Three Hundred Years of Religion in America

THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF RELIGIONIN AMERICA Walter H. Conser Jr. William G. McLoughlin. Soul Liberty: The Baptists'StruggleinNew England, 16301833 . Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991. 336 pp. Kenneth H. Winn, Exi,/esin aLand of Liberty:Mormons inAmerica,1830-1846. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. x + 284pp. Richard A. Grusin. Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authorityand the Higher Criticismof the Bible. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 194 pp. Martin E. Marty. ModernAmerican Religion:The Noiseof Conflic~1919-1941. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. xiv + 464 pp. Illus. The nature of authority has been an unsettled and unsettling question in the history of religions in North America. From Anne Hutchinson's antinomian controversy through the Canadian debates over the clergy reserves to Martin Luther King's appeal to a law higher than that of the State, American religious history has reverberated with the sound of clashes over conflicting conceptions of legitimacy. The variety of contexts and the multitude of shapes in which debates over religious authority have emerged help to explain the complexity of its history. In matters such as the engagement of religion and culture, the interpretation of scripture, separation of church and state or immigration legislation, differing assessments of origins,intentions, meaning, circumstance and significance have shaped the debates over authority in American religion. The four books under review add to our understanding of this common theme of authority, while at the same time makingindividual contributions to their specific fields of research. William McLaughlin's Soul Liberty examines the role of the New England Baptists in the achievement of the separation of church and state in the United States. The book contains previously published articles, together with veryhelpful introductory and concluding essayswhich draw out common themes and highlight relevant historical contexts. Thus the volume supplements McLaughlin's earlier and magisterial two-volume monograph on the New England phase of separation of church and state. 466 Walter H. Conser Jr. During the recent bicentennial celebration of the United States Constitution, some partisans insisted that rationalists such as Thomas Jefferson or pietists such as Roger Williams were principally responsible for the disestablishment of religion. McLaughlin's portrayal is more complicated. He acknowledges the contributions of Jefferson, Williams and their followers; however, he insists that the development of the unique American tradition of separation of church and state was more pragmatic, more hard-fought, fundamentally more ambiguous than those who see it as simply handed down from either the rationalist's pantheon or the pietist's heaven. Drawing on diaries, court records, poems and tracts, McLaughlin traces the Baptist search for religious liberty in New England from 1630, when they struggled for toleration, through the early 1730s, when they obtained occasional exemption from religious assessments, to 1833, when the Standing Order finally gave up ecclesiastical taxation. Significantly, McLaughlin explores the continuation of religious taxation after the ratification of the First Amendment (Massachusetts, for example, maintained a state-established religion until 1833) and notes the impact of the Second Great Awakening in revitalizing religion in the new nation. The debate over the relationship of a legal separation of church and state combined with a cultural establishment of certain religious traditions and values continues to occupy scholarly attention, and McLaughlin thoughtfully examines many of the roots of this controversy in the social and religious dynamics of this era. While McLaughlin admires the persistence of the Baptist's efforts to achieve religious liberty, his story is hardly a chapter in denominational hagiography. For example, he discusses the efforts by certain Baptists to drive the Shakers out of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to lay taxes on the Congregationalists when the Baptists were occasionally the majority in a town, to write into the Massachusetts constitution a test oath which discriminated against Roman Catholics, and to require church attendance on the Sabbath. Attention to these episodes gives McLaughlin's narrative a richlydetailed and realistically human look, one which includes the inconsistencies as well as the sacrifices of the Baptists. It also gives the reader a sense of the choices which Baptists faced: how far could one comply with civil authority when it conflicted with religious tradition? should one join with one's brothers and sisters in...