“Evangelicalism & American Life”
Prouts Neck, Maine
Speakers:
Dr. Nathan Hatch, Professor of History & Provost, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Grant Wacker, Associate Professor of History of Religion in America, Duke University Divinity School
Respondent:
Hanna Rosin, Religion Reporter,The Washington Post
DR. NATHAN HATCH:Americans have long considered religious liberty to be a crowning achievement of their revolution and at the heart of their national identity. They have also naturally linked liberty of conscience to such legendary heralds as Roger Smith and William Penn, who struggled against heavy odds to achieve religious freedom during the colonial era. After independence a strange coalition of humanists and evangelicals — including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland — joined forces to ensure that religion would not serve as an engine of civil policy.
To focus on such individuals creates a narrative of religious freedom as a heroic enterprise. Without underestimating the symbolic role of these champions of liberty, however, we may usefully consider whether there truly was such a close connection between intention and outcome. Perhaps most early Americans were not following the cloud and pillar of high principle but rather walking down the road to religious freedom without knowing it.
In retrospect, the evolution of religious freedom in North America seems so natural and uncomplicated — almost foreordained — that it is easy to overlook how unusual, even extravagant, was the hothouse of religious diversity within those colonies that became the United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, any traditional European churchmen would have found the religious environment of America disruptive and disorienting. Colonial America surged with religious diversity well before any theory could fully explain or justify it. The weakness of the English state and the strength of commercial capitalism conspired to make North America a haven for a variety of British and European dissenters, many of whom had compelling religious or ethnic reasons to flee the Old World. Religion became massively deregulated in the English colonies, not by design, but because of governmental and ecclesiastical weakness. This functional deregulation of religion is a stark contrast to the centralist tradition that characterized both the Spanish and the French experience in America.
English North America was also distinctive for the remarkable and unprecedented wave of immigration that mixed English, German, Swiss, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and African ethnic groups. Religious persecution accounted for some of them. French Huguenots barred from Quebec helped build Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, while Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Brazil also established communities in Charleston and New York.
In the twenty years before the American Revolution, about 300,000 people poured into English America — a number equivalent to the entire Spanish migration to America during the colonial period. As many as 16,000 flooded into the English colonies each year, more than the total number of French settlers to Quebec in 150 years. “The movement of hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans and Africans into the half-billion acres that lay east of the Mississippi,” Bernard Bailyn has written, “produced a culture unlike any other then known.”
I would suggest that within this culture religious liberty developed, in a legal sense, by default: the withering of state and ecclesiastical authority allowed rampant religious improvisation. At the time of the Revolution, for instance, South Carolina had what Richard Hofstadter called a “vacant establishment.” On paper, the Anglican church was the official establishment, and around Charles-ton it had some institutional coherence. Yet for commercial reasons South Carolina had always welcomed promising settlers, whatever their religious convictions, and Presbyterians actually outnumbered Anglicans. The back country of the colony, moreover, simmered with religious and ethnic dissent. With the exception of New England, the British colonies in North America had given up a monopolistic relationship between religion and the state prior to the adoption of the First Amendment.
The experience of the revolution and of building a democratic polity further undermined the already fragile foundations of church tradition. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, closely tied to elite institutions and civil authority, had a difficult time competing in the religious free market of the early republic. While they commanded a certain high ground of culture and power, they were too weak to restrain upstart vernacular religious movements that blurred the distinction between church and popular religion. Lay driven, voluntary, participatory, and enthusiastic, these movements became endemic. Methodists, a counterculture in England, outstripped all other churches in the United States and helped to define its core culture.
Colonial America bequeathed a unique and untidy diversity to the United States. The early republic, in turn, profoundly altered the relationship of class and religion in America. The upper classes in the United States would never control religion; nor would its diverse and democratized churches allow the state to control or centralize cultural life. No other Western democracy, not even Canada, would develop a system of higher education so decentralized, independent of state control, and open to the entrepreneurial efforts of religious dissenters.
