The Production of American Religious Freedom

Finbarr Curtis

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781479856763
• eBook ISBN: 9781479843800
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Americans love religious freedom. Few agree, however, about what they mean by either "religion" or "freedom." Rather than resolve these debates, Finbarr Curtis argues that there is no such thing as religious freedom. Lacking any consistent content, religious freedom is a shifting and malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. While Americans often think of freedom as the right to be left alone, the free exercise of religion works to produce, challenge, distribute, and regulate different forms of social power.

The book traces shifts in the notion of religious freedom in America from The Second Great Awakening, to the fiction of Louisa May Alcott and the films of D.W. Griffith, through William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Trial, and up to debates over the Tea Party to illuminate how Protestants have imagined individual and national forms of identity. A chapter on Al Smith considers how the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party challenged Protestant views about the separation of church and state. Moving later in the twentieth century, the book analyzes Malcolm X's more sweeping rejection of Christian freedom in favor of radical forms of revolutionary change. The final chapters examine how contemporary controversies over intelligent design and the claims of corporations to exercise religion are at the forefront of efforts to shift regulatory power away from the state and toward private institutions like families, churches, and corporations. The volume argues that religious freedom is produced within competing visions of governance in a self-governing nation.

1

You, and You, and You

Charles Grandison Finney and Democracy

All states of society, all forms of government, all inveterate habits and prejudices, from the iron Roman, the polite and philosophic Greek, to the most debased Sandwich Islanders, have been overcome and subdued alike by the Gospel, and always in the form of revivals of religion, and substantially by the use of the same instrumentalities which . . . have been so long, so widely, and so successfully used in the United States.

—Charles Grandison Finney

Charles Grandison Finney was no modest man. Reflecting on the revivals of his early ministry in upstate New York in the 1820s and 1830s, he remarked, “I have never seen, read, or heard of, revivals in any age of the church, more pure, powerful, and in every way desirable, than those of that period.”1 For Finney, a big revival was a good revival. Evangelists sought to save as many souls as possible. However, Finney’s emphasis on counting souls revealed an underlying tension between social and individual aspects of conversion. On one hand, sinners were individuals with free will. As he explained, “They are free moral agents, of course; rational, accountable.”2 On the other hand, a revival used social pressure to produce as many Christians as possible. If sinners were free to make their own choices, what was social pressure doing exactly?

Finney’s ideas about revivalism call us to consider the relationship between social pressure and individual freedom. While he argued for a greater role for human free will in Protestant revivalism than did his Calvinist predecessors, Finney was not interested in freedom for freedom’s sake. He wanted to understand how human volition worked in order to help individuals conform to social norms and theological truth. People were most free when they made the same choices as their Christian neighbors. This was not a simple matter of social control. External coercion was incapable of producing genuine conversions. Instead, the task of the revivalist was to affect the interior life of sinners so that they willingly chose Christ. Finney studied the psychology of will to consider how social norms and discipline governed choices. By producing free individuals within a population of free people, Finney’s revivals drew on distinctly democratic techniques of surveillance. The revivalist observed popular behavior in order to shape it.

The Language of the Common People

Finney was celebrated and denounced for his use of “new measures” to promote revivals. His measures included an anxious bench on which potential converts would sit in full view of the congregation, protracted meetings that lasted for hours and even days, extemporaneous preaching with plain language, an increased role for women, personalized addresses that refused to let those in the pews remain anonymous spectators, and a heightened emotional appeal that challenged a more reserved sense of Christian propriety.3 Taken together, these methods placed sinners under intense public scrutiny. The technique of anxious bench, for example, encouraged people to sit in a row reserved for sinners concerned over the state of their souls, thereby inviting additional pressure from the preacher and other congregants. Many, particularly in Finney’s own Presbyterian and later Congregationalist denominations, questioned whether such means were worth the ends. As biographer Charles Hambrick Stowe described the attitude of Finney’s opponents, “[They] did not differ from him so much on theological grounds. It was the style and tone—the bad manners—of the revivals to which they objected. ‘Doing the thing,’ as H. H. Kellogg in Clinton called it, seemed to them religious vulgarity.”4 Finney’s critics felt he damaged the dignity of the ministerial profession and undermined the decorum of church services. He offered no apologies: “Dignity indeed! Just the language of the devil. He rejoices in it. Why, the object of an illustration is to make people see the truth, not to bolster up pulpit dignity.”5

