An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. “To the Citizens of Pennsylvania” (Pittsburgh, 1808), 3. 2. My definition of religious knowledge is informed by scholarship on popular religion in North America that deploys a capacious definition of religious experience, as well as recent research on religion in the European Enlightenment. Historians have increasingly defined the Enlightenment as not merely a set of philosophical or religious precepts, but also new alignments of institutions, spaces, and communication networks that shaped intellectual life during the Enlightenment. See Jonathan Sheehan , “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–80. Below I discuss scholarship on popular religion in early America. 3. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 285; and New Hampshire Gazette, December 16, 1834. 4. Ithaca (NY) Journal and General Advertiser, February 10, 1830. 5. On the distinction between infidelity and heresy in early modern Europe generally , see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2–3 and 294–330; and in the Iberio-Atlantic world, see Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 18. On laws against heresy and their enforcement in colonial British North America, see Susan Juster, “Heretics, Blasphemers, and Sabbath Breakers: The Prosecution of Religious Crime in Early America,” in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 123–42. For a brief but useful introduction to deist theology in England, and deism’s opponents in England and British North America, see E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 160–61 and 166–68. 6. On the fusion of infidelity and heresy in England, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), esp. 26 and 320. 244 Notes to Pages 5–9 7. Even adherents of Christian positions such as Unitarianism and Universalism could face charges of infidelity from proponents of more traditional doctrines. For controversies surrounding Unitarianism and Universalism in the early republic, see, respectively, J. D. Bowers, Joseph Priestly and English Unitarianism in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007) and Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 8. Temple of Reason, January 31, 1801. 9. John Foster, Infidelity Exposed, and Christianity Recommended (Cambridge, MA, 1802), 12. On English deist controversies, see Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); on Pope’s Day and anti-Catholicism as a feature of culture and politics in British North America, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 56–63 and 112–19; and on conversos in the Iberio-Atlantic world, see Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 43–69. 10. Although many of the people who appear in this book used the terms “infidel” and “infidelity,” when I use them as the author I generally do so to capture or explain the antideist viewpoint of an individual writer or a larger group. 11. Boston Investigator, December 29, 1852. On the appearance of the Hall of Science , see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 511. 12. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 101–2. 13. My formulation of “lived deism” is informed by expansive theoretical and empirical approaches to early modern religious practice and belief, in particular the methodological overview and studies in David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Christopher Grasso first suggested the possibilities for exploring the history of a broadly considered “lived irreligion” in the early republic in “Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 3 (2002): 495n46. My emphasis on lived deism counters arguments for deism’s precipitous decline after about 1800. This interpretation appeared in...