That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture by David G. Hackett (review)

Hackett’s book is an attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the history of Freemasonry in the United States. Notwithstanding a few oversights and holes, it is by and large a constructive and welcome history that will not only be useful to scholars who study Freemasonry but also to those who study U.S. politics, political culture, and religion more broadly. Hackett takes as his guiding light Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), suggesting that the history of Masonic lodge activity and self-understanding parallels the rise and decline of an eighteenth-century enlightened public sphere. The intellectual and political health of civil society suffered with the triumph of modern, communicative capitalism. Interestingly, through the lens of the Masons, Hackett finds evangelical Christianity and partisan democracy in the antebellum United States to be far more significant than economic transformation in driving Freemasonry inward and thus away from the more civic and republican outlook that it espoused in the colonial and revolutionary eras.

Hackett’s sympathetic history elides the Marxist elements of the Habermasian scheme, allowing Hackett to avoid criticism of Masonry’s Whiggish narrative of its role in the founding and maintenance of the republic. Events like the disappearance of William Morgan, who was writing an exposé of the Freemasonry in 1826, and the challenges of Anti-Masonry appear as mere pathologies of populist excess in this book, threatening the purportedly benign, republican, and elite-guided public sphere of the founding. Likewise, although Hackett incorporates the scholarly insights of other historians regarding gender and sexuality into his work, he keeps them at an appreciative but safe distance. He pays some attention to changes in gender roles and in the dynamic between the public and the private spheres, but he never explicitly discusses their stability as analytical tools. The book includes the history of African-American fraternalism (and Prince Hall Freemasonry), Native-American Freemasonry, and the participation of Jewish and even Catholic immigrants in the twentieth century, but by treating all of them as completely self-contained stories, in separate chapters, his book runs of the risk of taking for granted the racial and gendered boundaries that are undeniably foundational to Freemasonry and its history. The rich and growing history of Latin American Freemasonry, in and out of the United States, also gets short shrift as a result.

These largely methodological hesitancies should not detract from the strengths of the book as a comprehensive study of Freemasonry within the context of U.S. history. The book is particularly strong in its careful attention to historical self-understanding, myth and narrative, historical symbolism, and temporality. Future research on Freemasonry will benefit greatly from it.