Patriotism & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation by Jonathan J. Den Hartog (review)

In this year of political turmoil, religious fear, and major challenges to federal institutions and what used to be touted as American values, Jonathan Den Hartog's 2015 book merits careful study. Federalists played a large role in establishing the norms and institutions that defined politics and religion in the early United States and in shaping forms of social organization that persist to this day. Federalists also played a decisive role in establishing a culture of religo-political factionalism that even now thrives with a vengeance.

Den Hartog's main thesis is that Federalism passed through three phases—Republican, Combative, and Voluntarist. John Jay represents the Republican phase. As a devout Episcopalian, second Governor of New York, and first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Jay placed self-governing institutions under the aegis of divine authority and viewed co-operation between religious and political institutions as central to God's providential design for America. Representing the Combative stage of Federalist history, Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong and New England Congregational ministers Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse attacked skepticism of biblical revelation as a threat to the American republic and its providential role in world history. These men railed against the immorality, anarchism, and infidelity they ascribed to French Jacobins, and to Thomas Jefferson and his proto-Democratic followers.

As the party of Jefferson gained strength and the Federalist party declined, the next generation of Federalists built voluntary organizations to recoup their losses and promote faith in republican order and providential design. Representing this Voluntarist phase of Federalist history, New Jersey Presbyterian Elias Boudinot retired from government office to serve evangelical organization, and John Jay's sons Peter and William devoted much of their lives to the American Bible Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and other voluntary organizations. The spirit of Federalism lived on through these evangelicals and their national organizations after the political party's demise.

Two troublesome groups inside the Federalist camp contributed to that demise. On one flank, Unitarian Federalists rejected the Trinitarian theology espoused by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Calvinist Congregationalists, and balked at religious intolerance, supernaturalism, and demands for conversion. On the other flank, Southern Federalists embraced the institution of slavery and resented the idea that it was immoral and unchristian, as many Northern Federalists believed. Men like the younger Jays freed Federalism from the Unitarians and slave owners who complicated it.

Den Hartog's argument provides a nice complement to that of Nathan Hatch's influential book written three decades ago, The Democratization of American Christianity, which placed the rise of evangelicalism in the early United States at the center of American cultural history. While Hatch focused on the transformation of democratic politics into evangelical populism, Den Hartog focuses on the transformation of Federalist republicanism into evangelical organizations. Taken together, they make a strong case for interpreting American evangelicalism as a political as well as religious movement.

Though Den Hartog's voice is not Combative, he does tell a partisan story. Readers of this journal might be surprised by his claim on page 202, that "Federalists had a strong hand in formulating how traditional Christianity would shape the new nation." Den Hartog is not referring to Catholicism here, but to a particular American version of Reformed Protestantism headquartered in Connecticut, elevated to "traditional" status by its evangelical proponents in the early nineteenth century. Passing up opportunities to engage critically the Federalists he admires, Den Hartog never scrutinizes the common-sense realism ubiquitous among them, or the grounding of morality in supernaturalism that some of them insisted upon. Den Hartog does not explain exactly what he means by "traditional Christianity," leaving this reader wishing he had made the effort to explain why some Federalists thought republican virtue impossible without it.