At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson's status as the greatest living American seemed assured. He had authored the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three years old and over the next two decades became a celebrated diplomat, intellectual, and statesman. Jefferson's legacy as a religious thinker has generally hinged on his authorship of the Virginia statute on religious freedom and his commitment to disestablishment in his home commonwealth. Baptists and later generations of evangelical Protestants saw Jefferson as the key political ally in disestablishing religion and offering religious liberty to their co-religionists. Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins called Jefferson and Madison the chief allies of Baptists in fulfilling the latter's desires for what they perceived as true religious liberty. Jefferson's role "in collaboration with the Bible-believing Baptists was spiritually ironic."
1 Kidd and Hankins posited that Jefferson in fact "remained a religious skeptic throughout his life."
Disestablishment represented only one aspect of Jefferson's thought however, and he was far from passive in his dislike of institutional Christianity. The Jeffersonian "wall of separation," posited his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, has been praised by evangelicals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Russell Moore in his book Onward, for instance, argued that Christians could live happily with separation so long as the state did not weigh in on religious matters: "A state that sees some aspect of Christian witness as bigoted and dangerous will not long stay on the other side of that wall."
2 But what Moore and other evangelicals failed to note is that Jefferson himself saw much of traditional Christianity, especially religious institutions, as bigoted and dangerous, and he saw separation as a way of keeping churchly influence from broader society. Jefferson's legacy was more about separating religion from the civil sphere than it was about merely removing the privileged position of state churches. The third president was largely quiet about his skepticism in public—all that we know about it comes from a few lapses in Notes on the State of Virginia and private correspondence, some of it not even sent. Yet his private views are evident enough in his public policy, and his supposed rights of conscience ran only one way: toward de-churching society. While the Virginian might not have hated "religion," he loathed churchly institutions and Protestant clerics. This stemmed not only from his pronounced anti-clericalism, but from a belief that aspects of the Christian Bible were antagonistic toward the natural law regime he hoped to perpetuate in the new American republic. Federalist divines—so often seen as reactionaries—and even some conservative Republican devotees of Jefferson in fact had good reason to think that Jefferson's ideas might unhinge and unmoor the historic Protestant social order they understood themselves to have inherited and believed they needed to maintain. Broad acceptance of disestablishment as an accomplished political fact did not mean that Jeffersonian separation doctrines were popular or even the norm in the Early National United States.
The political success of disestablishment and the numerical growth of its most obvious beneficiaries—Baptists and Methodists—obscured to later historians and clerics the continuing commitment of Anglicans, Congregationalists, and some Presbyterians to the close relationship between church and state that religious Americans believed could endure even in a disestablished religious order. George Washington, an Anglican vestrymen, broadly affirmed disestablishment but, as Michael Novak and Jane Novak have noted, broke with Jefferson and Madison on the idea that "disestablishment was a necessary consequence of religious liberty."
3 The first president "held both in principle and in practice…that government ought to endorse religious seriousness in general, since a long-lived republic" depended on a virtuous citizenry. Washington also saw government rightly accommodating itself to "to the claims of conscience in various religious bodies, in a manner consistent with the common good and public order."
4 It is common to note that Washington did not take communion, and his relationship with religion has been litigated too many times to count. But on the question of religion and the state, he affirmed the long-time understanding among Protestants and Anglicans that church and state both played a role in upholding civil society, and that they could cooperate in doing so. The extreme disestablishmentarianism of Jefferson and Madison—churches weren't able to incorporate again in Virginia until the beginning of the twenty-first century—"did not exhaust the range of the Founders' thinking about matters of church and state, and their views were far more narrow than Washington's." Washington's identification with the nascent Federalist Party during his presidency stemmed from the conservative beliefs regarding church and state that he shared with the party. While they did not see state churches as a necessity to ensure a virtuous social order and promote virtue, they did see the public presence of religion, and particularly Christianity, as non-negotiable. Historian Patrick Allitt has noted that "while the First Amendment to the Constitution declared that Congress should pass no laws relating to an established religion…it said nothing about the states, several of which retained established churches for several decades after the Revolution."
5 States like Connecticut and Massachusetts into the nineteenth century "followed the European erastian tradition, according to which the church was a branch of the state and subsidized by the state, unifying it and embodying its religious and moral will."
