At the same time, the influence of enlightened liberalism ate away the premises of Calvinism, indeed, of all orthodox Christian beliefs. The Enlightenment told people they were not sinful but naturally good, possessed of an innate moral sense, and that evil lay in the corrupted institutions of both church and state. The rational deism of the Enlightenment could not be confined to the drawing rooms of the sophisticated gentry but spilled out into the streets. The anti-religious writings of Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, the comte de Volney, and Elihu Palmer reached out to new popular audiences and gave many ordinary people the sense that reason and nature were as important (and mysterious) as revelation and the supernatural. For a moment at least the Enlightenment seemed to have suppressed the religious passions of the American people.6
All this emphasis on popular infidelity and religious indifference in Revolutionary America, however, is misleading. It captures only the surface of American life. The mass of Americans did not suddenly lose their religiousness in 1776, only to recover it several decades later. Certainly, the low proportion of church membership is no indication of popular religious apathy, not in America, where church membership had long been a matter of an individual’s conversion experience and not, as in the Old World, a matter of birth.7 In traditional European societies affiliation with a dominant religion was automatic; people were born into their religion, and that religion could continue to order their lives, in the rituals of birth, marriage, and death, even if they remained religiously indifferent. In such societies the significant religious decision for a person was to break with the religious association into which he or she had been born. Consequently, religious indifference could exist alongside extensive, though merely formal, church membership. But in America the opposite became true: religious indifference meant having no religious affiliation at all; the important decision meant joining a religious association. People who wanted religion had to work actively and fervently to promote it. Consequently, huge surges of religious enthusiasm could exist alongside low church membership, membership, of course, being very different from churchgoing; in the older traditional churches only members could participate in Holy Communion and vote in church affairs.8
Thus the relatively small numbers of actual church members in the population did not suggest that Americans had become overly secularized or unduly antagonistic toward religion. There were, of course, fierce expressions of popular hostility to the genteel clergy with their D.D.’s and other aristocratic pretensions during the Revolutionary years. Yet this egalitarian anti-clericalism scarcely represented any widespread rejection of Christianity by most ordinary people.
Indeed, the total number of church congregations doubled between 1770 and 1790 and even outpaced the extraordinary growth of population in these years; and the people’s religious feeling became stronger than ever, though now devoted to very different kinds of religious groups. Religion was not displaced by the politics of the Revolution; instead, like much of American life, it was radically transformed.
As the old society of the eighteenth century disintegrated, Americans struggled to find new ways of tying themselves together. Powerful demographic and economic forces, reinforced by the egalitarian ideology of the Revolution, undermined what remained of the eighteenth-century political and social hierarchies. As educated gentry formed new cosmopolitan connections in their learned societies and benevolent associations, so too did increasing numbers of common and middling people come together and find solace in the creation of new egalitarian and emotionally satisfying organizations and communities. Most important for ordinary folk was the creation of unprecedented numbers of religious communities.
The older state churches with Old World connections—Anglican, Congregational, and Presbyterian—were supplanted by new and in some cases unheard-of religious denominations and sects. As late as 1760 the Church of England in the South and the Puritan churches in New England had accounted for more than 40 percent of all congregations in America. By 1790, however, that proportion of religious orthodoxy had already dropped below 25 percent, and it continued to shrink in the succeeding decades. More and more people discovered that the traditional religions had little to offer them spiritually, and they began looking elsewhere for solace and meaning.
While nearly all of the major colonial churches either weakened or failed to gain relative to other groups during the Revolution, Methodist and Baptist congregations exploded in numbers. The Baptists expanded from 94 congregations in 1760 to 858 in 1790 to become the single largest religious denomination in America. The Methodists had no adherents at all in 1760, but by 1790 they had created over seven hundred congregations—despite the fact that the great founder of English Methodism, John Wesley, had publicly opposed the American Revolution. The Methodists benefited from having uneducated itinerant preachers who were willing to preach anywhere, on town greens, before county courthouses, on racing fields and potter’s fields, on ferries, and even in the churches of other denominations.9
By 1805 the liberal Congregational minister of Salem, Massachusetts, William Bentley, was astonished to learn how rapidly the Methodists had grown. They claimed one hundred twenty thousand “in fellowship” and one million “attending their ministry,” which, he exclaimed, was “a seventh of the population.” They had four hundred traveling preachers and two thousand local preachers and had been very effective in gathering communicants by holding two to three hundred of what Bentley called “extraordinary meetings.” And all this was accomplished, he declared with a certain amount of awe, in thirty-five years.10 Organized nationally into circuits and locally into classes, the Methodists soon overtook the Baptists to become the largest denomination in America. By 1820 they had well over a quarter of a million formal members and at least four times that many followers.11
By the early nineteenth century enthusiastic groups of revivalist Baptists, New Light Presbyterians, and Methodists had moved from the margins to the center of American society. But even more remarkable than the growth of these religions with roots in the Old World was the sudden emergence of new sects and utopian religious groups that no one had ever heard of before—Universal Friends, Universalists, Shakers, and a variety of other splinter groups and millennial sects.
