One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  The “collapse of the Puritan canopy,” evangelical scholar Mark Noll’s memorable phrase for the end of the religious monopoly held by people like Cotton Mather in Massachusetts, is often cited as the necessary precondition for the Great Awakening, that period of fervent religious transformation that began in New England in the 1730s and spread down the East Coast in the two decades following. As Noll and others have noted, the explosion of emotional religious revivals the Great Awakening brought about, and the movement of American Christianity away from covenantal theology and toward the elevation of individual religious experience, played an undeniable role in fostering republican ideas in the colonies. “From the revivals arose new evangelical churches, activities, instincts, and ways of expounding Christian doctrine,” Noll writes. “Before that rise could occur, older expectations for church and theology inherited from Europe had to give way. A process that ended with an intimate union between evangelical Protestant religion and Revolutionary politics began with disruption in the historic colonial churches.”

  Historians have often plotted a course of American spiritual development from the Puritans like Mather, to Great Awakening figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, to the Revolution—as if there were no other significant religious moods that might have contributed to colonists so believing in the cause of Independence that they would risk their lives. Yet while it may be true that religious zeal can inspire armies better than most secular incentives, there was another great awakening that occurred before and during the Revolutionary era that also played a role. The other great awakening was a reevaluation of the merits of doubt. Often unspoken, religious skepticism in the colonial era was taboo even among professed radicals. Yet the spiritual awakenings of the middle of the eighteenth century signaled a transformation of “unbelief” from presumed moral failing to a reasonable theological and political position.

  Among the charges leveled against the Boston inoculators in the 1720s, none was deployed with as much venom as “atheist.” In the colonial world, the word was an all-purpose insult, capable of impugning one’s intelligence, morality, and social status in just seven letters. While Mather might have inadvertently nudged open the door to acceptance of ideas drawn from diverse traditions, the stigma of standing outside mainstream religious assumptions did not disappear overnight—indeed, some might argue it never truly has.

  Even as the inoculation controversy raged, dividing Christians over matters of practice and doctrine, one finds in Boston newspapers the specter that some in the community might be pleased with all this discord. Portraying the atheist as something of a trickster figure, the unsigned writer of a column in the New England Courant of 1722 suggested that those without faith were not merely blind to religious truth but scornful of it, and were ready, as a consequence, to mock the divisions between believers. Speaking of Christians mired in disagreement with their coreligionists, he writes: “While one laughs at the other’s preaching, and the other laughs at his Preaching, the Atheist laughs at both, and there are very many that believe neither.” With the faith of “very many” hanging in the balance, the hypothetical atheist was quick to delight in the inevitable fall that would result from such divisions.

  Was this troublemaker a mere literary creation? If so, he was a busy one. In 1730, another writer imagined a local character by the name of Tom Puzzle, “one of the most eminent immethodical Disputants of any that has fallen under my Observation.” To the delight of those who agree with him and the disdain of those who do not, Tom is the sort of man, the author writes, who makes himself known by insisting he be heard on every topic in public discussion. “Tom has read enough to make him very impertinent,” he writes. “His Knowledge is sufficient to raise Doubts, but not to clear them.”

  It is a pity that he had so much Learning, or that he had not a great deal more. With these qualifications Tom sets up for a Free thinker, finds a great many things to blame in the Constitution of his Country, and gives shrewd Intimations that he does not believe in another World. In short, Puzzle is an Atheist as much as his Parts will give him leave.

  The colonial atheist was a boor, but he was also to be pitied. Compassionate souls would have nodded along to the quotations from Alexander Pope, likewise published in Boston in the 1730s: “An Atheist is but a mad ridiculous Derider of Piety.” But one should try to keep their derision in perspective: “Atheists put on false Courage and Alacrity in the midst of their Darkness and Apprehensions,” Pope continued, “like Children, who when they go in the dark, will sing for fear.”

  They should not be afforded too much sympathy, however. In the colonial worldview, the atheist was a moral hazard to the community, as were all religious outliers. (“I fear neither Atheist, nor Jew, Deist, nor Turk” another usage from the era noted.) A quarter-century after the New England Courant introduced Tom Puzzle, a New York paper went further in its character sketch of an unbeliever, with an opinion piece entitled “The Character of an Atheist” that catalogued the supposed deficiencies of anyone who dared to question the theological status quo:

  An atheist is an overgrown libertine; and if we believe his own genealogy, he is a by-blow begot by hazard, and flung into the world by necessity; he moves by wheels, and had no more soul than a windmill; he is thrust by fate, and acts by mere compulsion; he is no more master of his deeds, than of his being, and therefor is as constant to his word as the wind in the same corner; so that an atheist, by his own principles, is a knave per se, and an honest man only per accidens. In fine he starts out of dust, and vanishes into nothing.

