Earnestly Contending: Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Antebellum America

Conclusion

169 This exploration of antebellum American approaches to ideals of religious freedom and to religious diversity has looked in two directions. On the one hand, it has sought to delineate the demands of what I have called a “normative discourse” of freedom and toleration made on those who felt compelled to maintain strong religious foundations for American life and society, trying to delineate, as well, the ideas and assumptions that made foundations seem essential. On the other, it has sought to explore the power of religious demands, as such, on those who held them dear, and, specifically, to understand the power of religious imperatives in shaping efforts to come to terms with what ideals of freedom and facts of diversity seemed to entail. For a variety of reasons having to do with law, tradition , national identity, and even the characteristic tendencies of religion, as such, the normative discourse of freedom and toleration was firmly entrenched in American ideals and American ideology. But this study has also suggested that, even after a half a century’s effort, the confrontation between normative ideals and religious imperatives was contentious and never really resolved. The study has identified a set of factors to explain why this confrontation should have been so difficult. Certainly, there were forces in antebellum life—religious and secular alike—that complicated efforts to come to terms with freedom and toleration within a religious framework. Shifting notions of individualism in the direction of autonomy were important , as were an array of social and intellectual changes that led to increasingly strong, clear rifts over basic religious concerns. Notions of human nature were taking on distinctive, even competing terms; so were ideas about the nature of religious symbols, as such. Religious variation, up to and including competing, even contradictory conceptions of God Himself (and, in the antebellum lexicon, God was inevitably a “He”), reached Conclusion Earnestly Contending 170 unprecedented levels in the antebellum period, giving saliency, as well, to religious boundaries and their definition. Again, at least some contemporary dilemmas have significant roots in the specific developments of the antebellum period. Certainly this seems to be the case with regard to continuing developments in notions of individualism , in regard to the muddied lines between the sacred and the secular created by evolving intellectual trends, and by the complex, overlapping relationships among religion, national identity, and an array of social and cultural categories. An understanding of antebellum history should, in this regard, give greater historical depth to our understanding of contemporary affairs. Nevertheless, and bearing in mind Gordon Wood’s caution about recognizing the limits on using the past to think about the present insofar as issues of freedom and difference are concerned, it is possible to suggest that, even as important antebellum dilemmas remain vital into our own time, it was the general significance of the era’s religious developments that makes them valuable for thinking about contemporary concerns, particularly as we understand religion’s more common characteristics as a cultural system: its individual and collective thrusts, its explanatory and predictive purposes, its drives for consensus, and, above all, its status as an expression of ultimate truth. That is, recognizing the power of truth claims and, even more, the stakes attached to religious truth and religious consensus as the basis for the larger social order helps us to comprehend both the significance attached to limits in the antebellum realm and the dangers perceived in deviation for the health of that order as a whole. Looking at the travails of toleration in early modern Europe, Benjamin Kaplan has made the valuable point that, where one takes a corporate perspective on religion itself, there is one bit of classic American religious ideology that does not really apply. Noting, specifically, Thomas Jefferson ’s remark that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,”1 Kaplan suggests that, given the significance of the corporate dimension of religion, the outlier does pose a threat of injury to the integrity of the group by undermining both its homogeneity and the norms of submission on which the collectivity depends.2 Moving a bit beyond this, it is possible to add that, where religious people see the need for religious foundations for the social and political order, the “crimes” Jefferson sought to dismiss became serious indeed. [18.218.168.16] Project MUSE (2024...