Unity, Pluralism, and the Spiritual Market-Place: Interdenominational Competition in the Early American Republic

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 297-335
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Government Support ◽  
Religious Support ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Early American ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
New Churches ◽  
New Nation

Following independence, Americans’ sense of the special status of their new nation drew succour not merely from their republican experiment but from the unique character of the nation’s religious life. Even before the Revolution Americans had witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of sects and churches, to a degree unparalleled in any single European state, as ethnic diversity increased and the mid-eighteenth-century revivals split churches and multiplied congregations. The Congregationalist establishment in New England and Anglican power in the middle and southern colonies uneasily confronted energetic dissenting minorities, including Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, and German Lutheran and Reformed groups. After 1776 it took some time to define a new relationship between church and state. Colonial habits of thought persisted and prompted schemes of multiple establishment or government support for religion in general. The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786 and, five years later, the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution did not succeed wholly in eliminating state authority from the sphere of religion; indeed, residual establishments persisted in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. Yet an important shift was under way towards a ‘voluntary’ system of religious support, in which governmental authority in religion was replaced by increased authority for self-sustaining denominational bodies. After 1790 ecclesiastical institutions grew at an extraordinary pace, shaping the era labelled by historians the ‘Second Great Awakening’. As Jon Butler has reminded us, some 50,000 new churches were built in America between 1780 and 1860, sacralizing the landscape with steeples and graveyards and creating a heterogeneous presence that drew streams of European visitors curious to evaluate the effects of America’s unique experiment in ‘voluntarism’. By 1855 over four million of the country’s twenty-seven million people were members of one of over forty Protestant denominations, most of them recognizable by name as churches with an Old World ancestry but with features which made them distinctively American. Additionally, there were over one million Catholics.

“The True American Union” of Church and State: The Reconstruction of the Theocratic Tradition

1959 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fulton Maclear
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Radical Reformation ◽  
American Union ◽  
Church Historians

Modern studies of church and state in America have begun to modify some older conclusions. Much attention has been given to the Constitutional “solution” of separation and its contradictions and problems in practice. Similarly, church historians, qualifying an older assumption that conservative churches ultimately shed the forms of “classic Protestantism” and permitted American religion to be shaped by the sectarian heritage of the radical Reformation, have begun to re-examine the background of ideas. This re-examination is urgently needed in treating America's last disestablishment contest, the struggle over the state churches in New England which raged until the 1820's. For this struggle had unusual significance.

Public Spirit and Patronage: American Observatories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
Government Support ◽  
Social Entrepreneurs ◽  
Intrinsic Interest ◽  
Early American ◽  
Scientific Curiosity ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Private Context ◽  
The Cost

In the first half of the nineteenth century, American astronomical observatories were instruments for the personal exploration of the planets and the stars as well as monuments of civic development. Their value was often more symbolic than scientific and they represented significant expenditures for the individuals and communities that undertook them. Their costs were equivalent, in modern terms, to small robotic NASA probes. The cost of these facilities grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the Lick, Mount Wilson, and Mount Palomar Observatories representing major, billion-dollar equivalent investments in space exploration capabilities. These early American observatories were predominantly privately funded. Over forty observatories are investigated, only two of which were built with significant government support. The motivations that dominated the financing of these “lighthouses of the sky” were personal ones—intrinsic interest in the heavens and scientific curiosity, or the desire to signal status through monuments and legacies. This earliest period of American space exploration was thus one with an overridingly private context, with social entrepreneurs like Ormsby McKnight Mitchell and George Ellery Hale selling the mystique and adventure of the heavens to the wealthy elite and the general public. Major figures from the 19th century were involved in funding astronomical observatories, include Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

scholarly journals The Puritans in Early American Society and the Premises of Religious Fundamentalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-29
Author(s):  
Birane Sene
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Early American ◽  
The World ◽  
American Society ◽  
Relationship Of

Puritanism is historically a form of Protestantism, resulting from the movement of John Calvin affirmed in England, from the 1560s in reaction against official Anglicanism considered too close to idolatry. Puritans will leave England where they were persecuted and settle in the East of the United States later known as New England. This puritan community will serve as a model of a Protestant state based on religious principles. The rigor of the Calvinist doctrine determined social relations and guided the destiny of handpicked people for their moral rectitude. The principles that governed this Puritan society were already laying the foundations for a theocracy whose imprints are still visible in today’s American society. The puritans were pretending to be the light that should shine above the world and enlighten it with its values, and on this basis, they excluded any relationship of equality with others. Despite this theocratic ideal, the Protestant identity will gradually fade in favor of a secular state with a religious diversity and pluralism.