Recognizing the religious diversity within the thirteen states, members of the Constitutional Convention adopted the First Amendment, which prohibited any governmental establishment of religion and guaranteed free exercise of religious choice. Jefferson’s drive for religious liberty had arisen from his assumption that religious corruption sprang from the privileged status of established churches. Freedom of religion, Jefferson thought, would release churches from ecclesiastical hierarchy and sectarian enthusiasm and set them on a path of rationality and restraint.
What Jefferson actually witnessed, however, was anything but measured decorum. He and other Founders who lived into the first decades of the nineteenth century were deeply disturbed by the rising revivalist and populist faiths that were transforming the classical republic of their dreams into a “fiery furnace of democracy.” The early republic was swept off its feet by what Sean Wilentz deemed “one of the most extraordinary spells of sectarian invention that the nation and world has ever seen.” The most powerful social movement of the new nation was the very embodiment of enthusiasm and authoritative religion — the Methodists.
That the Methodists would achieve such a formidable position in the new United States was curious and unexpected. At the dawn of the American republic, New England Congregationalists, Middle Colony Presbyterians, and Southern Anglicans cast a dominant shadow in society, politics, and religion. While a few followers of John Wesley had made their way to colonial cities, the Methodists were not yet a separate church from the Anglicans and were insignificant in the American religious economy.
The explosive growth of the Methodist Episcopal Church was a surprising development in a republic that shunned state-sponsored religion. The American followers of John Wesley, who could boast no more than four ministers and 300 lay people in 1771, were threatened with extinction during the revolution. All their leaders except Francis Asbury returned to England, leaving the Methodist faithful to struggle with the stigma of Toryism throughout the war.
Under the tireless direction of Asbury, however, the Methodists advanced from Canada to Georgia by emphasizing three themes that Americans found captivating: God’s free grace, the liberty of people to accept or reject that grace, and the power and validity of popular religious expression–even among servants, women, and slaves. Led by uneducated preachers committed to sacrifice and travel, the Methodists organized local classes — or cells — and preaching circuits at a rate that alarmed more respectable denominations. Between 1776 and 1850, Methodists in America experienced a miraculous growth. Comprising less than 3 per cent of all church members in 1776, Methodist ranks swelled to encompass more than 34 per cent of all church members by 1850, becoming by far the largest religious body in the nation.
Unlike Methodism in Great Britain, moreover, which remained a dissenting movement despite its strength and never occupied the high ground of culture and power held by the Church of England, Methodism in America came to embody the nation’s preeminent religious and cultural ethos. The whole American style, which emphasized sincerity and openness rather than form and privacy, became “Methodist.” While the culturally prestigious style remained Anglican in England, enthusiasm of all kinds — religious, cultural, and personal — reigned in America.
Disestablishment in the early republic was not attributable solely to law. Rather, the free religious market emerged as the presumptive authority of traditional churches withered. While European churches were shoring up their authority following the convulsion of the French Revolution and Napoleon, America’s established churches and their college-educated ministers continued to read sermons and staid liturgies despite a tremendous assault. InThe Churching of America, 1776-1990,Roger Finke and Rodney Stark point out that, as a percentage of religious adherents, between 1776 and 1850 Congregationalists dropped from 20 to 4 per cent, Presbyterians from 19 to 11.6, and Episcopalians from 15.7 to 3.5.
It is difficult to give a coherent account of this period. Churches and religious movements after 1800 operated in a climate of tottering ecclesiastical establishments; the federal government had almost no internal functions; and the rampant migration of people continued to short-“circuit old networks of personal authority. Established religious institutions linked to the upper classes remained too weak to make a whole society accept their language and analysis. In America’s rapidly expanding society, fluid structures of institutional control allowed new and dynamic religious movements to take root and thrive. There was virtually unlimited social space, without hardened distinctions of social class or religious denomination.
