chattel slavery.
Many contemporary scholars have argued that Williams’s theological arguments on behalf of Church–State separation, which became rooted, if uneasily for some, in the United States, at least at the national level, underwrote the US’s exceptional religiosity. As compared with a secularizing Western Europe, where established churches ended up shouldering the blame for the decisions and behaviors of the worldly politicians with whom they had publicly and closely associated themselves, Church–State separation in the United States, such as it was, reinforced, it has been said, the purity of the Church. A separation, moreover, in which the state showed no favoritism toward any of the country’s competing religious sects – gradually adopted by all of the American states by the early nineteenth century – proved especially conducive to the liberty of conscience. Some have latterly argued, moreover, that non-establishment and the wide scope given for a multitude of competing religious sects spurred competition among churches to effectively meet the needs of their current and potential congregants, strengthening the churches, and promoting Christian evangelization.
New England’s Puritan churches were notable, and precedent-setting, exercises in self-government, offering clear models for secular political rule. Each church was independent of every other church. As its own independent, self-governing faith community, each church selected its own minister, who served at the congregation’s pleasure. (The congregational structure instituting self-government in ecclesiastical matters was codified in the Cambridge Platform of 1648.) While there were strong elements of what Alexis de Tocqueville later called “individualism” in these new departures, the colonial Puritan congregations were nevertheless intensely communal: the emphasis was on the collective spiritual, moral, and temporal needs of the group over and above those of the individuals who comprised it – an emphasis explicated in John Winthrop’s speech “Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), delivered shipboard during the Arbella’s Atlantic crossing. New England’s Puritans understood their communities as organic wholes: their individual members were the organs and limbs of a single human body, inextricably joined and sharing a common fate. Winthrop enjoined his flock on the Arbella that to “love one another with a pure heart fervently we must bear one another’s burdens, we must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” He called for common devotion to mercy and charity. Notably, Winthrop’s injunction to communal duty and care was directed toward the “private” institutions of “civil society” (here, churches), rather than toward the “public sphere” institutions of (secular) government. Concern for the needy was considered a matter of divine Christian obligation.
The Christian communions that formed churches made no claims to universal inclusion. The “people” with the authority to enter into the covenant organizing a church was a highly circumscribed class, in accord with the stringent purposes that had motivated the association in the first place. Full membership was limited to saints. And claims to sainthood required proof – visible evidence of having had a conversion experience, of being “Born Again.” A 1646 Massachusetts law mandated that all within a township attend its church. But only full members of the church were afforded governing privileges. In time, however, this orthodoxy began to clash with the more casual inclinations of others, who may not have been able to provide personal evidence of religious conversion.
As the Protestant theologians were often deeply learned men – educated, for instance, at England’s Cambridge University – their understandings of the proper government of churches were not fashioned from Christian sources alone. Puritan theologians in the colonies were also informed by ancient and modern texts of political philosophy, from Aristotle to (in time) John Locke. John Wise’s reflections on church governance, for example, drew upon Aristotle’s consideration of the virtues and debilities of rule by the one, the few, or the many (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy), and the possibility and potential of mixed political regimes. Wise was also persuaded by his near contemporary John Locke’s theories of government by consent, arising out of the state of nature. These understandings were disseminated in the American colonies not only in books and pamphlets, but also from the pulpit. As such, in their concern with questions of natural equality, the relationship of the individual to the community, the claims of conscience, of self-government, and significance of the individual’s voice in directing the affairs of the community – and, indeed, of political liberty – Puritan thought anticipated and informed colonial thinking concerning fundamental questions of (secular) American political thought.
Americans still debate the extent and nature of the Puritan legacy in US political thought. Religious traditionalists recur to the Puritans’ strict moral standards, their enlistment of public authorities to aggressively police personal and public morals, and their privileging of claims of the community over those of the individual. Many also claim that the Puritanism of early New England set the template for the country’s core political philosophy. Less remembered, perhaps, is the profoundly subversive strain of Puritanism’s more radical and persecuted dissenters – like Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the Quakers, who, like Hutchinson and Williams, had been banished from Massachusetts Bay. The same was true for many who remained, like the liberal Congregationalist minister Jonathan Mayhew of Boston’s Old West Church. In the role it afforded individual conscience, some of this thought was intensely individualistic. Mayhew’s and Wise’s voluntarist understandings of the nature of governing authority and non-submission and active resistance to illegitimate authority may have been initially developed as part of their reflections on the organization of churches. But their thought on these matters powerfully appealed to the American revolutionaries. Puritan theology figured into the theorizing about the rights of representation and, in time, of resistance and revolution. And, indeed, Mayhew took an early stand against illegitimate government power, adducing the divine right of Kings and British colonial rule as cases in point. Mayhew held biblical teaching to be consistent with Whig and Lockean premises holding the public good to be worldly government’s only legitimate end. He argued that subjects had not only a right but a duty to resist and overthrow any government that failed to promote the public welfare and preserve fundamental rights, and to fight for liberty against tyranny.
This line of Puritan thought, to be sure, was in tension with more conservative strains holding that non-submission and disobedience would tend “to the total dissolution of civil government; and to introduce such scenes of wild anarchy and confusion, as are more fatal to society than the worst of tyranny.” Romans 13 – whose conventional implications Mayhew had brilliantly inverted by emphasizing the failure of worldly leaders to faithfully adhere to their high responsibilities and duties, which lent legitimacy to their presumptive authority – had declared, after all, that “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Hierarchy and deference to legitimate authority – of wives to husbands, children to parents, and servants to masters – it was also said, conduced to healthy, well-ordered families, households … and polities. Both strains of Puritanism were present from the country’s earliest settlement.
Soon, however, major developments were afoot. Between the time of the first Puritan settlement in New England and the American Revolution, the transformation, and diversification, of American Christianity was well under way. The trans-denominational evangelical Christianity that has shaped American politics – including reformist campaigns like temperance/prohibition, abolitionism, the social gospel movement, and the contemporary Religious Right – was forged during the transatlantic First Great Awakening (c. 1730–1755). The English evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the colonies preaching at open-air revivals, set himself against the arid formalism and indifference amongst his Protestant brethren. Whitefield urged Christians to turn their gazes inward, examining their propensity to sin, to repent, and to commit themselves anew to a holy, Christian life. Whitefield, his countryman John Wesley, and other home-grown colonial evangelists like T.J. Frelinghuysen, Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, and Jonathan Edwards, encouraged their flocks to feel deeply both their depravity and the pure joy they would experience when they made the momentous decision to re-commit themselves to Christ – to be “Born Again.” In joining the community of “New Light” Christians in a flood of fervor and enthusiasm, the evangelists promised, they would be welcomed with a surpassing love of a kind they had never before experienced.