6 Jeffersonian separation appealed to evangelical groups without long traditions as the natural alternative to New England Erastianism, but this created a historical binary where there were in fact other ways in which public Christianity was upheld than state-supported churches.
Anglican vestrymen like Washington and others in the federal Congress and state legislatures implemented the constitutionally disestablished religious milieu but without Virginia's particularly aggressive disposition to de-church their political and social realms. The Old Dominion's en masse secularization program was an anomaly, and states allowed a wide variety of privileges for Episcopal churches and other bodies to remain in place. Even the retention of property served as a vehicle for Episcopalians in New York, for example, to exercise a "disproportionate influence" politically and socially well into the nineteenth century because of their wealth.
7 As late as the 1850s Episcopal rectors believed that the United States government and certain states had overstepped the bounds of prudence and a rightly ordered society by stripping established churches of their historic civic and social functions and rights beyond that of state financial support. After 1786, the Commonwealth of Virginia requisitioned church lands, for example, without compensation. John Norton, a Kentucky rector and biographer of bishop William White (1748–1836), believed that a clique of godless politicians had set out to use disestablishment to harm Anglicans. "The Episcopal Church," he lamented, "had scarcely begun to recover from the effects of past misfortunes" when Jefferson and Madison set their dissenters on Episcopal churchmanship.
8 Anglicans, Norton noted, could "point to Washington, and Jay, and Morris, and Madison, and Marshall, among her members, as evidence that the Episcopal government harmonized most perfectly with the free institutions of the land," but that was not enough for Virginia dissenters and their Jeffersonian republican leaders. "The old leaven of opposition," Norton groaned, remained entrenched in Virginia. "The children of those who had broken down the 'carved work' of the sanctuary, 'with axes and hammers,'" also seized with "unprincipled greediness," on Episcopal glebes "and other temporal possessions." Many of those who dispossessed the church, Norton warned, "had grown up in the faith" but had been "warped by the" Jeffersonian and extreme Republican "prejudices, of their fathers."
Jefferson's personal war against churchly authority and the proposition that religious institutions could bind consciences—which he viewed as innately tyrannical—led him to attack the idea of divine inspiration. He famously wrote The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, popularly called the Jefferson Bible, and also admonished friends and family concerning the necessity of reading the Bible skeptically. "Those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces."
9 Readers needed to "recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god" and "examine upon what evidences his pretensions are found, and whether that evidence is so strong as that its falsehood would be more probable than a change in the laws of nature in the case he relates." Jefferson proposed that the Bible should read like the histories of Livy or Tacitus. While the proposition of reading sacred texts historically did not entail a rejection of Christian metaphysics or traditional Protestant understandings of the ties between explicitly Christian morality and the maintenance of the civil and social orders, it did lead him to see the maintenance of orthodox Christianity as adiaphora. If Jesus wasn't God, he told his nephew, it was hardly something that should bother anyone. There were, he said, plenty of other enticements to virtue.
10
The question of virtue in society motivated Early Republic clerics and politicians to see Jefferson's expression of the church and state settlement as atheistic and incompatible with traditional Protestant understandings of a rightly ordered society. Federalist newspapers, politicians, and divines denounced Jefferson as an infidel and anti-Christian throughout the 1790s, and the attacks increased as Jefferson's election became more likely in 1800. Evidence that Jefferson's religious views were public knowledge and not at all hidden was found in the breathless editorials of Federalist newspapers.
11 After relaying Jefferson's sentiments on religion in Notes on the State of Virginia, The American Aurora warned that Jefferson was an avowed enemy of "all religious establishments."
12 Given this information, the Aurora demanded to know who among its readers "will now give his vote for this audacious howling atheist."
The threat to society from atheism served as a chief theme in sermons for Timothy Dwight IV (1752–1817).
13 He served as a Congregationalist minister and then president of Yale College for twenty-two years, until his death in 1817, at which point his legacy seemed complete. Born into one of Massachusetts's and New England's leading families, Dwight's vocation as a Congregationalist minister followed family tradition. In 1777 Dwight joined the Continental Army as a chaplain and proved to be popular, with soldiers and his superiors commending him in their reports. After the war, he married the daughter of one of New York's most prominent bankers. Although joined to his home region's elites through family ties and marriage, Dwight's conservatism meant that he did not see the new-fangled ideas of the late eighteenth century as beneficial for society or virtuous. He deplored the growth of religious skepticism, and he warned his students about it regularly. Dwight's 1785 epic poem The Conquest of Canaan cast the North American republic in the role of the people of Israel conquering a pagan continent and subduing pagan peoples. In Dwight's framing, the American republic, like Israel, could not ignore the divinity without consequences.
