals. Historians of American religion often conflate the history of corporations and business, but as scholars of early modern corporations point out, companies based around trade were only one type of corporation.10 Associational life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was legally and culturally indistinct from “corporate” life, and the companies that we associate with the history of business (such as the East and West India Companies) were also rooted in the idea of a “collegium or universitas.”11 Companies, guilds, towns, and religious confraternities were all understood as corporate fellowships endowed with the responsibility of cultivating what Phil Withington calls “corporate citizenship.” Withington describes corporations in seventeenth-century England as groups of men who developed a culture of “civic aristocracy and honestas as the normative mode of urban governance—that is, by tiers of ‘common councils’ in which the ‘discreet,’ ‘better,’ ‘able,’ and ‘honest’ members of the community were expected to assemble, counsel, and act according to their ‘wisdoms’ and ‘discretions.’”12 In colonial America and in the post-Revolutionary period, as the historian of nonprofit organizations Peter Dobkin Hall has argued, there was little legal distinction between public and private organizations, or business and associational bodies.13 Freemasonry played a critical role in modeling the form of what we would now call a “club,” an organization that exists both for its members’ private pleasure and for a public good. Dobkin Hall argues that as “delegations of public authority—bodies empowered to do the public’s business,” all corporations after 1760 borrowed from Freemasonry’s vision of civil society.14 Thus, beginning with Freemasonry as a crucial node in American sovereign ritual allows us to see how civic leadership and private ritual were intrinsically tied together in the early United States, before and after the Revolution.

Freemasonry began in seventeenth-century Scotland when lords and merchants began to join masons’ professional guilds. These “non-operative” masons were attracted by the artisan guilds’ esoteric mythology and fraternal bonding, a tradition that the historian David Stevenson has shown pre-dated the arrival of the non-operatives.15 After the guilds shifted to clubs consisting primarily of non-operative masons (by which I mean men who were not tradesmen), the rituals and mythology of the fraternity expanded. Replacing the original tests of membership that itinerant masons had used to recognize one another in new towns, non-operatives developed “catechisms” in which members were initiated through rituals of questioning about civilization’s history. Historians mark the transition to non-operative Freemasonry in the turn to ritualism, or the reprioritization of initiation as the fraternity’s primary function.16 Freemasonry in this new form traveled from Scotland to England, then swept the Continent, becoming especially popular in eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Holland. In all these places it was characterized by the participation of men from a variety of class backgrounds who did not share religious or political ties. Even the fraternity’s famous deism was one among many possible religious affiliations represented in the lodges. The fraternity’s rise in Europe took place contemporaneously with its development in the British colonies, making American Freemasonry part of a self-consciously cosmopolitan transatlantic brotherhood.17

Masons represent two visions of the Enlightenment sensibility: on one hand they are the sober representatives of toleration and a new form of social equality, and on the other they demonstrate the role of occult practices (such as alchemy and Rosicrucianism) in Enlightenment culture. Margaret C. Jacob’s seminal cultural history of the European Enlightenment, emphasizing the tolerant Enlightenment aspect of the fraternity, repositioned Freemasonry as central to eighteenth-century European civil society. As Jacob argues, Freemasons played a crucial role in developing the habits of democracy. Writing their own constitutions, voting on members, harmonizing disparate interests within a corporate body established by merit rather than by birth, masonic lodges effectively birthed a nascent democratic way of life.18

Yet the history of American lodges also demonstrates that the fraternal bodies linking together early democratic culture expressed themselves in forms not typically imagined as part of a discursive public sphere. Freemasons in fact readily adopted royal sovereignty to confirm their equal participation in fraternal bonds—a contradiction that mirrored other contradictions at the heart of the corporate form. Legal scholars have noted that corporate bodies were chartered by the king to create an extension of sovereign power, and yet the form was embraced as a model of association for early American democracy. Replicating the tension between horizontal and vertical power dynamics, American corporations were a form of local independence dependent on state regulation and largesse.19 Freemasonry’s ritual life between 1790 and 1820, a period in which masonic ritual became more baroque, points to Americans’ ambivalent reconciliation of sovereign representation and democratic participation.

Masons are often imagined as men fraternizing in the back rooms of bars and giving oratories on the nature of civil society, but this description of masonic practice (which has dominated much of its historiography) includes almost none of the activities masons performed in the lodges—namely, esoteric rituals of initiation. In contrast to Margaret C. Jacob’s description of public oratories, the theater historian Pannill Camp argues in his work on eighteenth-century French masons that the fraternity was, at its core, performative. Masonic lodge activity “included a range of nondiscursive performative operations. These incorporated, meticulously staged behaviors—hand signs, choreographed steps, embraces—as well as meals, concerts, and other non-ritual activities—were the work of the lodge.”20 As Camp points out, masonic practice was not primarily the Habermasian vision of rational discussion in which men exercised their ability to put aside their interests; instead, it was a series of flamboyant and highly material rites. But this lack of discursive activity should not dissuade us from asking how masonic lodges cultivated Enlightenment mores. Rather, if masonic practice was a key location in the development of Enlightenment civility and sociability, then civility and sociability looked like men grasping each other in intimate and violent choreography and playing out narratives in which men rose from the dead. Enlightenment civility, in other words, becomes visible as an odd dance of white men.

American Freemasonry, even more than its Continental counterparts, focused on ritual. After the American Revolution, Freemasonry in the new nation became increasingly focused on ritual regularization and the proliferation of degrees through the spread of the Scottish Rite.21 Due in part to this post-Revolutionary flowering, historians of American masonry have been more attuned to the fraternity’s deeply ritualistic nature. Counterintuitively, in tand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1  Uncomfortable Rites in Early Republican Freemasonry
• 2  Conventional Behavior in the American Bible Society
• 3  Involuntary Association in the American Seamen’s Friend Society
• 4  The Head and the Hands in Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity
• Epilogue: Awkward Ritual, Once More with Feeling
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index