"A battle not man's but God's": origins of the American temperance crusade in the struggle for religious authority.

Abstract

Major theories of the origins of American temperance have emphasized materialist explanations without taking seriously enough the independent role of ideas--and, in particular, religious ideas--in stimulating the reform. This article develops a new interpretation, focusing on the religious origins of temperance in a "crisis of contested authority" that befell the Protestant denominations descended from Puritanism during the early years of the 19th century. One outgrowth of the crisis over the authority of traditional religious ideas was a new theology focused on religious salvation through the suppression of vice. This new religious ideology provided a core of beliefs and powerful justification for organizing a public crusade to "exterminate" vice, and one that for ideological reasons ultimately narrowed its focus to the specific vice of intemperance. The crusade against vice in the early republic offered clergymen a "solution" to their problems of contested authority by providing new strategies and an organizational base of voluntary societies for carrying out what they perceived to be their sacred duties: winning souls to God, guarding collective salvation and leveraging government to promote obedience to religious prohibitions on vice. At least initially, temperance was part of a new kind of effort to assert the authority of religious ideas in the public sphere, and to regroup religious forces under auspices outside the church.