``Yet these were the most literate people in the history of the world,'' he said in a recent interview. ``You wonder: `Where do they get their ideas of self, of society, of corporate purpose - of what they are placed in the world to do?'''
His answer: the sermon. In colonial America, Stout says, the sermon was a message of extraordinary power. The average New Englander heard 7,000 sermons in a lifetime, about 15,000 hours of concentrated listening. There were no competing voices. It was a medium more influential than TV is today, he says.
Nor, Stout adds, had the tough-minded piety of Calvinism relaxed into a pallid outward morality in the sermons and religious life of the 18th century - currently, the accepted view. In the villages, ministers continued to preach the need for deep self-examination, redemption, rebirth, and freedom from sin.
Further, the colonial ministers - the grass-roots leaders of the Revolution, according to Stout - closely identified the events leading to 1776 with the ongoing drama of God's church and the fulfillment of a mission going back to the declaration of Puritan founder William Bradford: ``We are the Lord's free people.''
In this drama, Stout says, constitutional rights and political liberties were of secondary importance in the revolt against England. Of prime importance was the issue of spiritual destiny.
``In revolutionary New England,'' Stout writes, ``ministers continued to monopolize public communications, and the terms they most often employed to justify resistance and to instill hope emanated from the Scriptures and from New England's enduring identity as an embattled people of the Word who were commissioned to uphold a sacred and exclusive covenant between themselves and God.''
Stout's book is titled ``The New England Soul.'' But he is careful to say that colonial America wasn't New England writ large. For a time, the middle Colonies and the South were ignored by historians, he notes; recent scholarship has changed that. Still, New England had an inordinate influence in the colonial era:
Issues of power and authority, of spirit and law, were debated with solemn intensity in Congregational churches - attended by 70 percent of New Englanders. What was genuine conversion? Was it necessary for church membership? How would Psalms be sung? Could they come from sources other than the Bible? How were new parishes to be formed? What were their rights, their tax bases?
New York University Prof. Patricia Bonomi comments: ``The attention to fine matters of theology that most of us would care less about today - the passion, the brilliance - was the same quality of mind that would soon create the Constitution.''
The new twist was the active role of church members: ``Congregationalism, by its very nature, grants sovereign power to no one,'' Stout says. ``So we find people in New England in these churches playing democratic politics from the start, without ever calling it that. As a matter of fact, I think if you were to stop the average New Englander in the early 18th century and mention the word politics, they would know that word, but would think instinctively of church politics.''
Outside a scholarly circle, these views are news to the 20th century. Stout and others say popular history isn't accurate.
Says David Hall, a historian at Boston University: ``There is a religious continuity in American history through the Revolution, and it's important to know that. We exaggerate the religion of the 17th-century Puritans today, and devalue the religion of the Revolution. The uprising was not just about taxes and land.''
Even the classic deist-rationalists - Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin - believed in afterlife, says Dr. Bonomi.
It's all news to Stout's undergraduates. It doesn't fit with the history they have been taught. Students think the Revolution was a struggle for freedom, equality, and ``a way to make lots of money,'' Stout says. ``They find it curious that the colonists thought about it in terms of concepts like sin, virtue, and redemption.''
In class, Stout bridges the gap through popular music - the songs of Bruce Springsteen in particular. ``Bruce is disillusioned, because he's been brought up to think there is a promised land. But he doesn't find it in the factories, or in the streets of fire.'' What Stout asks his students is: Where did Springsteen ever get the idea that there is a promised land?
``The question I keep asking students is: `What does America mean to you? Where do we get our ideas?''' he says.
Stout, who holds a joint appointment in the Yale Divinity School and history department, is an easy-spoken native of Philadelphia - a baby-boomer who took seriously the idealism of his own generation. Ironically, his first teaching job was at Kent State University in 1970 - he arrived on campus three days after the National Guard shot four students (``There were tanks on campus ... I met the chairman of the history department in a grammar-school parking lot'').
He took up history after reading the great Harvard Prof. Perry Miller's ``Errand Into the Wilderness.'' It helped sort out American ideals and myths. Today Stout worries about ``zealots'' who confuse American nationalism with religion.
For now, experts say, the field of religious studies in American history is growing. New work is being done on colonial schooling, for example. (Puritan children knew more about the history of Israel than of England, Stout says.)
About these ads Rev. Charles Hambrick-Stowe's recent study of religious confessions of lay people is receiving more attention, as is a work by Brandeis University Prof. Christine Leight Heyrman on the communities of Marblehead and Gloucester, Mass., and Bonomi's recent ``Under the Cope of Heaven,'' about the vitality and contribution of Anababtists, Quakers, Lutherans, and others during the Revolution.
Says Bonomi: ``The field is developing rapidly. We talk about it with each other. But somebody has to say we've broken into a whole new territory.''
(Published on the eve of 4th of July 1987)
Although this is not exactly a Federalist/Anti-Federalist article, it is so thought provoking that I found it worthy of a ping to the group.
Wow! This is a 32-year-old review, but I’m very interested in the book. It is available on Amazon for a very stiff $31 paperback, $78 hardback. I feel it is a must-read so I’m buying the paper edition.
Thanks for a very good post.
I thought this was well-known.
Bookmark
Her first husband was a clergyman. Her second husband Gold Selleck Silliman had been a General in a Connecticut militia unit. He had one son, named Billy from his first marriage. General Silliman died in 1790, and his son struggled through the years, despite help from the rest of his family. In 1804, he apparently flirted with joining what was then, the early beginnings of the Democrat Party. He had participated in some of their caucuses.