Finney responded to calls for pulpit dignity by asking how many Christians had been converted by ministers who maintained this devilish decorum. Scholars have viewed his rejection of propriety as evidence for a democratization of American Christianity in the nineteenth century. According to this interpretation, those who denounced Finney’s “vulgar” style were motivated by a class-based anxiety over the erosion of traditional authority. Ministers trained at Harvard and Yale resisted increasingly popular forms of religious expression. As historian Nathan Hatch explains, “This shift [to democratization] involved new faith in public opinion as the arbiter of truth.”6 Revivalists flourished because they met the demands of the masses. An assertive version of the democratization thesis is proposed by rational choice sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, who celebrate an American free market of religion that rewarded preachers who embraced their roles as religious entrepreneurs and adapted to consumer demands.7 Unlike Finke and Stark, Hatch has mixed feelings about the religious marketplace. According to Hatch, the revivalist style simplified theology and encouraged anti-intellectualism in American life.8 As he laments, “These new ground rules measured theology by its acceptance in the marketplace. It flattened out uncomfortable complexity and often resolved issues by simple choice of alternatives.”9 While Hatch has reservations about the actual choices of religious consumers, he does agree with Finke and Stark that the choices of Americans were free. Revivalism was popular because it met the demands of American Christians.

Finney proudly adapted his preaching to his audience. As he stated, “Among farmers and mechanics, and other classes of men, I borrowed my illustrations from their various occupations. I tried also to use such language as they would understand. I addressed them in the language of the common people.”10 But Finney’s attack on the preaching style of his contemporaries did not always make him so popular. Recounting his reception in one town, he noted, “I learned in the course of the day that the people were threatening me—to ride me on a rail, to tar and feather me, and to give me a walking paper, as they said.”11 This reception adds a wrinkle to the portrayal of Finney as the preacher who gave the people what they wanted. He did not care if the masses liked him. Finney was confrontational and stressed the importance of “melting down” or “breaking down” sinners: “This committed state is moral depravity, the fountain of sin within them, from which flow by a natural law all their sinful ways. This committed voluntary state is their ‘wicked heart.’ This it is that needs a radical change.”12 Left alone, sinners would not choose what was good for them.

In representing revivalists like Finney as democratizing figures who gave the people what they wanted, historians like Hatch and sociologists like Finke and Stark portray revivalism as the natural extension of the people’s will. In doing this, they deflect attention from the work required to produce the will of the people. By depicting Finney’s revivals as protests of the masses against the classes, democratization theories elevate religious freedom in ways that divert attention from other forms of social and political power such as pressure and shame. According to historian Amanda Porterfield, Hatch ignores an authoritarian strand within American evangelicalism. As she argues, “Misrepresenting evangelicalism as antiauthoritarian and disregarding the connection between the growth of evangelicalism and the growth of slavery and the invasion of Indian lands, Hatch did as much to mask the developing relationship between religion and politics as to reveal it.”13

Porterfield’s analysis brings a welcome attention to social power. However, Hatch’s depiction of Finney’s antiauthoritarianism might not be a misrepresentation. I agree with Hatch that revivalism was a force for democratization in the sense that revivalists hoped to produce populations of self-governing people. Finney’s ministry mounted a popular challenge to existing institutional authority and social norms. This is not to say, however, that institutional authority and social norms vanished. Revivalism is best understood not as one side of a binary between authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, or between social control and popular sovereignty. Rather, the popularity of revivals depends upon institutional arrangements and distributions of power that make democracy possible. Instead of a process in which individuals became free, democratization might be better understood as a shift toward democratic forms of governance. A revivalist used social forces to gain the people’s consent to be governed.

As social events designed to produce individual conversions, revivals are a resource for thinking about the relationship between public opinion and private decisions in a democracy. This is especially true if revivals are illustrations of both democratization and market forces. Democracy does not just give people what they want; democracy requires institutions that measure, regulate, and implement democratic choices. There is a great deal at stake in making the marketplace the arbiter of democratic sovereignty. After all, markets do not just respond to consumer demands; they create consumer demands. Part of why market forces are effective is they conceal this work of creation. When portrayed as the vehicle for expanding religious freedom, the marketplace appears to be driven by the choices of religious actors acting upon internal desires that were otherwise constrained by external forces. By celebrating the agency of religious consumers, the equation of free markets with democratization naturalizes capitalist freedom. Instead of examining institutional conditions that produced a Protestant hegemony in public life, democratization theories present revivalism as the fulfillment of the popular will. Following this logic, if free markets meet innate consumer demands, and popular evangelicalism flourishes under free markets, then one can presume that the kind of evangelicalism that thrived in the nineteenth century was what people wanted.

