by Susan Jacoby
Between 1790 and 1830, roughly half of the Puritan-descended Congregationalist churches in Massachusetts (all of which were still tax-supported) had been transformed into Unitarian congregations.4 The spread of less doctrinaire forms of Protestantism was closely related to the emergence in the early republic of leaders who eschewed traditional religious institutions. This split between the conventional Puritan-descended denominations and more liberal intellectual denominations was carried westward by settlers—first from New England to upstate New York, then to the Midwest, and finally to the Pacific Northwestern territories of Oregon and Washington.
The Unitarians, though not aggressive proselytizers in the fashion of evangelical revivalists, turned plenty of Puritans into converts to a personal form of religion that stressed reason and good works rather than blind faith, predestination, and divine fury. John Adams, for instance, belonged to this group—though he would never have called himself a “convert.” He simply (and not so simply) opposed all forms of religion that involved intellectual or political coercion and did not make room for science and reason. It could not have been clearer from Adams’s correspondence with Thomas Jefferson during the last fourteen years of their lives that the two men, despite their many political differences, were in fundamental agreement about religion. “We can never be so certain of any Prophecy,” Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1813, “or the fulfilment of any Prophecy; or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle as We are, from the revelation of nature ie. Natures God that two and two are equal four. Miracles or Prophecies might frighten us out of our Witts; might scare us to death; might induce Us to lie, to say that We believe that 2 and 2 make 5. But We should not believe it. We should know the contrary.”5 A man like Adams, and thousands who moved from Puritan orthodoxy to liberal Protestantism or secular freethought (sometimes both) through rational re-evaluation rather than mystical revelation, would never have been found at a revival meeting, or trembling, like Robert Boyle, in fear for his immortal soul during a thunderstorm. Yet the split within the Puritan-descended churches that gave rise to Unitarianism and Universalism, in England as well as in the United States, was a conversion movement as surely as the revivalism that prompted farmers to pitch tents in muddy fields to hear preachers talk about salvation and damnation. The shift toward more liberal Protestantism was a long-term intellectual movement, not a sudden awakening—more like the modern transition to secularism from religious belief than the dramatic instantaneous religious conversions of the past.
The philosophy of Unitarianism and Universalism (if not the churches themselves) would prove well suited to the promotion of freethought on the frontier. The emotional revivalism personified by Cartwright found a larger and very different constituency in an antipodal position within the same unsettled society. What liberal Protestantism and evangelical fundamentalism had in common on the frontier was that they encouraged individualism in religious thinking—either the development of a personal relationship with God, or personal doubt about the existence of any divinity. Self-educated men like Lincoln learned to read with the Bible—usually the only book in their homes—as a text and needed years to find and absorb the thoughts of other, nonreligious authors and integrate them with earlier religious teachings. People who had to work hard to acquire the basic materials for learning could not cut the process short by embracing revelation while lightning flashed. Overnight conversions are so alien to the intellectual temperament that educated Americans (with some notable exceptions, such as William James) were inclined to dismiss even the most sincere accounts as inherently fraudulent.
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Cartwright began his post-conversion preaching career during the same period in which Unitarianism was replacing the retrograde brand of Puritanism that had led, only 120 years earlier, to the Salem witch trials. While Cartwright was preaching his energetic new brand of biblical literalism on the frontier, Paine was penniless and scorned because of his antireligious beliefs. One Unitarian pastor, William Bentley of the East Church of Salem, was among the few clergymen to defend the great polemicist of the Revolution when he died in 1809. He praised Paine for his elevation of reason and said, “He was indeed a wonderful man, & he was the first to see in what part every System was most vulnerable. Even in his attacks on Christianity he felt without knowing it, the greatest difficulties which rational Christians have felt.”6
Rational Christians. But the revivalist proselytizers on the frontier, in the South and the Middle West, were not in the business of promoting rational Christianity. Two and two could make five if God chose to suspend natural laws. The Cane Ridge meeting became the prototype of the emotional American revivals that would remain a powerful religious force well into the twentieth century, as Billy Graham would demonstrate in rural areas and in New York’s Times Square. Thus, the confrontations between Cartwright and Lincoln in the 1830s and 1840s are not only curious footnotes in American history; they also exemplify the unending conflicts between supernatural belief and naturalistic reason that have characterized American religious life since the colonial era.
Yet serious anti-intellectual preachers like Cartwright took care to distance themselves from some of the symptoms of mass hysteria that broke out at revival meetings. Cartwright inveighed against the “running, jumping, barking exercise” of converts who then “professed to fall into trances and see visions…and when they came to, they professed to have seen heaven and hell, to have seen God, angels, the devil and the damned; they would prophesy, and, under the pretense of Divine inspiration, predict the time of the end of the world, and the ushering in of the great millennium.” (Flashing lights were all right.) These born-again Christians often claimed that they could heal all manner of illnesses in what Cartwright described as “an appeal to the ignorance, superstition, and credulity of the people, even saint as well as sinner.”7 Of course, it was a bad thing for evangelists who preached the truth of supernatural events said to have happened nearly two millennia earlier if their audiences should be swayed by converts who emerged from trances to preach the truth of supernatural events said to be happening at that very moment. What potential convert would not prefer a preacher who could make the blind see and the lame walk right now to a preacher who could only refer to miracles said to have been performed by a Galilean carpenter in ancient times?