This Second Great Awakening was a radical expansion and extension of the earlier eighteenth-century revivals. It was not just a continuation of the first awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. It was more evangelical, more ecstatic, more personal, and more optimistic. It did not simply intensify the religious feelings of existing church members. More important, it mobilized unprecedented numbers of people who previously had been unchurched and made them members of religious groups. By popularizing religion as never before and by extending religion into the remotest areas of America, the Second Great Awakening marked the beginning of the republicanizing and nationalizing of American religion. It transformed the entire religious culture of America and laid the foundations for the development of an evangelical religious world of competing denominations unique to Christendom.
Most of these religious associations called themselves denominations, not sects, for they had abandoned once and for all the traditional belief that any one of them could be the true and exclusive church for the society. Each religious association, called or “denominated” by a particular name, came to see itself simply as one limited and imperfect representative of the larger Christian community, each equal to and in competition with all the others, with the state remaining neutral in this competition.
Although none of these denominations claimed a monopoly of orthodoxy, out of their competition emerged Christian truth and morality that worked to unify the public culture in ways that defied nearly two thousand years of thinking about the relation of religious orthodoxy and the state. “Among us,” wrote Samuel Stanhope Smith, the Presbyterian president of Princeton, “truth is left to propagate itself by its native evidence and beauty.” It could no longer rely on the “meretricious charms” and “splendor of an establis
hment.” In America, the clergy, “resting on the affections, and supported by the zeal of a free people,” had to earn their way by vying with each other in being useful, and this competition turned out to be good for the society. “A fair and generous competition among the different denominations of Christians,” said Smith, “while it does not extinguish their mutual charity, promotes an emulation that will have a beneficial influence on the public morals.” Competition, emulation—these were the processes that justified much of what was going on in early nineteenth-century American society, including arriving at the truth and rightness of a religious opinion that no one controlled.12
AT FIRST MOST OF THE FOUNDERS and other enlightened gentry showed little awareness of what was happening. Although they assumed that organized religion would become more rational and enlightened, they hoped in the meantime to enlist it on behalf of their republican Revolution, especially since most of them viewed religion as the best means for fostering the virtue and public morality on which republicanism was based. The enlightened declarations on behalf of the rights of conscience in the Revolutionary state constitutions did not initially signify a separation of church and state. Since the First Amendment at that time applied only to the federal government, prohibiting only Congress, and not the states, from interfering with “the free exercise” of religion, the states felt free both to maintain establishments and to legislate in religious matters. Not only did Connecticut and Massachusetts continue their tax-supported Congregational establishments, but the Revolutionary constitutions of Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia authorized their state legislatures to create in place of the Anglican Church a kind of multiple establishment of a variety of religious groups, using tax money to support “the Christian religion.” Many of the states outlawed blasphemy, which they defined as attempts to defame Christianity, and they sought to retain some general religious qualifications for public office. Five states—New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia—required officeholders to be Protestant. Maryland and Delaware said Christians. Pennsylvania and South Carolina officials had to believe in one God and in heaven and hell; Delaware required a belief in the Trinity.13
Although the federal Constitution was very much a secular document, not mentioning religion at all except for the reference in Article VII to “the Year of our Lord,” 1787, other important documents of the period, including the Northwest Ordinance, did recognize the importance of religion to good government. The peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783 opened with language familiar to British statesmen and to the devout Anglican ear of John Jay, one of the negotiators of the treaty, “In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity.” In 1789 some New England ministers expressed to President Washington their dismay over the fact that “some explicit acknowledgment of THE TRUE ONLY GOD, AND JESUS CHRIST whom he has sent,” had not been “inserted somewhere in the Magna Charta of our country.” Washington told the clergymen that “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”14
Washington was about as ecumenical as any American of the time. Following his inauguration as president, he exchanged salutations with twenty-two major religious groups and continued the practice he had begun earlier of attending the services of various denominations, including Congregational, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and Roman Catholic. He expressed toleration for all religions, including the religions of Muslims and Jews. Except for an unknown number of African slaves who may have been followers of Islam, there were not many Muslims in America at the time of Washington’s inauguration—perhaps only a small community of Moroccans in Charleston, South Carolina. But in 1790 several thousand Jews lived in the country, most of them in the cities of Newport, New York, Savannah, and Charleston.
