The Founding of the American Republic 3; C. Carson

The religious background and experience will be taken up first because it is most basic. A reading of the United States Constitution, however, could easily mislead any one as to the religious disposition Dr. Carson is Chairman, Social Science De partment, Okaloosa-Walton College. He is a noted .lecturer and author, his latest book en titled Throttling the Railroads. 621 622 THE FREEMAN October of the Founders. There is nowhere in it even a mention of God. The only direct references to religion are those prohibiting the estab lishment of religion and prohibit ing religious tests for office both negative in character. In ad dition, a case could be made that several of the leaders among the Founders were Deists - that is, held only such residues of religious beliefs as they could square with human reason. One historian notes the importance of religion in the coming of the revolt in this way: "Yet if we realize that the eight eenth century, for all its enlight ened rationalism, remained an age of faith, the religious background of the Revolution becomes instruc tive. This is not to say, of course, that religious grievances or re ligious ideology caused the Revo lution. . . . But the subterranean forces which motivate political be havior can be found within the more general atmosphere of the times. On the eve of the Revolu tion, the Protestant religion con stituted a fundamental aspect of American culture."1 To which needs to be added that the religious framework not only underlay the move for independence but under girded the way it was done, the 1 Peter N. Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970), p.xi.

statements of the day, the consti tutions that were drawn, and the Republic that was founded. How fundamental religion was to them can be made clearer by examining a little into the background. It is widely held that the Amer ican Revolution was not very revo lutionary - a view to which this writer subscribes -, that in com parison with the French Revolu tion, the Bolshevik Revolution, or even the Puritan Revolution in England in the seventeenth cen tury, the American one was not nearly so radical or was basically conservative. What contributed to this, as already indicated, was a considerable reliance on the Eng lish heritage, as well as a general dependence on experience and ex perienced men. But there was something else which made Amer icans shy about radical experi ments in social reconstruction. It has not been put this way before, I think, and a. new thesis deserves more extensive treatment, but it is very germane to this background.

Let it be stated baldly, then. Americans had already had their try at revolution before they came to break with England. Now I do not mean what Clinton Rossiter meant when he referred to The First American Revolubion. 2 His 2 This is the title of a paperback ver sion of the first part of his book, Seed time of the Republic.

1971 THE COLONIAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 623 meaning was that a revolution in outlook in the decades before 1776 preceded the declaring of inde pendence. What I mean is that when some of the colonists left England and arrived in America they attempted a revolutionary re construction of the social and political order. This could be con ceived as a revolution only by contrasting what they attempted to do in America with the order that prevailed in the land from which they came. Ordinarily, his torians think of a revolution in terms of a prior situation in some country in contrast with what was done in that same country. This may account for their not per ceiving the revolutionary content of the changes between England and America during the earlier colonial period. Be that as it may, there were some rather drastic ex periments attempted in America in several colonies. They failed, by and large, and their failure meant that the bulk of Americans were not inclined toward radical recon struction when they broke with England.

The Frontier Thesis What has impressed many his torians in more recent times has been the impact of the physical environment of America on set tlers from Europe. The thesis re garding this impact is known as the frontier thesis. The frontier thesis was first most persuasively presented by Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890's. It holds that American culture can be explained largely in terms of a succession of encounters with the moving fron tier. Undoubtedly, those who came to the New World had to contend with the physical environment, and, undoubtedly, they developed ways which were different in some respects from those of Europe in dealing with it. (Those who have held to the frontier thesis have meant much more than this, of course, for they have generally been determinists, holding that the environment actually shaped Americans.) Yet many of the early settlers struggled with something much less plastic than the physi cal environment, and from their unsuccessful wrestling with it must have drawn conclusions which joined them once again to the age-old experience of man. In several of the early communities, those who came wrestled with hu man nature itself, conceived and elaborated systems which would eventuate in new societies. They were much more impressed with the potentialities of a cultural frontier than of a physical one.

