Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic

5. The Campaign for Christian Unity

Chapter 5 The Campaign for Christian Unity The vitality of local diversity that had been stimulated by the Revolutionary War and continued to assert itself in the new nation led conservative evangelicals in the Delaware Valley to attempt to assimilate those differences into a common American Christianity that they believed essential for national stability and prosperity. As the Bible Society of Delaware optimistically proclaimed in its first annual report, "We behold Christians widely separated from each other, by countries, forms, and names, daily approximating, and coalescing into one spiritual body."! By insisting upon the fundamental unity of Americans as Christians, evangelical reformers strove to transcend the multiplicity of local identities with their clashing oppositional interests that increasingly seemed central to national life with permanent conflict between political parties in the nineteenth century. Religion and politics faced similar challenges as they took shape within and informed the increasingly national context of public life. As two Bible society missionaries reported of their organizing efforts in the west, a broad denominational base was crucial, for the perception of Presbyterian control led many to decide that "they could not unite" with the movement . Expressing a central opinion of cosmopolitan evangelicalism, these reformers found it "peculiarly injurious to the cause of religion, that party spirit or sectarian zeal should ever keep good men from uniting heart and hand, in a cause of the purest benevolence.V Conservative evangelicals sought to reduce diversity in American life, yet their work often stimulated even greater difference. Evangelical activists demonstrated enormous energy and creativity in their moral reform efforts, especially via sophisticated use of print culture to communicate their common values that they implemented through numerous interlocking organizations. Although never totally successful, conservative evangelicals made major contributions to the new national culture created in the Delaware Valley, and in many other parts of the country, in the 1810s and 1820s. The dramatic increase of Christianity's ideological and institutional presence in the new nation also bred resistance from individuals who feared the implications of uniform Christianity. Those who found its conformist demands overly burdensome reasserted local traditions against conservative reformers, who in turn modified their 174 Chapter 5 movement to accommodate certain aspects of local resistance. This negotiation helped moral reform to draw strength from populist evangelicalism with substantial local support. In the towns studied here, respectable women, some Pennsylvania Germans, and Presbyterians, above all, played important roles in cosmopolitan reform. For people in these groups, at least, the American Christianity of the early national period expanded to embrace difference in a newly inclusive manner. Bible societies contributed centrally to the Benevolent Empire of overlapping local, state, and national reform organizations created in the early nineteenth century. The Bible movement aimed to instill a common sense of Protestant national purpose and peoplehood throughout the United States. Residents of Burlington, New Castle, and Easton founded local Bible societies and female auxiliaries from 1809 to 1822 that brought a cosmopolitan national vision to each place as never before. Led by Elias Boudinot, non-Quakers in Burlington played an especially influential role in the country's earliest Bible societies, not just locally and in New Jersey but across the region and the nation. Although somewhat slower to be established , the Delaware Bible Society would draw on wide-ranging support from New Castle residents. John Latta, the town's Presbyterian minister, was one of the guiding forces of the organization, and the Bible movement there encouraged especially dramatic social activism by respectable local women who created the New Castle Female Bible Society. Easton was the last of the towns to form a local Bible society, and while some Pennsylvania German leaders participated in the movement, local people there showed greater indifference to it than in the other river towns. For Pennsylvania Germans and for Quakers, the Bible movement challenged familiar forms of religious life. Conservative evangelicals' success in crafting a unified American Christianity arose from their ability to adjust their movement to accommodate the logic of local circumstances in places throughout the nation. The Vision of a Christian Nation Cosmopolitanism always had local representatives in these river towns who drew inspiration from leaders and trends in larger and more sophisticated cities. Philadelphia, of course, was the cosmopolitan center of the Delaware Valley, and just as it was essential to the political, economic, and social expression of this perspective in the region, and often the nation, so too was it at the forefront of cosmopolitan evangelicalism. The Bible Society of Philadelphia (BSP) was founded...