RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: Religion and the Populist Revolution

2. Men and Machines: Freedom, Conformity, and the Complexities of Southern Evangelical Thought

2. Men and Machines: Freedom, Conformity, and the Complexities of Southern Evangelical Thought Long before it achieved its place of cultural centrality in the South, evangelicalism , as it emerged during the mid-1700s, distinguished itself from other forms of Protestantism by stressing individual conversion and voluntaristic church government. These ideas were new and challenging—as radical to some religious conservatives as deism or infidelity. In the South, early Baptists and Methodists further challenged the social hierarchy as they claimed equality among men, women, and Africans. In short, evangelical thinking blossomed among cultural outsiders and iconoclasts. During the period from about 1790 to 1835, or the “Second Great Awakening ,”these ideals coupled with the methods of revivalism to propel this evangelicalism across the South and the rest of the country. As evangelical emphases crossed denominational and class lines, they forged the predominant religious motif of the nineteenth century, and even though this widespread success brought varying degrees of conflict, something of a Protestant intellectual consensus developed as preexisting denominations,in whole or in part, embraced the theology and practices of evangelicalism. Except for the more rigid Calvinism of the Primitive Baptists and of theologically acute Presbyterians, the confessionalism of certain Lutherans, and the moralism of some Episcopalians, Protestants in North Carolina adhered to most of the same theological and philosophical ideals, and these ideals shaped not only religious presuppositions but social and political ones as well.1 In looking at the aspects of evangelical thought pertinent to Populism, we need to pay particular attention to how these sometimes contradictory patterns of thought aligned with the institutional and social developments examined in the previous chapter. More specifically, evangelicals’ commonsense 020 c2 (22-40) 2/7/06 9:18 AM Page 22 approach to human nature, institutions, economics, and political action, along with their belief in “God’s moral governance,” indelibly marked the contours of the Populist reform strategy.At the same time,their ideals of freedom , millennialism, antielitism, and belief that God especially favored the poor sacralized Populism’s mission to restore American democracy. Ironically , evangelicals’ conservative tendencies—tendencies often inherently and ironically joined to their more liberal ones—helped mobilize opposition to the Populist cause. If there is a key that unlocks the complexities of the evangelical mind, perhaps it is the movement’s basic epistemological and cosmological grounding: commonsense. * * * Providing a basic foundation for the way southern evangelicals understood how people, society, and God worked, Scottish-based commonsense thinking stressed the ability of all people to apprehend and conform to certain axioms, ideals, or “principles” by which God ruled heaven and earth. This way of thinking therefore influenced the way evangelicals understood the processes of thought, perception, learning, and government (moral, ecclesiastical , economic, and political), how people and institutions ought to behave, and how“proper”class, race, and gender relations ought to appear. This pattern of thinking—called “commonsense” by the unsophisticated or“Scottish Moral Philosophy”by the erudite—was rooted in the thought of eighteenth-century philosophers such as Thomas Reid. Formal Scottish Moral Philosophers like Princeton’s JohnWitherspoon (1723–94) and Brown’s FrancisWayland (1796–1865) taught that correct economic,political,or moral activity had to conform to eternal axioms that governed the proper relationships between God and humans,humans and humans,men and women,parents and children, governments and the governed, and so on. Yet they also believed that humans were themselves responsible for understanding and acting in accordance with these proper relations; hence, proper action involved both the nonrational passions that were tied to the will along with the higher faculties or reason used to apprehend these axioms. In order to involve both the rational and nonrational aspects of the human psyche, Scottish Moral Philosophers believed the conscience served as an arbiter between the passions and reason. The conscience, once informed through reason with the knowledge of right and wrong (the awareness of axioms or principles), would then arbitrate between higher and lower passions to connect unction to right behavior. Thus, reason would judge an action to be moral, or right, by an external locus of authority (natural law, the Bible, etc.) and at the same time utilize heartfelt unction Men and Machines 23 020 c2 (22-40) 2/7/06 9:18 AM Page 23 involving the will (moral activity was thus based on motive, not outcome, as utilitarians argued). As evangelical theologians wed this philosophical outlook to their ideas about salvation and...