14
Atheism represented not merely a spiritual threat to the American republic, according to Dwight. It also threatened the social and cultural life of the new American Union as well. In good Puritan fashion, Dwight believed that the story of human history was a battle between good and evil. Humans might be on the side of good—God; Jehovah; Yahweh; the Abrahamic deity and his subordinates—or they could ally with the forces of evil. God sometimes picked particular peoples to accomplish his will, and Dwight believed that Puritan New Englanders were in fact God's chosen people. Ernest Lee Tuveson noted that for Dwight, the experience of the first divinely chosen people—the ancient Hebrews—necessarily became the model for Israel's successors.
15 The Conquest of Canaan relied on biblical motifs, but their purpose was not sentimental or even merely spiritual. They were a blueprint for cultural, political, and social action in the newly independent United States. Dwight, noted Tuveson, "interspersed a number of parallels between biblical figures and their counterparts, American soldiers who fell in defense of liberty." God had "given the land—a continent—to the new republic as he did the promised land to the Israelites of old." Early National New Englanders affirmed Dwight's poetic assertion that God had given them "the fair empire of the promis'd land," where they had been ordained by heaven to "hold the sacred sway." The Puritan commonwealth given by God, and now part of the United States, was not to be a languid one. God demanded, in Dwight's word, the "voice" of the chosen people, and his expectations animated laypeople to bring about God's kingdom in their new republic.
16
Dwight argued that an atheistic society could not functionally achieve either spiritual or temporal benefits for itself. He argued in one sermon that "the consequences of these doctrines, or of Atheism generally, are in the text declared in these words, They are corrupt; they have done abominable works: there is none that doeth good."
17 Dwight fundamentally believed that "Atheists are corrupt; they do abominable works: there is none of them that doeth good." The character of Atheists, "seen by the Psalmist, and declared by the Spirit of God, three thousand years ago, has not changed for the better, at any period, down to the present day." Atheists, warned Dwight had always been corrupt. "They have ever done abominable works; there has never been among them a single good or virtuous man." As far as Dwight was concerned, skepticism over the existence of God undermined New England's self-conception as God's chosen people, and the fundamental cultural, social, and political structures in human history. Humans necessarily needed a divine order and purpose. Subordinating themselves to the perceived demands of the Christian God allowed humanity to achieve humanity's natural ends, which Calvinist New Englanders found in the Westminster Catechism: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Toleration of atheism obliterated this mission for Early National New Englanders.
In Early National New England, the charge of atheism not only called into question a man's moral or social standing. It implied a measure of seditious behavior as well. De facto religious politics dominated New England after the promulgation of the United States Constitution in 1788, and State churches remained untouched by the disestablishmentarian trends emanating from Virginia. Connecticut ministers, for instance, touted the essential tie between church and state during the early years of the new American republic. The chief minister of Hartford's First Congregational church told his parishioners that civil and ecclesiastical institutions were not independent of each other. Elizur Goodrich (1761–1849), a divine from Durham, noted to congregants that the magistracy and ministry had different but not opposite ends: "They mutually assist each other, and ultimately center in the same point. The one has for its object the promotion of religion and the cause of Christ; the other aims immediately at the peace and order of mankind."
18 The perceived essential ties between promoting religion, the cause of Christ, and the peace and order of mankind did not escape the Federalist-dominated state legislature of Connecticut. Federalists' strength in New England and their affiliation with state-sponsored religion against Jefferson's disestablishmentarians meant that constituencies for disestablishmentarian politics in New England, and Connecticut and Massachusetts especially, were poorly organized and weaker than they were in the Mid-Atlantic and southern states. Connecticut and Yale College saw little reason to change the centuries-old religious settlement. The number of religious dissenters—particularly Baptists—grew in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the opening decade of the nineteenth, but Robert Imholt rightly observes that "belief that Protestant Christianity underlay Connecticut law, politics, and society remained strong."
