On May 31, 1892, Charles W. Smouse addressed a petition to Congress on the subject of the Worldâs Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Set to open the following year, the Worldâs Fair promised to be a dazzling showcase of American prowess for a domestic and international audience. But Smouse, along with thirty-seven fellow residents of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, worried that the much-anticipated Fair might become instead a vehicle for clerical ambition. At the urging of evangelicals, lawmakers were poised to pass a measure that would force the Fair directors to shut the gates on the Sunday Sabbath . Were it to impose Sunday-closing, Smouse warned, Congress would be embarking on a dangerous path of âReligious Legislation,â and as such violating both the First Amendment to the federal Constitution as well as the wishes of the founders of the Republic. Now more than ever, Smouse declared, it was imperative to keep âReligion and the State Separate.â 1
This book is a history of men and women like Charles W. Smouse who, across a range of church-state battles from the early Republic to the Progressive era, campaigned for a greater separation between religion and government. Smouse was not a prominent jurist, politician, or cleric, and he lived far from the economic and intellectual centers of American life. But his protest over Sunday-closing is a fitting point of departure for three reasons. First, Smouseâs petition captures the core demand of the group that I refer to as secularists. The terms âsecularismâ and âsecularistâ first entered American parlance in the antebellum era, though they only became common after the Civil War. From the outset, their meaning was contested. Protestant evangelicals dismissed them as a mere dressing up of an old foe, atheism. But another understanding, which I follow in this book, also took hold. A secularist, as a Protestant minister who embraced the label explained, wanted âan absolute and unqualified divorce of the State from things spiritual.â 2 Opponents understood the term in the same way. Secularists, the Congregationalist Josiah Strong explained, believed in a distancing of religious and government institutions. 3 To his dismay, their ranks included many Christians as well as Jews and agnostics .
This points to a second revealing feature of Smouseâs petition, its balance of religious and non-religious voices. Smouse, along with several of his fellow petitioners, was a member of a religious minority, the Seventh-Day Adventists . But others signed simply as citizens, eschewing any affiliation with the Adventists or other churches. Nineteenth-century secularists were a diverse group, and their diversity extended to religious belief. The call for a secular state won support across the spectrum of belief, from those whose faith was fierce to merely tepid or even nonexistent. Some secularists cited Scripture, others preferred Thomas Jefferson , and many saw no contradiction in drawing on both. The third reason to begin with Charles W. Smouse and his obscure fellow petitioners from their small town in Iowa is to signal the grassroots dimension to this story. The lettered elite will play a significant role. But in analyzing a series of church-state controversies, I have tried to incorporate popular attitudes and protests. Without opinion polls or mass surveys, the best way to do this is through collective petitions, which feature heavily in the pages that follow. In sum, this is a history of secularist mobilization as much as ideology.
Placing a figure like Charles W. Smouse at center-stage runs against the grain of two interrelated approaches to church-state relations in nineteenth-century America. The first sees most Americans as instinctive non-preferentialists, a modern term which denotes an acceptance of state support for faith so long as it is distributed equally among all (Protestant) denominations. In his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States , Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story famously argued that the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment had a clear and limited goal: to âprevent any national ecclesiastical establishment.â The national government was barred from levying taxes in support of one church, or using its powers to enforce a specific creed. But indirect and indiscriminate aid to religion was entirely appropriate. Since Protestant values provided the solid foundations of republican government, the majority expected their faith to, in Storyâs terms, âreceive encouragement from the state.â 4 Story was writing in the midst of the explosion of evangelical energy known as the Second Great Awakening , and historians have long seen a connection between the model of disestablishment that he outlined and the religious vitality of the era. In one account, the demise of direct state support infused religion with a new democratic fervor. The rising Methodist and Baptist churches appealed directly to previously marginal groups, developing new techniques of persuasion that would enable them to prosper in an open marketplace of religion. 5 Other scholars paint a darker picture. Evangelical churches in this view relied more on fear than on hope, binding Americans to their faith by stoking fears about the alarming spread of irreligion and immorality. 6 But whether their vision was sunny or gloomy, evangelical churches profited from the absence of a state church to construct a vast network of reform and voluntary associations, in the process winning a privileged public position for their faith .