What they discovered - perhaps, better, came to accept - was the Old Adam in man which is not ex orcised by a new setting. This 624 THE FREEMAN October needs to be filled out with some particulars, but first the religious background needs to be covered. Religious Background Those Europeans who came to settle in America were preponder antly Christians, nominally, habit ually, or devoutly. The few who were not were probably theists and people of the Book, i.e., Jews. They were Christians whose churches and sects were known by such varied names as Baptists, Brown ists, Moravians, Quakers, Presby terians' Congregationalists, and Catholics. Though it was their dif ferences which stood out at the time and over which they wran gled, they nonetheless shared a basic outlook which transcended their differences and evidenced their common heritage. As Christians, they accepted God as Creator, as Provider, and Disposer. Life was viewed within a dualistic framework of Time and Eternity. Time was that dimen sion within which man lived out his allotted years; however brief they might be, they were fraught with ultimate significance as the span within which the decision for eternity was made. Christians had, and have, a historical framework implicit in their religion, one which is bounded by time and is marked off by several transcendent events: the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. These are the great landmarks of sacred his tory, past and future. Not every one"who has gone by the name of Christian has felt the impact of their deeper meaning, yet to be Christian has meant, to say the least, the acceptance of the Incar nation as the entering of God more directly into history through Jesus Christ, the providing of a way of salvation through His grace, and the setting in motion of events which will culminate with His re turn. To be a Christian has ever meant, too, that man does not give meaning to his life; instead, God gives meaning to it.

The Founders of these United States would have rejected out of hand any suggestion that they write any such credo into the Con stitution. Yet their rejection of it would not have signified in most cases that they rejected the beliefs involved. Indeed, they conceived themselves to be "doing something much less than and different from pronouncing upon th~.ological questions: they were erecting a frame of government. The kind of government they erected, however, was undergirded and informed by theistic and Christian concepts. It was a government which did not have as its object the salvation of man, the bringing of Heaven to earth, or anything of the sort.

1971 THE COLONIAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 625 These things could well be left to their own realm and men could be left free regarding them because they were in the domain and hands of God. Men without such a faith can leave no area of freedom, for to be free without God is a chaos of wills. The Protestant Reformation Most of those who came to America from Europe in the first two centuries of settlement along the East coast were Protestants. To speak of a Protestant faith or doctrine is to speak loosely, for Protestants have their doctrines and beliefs within particular churches and sects, and these dif fer greatly from one another. Yet, here again there is a common bond, acknowledged by the very use of the term, Protestant, and it goes beyond opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, though it is usually definecl in contrast with that body. The seventeenth century settle ment of America occurred while the tides from the Protestant Re formation were still flowing strongly. The religious wars, spawned by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, took place in the midst of the seventeenth century. Doctrines were still pick ing up adherents; there was a great vitality to religious matters, and many men were deeply concerned about correct belief. This is to say that at the time of the early settlements there was pro found interest in and concern about religion. Several currents of ideas were sweeping toward their crests. This was true of those called Puritans as well as a host of sectarians.

One thing that Protestants gen erally shared was an emphasis on the Bible as the sole source of their beliefs. This was in contrast with the Roman Catholic Church which used in addition to the Bible such other sources as church tradi tion and the writings of the Church Fathers. Undoubtedly, Protestants subsumed much of this tradition into their versions of Christianity. The Anglican Church kept a goodly amount of the older tradition. But Protes tants in general insisted upon a biblical foundation for their be liefs. This central role of the Bible provided a major underlying sup port to the idea of having a writ ten constitution. By analogy; the English constitution was like the Roman Catholic Church in relying mainly on tradition; the United States Constitution is Protestant like in being the written word. Another most important differ ence between Protestants and Catholics was in the position toward monasticism. In the Catho lic Church, a person with a re626 THE FREEMAN October ligious vocation went into one of the religious orders: if he was a man, he became a member of the secular clergy - those who served in such capacities as pastors and priests to the laity - or the regu lar clergy - those living under rules as monks; if a woman, she became a nun. Protestants re nounced, denounced, and, where they could, abolished monasticism.

