The American Revolution and Righteous Community: Selected Sermons of Bishop Robert Smith (review)

"My business at this time shall be to recommend to your attention the most noble and Christian duty of love and benevolence," announces Bishop Robert Smith in one of 27 eighteenth-century sermons collected by Charles Wilbanks in his new book, The American Revolution and Righteous Community (103). Although the sermon collection makes up the bulk of the book, this book also features an introduction and four chapters of analysis by Wilbanks. The sermons themselves are interesting artifacts. This review focuses on Wilbanks's critical arguments, as they also illuminate the content of the collection.

Wilbanks uses his four-chapter essay, in addition to the introduction, to make an argument for the importance of Smith as a historical figure in and of himself. He emphasizes the need to view Smith's sermons as key to understanding the role of Southern Anglicanism in revolutionary patriotism. Wilbanks sums up the first goal at the conclusion of his biographical sketch of Smith, spanning two chapters, as follows: "The real value of Smith's contributions to his church, his community and his country has not been treated with the seriousness it deserves. It is time that the oversight is corrected" (36). To that end, Wilbanks makes a second, more complex argument. To explain the importance of Smith's sermons in understanding the Revolutionary War and American religion, Wilbanks contextualizes them in terms of the bishop's personal biography, scholarship about the ideological justification for the American Revolution, scholarship about American civil religion, and the theological debates of the time.

The first two chapters discuss the sermons' importance within the context of Smith's biography itself. Smith's Cambridge education and his family connections (through his three marriages to the land-owning South Carolina planters who also dominated his parish) offer insight into his social condition as well as potential material motivation for his political positions. Wilbanks's sympathy for Smith as a character is clear, both through his detailed account and his occasional expressions of sympathy for difficult moments in Smith's life, such as the deaths of his wives and his decision to be loyal to the American rebels instead of the British authority who gave him his education and position. This segment of Wilbanks's essay is interesting, but other portions of his argument are more relevant for scholars not particularly interested in Bishop Smith as a historical figure.

In his third chapter, Wilbanks discusses a doctrinal conflict that was important in South Carolina before and during Smith's appointment—a distinction between Smith's Armenian understanding of the relationship between faith and works and the Puritan understanding of predestination. Wilbanks argues that Smith's understanding of the duty of believers to help others in the community makes his theological motivation for joining the Revolution different from the northern colonies' ideal of individual liberty. To make this distinction, Wilbanks notes, "[t]o Puritans, community interest was spiritually and socially separated from that of the individual. . . . Smith saw community interest, salvation and good works as inseparable" (39). Furthermore, Wilbanks suggests that, whereas political ideals of individualism and liberty fueled revolution in northern states, in Smith's community, a sense of duty to others drove the justification for war. Whereas separation of church and state seemed obvious to those with a theology of predestination, Smith's theology assumed that religion and politics were intertwined. Such an understanding of community, faith, and works is clearly represented in Smith's sermons. Also in the third chapter, Wilbanks shows how Smith's view of American civil religion differs from other more contemporary understandings, particularly Robert Bellah's. He suggests that Bellah's view is based on the individualistic, Puritan model of Christianity and therefore does not account for Smith's understanding, which he places closer to Burke's concept of poetic meaning, a conception "in which the community is no less real but is felt rather than...