The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America

Chapter 12. The Boundaries of Toleration and Tolerance: Religious Infidelity in the Early American Republic

C h a p t e r   The Boundaries of Toleration and Tolerance Religious Infidelity in the Early American Republic Christopher Grasso In 1798, a pamphlet by a member of a Newburgh, New York, deistical club responded to an attack printed in a local paper. The newspaper essayist’s denunciation of deism had begged two questions, the pamphleteer wrote: first, ‘‘is the gospel or any principle of religion incorporated in our federal or state constitutions,’’ and, second, ‘‘are deism and patriotism irreconcilable?’’ These questions, debated through the first half century of American independence , probed the boundaries of legal toleration and social tolerance. The Newburgh deist answered no to both. Citizens, he argued, were ‘‘doubly shielded’’ in the United States by laws guaranteeing religious liberty and by a spirit of independent opinion and mutual forbearance of differences, a spirit essential in a republican society. Another adversary, however, contended that propagating deism was a crime akin to treason. Accused by their opponents of having blasphemously mocked Christianity by once baptizing a cat and giving communion to a dog, the Newburgh deists seem to have disbanded by 1805. A Christian crusader named Abner Cunningham remembered his ‘‘infidel’’ Newburgh neighbors to warn a new generation of religious skeptics and freethinkers in the 1830s about God’s vengeance, claiming that within five years of the sacramental mockery, ‘‘some were shot; some hung; some drowned; two destroyed themselves by intemperance, one of whom was eaten by dogs, and the other by hogs; one committed suicide; one fell from his house, and was killed; one was struck with an axe, and bled to death.’’ Debauchery and villainy had proceeded from their anti-Christian principles, this Boundaries of Toleration and Tolerance 287 pious writer claimed, and they got what they deserved. The Newburgh deists were gone, Cunningham suggested, but the issues they raised were not.1 In the early American republic, questions about religious toleration (a constitutional and legal matter) and tolerance (a reference to cultural attitudes and social practices) were often directly connected to the problems posed by citizens who stood outside Christianity. These outsiders were not pagans or Muslims, whom Christians usually considered in the abstract, or Jews, who were a small percentage of the population and a special case theologically , but deists, skeptics, and freethinkers. Deists believed in a Creator and in morals derived from nature, but not in the divinity of either the Bible or Jesus; religious skeptics and freethinkers—or ‘‘free enquirers’’—doubted or denied most or all of Christianity’s claims about God, man, and salvation. All were called ‘‘infidels’’ by Christians. Infidelity and toleration are relative terms defined by subordination to governmental power and cultural authority . A confessional state, one that has privileged and empowered a particular religious group, may deign to ‘‘tolerate’’ dissenters; believers in a hegemonic religious faith denigrate those who disbelieve or oppose it as ‘‘infidels.’’ The Newburgh deist joined others—including some enlightened Christians— who called not for mere toleration but for religious liberty, and who hoped for less bigotry and more tolerance. In the early years of the new nation, the constitutional argument made little headway and the cultural one made less. The American Revolution had prompted a rethinking of religious liberty as Christian patriots, mobilizing opposition to Britain, had to forge ideological bonds across what had often been bitter sectarian divisions among Congregationalists , Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans. Stepping outside British constitutional rights to argue from a state of nature further broadened the philosophical basis of American citizenship. Framers of the new state constitutions struggled to guarantee liberty of conscience in religious matters while perpetuating a Christian culture. The new federal Constitution, with its First Amendment guaranteeing that the national government would neither establish religion nor interfere with its free exercise, left these issues to the states. For many Americans, however, the French Revolution, which produced a state that was for a time hostile to Christianity and fond of the guillotine, demonstrated that religious liberty was an idea that could be pushed too far or dangerously misconstrued. The American reaction to the astonishing events in France dovetailed with the formation of a deeply partisan national politics in the 1790s, culminating in 1800 with the bitterly fought election of a reputed deist, Thomas Jefferson. 288 Persistence of Tolerance and Intolerance These national and international political concerns also helped shape a cultural politics of patriotism, and of neighborliness and religious...