By necessity, state churches relied on politics for their maintenance. In the Early Republic, the Federalist Party's conservatism on church and state meant that almost by necessity, establishmentarians were politically partisan. Establishmentarian Congregationalists like Dwight publicly and vocally supported the Federalist Party and publicly denounced Jefferson's Republicans. Jefferson himself increasingly appeared as a dangerous radical to Federalists and in particular New Englanders. In 1797, Philip Mazzei (1730–1815), a Florentine merchant and doctor who lived in Virginia in the 1780s, gave pieces of his correspondence with Jefferson to a Parisian newspaper. The letters confirmed the suspicions of New Englanders like Dwight who believed that Jefferson was an irreligious skeptic who had been radicalized by godless French philosophers during his time as the American minister in France. In the letter Jefferson called the Federalist administration of George Washington and the Federalist-controlled Congress and courts "Anglican, monarchical, and aristocratic."
19 Federalists, said Jefferson, preferred the calm of despotism to what he called the "boisterous sea of liberty."
20 Jefferson routinely associated anti-democratic and religious politics with despotism, and in many ways saw churchly or institutional religion as the first cause of tyranny. Brooke Allen argues in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers that Jefferson saw Christian ministers as his chief enemy, especially as the election of 1800 approached. When Jefferson "swore upon the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man," he was, according to Allen, striking out against the tyranny not of "political tyrants but of religious ones, not of kings but of ambitious clergymen jockeying for power."
21
Jefferson's skepticism had a distinctively anti-churchly tone. Protestant ministers interested in politics, and especially those interested in Federalist politics, he called "'the genus irritable vatum,' who are all in arms against me."
22 And so they were. Timothy Dwight told a Connecticut senator that unless politicians and ministers worked together to stop Jefferson's election, they would "lose the only and certainly best, opportunity of securing public safety. The introduction of Mr. Jefferson will ruin the republic."
23 A New York Presbyterian opined that that the election of Jefferson represented the "deliberate surrender of the cause of Jesus Christ" in the United States." The ministers' fears were not, however, the dreads of partisan hacks fearful of losing power. They saw Christianity as underpinning the societal order and providing purpose for human existence. Christianity's place in culture and society meant it needed a place in law and politics as well. Jedediah Morse (1761–1826), the father of Samuel Morse of Morse code fame, preached a sermon in 1799 noting that it was to "the kindly influence of Christianity" that Americans owed "that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness" which the United States enjoyed as the new century dawned.
24 Morse, who spent much of his career defending orthodox Congregationalist Calvinism from the rising tide of Unitarianism in New England, warned that "all efforts to destroy the Foundation of our holy religion, ultimately tend to the subversion also of our political freedom and happiness." Whenever and wherever "pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican form of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them."
Undeterred by clerical opponents, Jefferson claimed to Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), one of his fellow Founding Fathers, that he hoped his views on religion would please "the rational Christian or Deist; & would reconcile many to a character they have too hastily rejected."
25 Rational Christianity he left undefined, but associating it with deism meant that hard metaphysical commitments to the Christian creeds over and against the ideas of the Enlightenment would preclude someone from being truly rational. The excesses of the French Revolution, he groaned, had stalled the progress of humanity away from medieval superstitions and "had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro' the US." Jefferson's complaint that partisan clergy were the only devotees of historic Christianity's place in the cultural, social, and political life of the American republic was overstated. Patrick Henry (1736–1799), Jefferson's predecessor as governor of Virginia and a committed proponent of Jefferson's own ideological commitments, nonetheless balked at Jefferson's deism, which Henry saw as synonymous with irreligiosity. Henry had during the 1780s praised the writings of Thomas Paine, but by 1796 the former had become so horrified by the anti-religious violence of the French Revolution and Paine's intellectual role in sowing the seeds of the Terror that he broke irrevocably with Paine, Jefferson, and even the Republican Party. Thomas S. Kidd noted that by the end of Henry's political life, the Virginian believed that "Paine's writings and Jefferson's well-known skepticism" challenged the United States' "spiritual foundations."
26 Henry saw that Americans "could no longer take their religious heritage for granted." He "feared that without fidelity to long-established religious precepts, the United States would spin apart in an atheistic whirlwind, just like Revolutionary France."
