appear to have been comfortable calling the order a handmaid of religion (that strove to make men better). Outside the fraternity, in 1972 Sydney Ahlstrom, the then-dean of American religious historians, observed that “for many they [the lodges] seemed to satisfy social needs and a yearning for rites and ceremonies that Protestantism lacked. For many others they seem to have provided a religious alternative to the churches.”7 More pointed were Freemasonry’s major Catholic and evangelical religious opponents, who accused the fraternity of creating a veritable church of the Antichrist.
Since Masons did not understand their beliefs and practices as constituting a religion, to claim that Freemasonry was a religion imposes an interpretive lens that inevitably distorts Masonic practices. Once the brotherhood is declared to be a religion, then how religion is defined determines what in the fraternity is described as religious. As Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed out, “‘Religion’ is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define.”8 Moreover, we know that academic definitions of religion were first developed in the context of colonialism and deployed as justifications for the marginalization of some social groups.9 When academics employ the term to identify the idioms of people who claim not to be religious, these definitions can’t help but skew our understanding of those practices.10 However, the fact that the category of religion is inflected with power does not render it useless. Rather, we can explore how this category was rejected and transformed by Masons and mobilized against them by others in the American religious arena to make boundaries and create identities. But this exploration cannot take place without some conceptualization of what we are talking about. To reap the analytic benefits of placing American Freemasonry into the context of American religious historiography, we need to adopt a broad and flexible definition of religion that can allow for the inclusion of a variety of voices. To that end, in this book I define religion as shared ideologies and practices that help people become human in relation to transcendent realities.11 By expanding and complicating the terrain of American religious history to include a group not usually seen as a carrier of religious beliefs and practices, this book intends to show how Freemasonry’s American history contributes to a broader understanding of the multiple influences that have shaped religion in American culture.
Freemasonry’s quest for primeval truth, for example, helps to reveal an enduring attraction to ancient wisdom throughout the American past. Fragments of broader, older ways of believing and acting, some predating Christianity, suffused colonial Protestantism.12 Studies of early nineteenth-century Protestant primitivism, in turn, have unearthed a yearning to restore the church’s ancient foundations.13 Inquiries into early Mormonism have revealed its occult and hermetical origins.14 Explorations of African American race histories, the Cherokee Keetoowah Society, Jewish efforts to create a modern Ararat, and antimodernism at the end of the nineteenth century have uncovered searches for intense spiritual experience among the archaic, medieval, and Eastern sources of the past.15 Freemasons participated in all of these pursuits.
In its efforts to cross political and religious boundaries, Freemasonry rivaled Protestantism in influencing the creation of the new American society.16 As one of the oldest and most pervasive American voluntary associations, Masons were more successful than the members of any other colonial organization in joining together disparate political and religious leaders. While regional denominational disputes stymied Revolutionary War chaplains, Masonic military lodges built ties among Continental Army officers. Perhaps even more than the Protestantism that emerged from the Revolution, a newly Christian and republican Freemasonry became closely identified with the new American nation. Where colonial leaders had invited Protestant ministers to sanctify their assemblies, by the early days of the new republic, American citizens were calling on Masons to bless their new institutions.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the fraternity began to develop its private, ritual life. Though scholarship has most frequently seen the expanding economy’s creation of boundaries between public and private as most influencing women’s lives, these changes had far-reaching effects on both men and women.17 Emerging alongside rather than replacing the public activities of the lodge, Masonic ritual life contributed to the creation of a male private sphere that preceded the appearance of a private world of piety and domesticity among nineteenth-century Protestant women. Compared to colonial Freemasonry, in which men of good breeding and upright character attained the honor of membership as a means of entry into “polite” society, the early nineteenth-century version was a private world of warmth and intimacy, separated from an increasingly cold, competitive, and uncertain public sphere, with rituals that spoke to the struggles and anxieties of young men living amid widespread social change. In creating these rituals, moreover, Masons contributed to a new understanding of the inner, “true” self, which could be realized only through emotional assault on outward defenses. Where studies of women and Protestantism have described the evolution of a pious women’s domestic sphere that encompassed the church, the growth and development of Freemasonry’s rich ritual life suggests the parallel evolution of a private haven of intimacy and ritual among growing numbers of men as the century progressed.
Though divided by gender into church and lodge, respectively, women and men were nevertheless joined together within a larger relational system. The masculine world of Freemasonry could never be totally separated from the feminine domain of the home. Moreover, late nineteenth-century efforts to resolve the tensions between lodge and home suggest a growing interest in closer cooperation between men and women. In contrast to scholarship that has emphasized antagonism between the sexes, this inquiry finds a growing acceptance of Freemasonry within the churches and an accommodation of women in lodge activities.18 Between the brotherhood’s female auxiliary, who supported it, and the radical evangelical women who attacked it were the great majority of Protestant women, who said little about Freemasonry. More than a story of the subjugation of women by men, relations between the sexes involved challenges to and accommodations of each other’s understanding of social life.
When placed alongside American Protestantism, the changing ideas and practices of the Masonic brotherhood suggest a religion not well known to the field of American religious history. At its eighteenth-century origin, the modern fraternity endorsed the Enlightenment theory which holds that people are naturally concerned for one another’s well-being. In the hands of influential Anglican clerics, this inclusive new social vision placed less emphasis on revelation and more on reason. In the revolutionary period, Freemasonry joined Protestantism in adopting the republican and democratic impulses of the new American society. Ministers from the leading Episcopal, Unitarian, and Congregational denominations joined the fraternity, which made internal efforts to Christianize its beliefs and practices. The ritual exposures of the Anti-Masonic movement, however, broke the identification of the postwar fraternity with the special providence of the new American nation, leading the fraternity to retrench to a more general Protestant conservatism. Though consistent with the rationalism, commonsense realism, and antirevivalism of antebellum liberal Protestantism, Freemasonry diverged from the expansive mood it fostered. The optimistic faith in the immanent love of God that pervaded the new society stood strikingly apart from the brotherhood’s awareness of human limitations.
The Protestant themes running through the history of American Freemasonry should not obscure the fact that other than atheism, the modern constitutions proscribed very little with regard to religion. Moreover, with no central authority imposing ideological orthodoxy, what it means to be a Mason has always been susceptible to cultural shifts, regional variations, and individual interpretations. Over the course of their brotherhood’s fabled history, Masonic writers have generally worked to reflect the religious ethos of a lodge’s particular setting. Yet despite this apparent conformity to surrounding religious life, Freemasonry carried within it a vast array of cultural elements that paralleled and diverged from Protestant religious beliefs and practices. Moreover, beyond the European American, old-stock, cultural Protestants who composed the great majority of the fraternity’s North American adherents, the African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics who joined the brotherhood adapted