In 1804, his daughter Patty wrote her Uncle Ben Silliman, Billy's half-brother about her concern over her father's involvement in the party. This is what Ben wrote back to her:
"You ask me whether any good comes from democratical Caucuses....No! I am not so unhanded as to believe that the democrats, as a party, are aiming at mischief; but I do sincerely believe that it is the genuine tendency of their principles & practices to weaken the religious, moral & sober habits of domestic life & to undermine the foundations of social order & good government. Multitudes of them are not aware of this, and while they are fascinated with the sounds of republicanism, liberty &c, they do not dream that they are toiling to elevate a few ambitious men to power & emolument, while themselves remain, & will, as obscure as before."
It was amazing to learn that the true nature of the Democrats reared its ugly head even that far back.
I find this odd. Maybe it's a new generation of academics just discovering this for the first time, but the influence of God and religion on the founding and revolution has been widely written about for a long time. There are many scholarly books on this subject.
Perhaps the past generation or two of academics just sought to write God out of the revolution.
This is hardly news to students of the revolution.
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As we have begun, of late, to react to the abhorrent movement, first begun in the late 1800's, and then self-identifying as a "liberal" movement (though not of the classical liberal interpretation), which now has become the driving force in American politics under its new and self-preferred moniker, "Progressive," we have been compelled to recognize it for what it always has been, a deliberate and contrived effort to undermine and overthrow the great principles underlying the philosophy of America's Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Such a "Liberal/Progressive" undertaking was initiated and has been led by many in the so-called "academic" community from the start, as can be documented easily for any whose interest and concern for preservation of the Constitution and its protections for religious liberty motivates them.
Removing any vestiges of religion from the "public square," or any vestiges of so-called "political speech" from religious spaces seems to have been a pet cause for radical "progressives." Why?
Are such ideological cultists so threatened by ideas conveyed by Judeo/Christian communities that they would exclude them from participation in our Republic's matters of state?
This thread aims at another facet of the discussion. For more perspective on the topic of this thread, readers might wish to review Professor Ellis Sandoz's Volumes on Political Sermons of the American Founding Era . . . ." - here.
Query: if sermons from the pulpit are dangerous to the Constitution, and if they are to be excluded from appropriate political debate, then why were these Sermons which pre- and post-date the Constitution, as published by Professor Sandoz, not criticized by the Founders themselves and/or subsequent Supreme Court decisions?
Just asking.
In other words, if the NFL and NASCAR had started around 1700, the revolution would never have occurred?...
John Witherspoon?
http://www.adherents.com/people/pw/John_Witherspoon.html
He signed the Declaration of Independence and he tutored James Madison for a long time.
Only a fool would discount the clergies impact on the American Revolution.
A facet of this that few are aware of is that in much of the American colonies, and for many years thereafter, very small towns and settlements were everywhere. Typically, over unimproved trails, a day’s walk by foot from each other.
Some traces of this density can still be seen in very “backwoods” areas. A big hint is that each tiny settlement has its own cemetery.
In any event, these settlements were kept connected with itinerant preachers, typically on horse, mule or donkey. They came to preach and sermonize, and were vital in spreading the news, and sometimes even the mail. In exchange, each settlement would put them up for a night or two, and feed them. Certainly there were not enough of them to provide a preacher at their church every week, so worship services were at almost random intervals.
Baptisms, marriages, funerals, etc., were also when the opportunity presented itself. But these preachers kept society knit together.
There no use crying about it — Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”
— Horace Walpole
Great post; ping. Thanks. BUMP!
And very good post. And contrary to the secularist, it was the effects of Christianity even enabled this.
To which can be added Alexis de Tocqueville (1805—1859. French political thinker and historian; best known for his two volume, “Democracy in America”) — The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man. Each sect adores the Deity in its own peculiar manner, but all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God...Moreover, all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same...
In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth...
There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated, In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions that frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact. But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace...
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live...
Thus religious zeal is perpetually warmed in the United States by the fires of patriotism. These men do not act exclusively from a consideration of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion to the cause. If you converse with these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be surprised to hear them speak so often of the goods of this world, and to meet a politician where you expected to find a priest.
They will tell you that "all the American republics are collectively involved with each other; if the republics of the West were to fall into anarchy, or to be mastered by a despot, the republican institutions which now flourish upon the shores of the Atlantic Ocean would be in great peril. It is therefore our interest that the new states should be religious, in order that they may permit us to remain free." (Democracy in America, Volume I Chapter XVII, 1835; http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/ch1_17.htm)
• There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor.
Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. (Democracy in America, [New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1851), pp. 331, 332, 335, 336-7, 337; http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/ch1_17.htm)
A quote often attributed to Tocqueville but which is not documented by any early sources, states,
• Not until I went into the churches of American and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
However, in Catholicism it is stated,
The entire encyclical [of Pope Leo XIII in Diuturnum] is worth reading in full, but these selections should put to a definitive end any idea among Catholics that a repeat of our revolutionary war may be justified. This becomes even clearer when we take seriously the fact that our initial Revolutionary War was illegitimate and cooperation with it immoral; although patriotic feelings often cloud this plain fact, the “social contract” justification for revolutionary war espoused in the Declaration of Independence was seriously flawed. The bloodshed that followed from it was blood shed in a deplorably immoral way. Any thought of repeating this war must be vehemently rejected among Catholics as engaging in serious sin. -https://catholicexchange.com/121409
bump
Thank you for posting this excellent piece.