  This captures succinctly the generally accepted colonial understanding of anyone who did not believe in God. As the unnamed author of this assessment saw it, an atheist supposed that he had no past, and so he would have no future. Having no real reason to be truthful, he could be counted on to lie. Having no real reasons for any of his actions, an atheist had no reason not to do wrong. When an atheist did right, if he ever did, it could only be per accidens, by chance.

  The literature of atheism available to American colonists only supported these understandings. Early in the eighteenth century, tracts imported from England warned against the menace of both actual atheists and, even more sinister because they could be found anywhere, atheistical inclinations. Books with imposing titles like The second Spira: being a fearful example of an atheist, who had apostatized from the Christian religion, and died in despair were read and expounded upon from pulpits and were believed to be of particular use to the young. As many seventeenth-century readers would have known, the first Spira alluded to in the title was an Italian lawyer who had denied the Gospel and, as a direct result, died from a spiritual illness inflicted by God. The “second Spira” of the later book faced a similar plight. The narrative consisted of an “account of his sickness, Convictions, Discourses with Friends, and Ministers, and of his dreadful Expressions and Blasphemies when he left the World.”

  Such books were considered especially beneficial for adolescents—“Published for an Example to others, recommended to all Young Persons, to settle them in their Religion”—but there is no doubt their elders read them as well. There was, it seems, a titillating element to stories of those who so brazenly shrugged off faith, a kind of theological escapism. The author of “the second Spira” offered a money-back guarantee: “If anyone doubts the truth of any Particulars in the following relation, if they repair to Mr. Dunton at Raven in the Poultry [the book’s publisher and place of business] they will receive full satisfaction.”

  Later in the same century, similar accounts of atheists and the bad ends to which they inevitably came were published on both sides of the ocean. “The atheist converted, or, The unbeliever’s eyes opened” told the tale—in several hundred rhymed lines—of a professed atheist who “would not suffer his children to go to church.”

  This man an Atheist, he was bred, we find,

  And so his children dear he strove to blind

  Telling them that all things by nature came


  The thoughts of heaven were all profaned.

  Spared the fate of either the first or second Spira, the subject of these verses eventually is shamed by his daughter’s devotion and sees the error of his ways. The atheist—and his cousins the Free Thinker, the Deist, the Jew, and the Turk—was in most eighteenth-century instances a character whose sole purpose was the enlivening of a cautionary tale.

  Yet a subtle change began to occur in the meaning and use of the word in the middle of the century. With Enlightenment ideas gaining ground, the possibility of applying reason to religious belief gave “atheist” a hint of the forward-thinking intellectual. As another anonymous colonial writer proclaimed:

  If I must sacrifice my Reason, my good Nature, my Love of Society, and handsome behaviour, to what they call Christianity, I’ll even continue my present Course of Life, and live and dye like a well-bred and reasonable Atheist.

  Two and a half years after the New York Weekly Journal weighed in on the pressing concern of the “character of an atheist,” the Boston Evening Post offered a different take on the question of the varieties of belief and their place in society. It was not lack of faith that was the true social ill; it was instead lack of sincere faith, whatever that faith may be. Atheism, on the other hand, was cast in a light that now seems prescient: “The Atheist is a man who doubts of the King’s Right to the Crown; and during the Doubt, refuses the Oath of Allegiance, or pays no Obedience to Supremacy.”

  Contrasting “Spurious and Genuine Devotion,” the Boston Evening Post puts atheists on the side of the genuine. Their opinions still might be risky to espouse in polite society, but there is definite evidence that atheism was gaining ground throughout the eighteenth century. Over time, the more it became linked with political opposition to the religious authority established by the mother country, the more atheism itself began to be seen in not entirely negative terms.

  As it happens, just as the meaning of atheism was changing and evolving, another publication entered the colonies’ already crowded media marketplace. Not only was it more political and more pointed in its opinions, it was the first publication in America to take explicit aim at the religious alliances common to most colonial governments. It was also, according to the critics who eventually succeeded in shutting it down, a hotbed of anti-monarchical and anti-religious sentiment.

  It was founded by a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named William Livingston.

  To understand the reception a religious outlier like Livingston received when he began publishing thoughts that strained the tolerance of more orthodox believers, it is first necessary to consider religious adherence—and the lack thereof—in the English colonies.

  Of all the myths associated with the founding of the United States, there is none so stubborn as the notion that the colonists who rose up against the Crown did so mainly because they were a people motivated and sustained by faith. While the religious inclinations of the founding fathers provide fodder for endless contemporary political disputes, the colonial population as a whole—the more telling piece of this puzzle—is less often considered. Historians who have taken the time to tally religious adherents in the colonies have not found the first Americans to have been particularly moved by Christian commitment. One need only look at the statistics of church membership to begin to imagine an alternate scenario. The image of colonists filling chapels before and during the fight for Independence may fit a contemporary narrative—that the United States was formed with the help of the divine. However, in most cases colonists were too busy and too spread out to gather very often for prayer.

