Only at the very end did Edwards say that a leader should belong to a “good family,” but that was simply because education was “useful” and would make him more effective. A great man could have nothing to do with self-interested people of a “narrow, private spirit.” Standing before the merchants, businessmen, and land speculators of Northampton, Edwards uttered a blistering condemnation of men who “shamefully defile their hands to gain a few pounds, and … grind the faces of the poor and screw upon their neighbors, and will take advantage of their authority to line their own pockets.”29 This revolutionary assault on the structural violence of colonial society spread to other towns, and two years later, Edwards was driven from his pulpit and forced to take refuge for a time on the frontier with other misfits, acting as chaplain to the Indians of Stockbridge. Edwards was well versed in modern thought and had read Locke and Newton, but it was his Christianity that enabled him to bring the modern egalitarian ideal to the common people.
The Great Awakening was America’s first mass movement; it gave many ordinary folk their first experience of participating in a nationwide event that could change the course of history.30 Their ecstatic illumination left many Americans, who could not easily relate to the secular leanings of the revolutionary leaders, with the memory of a blissful state that they called “liberty.” The revival had also encouraged them to see their emotional faith as superior to the cerebral piety of the respectable classes. Those who remembered the aristocratic clerics’ disdain of their enthusiasm retained a distrust of institutional authority that prepared them later to take the drastic step of rejecting the king of England.
In 1775, when the British government tried to tax the colonists to pay for its colonial wars against France, anger flared into outright rebellion. The leaders experienced the American Revolution as a secular event, a sober, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power. They were men of the Enlightenment, inspired by Locke and Newton, and were also deists, who differed from orthodox Christians by rejecting the doctrines of revelation and the divinity of Christ. The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, and ratified by the Colonial Congress on July 4, 1776, was an Enlightenment document, based on Locke’s theory of self-evident human rights—life, liberty, and property31—and the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality. These men had no utopian ideas about redistributing wealth or abolishing the class system. For them, this was simply a practical, far-reaching, but sustainable war of independence.
The Founding Fathers, however, belonged to the gentry, and their ideas were far from typical; most Americans were Calvinists who could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Reluctant initially to break with Britain, not all the colonists joined the struggle, but those that did were motivated as much by the millennial myths of Christianity as by the Founders’ ideals. During the revolution, secularist ideology blended creatively with the religious aspirations of the majority in a way that enabled Americans with very divergent beliefs to join forces against the might of England. When ministers spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, they helped people make sense of Sam Adams’s fiery denunciations of British tyranny.32 When the Founders spoke of “liberty,” they used a word charged with religious meaning.33 Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’s grandson and president of Yale University, predicted that the revolution would usher in “Immanuel’s land”;34 the Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin argued that liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and moved to America, where Jesus would establish his kingdom; and Provost William Smith of Philadelphia maintained that the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.” John Adams saw the English settlement of America as part of God’s plan for the world’s enlightenment,35 and Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of Noah.”36
This exaltation, though, was laced with hatred for the enemies of God’s kingdom. After the passing of the Stamp Act (1765), patriotic songs portrayed its perpetrators—Lords Bute, Grenville, and North—as the minions of Satan, and during political demonstrations their pictures were carried alongside effigies of the devil. When George III granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory, he was denounced by the American colonists as the ally of Antichrist; and even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God’s design for the overthrow of Catholicism.37 This virulent sectarian hostility enabled the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the Old World, for which many still felt a strong residual affection; hatred of Catholic “tyranny” would long remain a crucial element in American national identity. The Founders may have been followers of Locke, but “religion” had not yet been banished from the colonies; had it been so, the revolution might not have succeeded.
