Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (100 page)

In 1802 he sent a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, declaring that the First Amendment of the federal Constitution erected a “wall of separation between church and state.”
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It is unlikely that Jefferson had in mind the kind of high and often impenetrable wall between church and state that modern jurists have maintained. It is more likely that he had an exclusively political object. (In fact, he attended church services in the House of Representatives two days after writing this letter.)
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For Jefferson the wall of separation may not have been the crucial point of his message anyway. For him, the wall was simply a means toward a larger end. It would give time for reason and free inquiry to work its way to the ultimate enlightenment he favored. In other words, the wall might protect the Baptists from the Standing Order of Connecticut Puritans in the short run, but Jefferson thought that in the long run both the Baptists and the Standing Order, like all religions based on faith and not reason, were slated for extinction. Indeed, as late as 1822 Jefferson continued to believe that “there is not a
young man
now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”
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Of course, he could not have been more wrong. Jefferson did not understand the political forces behind his and Madison’s success in getting his bill for religious freedom through the Virginia legislature. He may have thought that most Virginians accepted the enlightened thinking in his preamble, but the bill would never have passed without the overwhelming support of growing numbers of dissenting evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists in the state who hated the Anglican establishment so much that they did not care what the preamble said. It was not enlightened rationalism that drove these evangelicals but their growing realization that it was better to neutralize the state in matters of religion than run the risk of one of their religious opponents gaining control of the government.

Ultimately, an enlightened thinker like Jefferson could not speak for the popular Christian world of the early Republic. But someone like the New Light Separate Baptist Isaac Backus could. The separation of church and state that emerged in the early nineteenth century owed much to evangelical Christians like Backus. Born in Connecticut in 1724, and receiving only seven years of elementary education, Backus served his Middleborough, Massachusetts, parish for over sixty years, all the while defying the state’s Congregational establishment. Throughout his career he preached, wrote, and traveled (a thousand miles a year) on behalf of the Baptist cause.
²⁷

To Backus true religion was vitally important to society, but it nonetheless had to rest ultimately on “a voluntary obedience to God’s revealed will” and not on the coercive power of the government. Liberty of conscience for Backus was not, as it was for Jefferson, a consequence of the rationalistic and pagan Enlightenment. Backus and the Baptists came to their belief in the separation of church and state out of the exigencies of being a minority sect within tax-supported established church systems and out of the pietistic desire to create gathered voluntaristic churches of individual believers.

Although Backus and most other Baptists became good Jeffersonian Republicans, their support for the disestablishment of the Puritan churches did not signify the end of what Backus called the “sweet harmony” between church and state; it meant only that Christ’s kingdom should be free to evangelize the society through persuasion aided by sympathetic but nonsectarian governments. Although Backus wanted no governmental interference with religion, he did expect government to
help religion create a climate in which Christian truth might prevail. Hence he and other Protestant evangelicals could support laws compelling church attendance and respect for the Sabbath and religious tests for governmental office even while advocating the separation of church and state.
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A
LTHOUGH
J
EFFERSON MAY HAVE REMAINED
oblivious to the increasingly religious character of the country, many other members of the elite soon realized what was happening; indeed, some of them developed a belated interest in religion themselves. Even when they privately scorned Christianity, they accommodated their outward behavior to the religiosity of the general populace. Franklin was only being wise in advising a friend in 1786 not to publish anything attacking traditional Christianity. “He that spits against the wind,” he said, “spits in his own face.” Thomas Paine destroyed his reputation in America with his scathing comments about Christianity in his
Age of Reason
(1794).
²⁹

It was one thing to denigrate Christianity in the privacy of one’s home, but Paine spoke openly to common people in the streets. Upon his return to America from Europe in 1802, he was attacked everywhere in the press as a “lying, drunken, brutal infidel.” Even former friends and sympathizers like the aged Samuel Adams grieved over what they took to be Paine’s efforts to “unchristianize the mass of our citizens.”
³⁰
The great spokesman for the common sense of the common people had seriously misjudged the religiosity of that people.

During the Revolutionary era Hamilton had shed his youthful religious inclinations and had become a conventional liberal with deistic inclinations who was an irregular churchgoer at best. People even told stories about his joking references to religion. During the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 Franklin proposed to call in a minister each day to lead the delegates in prayers “
to the Creator of the universe
” in order to calm the rancor of the debates. Hamilton is supposed to have replied that the Convention did not need any “foreign aid.” When Hamilton was later asked why the members of the Convention had not recognized God in the Constitution, he allegedly replied, “We forgot.”

A decade or so later it was not so easy to forget God, and during the 1790s Hamilton began recovering his earlier interest in religion, partially in reaction
to what he perceived to be the atheism of the French revolutionaries and their supporters in America. By 1801 in the aftermath of his fall from power he became increasingly devout. In 1802 he proposed the establishment of a Christian Constitutional Society—a network of interstate political clubs that would promote good works and the Federalist party. By the time of his death in 1804 he had become a true believer, desperate on his deathbed to receive Holy Communion from an Episcopalian minister.
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Many leaders came to realize that they had to make concessions to the growing evangelical religious atmosphere. In 1801 when the heir of several generations of Presbyterian divines Aaron Burr had become vice-president, he was criticized for not having been “in any place of public worship for ten years.” Concerned about Burr’s future career in politics, a close political associate reminded him of the Presbyterian vote and warned: “Had you not better go to church?”
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Other leaders also began thinking about going to church. In 1806 jurist St. George Tucker of Virginia, although a lifelong deist, became frightened enough by the social chaos that infidelity presumably was causing that he was willing to support state subsidies for Christian teachers regardless of their denomination. So too did Noah Webster, William Wirt, and John Randolph set aside their youthful deism in favor of the evangelical religion of the early nineteenth century. By 1806 William Cooper, who earlier had been contemptuous of churches, had come to believe “that our political Welfare depends much on adhering to the rules of religion,” and he began encouraging and subsidizing the new churches of Otsego County, or at least those churches that were orthodox and conservative. Even enlightened Freemasonry became much more of a religious institution in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
³³