Deliberate charlatanism was a serious problem for genuinely devout evangelists like Cartwright, not only because preachers who claimed to perform miracles would lure away converts but because deceiving the credulous in the manner of a magician was considered a sin by all religions. American intellectuals (including religious believers as well as nonbelievers) have often made the mistake of equating the emotionalism of all evangelical-revivalist conversions with the sort of outright fraud depicted in Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry. But the most effective American proselytizers, from Cartwright through Graham—whether preaching in makeshift tents in the first three decades of the nineteenth century or in football stadiums and iconographic urban spaces during the 1950s—were always careful to distance themselves from frauds that, in a country with a free press, were bound to be uncovered at some point. Such caution was not only a matter of tactical prudence; evangelists sincerely believed that the meaning and purpose of conversion resided in forgiveness of sin and eternal salvation, not in improving one’s temporal health or acquiring wealth. This is not to say that evangelists or their converts—like wealthy, more orthodox clergymen before them—had any objection to making money legitimately (Cartwright’s autobiography was a best-seller in 1856) or to living well. But most of them were not, as some Unitarian intellectuals in Boston and New York would have liked to think, in the business of taking money from blind people who hoped to see or cripples who hoped to walk. Honest evangelical proselytizers were interested in miracles that took place within the heart and soul, and such spiritual transformations did not have to contradict the reason evident in inventions and medical advances that visibly improved the lot of human beings throughout t
heir difficult lives on earth.
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The highly emotional, often anti-intellectual revivalism of the Second Great Awakening was not only a function of geography but of the curious merger of spiritually hungry individuals with a competitive “religious marketplace”—a phrase that did not become fashionable until the late twentieth century but was always a fact of American religious life. There seems to have been no doubt in the minds of devout evangelicals that out-arguing and out-praying the competition was the best way to spread the news of the Gospel.
Cartwright describes an incident, not long after his own conversion, in which he and his fellow Methodists encountered a Jew who “was tolerably smart, and seemed to take great delight in opposing the Christian religion.” At one of Cartwright’s prayer meetings, “this Jew appeared” and told the Methodists that “it was idolatry to pray to Jesus Christ, and that God did not nor would he answer such prayers.” Recognizing that the Jew’s desire was to “get us into debate and break up our prayer-meeting,” Cartwright asked him, “Do you really believe there is a God?” Yes, the Jew replied, he did believe in God. “Do you really believe that this work among us is wrong?” Cartwright asked. The Jew said he did believe that Christian proselytizing was wrong. One can only imagine what might have happened had such a comment been made at a prayer meeting in Geneva, Frankfurt, Lyon, or Edinburgh.
But Cartwright suggested a “test” resembling the one posed in the Bible by the prophet Elijah to the worshippers of Baal, who were asked to compete with the Israelites by offering the sacrifice of a bullock and waiting for the Lord to send fire from heaven to prove which religion was true. Elijah asked the Israelites and the Baal worshippers, “How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him” (I Kings 18: 21).*2 Cartwright—who even asked, as Elijah had, that God demonstrate his power by sending fire down to prove one side or the other right—told the Jew that if his God were the true God He would use the fire to put an end to Christian prayer.
Our Jew began and said, tremblingly, “O Lord God Almighty,” and coughed again, cleared his throat, and started again, repeating the same words. We saw his evident confusion, and we simultaneously prayed out aloud at the top of our voices. The Jew leaped up and started off, and we raised the shout and had a glorious time. Several of our mourners were converted, and we all rose and started into camp at the top of our speed, shouting, having, as we firmly believed, obtained a signal victory over the devil and the Jew.8
This story has several intriguing elements (apart from Cartwright casting himself in the role of a Jewish prophet to combat the beliefs of a Jew). First, a lone Jew appears in the backwoods of Kentucky to tell a group of Christian men that they are all wrong, and that by praying to Jesus they are worshipping an idol. Second, the Christian men don’t beat up the Jew but try to show him the error of his ways with a biblically based test that both Christian and Jews, if they knew their Bible (as they certainly did in the early nineteenth century), would recognize. Third, the Jew probably runs off because he is scared, but nothing else happens to him in this primitive religious marketplace. Finally—and here is where American Christianity is already more lax than the Bible itself—Cartwright, unlike Elijah, has hedged his bets. For the God of Israel to triumph over Baal in the Bible, it was necessary not only that the Lord ignore the bullock offered for sacrifice by the priests of Baal but also that He send fire to signal His acceptance of the Israelites’ bullock. Cartwright did not ask that his prayers be affirmed by fire from heaven; he asked only that the Lord not send down fire in answer to a Jew’s prayer to end the Christian meeting. This was an impossible wager to lose (absent a lightning strike) and probably arose from the same caution that prompted Cartwright to oppose those who made faith healing a condition of and cause for conversion.