Fears that Jefferson might inaugurate an anti-religious order that unmoored republican society's moral and religious foundations were not merely a Federalist fever dream. They were shared by Virginians like Henry who shared some of Jefferson's deepest Republican commitments as well. Jefferson had told Benjamin Rush that "the Episcopalians & Congregationalists" were especially troublesome for their lingering establishmentarian beliefs on church and state in 1800, but during and after his presidency he included Presbyterians—none of whom in Virginia supported the erection of state churches—in his list of problematic and invasive religious groups.
27 Jefferson's claims that his disestablishmentarianism rested on an absolute commitment to the rights of conscience seem less convincing when coupled with his obvious dislike for organized Christianity.
The extent to which Jefferson disliked churchly or creedal Christianity was already well-known in 1800, albeit largely by means of rumor—as noted, although relatively candid in private, Jefferson reined in his skepticism in public. After his presidency Jefferson wrote more candidly about his own beliefs, but even his actions during his political career indicate a relatively enduring dislike of doctrines such as the Trinity. Jefferson's deism—which appeared to have solidified into Unitarianism as he grew older—rejected the Trinity vehemently. He viewed the doctrine as the source of religious intolerance. The belief that God was one person and that Christ was not divine had been, he argued, the belief of the primitive Christian Church. The "unity of the supreme being" was not, he raged, "ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius."
28 Jefferson called the Athanasian Creed a "hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads" which "had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs." The strongest proof of what Jefferson called the "the solidity of the primitive faith" was its restoration "as soon as a nation arises which vindicates to itself the freedom of religious opinion, and its eternal divorce from the civil authority." For Jefferson, the American religious settlement was not simply a soil in which Unitarianism was permitted to grow, but itself the fruit that proved the truth of Unitarianism. Disestablishment's naturally corollary was the growth of Unitarianism and a rejection of the Christian Trinity. This was hardly a view shared by his enthusiastic Baptist and Presbyterian supporters, but they eventually learned that the third president held it deeply, much to their surprise and chagrin—particularly when Jefferson began picking potential faculty members for the University of Virginia.
Evangelicals should not have been too surprised at Jefferson's views on religion. As early as the mid-1780s, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he famously argued that "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
29 Jefferson's deism and deism in general was not libertarian, operating in harmony with historic Christianity or other traditional religions. It was programmatically committed to replacing historic Protestantism in American society. Elihu Palmer (1764–1806), a Jefferson devotee, authored Principles of Nature; or, a Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species, in which he argued that deism represented the final development in human intellectual, religious, and political freedom. Palmer argued that Luther, Calvin, and the other magisterial Reformers "were at least as superstitious, fanatical, and narrow-minded as the Catholic church from which they separated." Religious groups committed to rationality and reason threw off the old superstitions. Christopher Grasso notes that Palmer saw the destruction of Protestantism as a metaphysical necessity: "Arminians cast off Calvinism and restored the importance of human agency; Arians and Socinians moved toward a more realistic understanding of Jesus; and universalists abandoned limited atonement and endless punishment."
30 Rejecting Protestant religiosity and the historic political and social commitments built on Protestantism was not incidental to deism; it was part of a broader project to remake society. Deists hoped to "spread enlightened philosophy through print," encourage "people to use their reason," urge skepticism "about the claims of revealed religion," and place "faith, politics, and knowledge on natural, rational foundations."
31 They wedded this to distinctly political aims. Deists and their allies fought "for republican liberty and equality, at the ballot box or with a sword if necessary."
Deist Reformers "like Palmer and his friend Thomas Paine tried to combine a skeptical critique of revealed religion (especially Christianity) with a program for a simplified, liberated religion of reason and nature."
32 Paine's ubiquity within radical causes during the Federalist years of the 1790s, and Jefferson's association with Paine, showed religious Americans, and not just Federalists, that Jefferson did in fact represent a threat to religion in the new American republic. While Federalists might have overstated the degree to which Jefferson could make immediate changes to the American order, they were not wrong to perceive in Jefferson a greater enemy to churchly religion than Jefferson's partisans admitted him to be. Nor were the Federalists a niche group of New England reactionaries. William Linn (1752–1808), a Calvinist minister from Northern Ireland who served as the House of Representatives Chaplain, sneered and pantomimed Jefferson. "Let my neighbor once persuade himself there is not God and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck."