As Americans moved into new areas — from the hill country of New England, to the Ohio River Valley, to central Tennessee and Kentucky — staid churches could not make the transition. On the New England frontier, the slow-growing Congregationalists established only five churches during the 1790s while Baptists started twenty-six new congregations and the Methodists started nine. By 1800, these dissenters outnumbered Congregationalists by three to one. By 1810, only one in eight back-country communities had a Congregational church. Similar conditions prevailed on the frontier in Kentucky and Ohio, where the Methodists easily outstripped the Presbyterians.
In the young United States, religious power, influence, and authority were dispersed and based on popular appeal. Nothing better illustrates this fact than the marked pluralism of religious publishing, which exploded in the early nineteenth century and stood in sharp contrast to the tightly controlled and centralized traditions of publishing in Quebec and in Latin America. The historian Gaylord P. Albaugh has estimated that, of the 605 distinct religious journals founded in America by 1830, only 14 had existed before 1790. Journals appeared as quickly as they vanished, creations of common people for a broad popular audience. Before 1789, all religious journals had issued from either Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. By 1830, religious journals had been published in 195 different cities and towns and in every state but Mississippi.
These vernacular religious movements, which arose in the wake of religious liberty, blurred the distinctions between church and popular religion. While outbreaks of enthusiasm were common in European and British Christianity in the era of the democratic revolutions, America was unique because of the absence of a revived state church. In the United States, high culture was too weak to inhibit or restrict enthusiastic popular religiosity, and the cultural periphery remained far more powerful and unobstructed. In this ideal climate for churches growing out of the popular culture, the Methodists and Mormons thrived.
Both Methodism and Mormonism broke decisively with the kind of churches that had dominated the American colonies. They succeeded because they were willing to market religion outside traditional ecclesiastical space and to cater to the interests of specific market segments — a proliferation that Adam Smith had predicted would result with government deregulation of religion. Both movements empowered ordinary people by taking their deepest spiritual impulses at face value, by shattering formal distinctions between lay people and clergy, by providing an arena for the entrepreneurial instincts of religious upstarts, and by communicating the gospel message in the vernacular — in preaching, print, and song. Methodists and the Mormons were also strikingly alike in two other ways: in their focus on the reality of the supernatural in everyday life, and in their recruitment and organization of disciplined bands of young followers who were hungry for achievement, sacrificial in their zeal, and driven by a sense of providential mission.
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Methodist experience brimmed with overt enthusiasm, supernatural impressions, and reliance on prophetic dreams and visions, as is evident from Methodist journals and autobiographies. Methodism dignified religious ecstasy, unrestrained emotional release, and preaching by blacks, by women, by anyone who felt the call.
In America, the rapid expansion of Methodism created conditions that allowed women and African-Americans to assume religious leadership. The Methodists gave women extraordinary freedom to speak, encouraging them to share their religious experiences in public, and also granted African-Americans the right to preach the Gospel. They even ordained black ministers, though some attempted to keep black leaders on the fringe of the movement. This gave rise to independent black churches, the first being the African Methodist Episcopal Church found-ed by Richard Allen in Philadelphia.
By the time Joseph Smith announced his prophetic mission, the Methodist Episcopal Church was pushing enthusiasm to the margins, but the popular yearning for divine intervention in day-to-day experience remained. Joseph Smith issued a clarion call to a militant supernaturalism: a demonstrable revelation from heaven, the reality of miracles and apostolic gifts, and a sure and ongoing channel of prophecy. “I am a God of Miracles,” the Lord proclaimed in theBook of Mormon, and the “Latter-day Saints insisted on taking that claim literally.
Mormons and Methodists shared a common longing for the miraculous power of the biblical world. They also shared a genius for organizing and consolidating the expansion of their faiths. Methodists and Mormons were, at their core, youth movements with an extraordinary capacity to mobilize people for a cause and to build an organization sustained by obedience and discipline rather than ties of parish, family, and patronage. In both movements a battery of young leaders without elite pedigree constructed fresh religious ideologies around which the movement coalesced.