Judaism, as a religion, was not considered a particular threat in the antebellum republic—in part because there were so few Jewish immigrants at the time, and in part because Jews did not proselytize. Cartwright’s story of his encounter with a Jew who challenged Christian proselytizing is so rare that I would be tempted to call it unique in the annals of the early republic if I were not certain that someone, from some distant niche on the Internet, would produce a letter about a great-great-great-grandparent’s encounter with another wandering Jew who challenged Christianity as foolish idol worship.
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The heterodox nature of American religious thought and practice, even among the least educated audiences at revival meetings, meant that proselytizing and conversion would become a permanent feature of life in the new land. Protestantism in general might be America’s civil religion, but in fundamental matters involving the balance between faith and reason, Protestants were as divided among themselves as Protestants and Catholics had been during the battle over the Reformation in the Old World. These divisions created fertile soil not only for conversions but for the founding of entirely new religions—among them Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Science.
It is tempting to conclude that the current liberal—some ardent believers would say promiscuous—American attitude toward conversion was an inevitable result of the presence of so many Protestant denominations, right from the start, in the new and spacious land—so spacious that a theocrat like John Cotton could call Roger Williams’s expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony not a banishment but an enlargement. However, religious pluralism and seemingly endless physical space to accommodate nonconformist believers were necessary but not sufficient for the formation of the laissez-faire American attitudes toward conversion that generally prevail today.
And not all conversions were equally acceptable. Anti-Catholicism was a prejudice that united American Protestants of otherwise feuding denominations and very different social classes. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774–1821), like Peter Cartwright, came of age in the new American republic and was a religious convert—but that is all she had in common with the backwoods preacher. Seton, born into a prominent Episcopal family in New York City, would convert to Roman Catholicism, found the American Sisters of Charity, and eventually, in 1975, become a saint, canonized by Pope Paul VI. Everything about Seton’s conversion—except that there was no way, in America, for her disapproving family to use the power of the state to stop her from changing faiths—was unusual for the early republican period.
For an Episcopalian in America, Catholicism was a huge step down on the social ladder and was seen in that light by nearly all within Seton’s privileged circle of Episcopal friends and family in New York. Her grandparents settled in the New York area at the beginning of the eighteenth century; she was descended on her father’s side from Huguenots who had fled France. By the time of the Revolution, though, everyone in the immediate family seems to have joined the Episcopal Church—the religion of choice for New York’s social and economic upper class. When the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, whose wealthy family owned an export-import firm, the ceremony was performed by the first Episcopal bishop of New York. The young Setons, like their entire family, were members of the fashionable Trinity Church on Wall Street. (Thanks to a 1705 land grant—now prime Manhattan real estate—from England’s Queen Anne, the church possesses assets of more than two billion dollars, and its still-affluent congregation is embroiled in angry disputes over whether Trinity is doing enough for the poor.9) Seton, who had five children, was deeply involved in charitable work and seems to have taken her Episcopal faith as seriously as she would later take Catholicism. She and her sister-in-law Rebecca Seton were known as the “Protestant Sisters of Charity” for their efforts to help the poor in New York—much as Anne Hutchinson had been known for her activities as a midwife. In 1797, they helped found the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children—a response to a desperate need that had been apparent since the end of the Revolution, when many young war widows were left with no means of support. Seton herself, who was not poor, would be left a
widow in straitened circumstances when her husband died in 1803 of tuberculosis in Italy, to which the family had traveled in the futile hope that his health would be restored in a warmer climate. Seton’s first serious encounter with Catholicism seems to have taken place during this trip, when the young couple stayed with a well-off Italian family with business interests in New York. The grieving young widow was apparently most impressed by the church’s claim that, unlike the Church of England, it could trace its authority in an unbroken line to the apostles. When Seton returned to New York in 1804, she had five children under age eight and had already, according to her journals, decided to convert to Catholicism. Her family, however, was horrified—and Seton, although she had some money of her own, needed financial help. In any event, despite the family’s opposition, Seton was received into the Catholic Church in March 1805 and made her First Communion two weeks later. Elizabeth’s in-laws were particularly fearful that her proselytizing would influence younger members of the family, and her two youngest sisters-in-law did indeed convert to Catholicism—an astonishing and socially embarrassing development in such a prominent Protestant family. Salvation (presumably financial as well as spiritual) arrived in the form of a French émigré priest from Maryland, who invited Elizabeth to move to Baltimore and establish a Catholic school for the education of young children.