by Paul Harvey
By nineteenth-century standards, many abolitionists held remarkably egalitarian ideals of human unity across racial lines. They tested the bounds of America religious and racial habitations. Black abolitionists, as discussed in the previous chapter, did so more vigorously, and without the overlay of racial paternalism that appeared strongly in some of the white abolitionist literature. They understood that the crusade against slavery, although indispensable, was not enough. The true realization of God’s will for America would only come with the application of the ideals of the divinely inspired Declaration of Independence and other founding documents. Black abolitionists pushed their white colleagues throughout the antebellum era, but the rise of the kind of abolitionist vision embraced in mainstream political movements (such as the Free Soil Party) and in literature such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin separated abolition and racial equality, and tended to encourage the ideas of colonization that Douglass and others found so contemptible.
Abolitionists came out of the world of Protestant liberalism and Unitarianism that reshaped religious thought in antebellum America. Antislavery moderates found American slavery morally repugnant but also disdained abolitionist zealots and extremists. The antislavery moderates—men such as William Ellery Channing, Horace Bushnell, Calvin Stowe (Harriet’s husband), and Francis Wayland—joined with abolitionists in condemning slavery’s relationship to unbiblical notions of racism. But because proslavery thinkers were so successful in using the Bible to defend slavery in the abstract, apart from any particular form of slavery in concrete historical instances, antislavery thinkers who still wished to cling to biblical arguments eventually arrived at a progressive notion of biblical truth. Unlike the proslavery side, which could rely on commonsense thinking, and the abolitionists, who were essentially forced to reject the Bible (precisely because many of them shared the presuppositions governing biblical reading with the proslavery thinkers), antislavery moderates effectively invented liberal Protestantism by providing an account of progressive revelation and the historicization of morality. Further, they developed the idea of “organic sin,” a sin so interwoven with a society’s institutions that individuals themselves were not morally culpable. Salvation then could come through a slow ascent to a higher plane of social morality—thought that developed much further in the social gospel movement of the early twentieth century.
Beyond the middle position staked by the antislavery moderates, Protestant liberals, radicals, abolitionists, and early advocates of modernism searched outside the Christian tradition for versions of the truth. In combination with the emerging missionary movement to India, they looked especially to Asian thought. So did the first generation of foreign missionaries. In their case, it was not because they thought they would find truth, but because they needed to know what ideas they would be up against as they tried to implant truth in South Asia.
RELIGION, RACE, AND THE ORIENT
Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century were the first generation to dabble in the contemplation of Asian religious traditions. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams carried on a correspondence speculating on the relationship of Buddhism and Hinduism to Christianity; the remarkable independent scholar Hannah Adams published her An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day and other works investigating, from a Unitarian Christian point of view, the origins of non-Judeo-Christian traditions; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau picked and chose what they wanted out of Hinduism and Buddhism to fashion their own critique of Protestantism in America and introduce Americans to terms such as “Oversoul.”
Much as colonial Americans had done with African and Native religious practices, white American Protestants of the nineteenth century experimented with a succession of terms and concepts—heathen, Hindoo, Oriental religions, mystery religions, and others—as they tried to explain Eastern religions to American readers. In the process, they effectively invented religious traditions, such as “Hinduism,” out of what had been a menagerie of loosely related practices emanating from a multitude of regions in India.
The pioneers—Hannah Adams, Joseph Priestly, John Adams, and the Transcendentalist writers—compared religions across the world. They wrote at the origins of what we would now call religious studies or comparative religions. They did so within a world of debates within American Protestantism about theological boundaries and racial definitions. The early writers, including Hannah Adams and Priestly, intended to demonstrate the superiority of a true Protestant faith, defined liberally. Adams in particular showed how humans had evolved out of heathenism to the capacious Protestantism of nineteenth-century Unitarianism. She and others told a story of religious development through the ages in which a once honorable religious sentiment had devolved into heathenism and polytheism. Yet within the original system could be found evidences of God’s truth. Religious leaders in India, the brahmans, had corrupted the originally reasonable system. The ancient religion of the Hindus, while not on a par with Christianity, still had parts of the truth, as evidenced by their alignment with some of the truths of Christianity. Missionaries arriving in India would bring the message of the Bible and Christian progress and uncover the ancient truths that had been there all along but had gotten smothered. Joseph Priestly argued, similarly, that in early Hinduism “there is one God, the original author of all things,” but added to this truth “many inferior deities presiding over different parts of the system.”
Cover of A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832
Source: Public domain.
Ultimately, as Adams and Priestly saw it, Hinduism was not a full-fledged religion but a subset of a larger category of heathism. Even so, it had recognizable elements of religion, including texts, beliefs, and rituals. As scholar Mike Altman puts it, while Adams “sought to make sense of religious diversity throughout the world and found a place for Hindus in the narrative of human progress toward Protestant truth,” Joseph Priestly “defended Christian revelation, against unbelieving intellectuals and Orientalists, who sought to prove the Bible derived from ancient Indian texts, by denying that any truth could be found in Hindu religious thought.” This difference would continue to divide representations of Asian religions.
