Richard Carwardine

Freedom and religion in the nineteenth century

Acknowledgments Introduction Richard Helmstadter 1. The Whirlwind of religious liberty in Early America Nathan O. Hatch 2. Science and religious freedom Frank M. Turner 3. Which freedom for early Victorian Britain? J. P. Ellens 4. The limits of religious liberty: theology and criticism in nineteenth-century England R. K. Webb 5. The Jews of Europe and the limits of religious freedom David C. Itzkowitz 6. The Kulturkampf: restrictions and controls on the practice of religion in Bismarcks Germany Ronald R. Ross 7. Liberty and the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Europe Raymond Grew 8. Changing religious establishments and religious liberty in France, Part I: 787-1879 C. T. McIntire 9. Changing religious establishments and religious liberty in France, Part II: 1879-1908 C. T. McIntire 10. Religious freedom, clericalism, and anticleericalism in Chile, 1820-1920 Simon Collier 11. Religion and imperial power in nineteenth-century Britain Jeffrey Cox Abbreviations Notes Index.

Methodists, politics, and the coming of the American Civil War

In 1868 Ulysses S. Grant remarked that there were three great parties in the United States: the Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church. This was an understandable tribute, given the active role of leading Methodists in his presidential campaign, but it was also a realistic judgment, when set in the context of the denominations growing political authority over the previous half century. As early as 1819, when, with a quarter of a million members, “the Methodists were becoming quite numerous in the country,” the young exhorter Alfred Branson noted that “politicians… from policy favoured us, though they might be skeptical as to religion,” and gathered at county seats to listen to the preachers of a denomination whose “votes counted as fast at an election as any others.” Ten years later, the newly elected Andrew Jackson stopped at Washington, Pennsylvania, en route from Tennessee to his presidential inauguration. When both Presbyterians and Methodists invited him to attend their services, Old Hickory sought to avoid the political embarrassment of seeming to favor his own church over the fastest-growing religious movement in the country by attending both—the Presbyterians in the morning and the Methodists at night. In Indiana in the early 1840s the churchs growing power led the Democrats to nominate for governor a known Methodist, while tarring their Whig opponents with the brush of sectarian bigotry. Nationally, as the combined membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church [MEC] and Methodist Episcopal Church, South [MECS] grew to over one and a half million by the mid-1850s, denominational leaders could be found complaining that the church was so strong that each political party was “eager to make her its tool.” Thus Elijah H. Pilcher, the influential Michigan preacher, found himself in 1856 nominated simultaneously by state Democratic, Republican, and Abolition conventions.

Evangelicals, Whigs and the Election of William Henry Harrison

Few American presidential elections have engaged the passions of contemporaries or exercised the imaginations of later generations more than the ‘log cabin’ campaign of 1840. By their parades, slogans, symbols and songs party managers deliberately played down questions of public policy likely to divide their ranks, reasoned discussion was overwhelmed by an organized torrent of feeling, and the carefully cultivated images of candidates obscured the reality of their outlooks. Unscrupulous propagandists, especially of the Whig party, undoubtedly manipulated the emotions of the electorate. The excitement carried a massive 80·2 per cent of voters to the polls, a huge increase in turnout over previous presidential elections and a level of participation exceeded in no subsequent campaign. William Henry Harrison was indeed, as Philip Hone put it, ‘sung into the Presidency’ Yet style alone did not create the passion. The economic distress consequent upon the Panic of 1837 allowed the Whigs to act as a focus for those who blamed the Democrats for the hard times and who looked for a more vigorous stimulus to capitalist development than Martin Van Buren was likely to provide.

The Religious Revival of 1857–8 in The United States

In August 1858 an American minister described the current revival in that country as a ‘Fourth Great Awakening’ to be likened to pentecost, the sixteenth-century reformation and the eighteenth-century awakening in colonial America. His historical judgment was weak, but his euphoria typified the mood of American evangelicals after a year of mass conversions. Particularly through denominational ‘protracted meetings’ and inter-denominational or ‘union’ prayer meetings, all the protestant churches throughout the country shared in the excitement. Even many of the more cautious episcopalians, Unitarians and universalists showed sympathy for a wave of revivals which seemed remarkably well-ordered and free of the ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘human machinery’ of earlier ‘ingatherings’. By the end of annus mirabilis each of the evangelical denominations could report huge accessions: of the largest bodies, the presbyterians (old and new schools) added almost thirty thousand members by examination, the major baptist churches baptised almost one hundred thousand new members, while the two main branches of methodism reported a staggering net increase of nearly one hundred and eighty thousand, a growth of sixteen per cent over the previous year. What had moved Americans to flock to revival meetings and ‘get religion‘ in these numbers?

Unity, Pluralism, and the Spiritual Market-Place: Interdenominational Competition in the Early American Republic

Following independence, Americans’ sense of the special status of their new nation drew succour not merely from their republican experiment but from the unique character of the nation’s religious life. Even before the Revolution Americans had witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of sects and churches, to a degree unparalleled in any single European state, as ethnic diversity increased and the mid-eighteenth-century revivals split churches and multiplied congregations. The Congregationalist establishment in New England and Anglican power in the middle and southern colonies uneasily confronted energetic dissenting minorities, including Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, and German Lutheran and Reformed groups. After 1776 it took some time to define a new relationship between church and state. Colonial habits of thought persisted and prompted schemes of multiple establishment or government support for religion in general. The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786 and, five years later, the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution did not succeed wholly in eliminating state authority from the sphere of religion; indeed, residual establishments persisted in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. Yet an important shift was under way towards a ‘voluntary’ system of religious support, in which governmental authority in religion was replaced by increased authority for self-sustaining denominational bodies. After 1790 ecclesiastical institutions grew at an extraordinary pace, shaping the era labelled by historians the ‘Second Great Awakening’. As Jon Butler has reminded us, some 50,000 new churches were built in America between 1780 and 1860, sacralizing the landscape with steeples and graveyards and creating a heterogeneous presence that drew streams of European visitors curious to evaluate the effects of America’s unique experiment in ‘voluntarism’. By 1855 over four million of the country’s twenty-seven million people were members of one of over forty Protestant denominations, most of them recognizable by name as churches with an Old World ancestry but with features which made them distinctively American. Additionally, there were over one million Catholics.