33
The election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 renewed attention to the question of church and state relations in the Early Republic. Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association gave the American republic's political lexicon the phrase "separation of church and state," but that term was not analogous to the constitutional settlement on disestablishment, which was more narrowly limited to precluding a federally sponsored national religious establishment—an equivalent of the Church of England, for instance. A year after Jefferson's correspondence with the Connecticut Baptists, a pamphlet appeared, curiously entitled Two Sons of Oil. The book-length essay's name came from two oil-anointed offices inferred from the biblical book of Zechariah: civil minister and religious minister. The author, Samuel B. Wylie (1773–1852), was a Reformed Presbyterian—popularly termed "Covenanters," from their theocratic Scottish predecessors—minister and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He opened a debate on the "Constitution's compatibility with Christianity and the proper bounds of religious uniformity in the newly founded republic."
34 More importantly, the presence of divines like Wylie in prominent churches and universities—he pastored a church in Philadelphia for half a century, and taught and then served as Provost at the University of Pennsylvania for two decades—challenged "certain 'Christian' understandings of early America and the Constitution." Wylie's public debate with William Findley (c.1741–1821), himself a descendant of Scottish Covenanters, also posed problems "for attempts at a coherent theory of secularity, natural law, and the common good in our own day."
Wylie could be both a convinced "theocrat" as well as a convinced believer in disestablishment. While he never countenanced sedition or even a change to the republic's fundamental laws broadly, Wylie argued that he (and any Covenanter) could not support the United States because, among other things, the federal constitution did not explicitly recognize the existence of God, and because the United States sanctioned slavery.
35
Beginning with the 1800 presidential campaign, religious observers and writers worried about the rise of public irreligiosity associated with the personal and political beliefs of Thomas Jefferson. Linn went so far as to warn Christians against voting for Jefferson, a warning "founded singly upon his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or, in other words, his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism."
36 Theodore Dwight (1764–1846), the brother of Yale president Timothy Dwight IV, saw a dark post-Jefferson regime "governed by blockheads and knaves," where "ties of marriage with all its felicities" were "severed and destroyed," and where "your wives and daughters are thrown into the stews; our children are cast into the world from the breast and forgotten."
37 In a United States ruled by Jefferson's Republicans, "filial piety is extinguished, and our surnames, the only mark of distinction among families, are abolished. Can the imagination paint anything more dreadful on this side of hell?"
Although Linn and Dwight did not share Wylie's Covenanter political theology, they shared a belief that Jefferson's rhetoric and politics represented a departure from the religious politics of his two Federalist predecessors. Historiographic assumptions regarding a secular founding understandably focus on Jefferson, but neither the Constitution, nor prominent clerics and intellectuals at the beginning of the nineteenth century assumed a state-enforced secular republic. In fact, they assumed that the United States' republican social and civil framework, along with the states' institutional frameworks, relied on public Christianity. Washington was comfortable with religion in political life, and even Madison, the most convinced of disestablishmentarians, worked to create federal chaplaincies for the Senate, House, and other federal institutions.
Scholars devoted to the idea of a secular founding argue, like Steven K. Green in Inventing a Christian America, that a Christianized American republic was a creation of religious activists. "The myth of America's religious origins arose incrementally, not as a comprehensive account, over a forty-year period, roughly from 1800 to 1840"—so says Green.
38 Green does not deny the presence of Christian influence in the Founding Era altogether, but he wrongly relegates Christian influence to a fringe minority: "A handful of people during the founding period, orthodox clergy in particular…never abandoned their belief in an active superintending providence or their willingness to think in biblical types." That Wylie's work elicited a response from a sitting congressman, and that it went through several editions, indicated that his message appealed to more than a mere political or social fringe, and his status as a professor at an elite university meant that his intellectual credentials were secure.
Wylie's, Dwight's, and Linn's responses to Jefferson's accession create a problem for Green's secular thesis, however. Wylie and his brethren were not trying to contrive a story of a Christian America. Instead, they were trying to preserve one, fighting a rear-guard action against the beginnings of a new regime wherein the United States' religious roots were reimagined as playing a negligible role in its creation. 1800 more properly saw the invention of a secular America, not a Christian one. There was no need to invent an explicitly Christian founding, largely because the Christian socio-civil foundation of the republic was already largely assumed. Claims that Virginia's disestablishment and that state's particular brand of irreligious and even secular politics informed the Constitutional era have been, as Mark David Hall rightly notes, massively overstated.
