Peter Paris, and Albert Raboteau among these conversation partners in my sabbatical year. I presented successive papers at the annual meetings of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion, the American Academy of Religion, the Canadian American Studies Association, the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society of Church History, and the International Conference on Freemasonry. I am grateful too for invitations to discuss my work at Yale University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Notre Dame, Drew University, Union Theological Seminary, the Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, and the New York Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons.
I have benefited from comments from and conversations with a number of colleagues and friends in addition to those already mentioned. Early on, Mark Carnes welcomed me into his home and shared his efforts to understand the burgeoning of late nineteenth-century fraternal orders. Cathy Albanese, Randy Balmer, and Mark Noll all offered advice and encouragement in the early stages. Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Grant Wacker provided important feedback on the initial draft of what became chapter 6, on the Prince Hall Masons. Fritz Detwiler, Joel Martin, Patrick Minges, and Joy Porter weighed in on chapter 7, on Native Americans. Jonathan Sarna and Daniel Soyer provided feedback on Jews and Freemasonry, while Chris Kaufman advanced my understanding of the Catholic Knights of Columbus (see chapter 8). Cathy Brekus, Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Paul Harvey, and Bob Wuthnow read whole drafts of the manuscript and offered constructive guidance. Within the Masonic fraternity, Mark Tabbert, the curator of the Masonic collections at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, and especially S. Brent Morris, the editor of the Scottish Rite Journal, provided close readings of the penultimate draft. I am particularly indebted to Tony Fels for discussions of late nineteenth-century Freemasonry. Finally, it is a grace to have within the field of American religious studies good friends and colleagues who have offered words of encouragement as my research went down many a winding road. Beyond those already mentioned, Marie Griffith, Sam Hill, Brooks Holifield, Bob Orsi, Leigh Schmidt, Steve Tipton, and Tom Tweed have all rooted for this project, and I thank them for their support.
I first thought through the issues discussed in chapter 6 in an article in Church History (“The Prince Hall Masons and the African American Church: The Labors of Grand Master and Bishop James Walker Hood, 1831–1918,” Church History 69, 4 [December 2000]: 770–802 . Copyright © 2000 American Society of Church History. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.). I thank the editors for permission to reprint this essay in revised form here. This book has benefited from the superb copyediting of Juliana Froggatt and, at University of California Press, the careful guidance of Cindy Fulton and the consistent support of my editor Eric Schmidt. Together they carried the manuscript smoothly through to publication.
Here in Gainesville the circle of gratitude extends to my colleagues in the Religion Department, especially Vasudha Narayanan, Anna Peterson, Manuel Vasquez, and Robin Wright. The department secretary, Anne Newman, has regularly gone out of her way to provide technical assistance. Nancy Savage expertly corrected the final page proofs. At home are Evie and Ben, whose entire lives have taken place during the writing of this book. It is to them and the joy they bring me that I dedicate it.
Introduction
Modern Freemasonry emerged from a milieu of early eighteenth-century London clubs, salons, and similar societies that were coming into existence in private, outside the control of the state. In 1709 the influential British social theorist Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote a letter to a friend describing the emergence of these new forms of social life. Gentlemen who had previously upheld the “Sacred Truths” of the royal court, he recounted, were now meeting in “private” societies. There they engaged in wide-ranging conversations, “unravelling or refuting any Argument” so that greater truths might prevail. These “polite” societies, the English theorist observed, provided a new social space where urban gentlemen were free to discuss all manner of subjects, bound by private friendships characterized by “reciprocal tenderness and affection” that kept a studied distance from the solemn orthodoxies of state and church. These conversations, Shaftesbury warned, could take place only in private among gentlemen who knew one another well. To have such free interchange in public was “above the common Reach.”1
By embracing one another as brothers joined by love rather than obedience to an authoritarian father, the members of these new societies conducted social relations in new ways. New ideas, put forward most notably by the Earl of Shaftesbury, held that people naturally got along with one another and were genuinely concerned for the well-being of others.2 These innate sentiments could do naturally what the heavy hands of the monarchy and the church could no longer do artificially through coercion. According to their 1723 constitution, the gentlemen who joined the Masonic fraternity saw themselves “as Brethren upon the same level.”3 Within these affectionate bonds of brotherhood, members subscribed only to “that Religion in which all men Agree.” No longer bound as “in Ancient Times” by the “Religion of the Country or Nation,” Masons were free to pursue a variety of religious paths. Politically, aside from an agreement to be “a peaceable Subject to the Civil Powers,” no orthodox position was required.4
Freemasonry’s modern constitution, however, is rooted in ancient foundations. Though binding itself to progressive rules and regulations, the fraternity prefaced its constitution with a mythic history that traces Masonic origins to ancient wisdom and occult knowledge. No longer a medieval guild of stoneworkers, the brotherhood nevertheless retained the symbolic language and secret ceremonies of initiation. Within the secrecy of the lodge, members were free to entertain a variety of spiritual perspectives.5 Druids, pantheists, skeptics, and deists as well as Jews, Catholics, and Protestants could all be found within the eighteenth-century fraternity. Indeed, the new, speculative Freemasonry embodied the ideals of the age while allowing for alternative possibilities.
The purpose of this book is to weave the story of Freemasonry into the narrative of American religious history. Freighted with the mythical legacies of stonemasons’ guilds and the Newtonian revolution, English Freemasonry came to colonial America with a vast array of cultural baggage, which was drawn on, added to, and transformed in different ways in its sojourn through American culture. This study argues that from the 1730s through the early twentieth century, the religious worlds of an evolving American social order broadly appropriated the changing beliefs and initiatory practices of this all-male society. For much of American history, Freemasonry was a counter and a complement to Protestant churches and a forum for collective action among racial and ethnic groups outside the European American mainstream. As a widely available resource for organizing social relations and ideology, Freemasonry provides an interpretive lens through which to reframe our understanding of the American religious past.
This book comes at a time when the transformation of the field of American religious history has opened new areas of inquiry. In the past thirty years, a divinity school–based concern with the intellectual history of European American Protestants has given way to a religious studies interest in African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, Catholics, and other peoples and practices outside the domain of the Protestant middle class. Much of the new scholarship cuts across boundaries of gender, class, and region while paying particular attention to ritual and popular religion. Like most of the older American religious history, until recently the story of American Freemasonry has been a tale of middle-class European American northeastern male Protestants. Since the 1990s, however, a multicultural story of African American, Native American, Jewish, and Catholic Masons has emerged. In different ways, each of these groups employed elements of Freemasonry to navigate their way through a largely European American society. By assessing the appropriation of Freemasonry within and outside the European American mainstream, this study contributes to the ongoing effort to broaden and diversify our understanding of American religious history.
Although Freemasons rarely claimed that their fraternity was a religion, many both within and outside the brotherhood recognized its religious character. The society’s modern constitution states that Masons cannot be atheists.6 While