Though Anglicans. differed from other Protestants in many re spects, on this issue they were agreed. Renouncing the world, to Protestants, was a renouncing of the duties and responsibilities God had placed on men when they were born into it; it was a retreat from the necessary engagement with the Adversary who tested one's mettle. The Impact of the Puritan Ethic To devout Protestants, the things of the world are a snare and a delusion. Yet, we are called to grapple with them, possess them, live out our lives in the midst of them, and keep them in their proper perspectives - as things to be used rather than to be used by them. Out of this subtle and somewhat ambigu0l!s attitude toward life in the world came the Protestant ethic, an ethic fre quently referred to as the Puritan ethic but actually one shared by most Protestants, though less tenaciously by Anglicans and Lu therans at times. This ethic in volved a particular posture toward the workaday world. It is seen most clearly in the Puritan Doc trine of the Calling. According to this doctrine, God calls to useful employment all those whom He elects to salvation. This calling might be any lawful undertaking which compensated not only the person engaged in it but served others as well. One showed forth the character of his faith by the quality of his work. Though other denominations might be less ex plicit, the whole Protestant move ment was permeated by the drive to perform well by the fact that most religious people were en gaged in worldly undertakings rather than withdrawing from them into a life apart.

Person~J piety tended to replace for committed Protestants the per sonal devotions of the religious among Roman Catholics. This is often mistaken for a rigid moral posture toward everything both by observers and undoubtedly by some of the practitioners. Piety, however, is a vesting of all things and all acceptable activities with religious significance, a signifi cance that derives from their im pact on the condition of the soul of the person involved with them. Anything that cannot be done to 1971 THE COLONIAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 627 the glory of God cannot be right fully done. Protestants tended to repudiate the specializations of the Catholic Church: special or ders of religious people, holy days (Puritans castigated a great variety of Christmas activities as pagan), numerous sacraments, the collection of religious relics, and so on. No day was more holy than any other (except, the critic may observe, the Sabbath, which was the major Protestant concession to specialization, a day set aside for religious devotion, that which, in general, Protestants had down graded), no work more a calling than any other, no thing more worthy of veneration than an other. This was the tendency of the Protestant movement, and the outreaches were experienced in vigorous trade and productive ac tivities, insistence on public and private virtue, and a great deal of fervor going into many under takings which those who discrim inated according to a different ethos would reckon to be of little account. That much of this fervor would be obnoxious and repugnant to those of a different faith should be obvious, though men do not or dinarily concede that differences which do not attract them may de rive from a great faith, but any one who would understand Ameri can history must come to grips with this moving vitality which stems from a pious attitude toward the Creation.

Community Experiments English settlements in America grew up separate from one an other, as a rule. These settlements were originally called plantations, came to be known as colonies, and most of them eventually became states within the United States. The separation was owing in part to the accident of the location of grants from the king, in part to the difficulties of land travel in those days, in part to British mer cantile policy, and in considerable part to religious differences. Most seventeenth century colonies were conceived of and took shape as re ligious communities, though those who came to them may have had a variety of motives. That they were conceived as religious communities means that they were to be made up of people of the same faith (wi th a few notable exceptions) and that religion was believed to be the glue that held them to gether as well as sometimes that which distinguished them from the others.

There may be, there undoubt edly is, a strong individualistic strain in Christianity. Individuals are saved, not communities nor nations, according to Christian teaching. Protestants were more individualistic than Catholics, at 628 THE FREEMAN October least in their insistence upon a direct relationship between God and man, one which neither re quired nor could use a human in termediary. Moreover, Christian ity is a missionary religion, that is, the Gospel is to be preached to all nations and peoples. It is not an exclusive religion as is, say, the Hebrew religion. Therefore, religious community in an exclu sive or collective sense would be alien to Christianity or to the main thrust of it. Of course, con gregations or communities within organizations universal in their purported extent would not be alien. The Protestant Reformation eventuated in the breakup of the uni ty of Western Christendom and in the founding of numerous de nominations. The initial direction was the founding of national churches as the religion of the people was dictated by the religion of the prince. These national churches were sometimes distinct from any other, most notably the Church of England, and usually required that all those within the country adhere to them. Religion was probably more deeply en tangled with political power than it had been before the Reforma tion. At any rate, to be able to practice any religion freelY,it was necessary almost everywhere to hold political power.

