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Epilogue The Origins of American Cultural Politics Hubbard Winslow was pastor at Boston’s Bowdoin Street Church and a committed Whig in politics. Massachusetts ended its state religious establishment in 1833. Judging by Winslow’s 1835 treatise, Christianity Applied to our Civil and Social Relations, disestablishment was entirely for the better . Winslow had clearly absorbed the lessons of the religious controversies over infidelity of the previous decades. He ranked infidelity first when listing the “forms of our national disease.” “Let infidel principles gain the ascendant and atheism stalk at large over the land,” Winslow warned, “and all of our free institutions, now in the bloom and freshness of youth, would soon wither and expire.” He had no reason to believe that infidelity would not prevail. In religious matters, Winslow championed voluntary action in civil society rather than coercive enforcement through the state. Winslow embraced critical inquiry as completely as any celebrant of Thomas Paine’s birthday, and he revered popular opinion as the ultimate arbiter in public life. From Winslow’s perspective, Americans might choose infidelity over Christianity and then act on their decision politically. Winslow declared rhetorically, “Let public opinion advance in degeneracy, till it shall decree into its public enactments the maxims of infidelity and atheism . . . and what would be your legislators, your judges, your witnesses, your executive officers ? The mere panders and patrons of crime. What would be your subjects ? The mere perpetrators of crime.” Conversely, Christians could use the sources of infidelity’s possible advance to launch a counteroffensive. Thus Winslow called for a “union of Church and State which is produced by renewing the minds of men, and sending thence up a moral influence through our civil and political institutions, uniting them all to Christ, and rendering all men affectionately allegiant to Him, as king supreme.”1 238 Epilogue Winslow was one more nineteenth-century prophet of infidelity’s imminent arrival, yet he foretold a future that never materialized in quite the dramatic fashion that he and others like him envisioned. Still, being wrong about such matters was always politically powerful. The prevalence of actual infidels shifted the center of acceptable belief between the 1770s and the 1830s by creating more room for open religious doubt. In response, pious observers maintained Christianity’s cultural purchase by accommodating religious knowledge to changing standards of political authority, especially popular opinion and persuasion within civil society. Seemingly pedestrian improvements in print technology, reduced transportation costs for printed materials, and increased social opportunities to associate all rendered changes in religious knowledge possible. In debates over infidelity, Americans thus pursued competing religious beliefs in the public sphere by wedding religious opinion to political power in altogether new ways. As a result, by the 1830s Americans had thoroughly constructed American civil society and politics on religious terms. These developments served infidels as well as their opponents. Winslow called for a new union of church and state, however several new unions between religious opinion and the state formed in the United States from the 1830s onward. Consider Tobias Hogeboom of upstate New York, who cared for corn more than Christ. In addition to his lifelong participation in agricultural societies—the Columbia County Agricultural Society bestowed an award on his corn in 1848—he was also a committed supporter of Thomas Jefferson and later Andrew Jackson. In 1844 he was a presidential elector. Hogeboom was also one of the Boston Investigator’s earliest subscribers. When he died in 1849, an obituary described him as someone who viewed his critique of Christianity and his political commitments as one and the same: “The cause of Liberal principles, in Religion as well as in Politics loses in his death one of its most faithful and persevering champions.” Through the lives of Winslow and Hogeboom, it becomes clear how religious controversies over infidelity shaped the development and tenor of the Second Party System.2 Christians who subscribed to postmillennialism and ecumenical evangelical cooperation found an ideal vehicle for their reform efforts in the Whig Party, which adhered to an understanding of governance in which politics were used to regulate behavior and promote morality. Confidence in the abilities of everyday religious polemicists to bring about moral change in society and politics partly shaped the Whig Party’s vision for itself in American life. Institutions in civil society proved especially amendable to 239 Epilogue evangelical and Whig ends. In key ways, the Whigs became the party most concerned with regulating the context and consequences of religious opinions . They incorporated...

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