As soon as independence was declared in July 1776, the colonies began to compose their new constitutions. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) proposed a formula that would not survive the ratification process: “All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.”38 This guaranteed freedom for religion and freedom from it. But we must bear in mind that Jefferson’s conception of “religion” was based on two early modern innovations to which most of his countrymen did not subscribe. First was the reduction of religion to “belief” and “opinion.” As an apostle of Enlightenment empiricism, Jefferson rejected the idea that religious knowledge was acquired by revelation, ritual, or communal experience; it was merely a set of beliefs shared by some. Like all Enlightenment philosophes, Jefferson and James Madison (1751–1836), the pioneers of religious liberty in America, believed that no idea should be immune from investigation or even outright rejection. Nevertheless, they also insisted on the right of conscience: a man’s personal convictions were his own, not subject to the coercion of government. Obligatory belief, therefore, violated a fundamental human right. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expected prospect,” Madison objected.39 The last fifteen hundred years, he claimed sweepingly, had resulted in “more or less all places” in “pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”40 The “myth of religious violence” had clearly taken root in the minds of the Founders. In the new enlightened age, Jefferson declared in his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, “our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”41
The critique of Jefferson and Madison was a healthy corrective to the idolatrous tendency to give man-made ideas divine status. Freedom of thought would become a sacred value in the modern secular West, an inviolable and nonnegotiable human right. It would advance scientific and technological progress and enable the arts to flourish. But the intellectual freedom proclaimed by the Enlightenment philosophes was a luxury of modernization. In the premodern agrarian state, it had never been possible to permit an entire population to cast tradition aside and freely criticize the established order. Most of the aristocratic Founders, moreover, had no intention of extending this privilege to the common people. They still took it for granted that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead from above.42 Like most of the elite, John Adams, second president of the United States (r. 1796–1800), was suspicious of any policy that might lead to “mob-rule” or the impoverishment of the gentry, though Jefferson’s more radical followers protested this “tyranny” and, like Edwards, demanded that the people’s voices be heard.43 Still, it was not until the Industrial Revolution shook up the social order that the ideals enshrined by the Founding Fathers could apply broadly to social reality.
The second assumption of Jefferson and Madison was that “religion” was an autonomous, private human activity
essentially separate from politics and that mixing the two had been a great aberration. This may have been a self-evident idea to Locke, but it would have still been a very strange notion to most Americans. The Founders knew their countrymen: a federal constitution would never gain the support of all the states unless it refrained from making any single Protestant denomination official, as many of the state constitutions had done. Precisely because most Americans still approved of religion in their governments, therefore, uniting the several states would require religious neutrality at the federal level.44 Hence the first lapidary clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights (1791) decreed that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The state would neither promote nor obstruct religion but simply leave it alone.45 Yet there were political consequences even for that. During the bitterly contested presidential election of 1800, Jefferson the deist was accused of being an atheist and even a Muslim. He replied that while he was not hostile to faith, he was adamantly opposed to government meddling in religious affairs. When a group of his Baptist supporters in Danbury, Connecticut, asked him to appoint a day of fasting to bring the nation together, Jefferson replied that this lay beyond the president’s competence:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes to none other for his faith and worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation of Church and State.
While such separation could be beneficial to both church and state, it was not, as Jefferson assumed, written into the very nature of things but was a modern innovation. The United States was attempting something entirely new.
Jefferson had borrowed the image of the “wall of separation” from Roger Williams (1604–83), founder of Providence, Rhode Island, who had been expelled from New England because of his opposition to the intolerant policies of the Puritan government.46 But Williams was less concerned about the welfare of the state than that of his faith, which he believed would be contaminated by any involvement with government.47 He intended Rhode Island to be an alternative Christian community that came closer to the spirit of the gospels. Jefferson, by contrast, was more concerned to protect the state from the “loathsome combination of church and state” that had reduced human beings to “dupes and drudges.”48 He seemed to assume—quite wrongly—that there had been states in the past that had not been guilty of this “loathsome combination.” It remained to be seen whether the secularized United States would be less violent and coercive than its more religious predecessors.
Whatever the Founders wanted, most Americans still took it for granted that the United States would be based on Christian principles. By 1790, some 40 percent of the new nation lived on the frontiers and were becoming increasingly resentful of the republican government that did not share their hardships but taxed them as harshly as the British had done. A new wave of revivals, known as the Second Great Awakening, represented a grassroots campaign for a more democratic and Bible-based America.49 The new revivalists were not intellectuals like Edwards but men of the people who used wild gestures, earthy humor, and slang and relied on dreams, visions, and celestial signs. During their mass rallies, they pitched huge tents outside the towns, and their gospel songs transported the crowds to ecstasy. However, these prophets were not pre-Enlightenment throwbacks. Lorenzo Dow may have looked like John the Baptist, but he quoted Jefferson and Paine and, like any Enlightenment philosophe, urged the people to think for themselves. In the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God had sent his insights to the poor and unlettered, and Jesus and his disciples had not had college degrees.