The result, for many historians, was a swift march to social control. A second line of interpretation, then, emphasizes religious power. Nineteenth-century Americans, as William R. Hutchison notes, liked nothing better than to congratulate themselves for casting off the state churches that disfigured the Old World. But they soon developed a âvery effective religious establishment of their own.â 7 Whether through Sabbath restrictions, temperance laws or censorship regimes, evangelicals built an informal establishment. Along with other historians, Mark A. Noll sees its highpoint in the antebellum era when a ârepublican calculusâ brought together the forces of faith and democracy in a mutually beneficial embrace. 8 But many see a more enduring reign. In David Sehatâs account, the regime of Protestant coercion, or what he terms the âmoral establishment,â was at its most imposing near the end of the century, as the various groups who felt its lashâCatholics, Mormons , freethinkers , and othersâcould attest. âFor much of its history,â as Sehat concludes, âthe United States was controlled by Protestant Christians who sponsored a moral regime that was both coercive and exclusionary .â 9
In this narrative, a figure like Smouse plays a marginal role, the forlorn protester whose crushing at the hands of the moral establishment serves only to underline its ascendancy. However, if we understand secularists as a category to extend beyond the irreligious to encompass all those who rallied to a strict separation of church and state, a different narrative emerges. Evangelicals remain an imposing force. But their energy spurred an equally impressive secularist mobilization that managed to defeat or at least hold in check the push for a tighter fit between religion and government. The result was not a sweeping secularist victory. Smouseâs vision of a clean break between religion and state was never achieved. But far from succumbing to an evangelical juggernaut, nineteenth-century secularists proved remarkably effective in rallying support for their contention that the United States was not, in political or constitutional terms, a Christian nation.
In making this case, my analysis builds on the work of other scholars who have challenged the depiction of the nineteenth-century as the golden age of the informal Protestant establishment. Steven K. Green has argued most forcefully that this era witnessed a second disestablishment which, extending the gains made in the Revolutionary era, introduced secularist principles to law and public education. By the centuryâs end, he argues, the majority of Protestants had âreconciled with the idea that, while the culture retained Christian influences, the nationâs civic institutions were secular.â 10 The view that the Second Great Awakening produced a united evangelical front which swept all before it has also come under scrutiny. The competitive marketplace of religion, which is often seen as spurring evangelical growth, also had the effect of pitting preacher against preacher in the endless race for converts taking place in communities across the nation. As much as they celebrated the advance of religion as a whole, church leaders worried about losing ground to their rivals. 11 Nor, as Frank Lambert suggests, was there necessarily unanimity amongst Protestants in regard to political questions. On questions such as Sunday mail delivery, he argues, âProtestant unity in the public square was more illusory than real.â 12 Perhaps the most striking challenge to the story of evangelical dominance is the tolerance, albeit often grudging, granted to atheists. As Leigh Eric Schmidt shows, though often ostracized and regularly subjected to legal persecution, freethinkers carved out a prominent place in cities and small towns across the nation. 13 A handful even achieved great public renown. To the dismay of evangelicals, the notorious freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll dazzled large audiences with his biting attacks on moralizing clerics and their blind faith in dogma . 14
This book goes beyond a focus on freethinkers to encompass the diverse impulses which came together to make the case for a secular state. Without discounting the influence of figures such as Ingersoll, we need to look further than irreligion if we are to make sense of the vitality of secularist mobilization. 15 Some of the most prominent advocates of a secular state in nineteenth-century America were men and women of faith. It was a poor religion, they argued, that relied on government props to keep it upright. True faith had need of nothing more than the enduring power of its creed. But the social and cultural forces animating political secularism did not end there. Class animosity was a further powerful factor. In many church-state contests, labor activists denounced a Protestant clergy that seemed more interested in currying favor with the wealthy elite than uplifting the lives of the poor .
Nor can we ignore the element of race. The argument for a strict separation of church and state served multiple purposes in nineteenth-century America. In the hands of white southerners , it became a tool to uphold racial privilege. This became clear when northern evangelicals attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the door to the extension of slavery into the territories. The response of white southerners was furious. By using their pulpit as a political soapbox, they charged, these abolitionist preachers were overstepping the boundary between faith and government. The call for a secular state served, in this case, to silence critics of slavery. The defeat of the Confederacy only hardened opposition to what southerners saw as the politicized religion which ruled over northern society .
In short, secularist campaigns brought together an odd group of bedfellows: religious skeptics, liberal theologians, minority faiths, white supremacists , labor reformers, German radicals, and more. These alliances were largely informal,...