39
The Covenanter theology that underpinned Wylie's arguments was never supported by a majority of American statesmen in the Founding Era or Early Republic, nor did even a sizable plurality of American citizens worship in Presbyterian or Reformed churches. Nonetheless, the perception that Jefferson was enforcing secularism on a Christian socio-civil milieu created the circumstances whereby political theology was rightly understood not as a reactionary response to the Republican administration but as an intellectual and political pursuit that had long defined Colonial North America and the Early National United States. The incompatibility of Covenanter theocracy, specifically, with the longue duree of colonial and subsequently Constitutional practice in the United States did not mean accepting the invention of a secular Founding.
Most Protestants in the first decade of the nineteenth century did not affirm the idiosyncratic church and state doctrines of the Covenanters, but neither did they believe that disestablishment removed the church from the social or civil order. Likewise, Early Republic Protestants assumed that the church was a merely spiritual institution that was not affected by social and political changes. Presbyterian minister and King's College—now Columbia University—professor John McKnight (1754–1823), like most Presbyterians in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, celebrated disestablishment as a definitive corrective of an unnatural misalliance that began with Constantine. Constantinian establishmentarianism was a "heterogeneous and incestuous connection between the kingdoms of this world, and the kingdom of Christ; which, from the reign of Constantine, down to the present day," had been "the source of incalculable mischief, both to the interests of true religion, and the civil and religious rights of man."
40 Disestablishment renounced that connection. Church and state in the new American order each rested "on their own proper foundation," and exercised, "respectively, their particular and appropriate rights and prerogatives."
In McKnight's reckoning, disestablishment benefited church and state because it made their respective duties and limits clear. Disestablishment did not, however, disconnect them in their mutual goal to preserving human liberty and ordering human life. Governments, after all, cannot be separated from the societies they govern. There was, McKnight argued, a "close and intimate connection subsisting between" civil society and the church.
41 That connection between them rendered a right understanding of their association necessary for the protection for the liberty of both. "Civil and religious liberty, though distinct, in themselves, will generally be enjoyed or lost together. The same enlarged views, and the same liberal sentiments" that tended "to secure the one, will equally tend to the promotion and establishment of the other." The same spirit "of domination and lust of power, which aims at enslaving the bodies, will equally aim at enslaving the minds and consciences of men." Communities religious and civil, "or bodies politic, will always be prosperous and happy, in proportion to the religion and virtue which they possess."
Although disestablishment removed churches from the state's sphere of control, it did not disconnect churches from society or the state entirely. Churches were affected by the same forces that influenced broader society. Disestablishment of church from the institutional civil government did not entail disconnection from the influences that affected both. The push for a more complete separation came from Jeffersonian Deists and Baptists. John Leland (1754–1841), a prominent New England Baptist and Jeffersonian partisan, saw Jefferson as a hero for finally finishing off Protestantism's—and Christianity's—original sin of Constantinian accommodation: "That the Christian world has been in a gross error, from the days of Constantine to the present time, admits of no doubt," claimed Leland.
42 "From that period down, the Christian religion has been an institute of state policy, regulated by the laws of men, and supported by the sword of the magistrate." Protestantism, whatever its benefits, had not addressed the great sin of historical Christianity: religious establishments. "Whether in a papal or protestant mode, the principle has done incalculable mischief, and drenched the earth in blood," said Leland. Leland foreshadowed the utopian claims of the nineteenth century by asserting that America would escape history and inaugurate a new era of not only political, but also Christian history. "In the United States," Leland exclaimed, "the felonious principle has been apprehended, tried, condemned and executed." Baptist Roger Williams (c.1603–1683) and Quaker William Penn (1644–1718) "first attacked the villain, and Thomas Jefferson did more than any one man to bring him to the stake." Leland warned that "some few roots of this principle are yet in the soil of Massachusetts, interwoven in the constitution and laws of the state; but the spirit of the people triumphs over those evil roots." Leland placed his hopes for a disestablishmentarian order in populist democracy. There were, he noted, "but few places in the state where the people would succumb to a legal distraint for religious uses."
Baptists needed disestablishment to mean more than merely disestablishing the Anglican Church. They needed to defang the socio-religious order that regarded their emotionally-charged worship as unusual at best and heretical at worst. Leland recorded happenings at Baptist tent revivals along the James River in the summer of 1785. "At Associations, and great meetings," he saw souls awakened, in his words, "who afterwards give clear, rational accounts of a divine change of heart."