James Kelly and Barton Stone railed against the aristocratic clergy who tried to force the erudite faith of Harvard on the people. Enlightenment philosophers had insisted that people must have the courage to throw off their dependence on authority, use their natural reason to discover the truth, and think for themselves. Now the revivalists insisted that American Christians could read the Bible without direction from upper-class scholars. When Stone founded his own denomination, he called it a “declaration of independence”: the revivalists were bringing the modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could make their own. This Second Awakening may have seemed retrograde to the elite, but it was actually a Protestant version of the Enlightenment. Demanding a degree of equality that the American ruling class was not yet ready to give them, the revivalists represented a populist discontent that it could not safely ignore.
At first, this rough, democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer Americans, but during the 1840s Charles Finney (1792–1875) brought it to the middle classes, creating an “evangelical” Christianity based on a literal reading of the gospels. Evangelicals were determined to convert the secular republic to Christ, and by the mid-nineteenth century, evangelicalism had become the dominant faith of the United States.50 Without waiting for guidance from the government, from about 1810 these Protestants began to work in churches and schools and established reform associations that mushroomed in the northern states. Some campaigned against slavery, others against liquor; some worked to end the oppression of women and other disadvantaged groups, others for penal and educational reform. Like the Second Great Awakening, these modernizing movements helped ordinary Americans to embrace the ideal of inalienable human rights in a Protestant package. Their members learned to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a rational way that empowered them against the establishment. We in the West tend to evaluate other cultural traditions by measuring them against the Enlightenment: the Great Awakenings in America show that people can reach these ideals by another, specifically religious route.
In fact, American evangelicals had appropriated some Enlightenment ideals so thoroughly that they created a curious hybrid that some historians have called “Enlightenment Protestantism.”51 This paradox had been noted by Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited the United States during the 1830s, remarking that the character of the country combined “two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America,… they have succeeded in incorporating somehow one into another and combining marvellously: I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.”52 The Founding Fathers had been inspired by the so-called moderate Enlightenment of Isaac Newton and John Locke. The evangelicals, however, repudiated the “skeptical” Enlightenment of Voltaire and David Hume as well as the “revolutionary” Enlightenment of Rousseau but embraced the “common sense” philosophy of the Scottish thinkers Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Thomas Reid (1710–96), Adam Smith (1723–90), and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828).53 This taught them that human beings had an innate and infallible ability to see clear connections between moral causes and their effects in public life. Understanding things was simple, a matter of common sense. Even a child could grasp the essence of the gospel and figure out for herself what was right. Enlightenment philosophers had told people to cast aside the habit of tutelage and work out the truth for themselves, without relying on authoritarian institutions and learned experts. American evangelicals, therefore, were confident that if they put their minds to it, they could create a society in the New World that fully implemented Christian values.54 The Constitution had established a secular state but had done nothing to encourage the development of a national culture; the Founders had assumed that this would evolve naturally in response to government action.55 Yet thanks to the evangelical welfare and reform associations, “Enlightenment Protestantism,” somewhat ironically, became the national ethos of the secular state.56 You can take religion
out of the state, but you can’t take religion out of the nation. By dint of their energetic missionary work, reform organizations, and publications, the evangelicals created a Bible-based culture that pulled the new nation together.
The Americans had shown that it was possible to organize society on a more just and rational basis. In France the leaders of the bourgeoisie, the rising middle classes, watched these events very carefully because they too had developed ideologies that emphasized the freedom of the individual.57 They had a more difficult task, however, because they had to depose a long-established ruling class with a professional army, a centralized bureaucracy, and an absolute monarchy.58 But by the end of the eighteenth century, traditional agrarian society was coming under increasing strain in Europe: more people were moving to the towns and working in nonagricultural trades and professions, literacy was more widespread, and there was unprecedented social mobility.
In the spring of 1789, Louis XVI’s absolutist monarchy was in trouble. Profligate stewardship had plunged the French economy into crisis, and now the clergy and nobility (the First and Second Estates) were refusing a new regime of taxation by the crown. To break the deadlock, the king called the Estates General to meet at Versailles on May 2.59 The king wanted the three estates—clergy, nobility, and commoners—to deliberate and vote separately, but the Third Estate refused to allow the aristocracy to dominate the proceedings and invited the clergy and nobility to join them in a new National Assembly. The first to defect to the Third Estate were 150 of the lower clergy, who came from the same background as the commoners, were weary of the bishops’ hauteur, and wanted a more collegial church.60 There were also defections from the Second Estate: the rural gentry disdained by the Parisian aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeois who were impatient with the nobility’s conservatism. On June 17 members of the new National Assembly swore that they would not disperse until they had a new constitution.
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