Beyond a Christian commonwealth: The Protestant quarrel with the American Republic, 1830--1860
Abstract
This dissertation explains Protestant religious motives for attacking the rise of liberal democratic culture in late antebellum America. The essay locates this dissent primarily within two types of clerical discourse--the religious jeremiad and the regular sermon. I distinguish "religious" from "political" jeremiads in order to isolate and analyze those intramural homilies that represent communication directed at believers and not the society at large. The premises for this analytical approach are, first, that clergymen were more likely to articulate religious concerns and cultural dissent in the regular sermons and religious jeremiads that comprised the majority of their discourse. Secondly, strictures intrinsic to ministers' occasional civic addresses (Fourth-of-July orations, for example) tended to prefigure a social or political emphasis and mute core religious concerns. Civic discourse, together with speculative theological treatises, express the "periphery" of Protestant concerns and are less reliable as indicators of the mainstream antebellum Protestant message. My findings indicate that, far more than recent scholars have acknowledged, antebellum ministers--confessionalists as well as pietists--separated Christianity and culture and attacked the political and nationalistic pretensions of the republic. Their primary motivation was a belief that liberal, democratic culture, the outgrowth of political democracy, threatened to sanction systems and ideas hostile to religion itself. Clerical dissent culminated in attacks on a "new infidelity" by the late 1840's. Ministers believed that unchecked liberalism could "popularize" unbelief and eventually produce widespread rejection of faith as an obstruction to human liberty, equality and progress. Clergymen responded by recounting Protestantism's exclusive, transcendent claims. This research challenges the thesis that antebellum Protestant "chauvinism" derived mainly from uncritical republican or nationalistic zeal. It defines that chauvinism as a product of ministers' religious dissent, not political enthusiasm, and traces it to the clash of historic religious beliefs with the individual freedoms of a new liberal order.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Larson, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American history|Religious history
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