Republican Religion

I'm talking about 18th-century republicans — the Revolutionary War kind of republicanism. I just finished The American Revolution: A History (2002) by Gordon S. Wood. It includes ten pages on "Republican Religion" that speak directly to the religious background of Joseph Smith, Jr., and his parents. Seems like a topic worth sharing.

Here's what happened according to Wood:

The Revolution shattered traditional structures of authority, and common people increasingly discovered that they no longer had to accept the old distinctions that had separated them from the upper ranks of the gentry. ... [H]alf-literate plowmen were being told (even by aristocrats like Thomas Jefferson) that they had as much common or moral sense as learned professors.

Just as throwing off the established political system of England allowed political experimentation, so throwing off the established religious system (Anglicanism in the South; Puritanism or Congregationalism in the North) allowed religious experimentation.

Under such egalitarian circumstances, truth itself became democratized, and the borders the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had painstakingly worked out between religion and magic, science and superstition, naturalism and supernaturalism, were blurred. Animal magnetism seemed as legitimate as gravity. Dowsing for hidden metals appeared as rational as the workings of electricity. Popular speculations about the lost tribes of Israel seemed as plausible as scholarly studies of the origins of the Indian mounds of the Northwest.

Gone was the dominance of Anglicans and Puritans. Instead, "enthusiastic groups of revivalist Baptists, New Light Presbyterians, and Methodists had moved from the margins to the center of American society." And brand new groups popped up out of nowhere: "Universal Friends, Universalists, Shakers, and a variety of other splinter groups and millennial sects."

This is still a generation or two before the flowering of Mormonism, but it's quite a prologue. As Wood concludes the section, "There was nothing like it in the Western world." Two hundred years later, that's still true.

Comments

[Seth R.]

It's also important to remember the extent to which prominent public figures in America couched the Revolution and the national destiny in terms of the narrative of the Exodus.

Figures no less prominent than Benjamin Franklin were comparing the United States as a new promised land that would throw off the yoke of Egypt and forge a new destiny as a free people before God.

[Matt Bowman]

I'm not entirely convinced by Wood's argument in practical terms - I think he overstates the degree to which established faiths dominated the religious landscape. Baptists were flourishing in Virginia before the Revolution, and the Puritan monolith was never as solid as it appears to us looking backwards.

Purely in terms of ideology, however, he may have a point.

[Dave]

Matt, one of the trivia facts I recall from Woods' short review was that a half-dozen Baptist preachers in Virginia were sitting in jail just prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Which no doubt strengthened Baptist resolve, but also showed the constraints under which all but the established denominations -- Puritans/Congregationalists in the North, Anglicans in the South -- labored. All of that changed with the Revolution.

[Matt Bowman]

Oh, indeed, Baptists were subject to (though somewhat irregular) prosecution - though in New England they had gained the right to exist as a denomination before the Revolution. (In the case of Rhode Island, of course, about a hundred and fifty years before). However, their membership numbers were exploding in rural Virginia and the middle colonies from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. This process began before the Revolution; it continued after it. Doesn't mean that egalitarian ideology, and even disestablishment, didn't give such dissenting faiths a boost. However, it does call into question whether the Revolution can be credited with the success of such sects to the extent Wood believes.

[Clark Goble]

I'm not sure there was nothing like it in the western world. There for a few years during the era or Republicanism in England after the Civil War one could find it there. (Despite the excesses of the Puritans) But it didn't last long.

[Naiah Earhart]

This land was prepared for the coming forth of the restoration...