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.

New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Judith Sargent Murray ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
Religious Establishment ◽  
Role Of Religion

Drawing on novels, poetry, correspondence, religious publications, and legal writing, this book offers a new account of women’s political participation in the process of religious disestablishment. Scholars have long known that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote pious, sentimental stories, but this book uses biographical and archival methods to understand their religious concerns as entry points into the era’s debates about democratic conditions of possibility and the role of religion in a republic. Beginning with the early republic’s constitutional and electoral debates about the end of religious establishment and extending through the nineteenth century, Murphy argues that Federalist women and Federalist daughters of the next generation adapted that party’s ideals and fears by promoting privatized Christianity with public purpose. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, Judith Sargent Murray, and Sally Sayward Wood authorized themselves as Federalism’s literary curators, and in doing so they imagined new configurations of religion and revolution, faith and rationality, public and private. They did so using literary form, writing in gothic, sentimental, and regionalist genres to update the Federalist concatenation of religion, morality, and government in response to changing conditions of secularity and religious privatization in the new republic. Their project is shown to complicate received historical narratives of separation of church and state and to illuminate problems of democracy and belief in postsecular America.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Evangelical Story of Disestablishment

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-184
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Irrational Belief ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The People ◽  
Moral Efficacy

This chapter examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of the separation of church and state in her regional New England novels, Oldtown Folks and Poganuc People, both set in the early republic. It argues that while Stowe’s evangelical vision of religion led her to praise the purification of religion from politics, her simplified story of disestablishment enables a more complicated intertwining of Christianity with democracy. Drawing on family lore and regional history for both novels, Stowe criticized the New England Federalists and Calvinists of her father Lyman Beecher’s generation for treating religion as a political tool, but she also credited them with safeguarding Christianity from the forces of secularization that she associated with the French Revolution. Her novels thus seek to adapt state religion by depicting sites of intense, irrational belief (Spiritualism in Oldtown Folks, Christmas wonder in Poganuc People) that leaven Federalist and Calvinist rationalism with enchantment for the purpose of democratizing Christianity. Stowe’s historical progress narrative depicts Christianity made more democratic when it is seized from the hands of elites and politicians, yet this shift transforms it into a more powerful tool for regulating society. Strengthening the moral efficacy of religion, Stowe’s vision depicts a weakening of the state and public polity, because in Stowe’s libertarian New England history, democracy of the “people” and the “folk” is reassigned to Christianity in the private sphere.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

This volume charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various Dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—the denominations that traced their history before this period—and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of ‘New Dissent’ during the eighteenth century. The second part explores the ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between Church and state was rather more loose. The third part is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters’ relationship to the British state and their involvement in campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards Scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture; and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

“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.

scholarly journals Understanding the Essex Junto: Fear, Dissent, and Propaganda in the Early Republic

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-656
Author(s):  
Dinah Mayo-Bobee
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The Federalist

Historians have never formed a consensus over the Essex Junto. In fact, though often associated with New England Federalists, propagandists evoked the Junto long after the Federalist Party’s demise in 1824. This article chronicles uses of the term Essex Junto and its significance as it evolved from the early republic through the 1840s.

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

New England Dissent 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State

1972 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 402
Author(s):  
Sydney E. Ahlstrom ◽  
William G. McLoughlin
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State

Designing Secularity at Sarang Church

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 429-454
Author(s):  
Heather Mellquist Lehto
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Church

Abstract The Sarang Global Ministry Center (SGMC) in Seoul, South Korea, is well known for its architectural design and for several controversies surrounding its construction. The SGMC does not have conventional Christian architectural features, such as a steeple or stone facade; instead, the church resembles a luxury department store. Reactions to this building have been mixed, reflecting differing opinions about Christianity in South Korea. Some value the fact that the building’s aesthetics blend Christian activities with everyday life outside the church. Others criticize the building’s corporate appearance, citing it as evidence that Sarang Church is “just a business.” While the way religion is permitted to operate in South Korean secular society is partially defined by legal principles, such as the separation of church and state and state neutrality toward religion, secularism also entails an active configuration of the social order through lived experience. Secularity both constitutes and is constituted by the materiality of religious space, which disputes over the SGMC design make clear. Considering varied responses to the SGMC building project, this article highlights how church architecture, city planning, and consumer capitalism participate in the shaping of Korean Protestant Christianity and how it manifests within South Korea’s secular social and political order.

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