43 Certain exercises—typically physical convulsions often resulting in the new convert falling to the ground and writhing uncontrollably—"were not confined to the newly convicted, and newly converted, but persons who have been professors a number of years." These converts and enthused believers "at such lively meetings, not only jump up, strike their hands together, and shout aloud, but will embrace one another, and fall to the floor." Leland had "never known the rules of decency broken so far as for persons of different sexes, thus to embrace and fall at meetings." He admitted that these apparently spiritual confirmations of revivalist preaching were not "seen in all parts of the state, at times when God is working on the minds of the people." Instead, "under the preaching of the same man, in different neighborhoods and counties, the same work, in substance, has different exterior effects." Baptist flirtation with revivalism often drew the ire of public authorities. What Baptists defended as religious freedom, states prosecuted as public disorder. This did not stem from states' commitments to lingering Anglican political theology. Even in disestablished Virginia, a majority of people in the Commonwealth viewed Baptists and Methodists with suspicion. Christine Leigh Heyrman observed in her book Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt that "obnoxious as Baptists and Methodists were to many members of the Anglican gentry, many white southerners of lesser means liked these religious upstarts no better. White middling farmers might not have wanted to maintain the church of England institutionally, but that did not mean they embraced a socio-religious order committed to en masse religious freedom."
44 It was not, Heyrman argued, "only members of the gentry or Anglican clergymen who violently opposed early evangelicals." When a Baptist minister was arrested in the 1770s, locals gathered in significant numbers to harangue him. When Baptists tried to preach in jail cells, townspeople disrupted that too.
A wholesale remaking of society, and not merely disestablishment, was the goal of Early Republic Baptists. Leland's Jeffersonianism and disestablishmentarian intellectual framework, Mark Noll notes, "clearly distinguished between political and religious spheres of life."
45 The Baptist minister "was a determined foe of all hierarchies—social, commercial, medical, and legal, as well as clerical—and of every effort to coerce the conscience." Leland campaigned against the Christian and Protestant past and urged that individuals, according to Nathan O. Hatch, "free themselves of natural authorities: church, state, college, seminary, even family."
46 Hatch rightly noted that Leland "carried the ideological leverage of evangelical urgency and Jeffersonian promise." Most importantly for the relationship of religion to society broadly, Leland "proclaimed a divine economy that was atomistic and competitive rather than wholistic and hierarchical." Leland combined religion and politics even as he ostensibly tried to separate them. He proselytized citizens with a kind of "liberal individualism" which "could be easily embraced at the grass roots." Ordinary Americans "gladly championed the promise of personal autonomy as a message they could understand and a cause to which they could subscribe—in God's name no less."
The election of 1800 definitively turned the telos of federal politics against traditional Protestant conceptions of church and state. And yet that did not mean a majority of Americans supported the Jeffersonian conception of church and state. New England Federalists remained intransigent. So too were intellectuals in Early National colleges and churches. The court system of the United States, filled with southern and northern Federalists appointed by Washington and Adams, also pushed against the rising tide of religious de-institutionalization. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectual, religious, and judicial elites remained committed to older Protestant understandings of church and state whereby two separate institutions worked hand in hand to maintain the civil and social orders. The bulwark they created proved surprisingly resilient. Jeffersonian separationism was not de facto disposition of society in the Early Republic. As late as 1839, John L. O'Sullivan (1813–1895), a Democratic editor, argued that Americans who continued to "venerate the rubbish, the prejudices, the superstitions of other times and other lands, the theocracy of priests, the divine right of kings, the aristocracy of blood, the metaphysics of colleges, the irrational stuff of law libraries" would eventually be overawed by "the mighty impulse of the age;" and "carried onward by the increasing tide of progress."
47 Forces of tradition like the old socio-civil conceptions of the Reformation would not, he hoped, withstand "the glorious movement of the masses." Like John Leland, O'Sullivan hoped to eventually to sweep away the hierarchies and institutions of old. But "the retrograde tendencies of our laws, our judicature, our colleges, our literature" stood in the way. From the election of Jefferson onward, historic Protestant legal frameworks in state laws, judges, colleges and universities, and the burgeoning American literati all upheld Protestantism's fundamental place in American culture, politics, and society, whether Jefferson liked it or not.
). It's a great time to ask great things of the Prophet of the Church.
