in practice, postwar Masonry’s celebration of republican morality, science, and education did separate the fraternity and its members from the narrow localisms of family, church, and region and link them to the larger, cosmopolitan world of the American republic. As believers in the fraternity as the “primordial” source of learning and education, Masonic leaders saw earlier than many the need for “mental improvement” in support of republican institutions.72
The Masonic expression of these republican ideals at a time of national expansion contributed to the dramatic increase in the number of American men who entered the fraternity. Between 1800 and 1820, the American population nearly doubled, from 5.3 to 9.6 million, and spread rapidly to the west.73 By 1821, nine new states contained a quarter of the American population. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the American Masonic fraternity grew more than threefold, from an estimated twenty-five thousand members, primarily in the urban East, to an estimated eighty thousand nationally. This represented an increase from about 3 percent of the adult white male population in 1800 to about 5 percent of the 1820 number (the percentage of Masons among those with the leisure to attend the fraternity’s gatherings and the resources to pay its initiation fees was even larger).74 In 1824, Freemasonry was described as “powerful” in every state of the union. Its members identified as “men of rank, wealth, office and talent . . . effective men, united together . . . in the legislative hall, on the bench, [and] in every gathering of men of business.”75
During this Masonic heyday, the fraternity’s civic role replaced that of Christian churches in the colonial period. Prior to the Revolution, Congregational, Presbyterian, and especially Anglican clergyman were called on to bless the public enterprises of the monarchy’s subjects. The revolutionary overthrow of hierarchical society, the separation of church and state, and the rise of republican ideology punctured the sacred canopy of the Christian Church. Into this void stepped a newly democratic, patriotic, benevolent, and republican Freemasonry, which willingly offered its symbols and rituals as a means for rebuilding society’s foundations.
CHRISTIAN REPUBLICAN MASONRY
In the revolutionary era, American Protestantism incorporated republican and Enlightenment ideas into an expanding framework that closely identified the church with the nation. Between 1763 and 1789, the meanings of Christian “liberty” and “righteous community” came to embrace not only the church but the nation as well. Though the church was never tied to the constitutional structure of the state, American Protestantism and republicanism became closely interwoven.76 Similarities between their principles, moreover, led to the pervasive assumption that republicanism not only expressed Christian ideals but should be defended with Christian fervor. This was particularly true of Calvinist Christians and their evangelical heirs, yet it was also so for the early proponents of liberal Protestantism, whose distinctive ethos was then emerging from the influence of Enlightenment thought on Calvinist Christianity. Though orthodox and liberal Protestants would soon be at loggerheads, all came together in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in the belief that the success of the American republic depended on the moral education of its people.
In these early years of the American nation, Enlightenment influences similarly expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include Freemasonry. As we have seen, prior to the revolution, colonial Masons had an ambiguous relationship with the Christian religion. Their 1723 constitution instructed Masons to leave “their particular Opinions to themselves” and instead to adopt only “that Religion in which all men agree.”77 Some defended the order as inherently Christian, others believed that it transcended Christianity, and a few were fascinated with ancient, esoteric wisdom, but most appear to have seen the fraternity as representing universal moral principles rather than particular religious claims. While these multiple views continued into the early national period, Freemasonry was increasingly seen as working to realize the temporal ends of Christianity. This had to do with changes in both American Protestantism and the fraternity.
In the revolutionary period, Enlightenment thinking led to the development of a Protestant liberalism that, while not denying the reality of supernatural forces, brought the power of reason to bear on religious judgments. The indigenous religious liberalism of Unitarianism, for example, had its intellectual and social origins in a small group of Congregationalist clergy in the Boston area who took offense at the “enthusiastic” religion that George Whitefield was spreading in the 1730s and 1740s.78 Such men as Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew were uncomfortable with a Calvinist frame of reference shaped by the belief that human beings are essentially sinful and can attain salvation only through an act of grace. In contrast, American liberal Protestantism asserted the human capacity to create a just and benevolent world. “Reasonable” Christianity provided the religious foundation for Enlightenment beliefs about humanity’s ability to construct, improve, and abide by the rules of a safer and more caring environment.
The emergence of liberal Protestantism expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include the ideology of colonial Freemasonry. The latitudinarian movement in the Church of England, in particular, employed Newtonian science to stake out an understanding of religion between the extremes of Catholicism and atheism or religious indifference. Reason and science rather than faith and revelation lay at the foundation of latitudinarian belief and practice. This Anglican view was widely adopted by colonial American Masons, including clergy.
In the early nineteenth century, Protestant ministers and other members of a variety of denominations joined Freemasonry, with the great majority of its new leaders coming from the Unitarian, Episcopalian, and Congregational Churches. The brotherhood met this attraction with efforts to link itself more overtly with Christian faith. Standing to the left of sectarian Calvinists and their evangelical heirs yet to the right of Enlightenment rationalists, Christian Freemasonry appeared to respond to a widely shared desire to reimagine the character of American society as it emerged from the revolution.
The Unitarians James Thompson and William Bentley were characteristic of the Protestant ministers who joined the fraternity following the war. When he was ordained in 1804, the Harvard-educated Thompson stood, “like many of the New England clergy, on that indistinct and wavering line between Calvinism and Unitarianism, sometimes called moderate Calvinism.” In that same year, the Barre, Massachusetts, native was present when the appointment of a liberal to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity marked the end of orthodoxy at his college. “Following discussions attendant on the inauguration of Dr. Ware as Hollis Professor,” Thompson was said to have become “completely emancipated from Calvinistic . . . theology.” He joined his local lodge shortly thereafter and later served as the grand chaplain of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge.79 Bentley had a similar story. In his youth in prewar Salem, Massachusetts, and at Harvard during the war, he was described as a “decided and earnest Calvinist.” Following his ordination and permanent settlement in Salem’s Second Congregational Church in 1783, he “renounced Calvinism” and soon became an “avowed Unitarian.” Two years afterward, Bentley joined his local lodge, later serving as state grand chaplain.80
The twenty-four ministers who served as Massachusetts Grand Lodge chaplains between 1797 and 1825 followed similar courses. Twenty were raised in the strict-to-moderate Calvinism of the Congregational Church and later helped form its liberal wing (five) and the liberal Unitarian (twelve) and Universalist (three) Churches. The majority of these grand chaplains, including two of the four Episcopalians, attended Harvard College. Nearly all were ordained within a few years of finishing college and joined their local lodge around the same time.81
These clergymen were benevolent and educated, concerned more with the moral and mental improvement of society than with the dogmatic sectarianism of Calvinist churches. Believing in the universal benevolence of God and universal salvation, these liberal ministers avoided theological controversies and supported the formation of interdenominational societies to advance social morality and education. These were men such as the Unitarian John Pipon, whose sermons were always “sound” but “never doctrinal” and who avoided “the topics of dispute which