Much of this played into Protestant arguments with each other over the definition of true Christianity. It stemmed as well from the Protestant critique of the idolatry and superstition characterizing not just heathen religions, but also Catholicism. Congregationalist James Goodrich, for example, in his work Religious Ceremonies and Customs, saw in Tibetan Buddhism “the counterpart of the Romish. They believe in one God, and a trinity, but full of errors, a paradise, hell, and purgatory, but full of errors also. They make suffrages, alms, prayers, and sacrifices for the dead; they have a vast number of convents filled with monks and friars. . . . They have their confessors who are chosen by their superiors, and receive their licenses from the Lama, as a bishop, without which they cannot hear confessions, or impose penances.” Tibetan and Romish hierarchy were parallel, he concluded, as was the approach to the Dalai Lama and the Holy Father—“In approaching him, his votaries fall prostrate with their heads to the ground, and kiss him with incredible veneration.”
During the same time, Protestants began organizing the first overseas missionary effort, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The early mission advocates placed non-Christian worlds in “hierarchies of heathenism,” implicitly judging their readiness to receive missionary efforts. Native American civilizations ranked low; Asian civilizations, with their long histories of religious development and cultural products that Christian Americans could appreciate as substantial, merited a higher score. They thus attracted the interest and attention of early missionary efforts, which were designed to bring them the fruits of civilization and extend the American empire of civilization abroad.
Andover Seminary, founded by Jedidah Morse in 1807, trained
an early generation of missionaries to Asia and helped lead to the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABFCM). Founded in 1810, the ABFCM sent out missionaries soon to be legendary in American Protestant lore: Adoniram and Nancy Judson, Samuel and Harriet Newell, Roxanna and Samuel Nott, and Luther Rice. Their missionary writings, published in The Panoplist and The Missionary Herald, gave American Protestant readers many of their first chances to “see” heathen religions. What they described was raw heathenism—blood and sacrifice (again akin to Catholicism), noise, and a disturbing eroticism. All of this spoke to Protestants of the New Divinity School, who preached that disinterested benevolence should govern the Christian’s life. Evangelicals saw authentic, true religion, as leading humans toward the rational and the ordered; Hinduism was precisely the opposite.
Meanwhile, mariners sailing to and from India, operating from the major seaport of Salem, Massachusetts, interested themselves not at all in the abstractions of doctrine but instead in Oriental material culture. This included icons and deities and all manner of items to stow away in cabinets of curiosities. These objects represented lands of ancient mysteries. They were alluring, exotic, but dangerous in comparison to the progressive development of modern human civilizations, culminating in the best that the Anglo-American world had to offer. “The Orient” was all that New England was not. That was precisely what made it fascinating and for a few intellectuals alluring in its more sensuous approach to truth. It was also why it could not be a foundation for a true modern civilization. Transcendentalists, however, were interested in finding religious truths that would satisfy a deeper longing unfulfilled by Protestant Christianity. As a result, they could accept Oriental religions, including Hinduism, as something other than pure heathenism. And when they began to envision the religions of the “contemplative and spiritual East,” some challenged the traditional conception of heathenism.
Later in the nineteenth century, Protestant liberals, Unitarians, and those who rejected Protestantism as an exclusive source of truth envisioned the role of religions in world civilizations differently. They contextualized Hinduism within a larger model of comparative religions meant to find universal truth across all the great religions. Hinduism was part of “The Orient,” opposed to but complementary also to the West. The Transcendentalists imagined and created Oriental religions. They imagined an Orient, and a Hinduism, in a manner that fit what they needed and wanted in their ongoing dialogue with other New England Protestants. It allowed them to exalt contemplation, oneness, and unity, and pair that with Western action and practice. Asia, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, believed in “the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense Fate,” while “the genius of Europe is active and creative.” Emerson sought to bring together the two and found that his reflections on Plato gave him the opportunity to do so. Emerson essentialized West and East, made their differences eternal, but also wanted a fusion of qualities that incorporated Eastern concepts as an implicit critique of Western Protestantism. Emerson mused that “the unity of Asia and the detail of Europe, the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-seeking, surface-seeking operagoing Europe, Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the energy of each.”
The division between contemplation and action, moreover, was universal. Emerson sought unity between the two streams of human civilization, between Oneness as conceived in the East and the many truths of the practical West. In Transcendentalist publications, they printed excerpts from Hindu religious texts in the “Ethnical Scriptures,” which they saw as pointing to universal truth. Religious difference, formerly signifying cultural gulfs, now pointed to universal truth.
