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American Religion: American Enlightenment

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Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post on American priestcraft:

[1] The dichotomy, “Enlightenment or evangelical” is a bit too pat for my taste, but then I tend to squint until I see shades of gray in what others see as the most black and white of situations.

[2] On Anglicanism in colonial America: The appointment of an Anglican bishop was a big deal to the colonists, not only for “religious” reasons, but because the colonists feared that it portended English political consolidation over the colonies. (There was a big, big streak of Whiggish paranoia among wide swaths of the colonists – so I don’t know that the reaction to the Bishop’s appointment was justified or not, nonetheless, that, apparently, is how many colonists interpreted the appointment, and so opposed it.)

[3] So I’d tend to see anti-clerical rhetoric as more epiphenomenal rather than causal – If you want to oppose British political rule, one way of doing so is impugning the “popishness” of the established religion. Being able to tap into religious emotion is a tried and true means of enabling violence for otherwise more worldly ends.

[4] I read a number of the sermons by Whig pastors from the revolutionary era some years ago – I don’t know how representative they are (although there are a lot of them). My recollection is that I was shocked at the idolatrous move in the sermons, presumably expositing a Biblical text, from liberty in Christ to political liberty.

I’m open to a more careful analysis – and a more general sample of sermons – but for the time being, in my own mind, I resist equating “support from evangelical Presbyterian pastors” with the revolution then being “an evangelical Presbyterian rebellion.” I’m inclined to believe that the support the revolution received from pastors represented a serious deformation of the faith.

[5] I say this believing almost entirely that the American Revolution was, on British constitutional grounds, a constitutionally justified action. Whether British subjects carried the right of representation with them when they immigrated to other British territories was a real ambiguity in the British constitution.

[6] Also, keep in mind that I understand the American Revolution to be an action designed to vindicate the legislative rights of colonial assemblies against the claims of the British metropolitan government rather than as an action designed to vindicate “individual liberty” against an oppressing government. So I understand the “ideology” of the Revolution to be much different than as it is often understood (not that your short post necessarily assumes what I take to be the more common, and mistaken, view).

On what the Americans thought justified their actions, starting at the first, just look at the specific indictments in the Declaration and ask yourself where individual liberty against generic government is asserted:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws . . .

He has refused to pass other Laws . . .

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant . . .

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly . . .

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected . . .

These are the very first indictments, and we could continue the list. To be sure, a couple of the later rights could be considered “individual rights,” but the bulk of the indictments deal with complaints about British rule preventing colonists from having the laws they need to govern themselves. I only half-joke with my students that we can read the Declaration as a complaint by big-government colonists against a libertarian King of England, who is giving the colonists less government than they want!

So I think it is really difficult to see the Revolution as a “liberal” revolution. The lines seem to me to go more directly to 1688 in England. And I’m agnostic about just how much we want to tie 1688 to continental Enlightenment. At the very least, there seems to be centuries of English history that are sufficient to set up the 1688 action whether or not the Enlightenment occurred. (Not that I would deny Enlightenment influence altogether; I just doubt that it was necessary to 1688.)

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 8:14 am

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American Religion: American Enlightenment

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