That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture

Introduction

1 Modern Freemasonry emerged from a milieu of early eighteenthcentury London clubs, salons, and similar societies that were coming into existence in private, outside the control of the state. In 1709 the influential British social theorist Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote a letter to a friend describing the emergence of these new forms of social life. Gentlemen who had previously upheld the “Sacred Truths” of the royal court, he recounted, were now meeting in “private” societies. There they engaged in wide-ranging conversations , “unravelling or refuting any Argument” so that greater truths might prevail. These “polite” societies, the English theorist observed, provided a new social space where urban gentlemen were free to discuss all manner of subjects, bound by private friendships characterized by “reciprocal tenderness and affection” that kept a studied distance from the solemn orthodoxies of state and church. These conversations, Shaftesbury warned, could take place only in private among gentlemen who knew one another well. To have such free interchange in public was “above the common Reach.”1 By embracing one another as brothers joined by love rather than obedience to an authoritarian father, the members of these new societies conducted social relations in new ways. New ideas, put forward most notably by the Earl of Shaftesbury, held that people naturally got along with one another and were genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of others.2 These innate sentiments could do naturally what the Introduction 2 | Introduction heavy hands of the monarchy and the church could no longer do artificially through coercion. According to their 1723 constitution, the gentlemen who joined the Masonic fraternity saw themselves “as Brethren upon the same level.”3 Within these affectionate bonds of brotherhood, members subscribed only to “that Religion in which all men Agree.” No longer bound as “in Ancient Times” by the “Religion of the Country or Nation,” Masons were free to pursue a variety of religious paths. Politically, aside from an agreement to be “a peaceable Subject to the Civil Powers,” no orthodox position was required.4 Freemasonry’s modern constitution, however, is rooted in ancient foundations. Though binding itself to progressive rules and regulations, the fraternity prefaced its constitution with a mythic history that traces Masonic origins to ancient wisdom and occult knowledge. No longer a medieval guild of stoneworkers, the brotherhood nevertheless retained the symbolic language and secret ceremonies of initiation. Within the secrecy of the lodge, members were free to entertain a variety of spiritual perspectives.5 Druids, pantheists, skeptics, and deists as well as Jews, Catholics, and Protestants could all be found within the eighteenth-century fraternity. Indeed, the new, speculative Freemasonry embodied the ideals of the age while allowing for alternative possibilities. The purpose of this book is to weave the story of Freemasonry into the narrative of American religious history. Freighted with the mythical legacies of stonemasons’ guilds and the Newtonian revolution, English Freemasonry came to colonial America with a vast array of cultural baggage, which was drawn on, added to, and transformed in different ways in its sojourn through American culture. This study argues that from the 1730s through the early twentieth century, the religious worlds of an evolving American social order broadly appropriated the changing beliefs and initiatory practices of this all-male society. For much of American history, Freemasonry was a counter and a complement to Protestant churches and a forum for collective action among racial and ethnic groups outside the European American mainstream. As a widely available resource for organizing social relations and ideology, Freemasonry provides an interpretive lens through which to reframe our understanding of the American religious past. This book comes at a time when the transformation of the field of American religious history has opened new areas of inquiry. In the past thirty years, a divinity school–based concern with the intellectual history of European American Protestants has given way to a religious studies interest in African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, Catho- Introduction | 3 lics, and other peoples and practices outside the domain of the Protestant middle class. Much of the new scholarship cuts across boundaries of gender, class, and region while paying particular attention to ritual and popular religion. Like most of the older American religious history, until recently the story of American Freemasonry has been a tale of middle-class European American northeastern male Protestants. Since the 1990s, however, a multicultural story of African American, Native American, Jewish, and...