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Introduction Remaking Religion James Ross thought Christianity was for the dogs. After all, he had mockingly administered the Lord’s Supper to several furry, four-legged communicants . At least these were the rumors about the Federalist candidate for governor of Pennsylvania in 1808. The state’s Republicans spread this story throughout Pennsylvania and beyond. Ross’s supposed irreligion had been a political issue for nearly a decade. This latest irreverent act, his opponents warned, was another example of why Ross’s unchristian sentiments left him morally bereft, thus unfit for political office. Ross’s supporters agreed, for if the accusations were true they indicted Ross of “a crime that must excite horror and detestation in every virtuous heart, and must exclude the perpetrators of it, not only from public confidence, but from private friendship and society.” Both sides in 1808 found it difficult to ignore rumors about Ross because they raised vexing questions about how best to reconcile religious belief and political life. Indeed, concerns about the relationship between religion and politics proved urgent to many Americans in the generations following the Revolution.1 History allowed no sure guarantees that the new United States would avoid the mire of religious and political conflict that gripped much of the European world for three centuries. Religious disputes had fractured Christian Europe along sectarian lines. More recently, the French Revolution amplified perceptions that atheism and violence were often grim companions to political change. From the mid-1770s onward, broad-ranging debates erupted in the United States about how or even if long-standing religious beliefs, institutions, and traditions could be accommodated within a new republican political order that encouraged suspicion of inherited traditions , institutions, and ideas. Things sacred did not seem automatically or 2 Introduction entirely compatible with America’s new political culture. Public life in the early United States thus included contentious arguments over how best to ensure a compatible relationship between diverse religious beliefs and the nation’s recent political changes. In the process, religion and politics in the early United States were remade to fit each other. Specifically, religious conflict became safe for American politics. Explaining how early national Americans remade religion and politics in such ways is the central focus of this book. Doing so elucidates interconnections between debates over religious knowledge and developments within American political culture. The history of religious knowledge in the early national United States is, in important respects, a political history. I define religious knowledge in broad terms to include historical definitions of religious truth; the standards by which individuals determined what was or was not a true religious belief; and the means by which individuals expressed and circulated, thus communicated, the religious beliefs they held as true. The rough-and-tumble world of early national politics offers great insight into the changing public authority of religious knowledge in the decades following the American and French Revolutions. The advent of partisan institutions including parties and elections; an increase in political communication, especially through newspapers; and the creation of political spaces such as voluntary associations within civil society each expanded opportunities for Americans who held competing notions of religious truth to pursue their beliefs in ways that would hopefully avoid the sectarian controversies of recent historical memory.2 As a result, the context in which people expressed religious opinions and the implications of these expressions became more controversial than the beliefs themselves. Thomas Jefferson recognized this shift from content to context as the source of religious controversy when, in the 1780s, he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” This shift had lasting influence. Decades later, the author of an 1834 article in the New Hampshire Gazette smeared a Boston politician for his supposed acquaintance with the infamous freethinker Abner Kneeland. “In stating these facts,” he clarified, “we wish to be understood as casting no reproach upon any man for his belief or want of belief—for we regard men’s actions more than their faith.”3 Attention to context over content had intellectual and political implications . Intellectually, it marked a growing acceptance that notions of 3 Introduction religious truth were ultimately matters of opinion, thereby open to public debate. Moreover, it allowed people of various beliefs to argue politically with each other about religion’s influence in American public life while avoiding debates over the...

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