the Calve’s Head Club, and other eating clubs; various literary, theatrical, and philosophical societies; and predominantly female salons and tea tables. Dedicated to the pleasures of amiable conversation, the arts, and good eating, these societies promoted the common interests of relative strangers in the new public meeting spaces of taverns, coffeehouses, and well-appointed homes. At a time when urban social relations were moving beyond the traditional ties of family, ethnicity, church, and local community, Freemasonry was among the new social forms that anticipated the rise of the American middle class.67
Since 1990, several colonial historians have adopted and refined Jürgen Habermas’s theoretical framework of the public sphere to explain these social developments in America while not paying particular attention to religious life. Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic (1990) makes the case for the significance of an emerging print media in the establishment of a secular eighteenth-century public sphere. He holds that through a burgeoning array of newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, print was both a carrier and an expression of a new republican ideology. David Conroy’s study of taverns in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, In Public Houses (1995), investigates their role in the creation of secular public space. In Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997), David S. Shields argues that colonial polite societies were vehicles for producing horizontal relationships among the elite.68 Taken together, these books suggest that a new language of secular discourse was taking hold through print and the new societies. I argue—in contrast to the secular focus of these studies, a tendency characteristic of Habermas’s European public sphere—that debates over religious ideas suffused the public sphere that emerged in America by the 1740s.69 The late colonial period saw an intermingling of secular and religious discourse.
Although Habermas held that the totalizing worldview of premodern religion stood in an inverse relationship with rational criticism, whereby religion must decline if enlightenment were to progress, his theoretical framework of an exclusively rational public sphere does not sufficiently acknowledge the pervasive presence of religion in the colonial world. There, unlike in England, the metaphysical authority of the monarchy was an ocean away.70 Instead, Reformed Protestant and Anglican establishments held varying degrees of religious authority across the colonies. A flexible Calvinism that was capable of including both the orthodox and the revivalist sides of the Great Awakening informed most eighteenth-century Christianity.71 At one of its extremes was a small minority of Catholics, and at the other the various advocates of Enlightenment religion, while all stood apart from Native American religions and the African gods of eighteenth-century slaves.72 Within this broad religious culture, moreover, magical beliefs and practices, some older than Christianity, persisted.
Not only was British metaphysical authority an ocean away, but so too was the English Parliament. Thus colonial assemblies and especially local governments shaped political society. As David D. Hall has argued, rather than cohesively united by the absolute authority of the monarchy, religious and political authority in colonial America were “remarkably local and decentralized.” Moreover, unlike England, eighteenth-century America had no “broad distribution of printed matter.” As a result, its “social and political criticism were never fully differentiated from the language and practices of radical Protestantism.”73
Timothy H. Breen first described this “religious public sphere” as “an intellectual space in which allegedly disinterested writers employing their reason in the name of the people might criticize and shape popular religious assumptions.”74 Beginning with the controversies that came to be known as the First Great Awakening, Americans engaged in public, print debates over religious matters. Frank Lambert has argued that the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield initiated these disputes by demanding that the forum for religious controversy be moved from the private, clerically controlled pulpit to the public arena of print, where literate men and women could make reasoned judgments and arguments.75 Accusations that the upstart evangelicals spoke in uncouth language while employing rhetoric and emotion rather than reason resulted in their making efforts to dispute in the language and reasoned logic of polite society.76 In moving from the private expression of religious convictions to public, printed efforts to persuade readers of the truth of their beliefs, writers on all sides of the issue learned to frame their arguments to appeal to the common sense of their readers. As the Boston antirevivalist John Caldwell warned, “Understand with your own Understanding; see Evidence before ye believe or judge.”77 Moreover, this paralleled ongoing secular debates over bank fraud and related issues, and in both cases, more and more colonial Americans adapted to polite society’s insistence that individuals make informed, well-reasoned decisions in an expanding marketplace of ideas.78
Whatever the character and significance of the American public sphere, it first appeared among the less than 5 percent of the population that lived in coastal cities.79 By the early eighteenth century, every major port city had at least one coffeehouse or tavern, which served as nexuses for extralocal news and information and, like elegant homes, a site for the new sociability. Within the decorum of this nascent polite society, strangers met, circulated manuscripts and published materials, engaged in and discussed literature and the arts, and entertained alternative visions of social and religious life. Gradually, a small but influential number of colonial elites fashioned a new and experimental realm of social life where they worked to bridge differences through civility and congenial conversation and find common cause in a wide variety of pursuits. Sheer joy, entertainment, and the members’ delight in one another’s company, David S. Shields has argued, were as much the purpose of these societies as any other motive. However, while providing a common ground of private pleasures for a coalescing upper class, they foreshadowed, with their multiple forms of communication and social relations, the emerging public.80 By the 1760s, this congenial realm of elegance and polish gave way to the sober reason and morality of a rapidly expanding public sphere, in which the new print media joined growing numbers of citizens in dialogue over questions surrounding revolutionary social change.
Freemasonry established its first American lodge, in Philadelphia in 1733, within the social and cultural milieu of polite society. By the 1740s, Philadelphia and the similarly old and large urban centers of Boston and New York had several lodges, while inland seaports founded their first lodges in the following decades (Albany’s, for instance, in the 1760s). Masonic membership was a means of entry into polite society. Lodge meetings were held in the elegant private rooms of upscale taverns, where gentleman habitually gathered for dinners and entertainment. Deliberately expensive fees attracted the “man of merit” while discouraging “those of mean Spirits, and narrow, or Incumber’d Fortunes.”81 Those who were “well known” by the brothers were immediately admitted to candidacy; others were required to wait one month while “proper inquiry” was made into their character and behavior. James Anderson’s Constitutions instructed lodge members to “avoid all slandering and backbiting and talking disrespectfully of a person” and instead to treat one another “with much courtesy.” Individual lodges required members to appear in “decent cloathing” and refrain from obscene language, excessive drink, and indecent behavior. They were to participate in lodge rituals with the utmost “solemnity” and offer the master of the lodge “due reverence.” An escalating series of punishments, beginning with fines and culminating in banishment, met infractions of this gentlemanly code.82 Though Freemasonry was a society with secrets, entry into the fraternity was intended not as a withdrawal into private life but as an opportunity for gentlemen to demonstrate and refine the social manners of the upper class.
Freemasonry also helped to shape the structure and discourse of the emerging public sphere. In its efforts to harmonize the divisive forces of nationality, religion, and politics, the fraternity helped to create a new social order that brought together leading affluent white men of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The social philosophy and organization of Freemasonry were part of the “new civility,” which enabled persons of different ranks, callings, origins, and occupations to put aside their differences and engage in congenial communication and common activities. The fraternity’s