Escape from a State Church Hardly anyone cpuld conceive of a community or nation existing at the beginning of the seven teenth century which did not have one established religion and did not proscribe all others. After all, religion undergirded all institu tions, laws, and other establish ments. One might as well speak of a people living together under several different systems of laws as with several different religions, so people generally thought. In such a framework, the freedom to practice one's particular religion entailed the lack of freedom of anyone else to practice his in the same community. The Protestant Reformation not only spawned national churches but also a great deal of religious questioning and vigorous searches for the one true religion. Once a man had discovered the true re ligion - or the true doctrines and practices within the Christian re ligion - he must needs live accord ing to his belief, else his soul would surely be forfeit. America was a land of opportunity in the seventeenth as well as later cen turies, a land where converts of the true faith might come and set up communities where their faith could prevail.

It was this character to some of the settlements in America which made their coming and their ac1971 THE COLONIAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 629 tivities in America a revolution, of sorts. Several religious groups in England revolted, in effect, against the Church of England. The Separatists, of whom the Pil grims who came to Plymouth were a branch, definitely would not ac cept worship in the Church of England. The Puritans, when pressed to conform, were in tacit revolt against the established church. Something of the same could be said for the Quakers and a goodly number of members of other sects not only in England but also in other lands. Those who came to America were usually successful in their revolt, in that they were able to practice their religion in the New World. The Massachusetts Experiment What was more revolutionary' than this was the kind of society some of them tried to set up. The example which comes most readily to mind is that of the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts in large number in the 1630's. These had greater opportunity than did most settlers to .innovate because they brought their charter with them and a controlling group of stockholders as well. The Puritans were not utopians, nor were they redistributionists by doctrine.

They did, however, conceive of the good society as one ruled by the saints, that is, ruled by the elect. They were Calvinists in deriva tion, and believed in the doctrine that God has elected some to sal vation and the rest to damnation. It is His will, so they thought, that the redeemed, so far as they could be discovered, should rule. And, in their rule, they tried to run the government and order society so as to remove all wrongdoing and leave men free only to do good. The Puritans established their church in Massachusetts, and branch-offs from it were estab lished in other places in New Eng land, with the notable exception of Rhode Island. The church was supported by taxation, attendance upon its services was required of all inhabitants, and the moral pro hibitions enforced by the civil authorities.· The Puritans enforced an orthodoxy in public utterance as well as in moral behavior. Those who would not conform were ban ished from the colony. They had not come, they said, to form a debating society.

The Puritans' insistence on orthodoxy may have had political sources, in part. They had a diffi cult time in justifying the rule of the saints and the prescription of the same regimen for both saved and damned. Since all of their theologians could agree that a moral life could in no wise attain salvation for one, it was not at all clear why the saints should con630 THE FREEMAN October cern themselves with church at tendance and what are ordinarily referred to as the private morals of. the unredeemed. The Massachu setts Puritans had a dogma to fill this apparent vacuum; it was known as "preparation for salva tion."3 This was the doctrine that one could be prepared for the re ceiving of grace for salvation by hearing sermons, attending church, and good conduct. This justified, in their minds, the 'use of force or power in religious mat ters; it provided an ultimate sanc tion to the mundane business of intertwining church and state.

The Puritan experiment failed; everyone seems to agree on this point. Their preachers never tired of telling their congregations that they had fallen away from the zeal of their fathers. Their small farm ing towns founded on an abstrac tion of the manor failed to contain a population, much of which turned to the sea for a livelihood. A Half-way Covenant in the latter part of the seventeenth century admitted the children of the "saints" to church membership and political participation without requiring of them all the signs of election. The charter was revoked 3 See Perry Miller, "'Preparation for Salvation' in Seventeenth-Century New England," Essays in American Colonial History, Paul Goodman, ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. 152-183. in the 1680's. The witchcraft per secutions of the 1690's made many doubt the validity of theocracy. The Congregational church was not finally and fully disestablished in Massachusetts until the 1830's, but the theocratic concept of a Holy Commonwealth had long been abandoned. There were, of course, powerful residues from it. The covenant idea went into a stream of ideas which supported a writ ten constitution as a pact between the governors and the governed.

