Travels

During the next several decades, from the 1750s through the 1770s, Congregational ministers across New England struggled and frequently failed to corral the unruly religious experiences of their inspired parishioners. Part 5 recounts the strife that plagued not only well-established churches such as Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton, Massachusetts, congregation but also upstart separatist groups led by ardent revival proponents like Separate Baptist minister Isaac Backus. Radical sectarian communities, Perfectionist seekers set out on a ceaseless quest for spiritual purity that led many of them to question all institutions—churches, communities, and families—and to generate startling new conceptions of the body and sexuality; others sought shelter from the growing ecclesiastical maelstrom in the rational faith and orderly worship of the Anglican church. Thrust into a dizzying and unstable religious marketplace, godly walkers, Separate Congregationalists, Anglican conformists, immortalists, Shakers, and “Nothingarians” trafficked in and out of the churches of the standing order at a startling rate. By 1780, religious insurgents had shattered the Congregational establishment.

The Struggle between “Religion and Nonreligion”: Jefferson, Backus, and the Dissonance of America's Founding Principles

The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between “religion and nonreligion.” This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.