Religion in the Public Square: Interactions Between the Sacred and the Secular in Colonial and Revolutionary America

Over the past three decades, books on religion in America have often overstated or understated religion’s role in the public square. So-called “evangelical” historians stress religion as one of the most powerful formative agents in shaping American politics and culture. More secular historians sometimes dismiss or ignore religion’s influence outside the private realm. Framing these widely different interpretations is secularization, which directs the narrative toward that of religious declension or religious persistence. The result is a historiographical debate in which one body of work depicts the steady march of secular forces in economics, politics, and culture pushing religion to the margins of American public life. An opposing body of work sees religion as ever-vital in all arenas of American life, including the marketplace and the statehouse, while its vitality has been largely undermined by liberal politicians and ignored by secular historians.

One of the most daunting challenges for the historian wishing to explore religious influence in America is to measure that influence. If one gauges influence by rhetoric, then there is a strong case to be made that religion has, from the beginning of the republic, shaped public affairs. Sermons abound that speak to political issues of the day, couching them in biblical and moral language. Political addresses teem with references to divine guidance and providential favor for public undertakings. This is especially the interpretation of evangelicals, who, by their self-understanding, are called to proclaim the gospel to the world. Whether in the mid–eighteenth-century Great Awakening or in today’s culture wars, evangelicals make bold proclamations. They present their case with great passion and certainty, and they excel in exploiting all forms of media to reach a mass audience. But does this rhetoric translate into a changed reality? Liberal and secular academic historians question the change that religion effects in the marketplace and the political arena. They point out that the greater change is that of America shaping religion rather than that of religion shaping America.

While arguing that religion has had profound influence on American life, Mark Valeri and Thomas Kidd acknowledge that the influence between religion and American culture is bidirectional. Their arguments focus on interaction between the sacred and secular, and they view these interactions as dynamic. While writing about different eras and focusing on different arenas, Valeri and Kidd share a common approach to their treatments of religion in the public square. Both challenge the idea that secularization has pushed religion to the sidelines. Both refute the notion that religion is strictly private and has no public role in American life. Neither panders to those who wish to rewrite the story of religion in America in search of a usable past. Partisans in today’s culture war will no doubt be disappointed that neither of these books champions their respective positions. Accommodationists who wish to see a cozy relation between church and state from the creation of the republic will be troubled by the powerful influence of secular forces, while separationists who read a strict separation between church and state will fret over the prominence of religious language and symbols during the founding era.

Mark Valeri examines the interaction between religion and commerce in Puritan New England. He rejects the secularization interpretation that explains an ever-widening distance between religion and commerce, with religion all but disappearing in the wake of expanding trade that hews only to laws of the marketplace. Instead, he argues that Puritan ministers developed views of commerce that changed over a very long period of time and that Puritan merchants continued to be influenced by new understandings of their place in God’s providential plan. Valeri identifies four distinctive theological interpretations that spanned the period from initial settlement in the early seventeenth...