Religion and the American Revolution

An Imperial History

Katherine Carté

• Editore: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469662657
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Early American History

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.

1

Britain’s Imperial Protestantism

In 1762, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Secker used backroom politicking to get Britain’s Privy Council to block an act of the Massachusetts General Assembly authorizing a new missionary society. The archbishop’s objections were not related to the purpose or nature of the new Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge among the Indians in North-America (SPCKNA). After all, it looked and sounded a lot like the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), of which Secker was the head. The SPCKNA had been created by a government act, like the Anglican SPG, and its leaders were part of the established church in Massachusetts, just as the SPG’s were in England. Rather, Secker’s objections lay in denominational competition. The Massachusetts project was sponsored by New England congregationalists, whom Secker thought of as “dissenters,” members of a transatlantic community that included English presbyterians, congregationalists, and baptists—denominations that refused to conform to the Church of England. A deep and lasting antagonism existed between the dissenting and Anglican communities on both sides of the Atlantic, even though both groups were protestant, enjoyed the privileges of establishment where they could, and agreed on the value of building organized protestant Christianity.¹

That the Anglican Secker would thwart a dissenting missionary group was hardly surprising. The tensions between Anglicans and dissenters in Britain’s eighteenth-century empire are well known. What is more striking in this story is what the two groups had in common. First, both sides assumed that missionary work should be carried out by government-sanctioned voluntary societies and led by members of the established church. Second, Anglicans and dissenters acted on the presumption that government authorities in London would treat their separate projects as roughly equivalent because both promoted an authentic protestant faith. Secker did not openly condemn the SPCKNA because it was unseemly for one legitimate denomination of protestants to oppose the good work of another legitimate denomination. “Our Society for propagating the Gospel cannot with a very good Grace make any opposition,” he wrote to the bishop of London. The archbishop knew that “no serious man can object against the Intention” the New Englanders had expressed. To make his case, Secker had to pivot away from discussion of religion. He argued to the Privy Council that the new society could damage Britain’s policy with Indigenous Americans, and on those nonreligious grounds the Council vetoed the Massachusetts act.²

At this juncture, the Massachusetts leaders gave up their effort because respectable missionary organizations worked arm in arm with authorities, not against them. Secker’s choice of political strategy and the dissenters’ acquiescence in the face of their loss were two sides of the same coin; government bodies set the rules for protestant institutions. Dissenters conveyed the news of the veto from London to Boston, and they howled with anger, reflecting, too, that the two sides in the conflict shared strong networks that facilitated transatlantic communication among religious leaders in Britain’s far-flung territories. But the dissenters’ anger changed little about the outcome. Only when the United States was free of the constraints of the British Empire, when its religious communities ceased to recognize the shared authority of the Privy Council, did New Englanders form their own, independent missionary society.³

The American Revolution destroyed the habits and mechanisms of connection, competition, and legitimation between protestant institutions that were evident in the SPCKNA incident. It also transformed the networks of connection that linked protestants on one side of the ocean to the other. Recovering that system, a protestant scaffolding that surrounded the empire, is essential to understanding how the American Revolution reformed Anglo-American religion into a new shape. Doing so reveals a colonial-era system in which protestant groups competed by a shared set of rules and worked to common ends. That shared system was remarkably robust, and it was rooted in the political circumstances of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. More precisely, it resulted from political choices made in the era of the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Union, when Britain’s imperial governors defined their conglomerated polity in religious terms, through its protestantism. That political stratagem had direct consequences for protestant institutions, which benefited from government legitimization and support. It also had consequences for Anglo-American religious community, as it provided a framework within which transatlantic protestant networks and projects developed. The dynamics of eighteenth-century protestantism, including fights between Anglicans and dissenters, as well as the fractures around the growing awakening movement, must be understood within that framework. It steered the empire’s protestants toward a common purpose, even when they struggled with one another.

When imperial protestantism comes into view, it is possible to see how central policies forged diverse church establishments into a roughly common shape, why transatlantic religious institutions connected particular protestant communities to one another, and the way both communities and policies intertwined protestants’ plans to build their faith with the goals of the state. Yet historians of eighteenth-century Anglo-American religion have long overlooked these common structures of eighteenth-century imperial protestantism, focusing instead on regional and national protestant cultures. It is an oversight that has had direct consequences for interpreting the place of religion in the imperial crisis and war. By stressing local variation and overlooking the broad patterns that were evident across the empire, scholars have also underestimated the extent to which imperial policy determined the shape and focus of protestant community. As a result, it has been hard to see the myriad ways that the American Revolution—at its core a rupture in the British Empire—transformed religious communities and institutions.⁴

Britain’s imperial protestantism surrounded the empire. Acting as a scaffold, imperial protestantism bound the empire together and depended on it at the same time. The pillars holding up this scaffolding were the various church establishments around the empire, each unique to a specific jurisdiction but nonetheless united into a common outline that was determined by shared pressures of central policy. Between these parallel establishments, communities flourished. When protestants wanted to spread the gospel, to communicate with distant fellows, or needed support in a local conflict, they relied upon the denominations, religious societies, and personal relationships that linked the empire’s distant religious communities. These were the scaffolding’s planks. They bridged regions and crossed the ocean, but they followed the boundaries of the empire, and they functioned under its protection and by its rules. As a whole, the scaffolding did not prevent the kinds of competitions that were evident between Archbishop Secker and the Massachusetts dissenters, but it kept them from spiraling into major political conflicts, and it pushed protestant institutions into a form through which they supported and strengthened the bonds of empire.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE’S PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT

Britain’s protestant scaffolding bound together groups that had, before the eighteenth century, been hostile, even at war. Indeed, there was no British Empire before 1707, and the various polities that eventually constituted that empire—England, Scotland, Wales, and a variety of colonies founded under diverse arrangements—were more divided by faith than joined by it. Those divisions were rooted in the sixteenth century. After its split from Rome in the Reformation, the Church of England, with its daughter church in Wales, developed as an episcopal church, meaning that it had bishops. Those bishops sat in the House of Lords and thus played a direct role in the national government. Scotland, on the other hand, had embraced a presbyterian form of protestantism, in which the established church received funds and support from the government but in place of bishops the church was run by presbyteries, bodies made up of clergy and laity. When Scotland’s James VI became England’s James I in 1603, bishops were gradually instituted in Scotland, only to be swept away from both countries during the puritan ascendency in the 1640s and 1650s. The same era saw the establishment of puritan colonies in New England, which developed a congregationally based church establishment. Congregationalists, also known as independents, followed a model of church organization in which eac...