Cities, States, and Citizens in the Atlantic World: Towards a New Narrative

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 179-246
Author(s):  
Emma Hart ◽  
Robert J. Allison ◽  
Paul P. Musselwhite ◽  
Daniel K. Richter ◽  
Mark Peterson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Early America ◽  
Us History ◽  
Early American ◽  
Mark Peterson ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
Interpretative Framework

Abstract In his book Mark Peterson presents an innovative perspective on the development of Boston and its New England hinterland as an early modern city-state. His purpose was to tell the story of Boston in its own right, shedding US national history as the dominant interpretative framework. The four reviewers pick up various strands, focusing, among others, on the validity of the city-state concept, especially as Boston did not become an incorporated city until 1822, criticize what one of them sees as an attempt to return New England to the center of early American historiography, and assess whether the city-state model can be applied elsewhere in early America and in the Atlantic World. In his response, Peterson argues that his aim was not to propose a city-state paradigm for comparative purposes, but rather to employ the city-state concept as the best way to explain Boston’s historical trajectory over two centuries, and to highlight the contingency of US history.

person’s use of the Bible as the most important religious authority was implicitly to devalue the elaborate edifices protecting scriptural interpretation that prevailed in all the historic European churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. The institutions compromised by such logic included established churches defined as authoritative communicators of divine grace through word and sacrament, institutions of higher learning monopolized by the establishment in order to protect intellectual activity from religious as well as rational error, and the monarchy as the primary fount of godly social stabil-ity. British Protestant Dissent moved somewhat more cautiously in this direction. But even after the rise of Methodism and the reinvigoration of the older Dissenting traditions, the strength of evangelicalism among British establishmentarians never permitted the kind of thoroughly voluntaristic ecclesiology that prevailed in the United States. On questions of establishment, post-Revolutionary American evangeli-calism marked a distinct development from the colonial period when the most important evangelical leaders had spoken with opposing voices. Some, like Charles Wesley, whose hymns were being used in America from the 1740s, remained fervent defenders of the status quo. Some, like George Whitefield, gave up establishment in practice but without ever addressing the social implications of such a move and without being troubled by occa-sional relapses into establishmentarian behaviour. Some, like the Baptists in America from the 1750s, renounced establishment with a vengeance and became ardent proponents of disestablishment across the board. Some, like the American Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, eagerly threw establishment away in the enthusiasm of revival, only later to attempt a partial recovery after enthusiasm cooled. Some, like John Wesley, gave up establishment instincts reluctantly, even while promoting religious practices that others regarded as intensely hostile to establishment. Some, like Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodists, gave it up without apparent trauma. Many, like Jonathan Edwards and the leading evangelical laymen of the Revolutionary era – John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay – never gave up the principle of establishment, even though they came to feel more spiritual kinship with evangelicals who attacked established churches (including their own) than they did with many of their fellow establishmen-tarian Protestant colleagues who did not embrace evangelicalism. By the late 1780s, except in New England, this mixed attitude towards formal church and state ties had been transformed into a nearly unanimous embrace of disestablishment. Even in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where evangelical support of the Congregational establishments could still be found, the tide was running strongly away from mere toleration towards full religious liberty. Methodism was an especially interesting variety of evangelicalism since its connectional system retained characteristics of an establishment (especially the human authority of Wesley, or the bishops who succeeded Wesley). But

2003 ◽  
pp. 160-161
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
The Status ◽  
George Whitefield

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Judith Sargent Murray ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Lydia Sigourney ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Democratic Life

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

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