Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (review)

Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts. By James F. Cooper, Jr. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 282 pp. $55.00

The purpose of this study of New England Congregationalism, from its founding to the eve of the American Revolution, is to demonstrate that the principle of free consent as a crucial privilege of the (male) laity in church governance was vigorously maintained by those lay members and, with almost equal enthusiasm, by the clergy. Cooper seeks to correct other histories of early Congregationalism, including my The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1972), which argue that the ministers were never fully comfortable with lay privileges and, in the aftermath of crises such as the Antinomian controversy of 1637/38, tried to enhance their own authority. Cooper bases his argument that no such change occurred both on church records that reveal cooperation and sympathy between the clergy and a much-engaged, well-informed laity, and on the absence of explicit proposals by the clergy to assume more authority.

Cooper acknowledges conflict and change, but denies that the turmoil surrounding the decision in 1662 to introduce the "half-way covenant" signaled a breakdown in lay-clergy relations. He points out (correctly) that a substantial majority of the laity supported the decision. Nonetheless, he notes that the seeds of discord were planted in 1662 when, because of disagreements among the clergy, the laity began to realize that principles of church order were not strictly scriptural, or sacred. These seeds ripened alongside a growing individualism and majoritarianism that, by the 1730s, was displacing the "communitarian" ethos of the early decades. A final irony is that the revivals of the 1740s failed to restore this ethos.

Cooper tells the story of Congregational governance not only for its own sake but also in order to explain "the roots of New England democracy" (4), which, he argues, have misleadingly been located in the town meeting. But because he says relatively little about the nexus between religious and secular discourse, I address the real heart of this book, his interpretation of Congregationalism.

Cooper is right to insist that most of the first and second-generation clergy, most of the time, spoke and acted in support of lay consent and limits on their own authority. He is on even firmer ground in arguing that the laity was literate and well-informed, and in making them so much a part of the story. He reminds us, too, of the limited scope of the "Antinomian" revolt, and he is especially helpful in challenging the much-reiterated assertion that the clergy "forced" the half-way covenant on a reluctant laity. He is informative about a number of other points, and his factual slips are relatively few.

This book is based on solid, careful research--some of it in obscure sources--but it is not the entire story. It neglects the ministers' ongoing determination to preserve an "office" apart from the localized, quasidemocratic aspects of church government, and it mentions nothing about ordination and "maintenance." Even more striking, Cooper relegates the "negative voice" that the ministers incorporated in the Cambridge Platform of 1648 to forestall congregational majoritarianism to a footnote, apparently because he finds little or no evidence that the laity objected to it. Because the concept of office was central to my study of the ministry, Cooper corrects part, but only part, of my interpretation. What is at stake in these disagreements? Not that much, considering that Foster and myself (in work done subsequent to The Faithful Shepherd) regard the Congregational order as rooted in lay expectations, authorizing a remarkable degree of participation by the laity. ¹ But a great deal if the alternatives are either the ancient bugaboo of clerical authoritarianism that lingered on into Miller's telling of early New England church history and that has found a new life among...