The idea of reconstructing society for the good of all has not died, either; it has gone through many mutations in American history. But many New Englanders had enough of such drastic experi ments by the eighteenth century. Communal Failures There is not space here to dis cuss in any detail the many dif ferent community experiments of the colonial period; it would take a good sized book to do so. There were experiments in communal storehouses and disposal of land. The earliest of these was at Jamestown; it was such a dismal failure that it was very shortly abandoned. A similar fate met the Plymouth experiment in the 1620's. This did not deter the founders of Georgia from attempt ing an even more extensive experi ment along these lines in the 1971 THE COLONIAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 631 1730's and 1740's. They attempted to plan the economy and control the morals of the inhabitants: small parcels of land were distrib uted to householders; an attempt was made to produce silk; they selected the inhabitants according to need and other criteria; and an act of 1735 declared that "no Rum, Brandies, Spirits or Strong Waters" could be imported or sold in the colony.4By mid-century just about everyone had had enough of this experiment, including the trustees. Of this experiment in philanthropy, historian Daniel Boorstin notes that "a project which had been lavishly supported by individual charity and public philanthropy, had come to a dismal end. It is· uncertain how much of the population had deserted Georgia for the freer opportuni ties of Carolina and the other colo nies by the middle of the century.

... But many had left, and there was more than romance or malice in the notion that Georgia was on the W8Y to becoming a deserted colony."5 The Quaker Colony These were not strictly religious experiments, but the effort of· the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania 4 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), p. 82. 5 Ibid., pp. 94-95. was more nearly so. The Quakers departed radically from Christian tradition. They abandoned the in herited forms of Christianity, in deed, professed to despise them, eschewed liturgy, theology, or a specialized clergy, believed that each man was illumined by an inner light, and were confirmed pacifists. Also, in the early years, their zeal was almost unbounded, as is illustrated by the determina tion of some of their number to be martyred in Massachusetts. (The authorities there finally de cided to oblige them.) They re fused to be sworn in courts or take oaths of office in conventional manner. They believed that if· the Indians were treated fairly there would be no trouble with them.

How such a people with such be liefs could govern is difficult to fathom. Government has to do with monopolizing and using force, if it is to be employed at all. Yet here were a people loath to bear arms. Boorstin observes that "almost from the beginning the Quakers realized that their re ligious doctrines ... would put difficulties in the way of running a government. It was one thing to live by Quaker principles, quite another to rule by them."6 Over a good many years in the mid eighteenth century Quaker legis lators hampered the government 6 Ibid., p. 43.

632 THE FREEMAN 'October from preparing to defend against Indians on the frontier. The mat ter came to a head during the French and Indian War when In dians rampaged over western Pennsylvania. After much debate and soul searching, most of the Quakers who adhered to a rigid pacifism withdrew from apoliti cal activities in 1756. Most of those who remained in the legis lature were willing to compromise on the issue. 7 By the middle of the eighteenth century most Americans had been weaned away from visionary ideas; their experience in the New World had brought them closer to that of the Old World, even as they were growing away from political connections with the old. Many were of a mind to learn from the wisdom of the ages. The Great Awakening: Churchly People vs. Sectarians American experience was tend ing to wean people away from es tablished churches, too. The most generally established body was the Church of England. It was most vigorously established by law in Virginia, where it was not only supported by taxation but other denolninations were scarcely tolerated. This attempt to make the church not only the cement of community but also the support of 7 See ibid., pp. 61-62.

monarchy and other aristocratic es tablishments had largely failed. Many Virginians disliked having such an establishment, held the clergy in low esteem, and were quite willing to part with it when the opportunity offered itself. In many of the other colonies the es tablished church was only one among many other denominations. In such circumstances, it was not very convincing to argue that all the people of a commonwealth must be of the same faith else the community would fall apart. This was clearly not the case. Several colonies did not even have an es tablished church, and some of these were as cohesive as those which did. There was more to the tendency away from established churches, however, than an unfavorable ex perience with them. There were principled objections which even tuated in new conceptions of the relation between government and religion and between the individ ual and society. The two major sources of these were the sectarian denominations and the Great Awakening.