In 1811 the distinguished jurist James Kent, the chief justice of the New York supreme court, actually acknowledged in a notable blasphemy case,
The People of New York v. Ruggles
, the legal connection between his state and religion. Although Kent recognized that New York had no formally established church, that its constitution guaranteed freedom of religious opinion, and that the state had no statute prohibiting blasphemy, he nevertheless declared that to revile with contempt the Christian religion professed by almost the whole community, as Ruggles had done, was “to strike at the roots of moral obligation and weaken the security of the social ties.” That Kent was willing to declare Christianity to be part of the common law of the state of New York when he despised religious enthusiasm and in private called Christianity a barbaric superstition is a measure of just how intimidating the popular evangelical climate of the Second Great Awakening could be.
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Still, the proliferation of competing evangelical religious groups coupled with the enlightened thinking of the gentry soon eroded what was left of the idea of a European-like coercive state church. In the decades following the Revolution the remains of traditional church-state connections and establishments were finally destroyed: South Carolina in 1790, Maryland in 1810, Connecticut in 1818, New Hampshire in 1819, and Massachusetts in 1833.

R
OMAN
C
ATHOLICS
on the European continent were certainly accustomed to church-state establishments, but in America any semblance of a Catholic establishment was impossible. Numbering about thirty-five thousand in 1790, they were still a tiny minority in all the states. Even in Maryland, which had the largest proportion of Catholics, they numbered only about fifteen thousand out of a Maryland population of nearly three hundred and twenty thousand at the time of the first census. All the colonies had politically discriminated against Catholics, but the Revolution created an atmosphere of greater tolerance. In 1783 Rhode Island repealed its 1719 statute preventing Catholics from voting and holding office. (The state eliminated similar restrictions on Jews in 1798.)

By the time John Carroll of Maryland became the first Catholic bishop in 1790, the Catholic Church of America had begun adapting to the
republican climate of America. In the 1780s Carroll had worked to make the Catholic Church an “independent national church” rather than simply a Catholic mission dependent on the Vatican. He argued that the American Revolution had given Catholics “equal rights and privileges with that of other Christians” and that Catholicism deserved to be independent of “all foreign jurisdiction.” Carroll established a Catholic college in Georgetown, created a Sulpician seminary in Baltimore, promoted the use of English in the liturgy, and urged the publication of an English translation of the Catholic version of the Bible, which the Irish-born immigrant and devout Catholic publisher Mathew Carey undertook in 1790.

At the same time, Catholic laity began to participate actively in the organizing and the running of their churches, replicating the process that many of the Protestant groups had experienced in the colonial period. The practice of laymen forming trusteeships elected by people in the parish began in the cities but soon spread to the frontier areas. Without benefit of clergy Catholics banded together and formed religious societies, elected their leaders, purchased land for a church, and assumed responsibility for governing their church.
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Already Catholics were coming to accept the idea of separation of church and state and to think of themselves as just another Christian denomination—a position that the Roman Catholic Church as a whole did not formally endorse until the Second Vatican Council of 1962. In Maryland in the 1780s Catholics had opposed the proposal of a multiple establishment with tax money going to all Christian denominations out of fear that such a measure would be the first step toward reestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in the state. Carroll believed that the religious experiment of religious liberty, “by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.”
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Although fear of the anti-religious message of the French Revolution compelled Carroll and the American Catholic Church in the 1790s to revert to the use of Latin liturgy and the hierarchical appointment of priests, the process of local church government and lay control of the congregational parishes survived, largely because of the shortage of priests and bishops. And because Catholics remained everywhere a small minority in a sea of Protestants, they enthusiastically supported the idea of separation of church and state. In spite of continual pressures to
become more like the Catholic churches of Europe in organization and character, the American Catholic Church essentially developed as just another Christian denomination among many.

The number of Catholics grew rapidly. In 1808 Bishop Carroll secured the creation of four new dioceses—in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Kentucky. This western outpost of Bardstown, the bishop of the diocese claimed, contained by 1815 nineteen Catholic churches and at least ten thousand communicants. With the acquisition of Louisiana and the addition of the diocese of New Orleans, Spanish and French Catholics became part of the United States. In 1819 two more dioceses were established in Richmond and Charleston, and by 1820 the number of Catholics in the country totaled nearly two hundred thousand.

Despite this rapid growth, the country remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Although most of the competing Protestant denominations were formally separated from the state, they tended to identify themselves with the nation. Most of the Protestant clergy were determined to prove that America’s separation of church and state would not result in the infidelity and religious neglect that Europeans had expected. The evangelicals continually emphasized that America, although lacking a state-supported church, was nonetheless a nation of God, a Christian God, and a Protestant Christian God at that.