Later in the nineteenth century, Lydia Maria Child’s The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages (1855) and James Freeman Clarke’s Ten Great Religions each argued that all religions contained at least partial truths. When compared and fused, they could point the way to transcendent truth. Clarke believed Christianity to be the summa of religions. “Every ethnic religion has its positive and negative side,” Clarke wrote, containing some “vital truth” but missing some other “essential truth,” meaning ethnic religions were true but “limited and imperfect.” Christianity, by contrast, alone was a “fullness of truth, not coming to destroy but to fulfil the previous religions; but being capable of replacing them by teaching all the truth they have taught, and supplying that which they have omitted.” Christianity was not a system, creed, or form, “but a spirit,” and thus “able to meet all the changing wants of an advancing civilization by new developments and adaptations, constantly feeding the life of man at its roots by fresh supplies of faith in God and faith in man.” Thus, Christianity alone (“including Mohammedanism and Judaism, which are its temporary and local forms”) was the “religion of all races.” The Transcendentalists invented a religion called Brahmanism in trying to understand India and envisioned it as governed by “veneration and mysticism,” or, as Clarke called it, “pure Spiritualism.” As he saw it, God was “an intelligence, absorbed in the rest of profound contemplation.” He also saw declension leading to the degradation of modern India.
James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888)
Source: Public domain.
And a few, such as Frederick Douglass, proposed ideas such as Douglass’s “composite nationality.” In an 1869 speech defending Chinese immigration, he noted with approval the theory that “each race of men has some special faculty, some peculiar gift or quality of mind,” and that each race “has a definite mission in the world.” The role of America in this was to “make us the most perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.” Much as W. E. B. Du Bois proposed in his “Conservation of Races” in the early twentieth century, Douglass listed qualities that individual races either had in abundance or lacked: “In one race we perceive the predominance of imagination; in other, like the Chinese, we remark its total absence. In one people, we have the reasoning faculty, in another, for music; in another exists courage; in another, great physical vigor. . . . All are needed to temper, modify, round and complete the whole man and the whole nation.” And, he added, religious liberty itself would benefit from the “clash and competition of rival religious creeds.” In the twentieth century, others would take up Douglass’s notion; it was a nascent cultural pluralism, still full of the language of the nineteenth century, but pointing to an ideal of nationalism in which diverse peoples would, as Douglass put it, “vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”
Transcendentalists helped to invent comparative religion. They used it to find religious truth, whether in Clarke’s liberal Protestantism, Child’s religious liberalism, or elsewhere. Hinduism, or Brahmanism, imparted to religion contemplation and mysticism rather than action, and in doing so provided exactly what Western religions had lost. Transcendentalists saw Americans as lacking in the contemplation of a more ethereal, pantheistic spirituality. Herman Melville parodied their view in Moby-Dick, in a famous passage about the watchman on the boat becoming so immersed and “at-one” with the sea that he fell right into it. But for the Transcendentalists, India could provide Americans with access to the mystical and spiritual, the very qualities that hard-driving and hard-bargaining Yankee Protestants were too busy to contemplate. This tradition of seeing in India the spiritual, and in America the practical, obviously had a long life, continuing into the 1960s and “seekers” who traveled to India in search of spiritual truth.
Schoolbooks from the era also relied on systems of comparative religion. But while built on past representations, they envisioned Hindus and Buddhists as Oriental others, different not just in terms of religion but also differential racially from Caucasian Christians. Thus, while missionaries imagined Hindus as religious others, Americans more generally categorized them as racial others and thus as doubly threatening. Eventually, this conception would play crucially into Supreme Court cases which racialized Hindus
(and Sikhs) precisely because of their religious practices. And all this intellectual seeking of truths from this era did not prevent a great upsurge of violence directed against Asian immigrants in the years after the Civil War, nor the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its subsequent reratification for decades afterward. Thus, the nineteenth-century paradox—intellectual longing for grasping the mysteries of Asian religions, together with the contempt for and eventual exclusion of actual Asian people—carried forward into the twentieth century. Intellectual hunger, Orientialist writing, and nativism together made up a package that essentialized Asian religions and racialized Asian peoples.
LATINO CATHOLICS IN A PROTESTANT REPUBLIC
In the Southwest, those egalitarian ideas faced a different challenge in dealing with Latino Catholics in a Protestant Republic. In the antebellum era, as the cotton and slave economy expanded rapidly into the newly opening states of the Deep South, Americans also looked southward and westward, into Texas and California and the Southwest. The rhetoric of Protestant triumphalism, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and Manifest Destiny crested. Populist and antiformalist religious groups, especially the Baptists and Methodists, expanded rapidly, and visions for the future of the Protestant republic resounded in the literature of the period.
Protestant thoughts excluded Catholics generally from the category of Christian, especially when it involved brown Catholics in lands desired or already conquered by white settlers. Writing of the missions around San Antonio, one author in 1851 noted how, after the removal of the Franciscans, “everything went to decay. Agriculture, learning, the mechanic arts, shared the common fate; and when the banners of the United States were unfurled in these distant and desolate places, the descendants of the noble and chivalric Castilians had sunk to the level, perhaps beneath it, of the aboriginal savages.” Of Catholic priests in California, Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote that they “possessed little learning or intelligence, and this little they devoted to the crushing and plundering of their people,” while the parishioners were “supercilious, yet ignorant and superstitious, and full of beastly habits.”