The American population in the colonial period could be divided into two major religious group ings: the churchly people and the sectarians. Churchly people were those who had or sought to have an established church. Sectarians 1971 THE COLONIAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 633 were those who neither had nor in principle desired an established church. The first of the sectarians to hold power was Roger Williams in Rhode Island. Williams denied that there was any efficacy to en forced religion. God chose whom he would and rejected the others; no good works or any other human agency or action could affect God's choice. Both the saved and the damned must live in society with one another, and government was necessary to that end. But it would be an abomination to attempt to enforce the dictates of religion on those not elected; it would disturb the peace of the community, give decision over religious matters to unqualified men in government, and would dangerously intertwine matters of this world and the next in ways that they could be dis tinguished and kept separate. 8 There were other sectarians, some of whom did not trace from Calvinism. The Quakers were the most prominent. They did not be lieve that religion should be forced, and where they had au thority there was religious tolera tion. Many German sectarians came over in the eighteenth cen tury to settle in the areas where they would not be bothered or where there was religious tolera8 See Alan Simpson, "How Democratic was Roger Williams?" in Goodman, op.

cit., pp. 188-89. tion. Among them were Mora vians, Mennonites, Amish, and so on. The Great Awakening, however, played an even more prominent role in the breakdown of the ties between church and state. The Great Awakening was a revival movement which swept through the colonies in the 1740's and whose impetus continued through the latter part of the eighteenth century. The most prominent preachers ·were George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert Tennent. Whitefield was an Eng lishman who preached throughout the colonies with great impact. It was through this movement that evangelical piety began its move to become the dominant mode of American religion. The evangelical movement took the emphasis away from doctrine, from forms, from ritual, and from what may be called in more gen eral terms "churchiness." What was essential was not outward conformity to religious prescripts but inward conversion, a new heart, and a new man. To such an outlook, an established church tended to be only so much dead weight. The revival movement stressed individual conversion and individual piety and the improve ment of society by way of im proved individuals. The way to community was not through gov634 THE FREEMAN October ernment power but by changed men. The Great Awakening di vided the older churches between those who accepted the new re vivalist emphasis and those who championed the rational approach.

An established church became, quite often, an anachronism, when what was no longer involved was a single church. Moreover, the Great Awakening cut across the bounds of colonies and religion to provide a common ground in reli gion to inhabitants throughout the colonies. By the latter part of the eight eenth century, then, men were chastened by their experience with attempts at reconstructing society, by the use of government to achieve some religious end. They had also been enlivened by a new concept of the role of religion in society. For some Americans, re ligion may have become less im portant than it was to their fore bears. To many others, it was still of utmost importance, so impor tant that it should not be cor rupted and stinted by the expedi ency of the exercise of power. To virtually all Americans, their re ligious background provided the framework through which they winnowed their ideas and in terms of which they buiIded. f) Next: Colonial Political Experience A Formula lor Freedom IDEAS ON $ LIBERTY THE COLONISTS didn't have to contend with a politicalized Church, and later wrote the First Amendment to prevent such a develop ment. The eighteenth-century pulpit in America stood staunchly for freedom. "The Americans," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, "com bine the notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other."

The framers of our basic political documents and the people for whom they spoke were end products of the long religious and cultural heritage of Christendom. They willed religious, political, and social liberty as a necessary corollary of their religious com mitment, and our relatively free society was, in part, a projection of the teaching of the colonial churches. ED M U N D A. 0 PIT z, Religion and Capitalism: Allies Not Enemies Individual Freedom THOMASF. BAYARD I HAVE WITNESSED the insatiable growth of that form of state so cialism styled "Protection," which I believe has done more to foster class legislation and create in equality of fortune, to corrupt public life, to banish men of inde pendent mind and character from the public councils, to lower the tone of national representation, blunt public conscience, create false standards in the popular mind, to familiarize it with reliance upon state aid, divorce ethics from poli tics, and place politics upon the low level of a mercenary scramble, than any other single cause.