  Historians Roger Finke and Rodney Stark put the percentage of religious adherence among residents of the North American English colonies at just 17 percent. It doubled, from 1776 to 1850, to 34 percent. However, religious adherence did not grow in the ways that were expected. As Finke and Stark note, fifteen years before the Revolution, Ezra Stiles (the founder of Brown University and an early president of Yale) predicted that in one hundred years the theological descendants of the Puritans, the Congregationalists, would number seven million, while the adherents of newer Christian sects would be lucky to hold even. In fact, nearly the opposite turned out to be true: Members of the churches formerly established in the colonies left in droves for the new, experimental denominations. Stiles could take heart that no less a prescient thinker than Thomas Jefferson made a prediction that was even further off base: Near the end of his life, he suggested that the whole country would soon be Unitarian. Just 0.3 percent of Americans, three per thousand, are Unitarians today.

  Imagining the English colonies as profoundly unreligious is of course contrary to the usual depiction of the nation’s prehistory, and to the very idea of city upon a hill exceptionalism. The always popular notion that the United States is in “moral decline” (a phrase favored in the pulpits and the press of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) rests on the assumption that Americans used to be far more religious and should strive to return to their former fidelity. Yet the colonial church attendance rate of less than 20 percent puts the colonists much closer to trends in twenty-first-century France than to the highly churched population of the colonists’ own descendants.

  Patterns of colonial geographic dispersion provide some explanation of this. The picture of life in pre-Revolutionary America most often portrayed in popular history is one of public squares and town criers announcing royal decrees until the rebellious inhabitants of urban centers like Boston and Philadelphia rose up against them. The truth is that the English colonists who would declare independence lived far afield, for the most part. Ninety percent of the population could be found in rural areas.

  Leaving aside the difficulty of actually getting to a meetinghouse for worship, the colonists were a people who typically had work to do and wished to be left alone—both religiously and politically. This was equally true after the Revolution. As the French chronicler of the young nation Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur would write in 1782, religious indifference, not pious fervor, was to Europeans the characteristic most remarkable about this new species called Americans:

  All sects are mixed as well as all nations; thus religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other; which is at present one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans. Where this will reach no one can tell, perhaps it may leave a vacuum fit to receive other systems. Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here: zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates in the great distance it has to travel; there it is a grain of powder inclosed, here it burns away in the open air, and consumes without effect.

  Even among the faithful, indifference to divisions was the norm. St. John de Crèvecoeur describes the quite modern-seeming experience of passing by a number of houses, knowing that in one lives a Lutheran, in another a Calvinist, in a third a Catholic. Each “works in his fields, embellishes the earth, clears swamps.” The neighbors visit, talk of local things, but “what is it to their neighbours how and in what manner they think fit to address their prayers to the Supreme Being?” In time it may come to pass that the daughter of the Catholic might marry the son of one of the Protestants and the young couple may move far from their parents. “What religious education will they give their children?” St. John de Crèvecoeur asks. “A very imperfect one. If there happens to be in the neighbourhood any place of worship… rather than not shew their fine clothes, they will go to it.”

  Faiths rise and fall through proximity, the Frenchman implies, but in America there is no end to distance. Religion looked in colonial times not so different than it looks now: Some Americans were true believers, but many did not give it enough thought to care. Still others doubted the whole enterprise, especially where it overlapped with politics. Though they risked the kind of opprobrium the colonial press had long heaped upon unbelievers of all stripes—“the Free Thinker, the Deist, the Jew, a
nd the Turk”—a few of them were brave or naïve enough to say so.

  Into this last camp fell William Livingston. In 1752, he founded a weekly magazine in New York called the Independent Reflector, which in each issue offered a single essay “on Sundry Important Subjects More Particularly Adapted to the Province of New York.” Often overlooked in histories of the conflict with England, in some ways it can be seen as lighting the fuse.

  When the men usually credited with crafting religious freedom in America were still boys—Thomas Jefferson just beginning his Greek; James Madison still growing in his baby teeth—Livingston was fresh out of law school and ready to begin his professional life in New York. He had given up his dream of being a painter by then but still had something of a poet’s soul. Even as he settled into the bustle of the city, he wrote unpublished verses about the lure of rural life.

  His first printed words, however, belie his apparent wish to remain outside the fray. Even his earliest publication—an ill-advised satirical article about his employer’s wife published while he was still a teenager—showed that writing was as likely to get him in trouble as it was to earn him a living or a reputation for wit.

  After law school, Livingston had settled in New York to practice. There he fell in with two other young men, each a nominal Presbyterian like him. Together they founded the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge and determined the best way to promote such knowledge was through the creation of what his nineteenth-century biographer called “the first periodical in the colonies… with no professed attachment to any political party, devoted to… a close and impartial scrutiny of the existing establishments, and pursuing its course without fear or favour.” The goal of the three men was “exposure of official abuse, negligence, and corruption in whatever rank they were to be found.”