Washington went out of his way to make Jews feel they were full-fledged Americans. In his famous letter of August 18, 1790, he thanked the members of the Touro Synagogue of Newport for their warm welcome during his tour of New England. He assured them that “happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” America, he said, was as much their home as anyone’s. “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land,” he wrote, “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”15
Washington’s ecumenical spirit, however, did not flow from any indifference to the importance of religion to America’s civic culture. Indeed, his first inaugural address conveyed more religious feeling than any of the subsequent presidential inaugural addresses in American history, except for Lincoln’s second.16 In November 1789 Washington quickly acceded to Congress’s recommendation that he proclaim a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving to acknowledge on behalf of the American people “the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.”17 For all their talk of reason and enlightenment, Washington and the other leading Founders were more religious than they sometimes seem. Most of them had no quarrel with religion as long as it was reasonable and orderly. Washington was a member of his Anglican, later Episcopal, church vestry, and he remained a frequent churchgoer—though unlike his wife, Martha, he never became a member of his church, meaning that he did not partake of the Eucharist on communion Sundays. Washington, the perfect Freemason, considered himself enlightened in religious matters (“being no bigot myself to any mode of worship”), and he almost never knelt in prayer and seems never to have purchased a bible. Yet Washington, unlike Jefferson, had no deep dislike of organized religion or of the clergy as long as they contributed to civic life; indeed, as commander-in-chief in the Revolutionary War he had required all troops to attend religious services and had prescribed a public whipping for anyone disturbing those services.18
In his Farewell Address Washington stressed the importance of religion and morality for republican government and emphasized especially the religious obligation that lay behind the swearing of oaths. For all of his deistic-like talk of God as “the Grand Architect of the Universe,” Washington was sure that the Architect intervened directly in human affairs; indeed, he thought that during the Revolution Providence had looked after not only the prosperity of the United States but also his personal well-being. He and Franklin, and, in fact, most of the Founders, believed in the efficacy of prayer as well as in some sort of afterlife.19
Jefferson took the possibility of an afterlife seriously. Despite his intense dislike of orthodox Christianity, he remained outwardly an Anglican and then an Episcopalian throughout his life. He was a regular churchgoer, was baptized and married in his parish, served on his local vestry, and sometimes attended church services in government buildings in Virginia. Jefferson was known for hypocrisy, but in this case his outward display of religious observance seems to have come from his deep aversion to personal controversy.
He learned his lesson about what not to say publicly about religion from his early indiscretions. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he had written 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.” Then in the preamble to his 1786 bill for religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson had stated, to the astonishment of many, “that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”20 Since these public comments were drastically out of line with the opinions of ordinary people as well as most elite gentry, they raised a storm of criticism. Thereafter, Jefferson confined his derisive criticisms of Christianity to private letters and to those he believed would not object to his views.
In the election of 1800 these earlier awkward public comments led to his being called “a French infidel” and an “atheist”—certainly the most d
amaging charge his opponents ever made against him. “Should Jefferson prove victorious, there is scarcely a possibility that we should escape a Civil War,” warned lawyer Theodore Dwight, in a typical Federalist outburst that appeared in the Connecticut Courant in 1800. “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes.”21
Although Jefferson, like all the Founders, had no doubt of the existence of God, he publicly suffered these charges of atheism, infidelity, and immorality in silence, privately dismissing them as the characteristic carping of bigoted Federalist clerics. He expected nothing but “the extreme of their wrath” from New England’s clergymen. “I wish nothing,” he said, “but their eternal hatred.”22
Yet Jefferson very much wanted to win over to his Republican cause all those ordinary religious people who had voted for his opponent. To do so he knew he had to offset the Federalist accusations that he was an enemy of Christianity. Consequently, to the surprise of many Federalists, he had good things to say about religion in his first inaugural address. He also knew very well what effect he as president would have when in January 1802 he attended a church service held in the chamber of the House of Representatives. His attendance attracted wide public notice and astonished the Federalists. Even though other churches were available, Jefferson continued to attend church services in the House chamber and made available executive buildings for church functions. Sometimes the U.S. Marine Corps Band supplied music for the religious services. As president, however, Jefferson held to his vow never to call for any days of fasting and prayer as his two predecessors had done.
In 1803 upon receiving a copy of Joseph Priestley’s Socrates and Jesus Compared, Jefferson was encouraged to set down his own similar thoughts in what he called his “Syllabus of an Estimate on the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with Those of Others.” He sent copies of this thousand-word essay to Priestley, to Benjamin Rush (who had asked him about his religious views), to a friend, John Page, and to members of his cabinet and family. He followed up this essay with an edited version of the New Testament in which he cut out all references to supernatural miracles and Christ’s divinity and kept all the passages in which Jesus preached love and the Golden Rule. He called this collection “The Philosophy of Jesus.” He told a friend that these works, which came to be called the Jefferson Bible, were “proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel.”23 Although he never published these works, word did get out that Jefferson had changed his religious views, a rumor that Jefferson was at great pains to deny.
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