A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post- Revolutionary New England Clergy

Abstract

A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-- Revolutionary New England Clergy. By Jonathan D. Sassi. (Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 298. Illustrations. $49.95.) In this fine monograph, Jonathan D. Sassi provides a missing link between the Congregationalist clergy who urged New Englanders to stand up to British tyranny and those who inspired them to call for an end to slavery. He argues that the pulpit power was not shattered by the rise of dissent after the Revolution, nor was it made irrelevant by the general shift in American religion toward a democratic individualism that was little concerned with public affairs. Instead the heirs of the Puritans made a transition that allowed them to remain respected spokesmen for private and public morality despite the political and ecclesiastical changes that took place in the half-century after 1783. Thus, A Republic of Righteousness attempts to correct a rather large body of scholarship, of which Harry S. Stout's respected The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (1986) is the latest example, that would relegate the New England clergy to what Sassi refers to as the dust bin of social irrelevance (5) in the new republic. At the same time, Sassi wants to demonstrate that public Christianity-the ways in which ministers tried to make religious beliefs and values speak to the problems of life in society (11 )-remained alive, despite the contrary implication of Nathan O. Hatch's enormously influential The Democratization of American Christianity (1993). Sassi's focus is on Massachusetts and Connecticut, where Congregationalism remained the established religion, although dissenters could designate their tax dollars for their own ministers. Not only did the established clergy enjoy a larger share of public funding, but they also maintained a close relationship with the economic and political power structure and continued to be recognized as the official interpreters of divine will. These clergymen saw the American Revolution as a work of Providence, although there was some question as to whether the United States had inherited the national covenant that once belonged to the Puritans or whether it was simply uniquely blessed. In any case, it was possible for the established clergy to see the hand of God in American affairs through the years of the Federalist ascendancy, although the French Revolution and its reverberations in America caused them concern. The election of Thomas Jefferson, however, was heavy rain on the Congregationalist parade. Not only did Republican success raise questions about the relationship between Divine Providence and American history, but it weakened the position of the established clergy and strengthened that of the dissenters, who were much more friendly to the new regime. By 1810, the Congregationalists were angry enough with the national government that they attacked the Constitution for its absence of religious provisions, and the War of 1812 completed their alienation. Meanwhile, at home in New England, the Baptists and the Republicans were making common cause, and when the Episcopalians in Connecticut joined that coalition, the result was a new constitution that ended that state's Congregationalist establishment in 1818. The demise of the Massachusetts state church was more a suicide than a murder, resulting from the split between Unitarians and orthodox Trinitarians that widened in the years after 1805 when the Unitarian Henry Ware became the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard. Although the establishment struggled on until 1833, the mortal wound came in 1821, when the state supreme court allowed the taxpayers of Dedham to choose a Unitarian clergyman despite the fact that the church members wanted an orthodox one. …