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Chapter 7 Political Religion, Political Irreligion Of the many July Fourth orations delivered in the summer of 1827, two expressed in clear detail how free enquirers and evangelical polemicists understood their civic duties and their political challenges. Robert L. Jennings delivered an oration before an audience of roughly sixty selfproclaimed deists and free enquirers assembled by the Free Press Association , an organization established in New York City to sponsor and promote critical discussions of Christianity. Although a Scottish émigré, Jennings readily invoked the memory of the American Revolution when he declared that recent efforts at evangelical organization were dangerous deviations from the principles of 1776. Jennings warned his audience that the Revolution would prove for naught unless Americans resisted the distribution of Bibles, religious tracts, and legislative enforcements of the Sabbath. Presbyterian minister Ezra Stiles Ely also invoked the Revolution’s legacy in an oration delivered from his Philadelphia pulpit. Only an organized Christian polity could fulfill the Revolution’s promise, Ely announced.1 Jennings concluded by denouncing the circulation of “vile pernicious tracts, which are calculated to prepare the minds of our now politically free citizens, for that passive submission to the expounders of holy oracles.” On the other hand, Ely concluded his remarks by calling for a “Christian party in politics.” This party would not gain its strength from national and local institutions or organizing documents. Instead its power would derive from the shared and voluntary efforts of Christians committed “to act upon, truly religious principles in all civil matters.” Ely was convinced that by sheer numbers the nation’s Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists could act in concert at election time to ensure that the United States “would never be dishonoured with an avowed infidel in her national 203 Political Religion cabinet or capitol.” In fact, Ely claimed that Presbyterians “alone could bring half a million of electors into the field, in opposition to any known advocate of Deism, Socinianism, or any species of avowed hostility to the truth of Christianity.”2 Jennings and Ely, respectively, voiced political positions inherent in infidel conversions and the religious concerns addressed in tract literature. Conversions to infidelity and evangelical concerns about personal disbelief provided the foundation for organized free enquiry and institutionalized Christian moral reform, which emerged simultaneously as advocates of each justified their position through opposition to the other. Both 1827 orations contained salient themes that appeared consistently in conflicts between free enquiry and evangelical reform throughout the 1830s. Jennings’s audience consisted of self-avowed free enquirers and deists, a point of only passing importance for Jennings in light of his immediate concern to limit the political reach of evangelical reform. For Ely, however, organized free enquiry constituted a coherent political interest within an “infidel” bloc, in essence a party that could mobilize constituencies and elect candidates to national political office. Thus Ely countered by advocating the formation of a Christian party in politics. In terms current to the 1820s and 1830s, Jennings opposed “fits of political religion,” or the pursuit of sectarian ends through political means. Ely, for his part, sought to curb what another observer described as “political irreligion,” or “carrying on the business of the commonwealth professedly as ‘without God in the world.’”3 Political religion and political irreligion referred to, first and foremost, the social consequences rather than the intellectual merits of personal religious opinions. Conflicts between Protestant reformers and free enquirers thus increasingly turned on questions of political power. With other Americans during the 1830s, Protestant moral reformers and free enquirers expand their public presence by forming new voluntary associations and denser print networks. Growth in American civil society amplified the influence of political religion and political irreligion. In addition, the legal and cultural underpinnings of civil society proved more effective at bolstering competing notions of religious truth than either theological claims alone or developments within religious movements. As a result, however, it seemed to free enquirers and Christian moral reformers that religious opinions were wedded more closely to the coercive and intolerant exercise of state power than at any time in American history. This fear eventually gained wide partisan currency. When the Democrats and Whigs finally coalesced 204 Chapter 7 as political parties in the 1830s, they were identified in contemporary partisan discourse as, respectively, the party of infidelity and opposition to Protestant reform and the party of orthodoxy and support for Protestant reform. Without question, the Protestant moral reformers who busied themselves throughout the 1820s and 1830s were more numerous and...

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