Scholarship that equates freedom with evangelical salvation supports Catherine L. Albanese’s observation that American “public Protestantism” has functioned in tandem with a celebration of pluralism and multiplicity.14 Religious freedom goes hand in hand with the commonsensical equation of Protestantism, voluntarism, and religious freedom in the United States. According to historian David Sehat, celebrations of religious freedom serve as a civic myth that conceals the practical exercise of power through what he calls a “moral establishment.” As he states, “The invocation of religious liberty should not be confused with the actual distribution of power and the formation of political institutions.”15 John Lardas Modern describes how evangelical forms of agency became part of American common sense. According to Modern, evangelicals cited their particular genius for adapting to a secular political order that liberated Americans from institutional control. Evangelical freedom coincided with democratic freedom in that both deflected attention from institutional power by attributing authority to the unmediated will of the people. In this secular milieu, “the ‘State’ was an energy that operated within human history, a non-mediating medium that would allow individuals to act voluntarily, on their own terms, as a people. As a control variable for both ‘religion’ and the organization of the population, this energy made the evolution of evangelicalism and social order part of the same horizon of possibility. Moreover, this energy secured the meaning of evangelicalism as emancipation from the fetters of artificial, and therefore unreasonable, authority.”16

To understand how the rhetoric of emancipation worked in tandem with the organization of the population, Modern draws on the critical theories of Michel Foucault, who tried to understand how individual choices in the modern liberal state are produced. According to Foucault, social power did not repress individual subjects but constituted individuals within networks of power so that individuals more effectively reproduced the conditions that make the modern state possible. As he stated,

The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe one of its prime effects.17

Examining the individual as an effect of power can explain how Finney’s new measures worked to produce liberal subjects. Revivals did not depend upon external institutional coercion. Rather, a revival was a social event that produced free individuals.

In Foucault’s later work, his focus on the discipline of an individual subject was supplemented by attention to what he called “security.” Security measured and normalized individual behavior in the context of some population. A certain amount of variation, or multiplicity, was permissible as long as it was possible to maintain public norms. In other words, it was not necessary to discipline each person in the same way within a democratic polity; what mattered was measurable, quantifiable behavior.18 This tension between discipline and security can help to explain the relationship between the social event of a revival and the project of individual conversion. Finney’s revivals did not simply gather a collection of consumers; they produced environments in which social norms and public standards prescribed a limited variety of acceptable forms of individual discipline.

A social norm does not require that everyone’s behavior be the same. Democratic governments are not like totalitarian states that seek to control people’s behavior. Rather, liberal democracies survey and manage people within a population. For this to work, individuals choose whether to conform to social norms. What matters is not that all private behavior is identical, but that some norm maintains public influence. Rather than rely on top-down control of all people, democratic security surveys and measures a range of behavior in territory inhabited by free subjects. As Foucault explains, “Freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of the apparatuses of security. An apparatus of security, in any case the one I have spoken about, cannot operate well except on the condition that it is given freedom in the modern sense [the word] acquires in the eighteenth century: no longer the exemptions and privileges attached to a person, but the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things.”19 The work of security accounts for natural desires and behaviors across a population to allow for effective government.

Foucault’s ideas about security can help to clarify the production of religious freedom in the early republic. In the same way that democratic citizens were members of a population, sinners were members of an audience. To reach the greatest number of people within his prospective audience, Finney developed a science of revivals that studied how people made choices. He was especially interested in developing techniques of measurement and regulation to observe how social pressures could impact individual decisions. Before breaking down individual resistance, he needed to understand how human nature worked in order to develop measures appropriate to his audience of “common people.” He wanted to know how to shape a social environment that would influence free people to make decisions for Christ. Individual religious freedom, then, was not in a private space removed from public life but was the focus of surveillance, discipline, and security.

Finney knew that not every sinner would accept Christ. When looked at from the perspective of a population, this was not necessarily a problem. A revival’s success was measured by its ability to convert the greatest number of people. For such measurement to be possible, conversions needed to be standardized, countable events. If producing the greatest number of converts was the purpose of a revival, conversions should be widely accessible. This market logic repulsed Finney’s critics who saw something vulgar about his willingness to disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. You, and You, and You: Charles Grandison Finney and Democracy
• 2. I’m Not Myself To-night. I Owe Money: Louisa May Alcott and Salvation
• 3. Sentiment Rules the World: William Jennings Bryan and Populism
• 4. The Helpless White Minority: D. W. Griffith and Violence
• 5. The Fundamental Faith of Every True American: Al Smith and Loyalty
• 6. Do You Hate Me? Malcolm X and the Truth
• 7. Science in a Little Box: Intelligent Design and Secularity
• 8. The Most Sacred of All Property: Corporations and Persons
• Epilogue: You, and You, and You
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author