Evangelicals, Infidels, and Politics in the Early Republic

Last year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Nathan O. Hatch's Democratization of American Christianity (1989), a historiographical landmark in the religious history of the early American republic, and the three books under review here each explore connections between religion and politics that were raised by Hatch. Hatch's book was important, in the first place, for turning attention away from the elite clergymen, often from New England, who predominated in religious history (including in his own first book, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England [1977]). Instead, in Democratization, Hatch focused on the leaders of five “insurgent religious movements” (p. 9): Baptist, Methodist, Christian primitivist, Mormon, and African-American churches, all of whom embraced a “religious populism” (p. 5) that emphasized how the American Revolution had endowed them with legitimacy as Biblical interpreters and religious authorities. The result was that the religious history of the early republic shifted from a narrative driven by the likes of Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, and Charles G. Finney to upstarts such as John Leland, Lorenzo Dow, and Joseph Smith. Second, Hatch called attention to the early republic's burgeoning print culture and such underutilized primary sources as hymns, pamphlets, and religious newspapers. Third, he drew upon the work of scholars such as Joyce O. Appleby and Gordon S. Wood and connected the popular evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening with the emergence of “a liberal, competitive, and market-driven society” (p. 14). In other words, while not a book about church-state relations or the influence of religion on partisan politics, Hatch's Democratization sketched how evangelicals embraced the ethos of Jeffersonian democracy.

Amanda Porterfield certainly had Hatch's book in mind when she wrote Conceived in Doubt. Although her book's subtitle suggests something more wide-ranging, its chronology fits between the mid-1790s and 1812. During the first half of the 1790s, according to Porterfield, religious skepticism enjoyed wide currency, and it went hand-in-hand with a permissive, “sex-saturated pleasure culture” (p. 78) that basically accepted promiscuity and prostitution. Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft were widely read, and Aaron Burr epitomized an era of “open-ended critical inquiry” in religion and sexuality (p. 38). The partisan escalation between Federalists and Jeffersonians fed “mistrust” and cultural anxiety that were exacerbated by the growing assertiveness of women and blacks (p. 48). By the late 1790s, an “uneasy atmosphere of mistrustful doubt” blanketed the land, as many Americans feared for the future of both religion and the republic (p. 2).

Into this situation, evangelicals charged to lead a counterattack, decrying religious “infidelity” as the root of the nation's ills. As Porterfield explains her thesis, “Managing anxiety about American freedom, churches muffled skepticism about biblical revelation and the need for religious authority. . . . [They] also fostered distrust of secular reason and government. Thus churches manipulated distrust as well as relieved it” (p. 2). This was “Revivalism to the Rescue,” the title of her third chapter, as evangelical churches emphasized how they accorded with American liberty and fostered morality in a society of otherwise weak institutions. At the same time, Jeffersonians recognized a political liability and distanced themselves from Paine and like-minded radicals. Thus, in Porterfield's account, evangelicalism and Jeffersonian liberalism gave one another a cynically self-serving, mutual blessing. “As an expansive commercial economy based in real estate, cotton, and slavery gained dominance, impassioned appeals for repentance coincided with increasingly impassioned appeals for votes” (p. 7). The book ends in 1812 with Henry Clay and the cry for war, which...