Catherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Abstract

Carté, associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, has provided to church historians an invaluable resource in her definitive narrative of what she terms “British imperial Protestantism” and its role in colonial North America and the subsequent shape of religion in the American Revolution and the newly independent United States. She has replaced the often disjointed and narrowly focused histories of the established churches in England and Scotland, the dissenting Congregationalists, Baptists, and Moravians, along with their missionary societies and colleges and the international rise of pietism (including the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century). Finally, she provides the broad context out of which American denominations arose after the Revolution. This grand narrative comes together in a single volume of manageable size that once required a small library to pull together.What the author calls imperial Protestantism developed out of the British Act of Union (1707), which brought together the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the Toleration Act (1689). which categorized dissenters into a mixed system rather than a single established church. In the eighteenth century an interlocking network of societies from each group further included the Pietistic movement, which Carté calls “awakened Protestants.”The empire stumbled toward the American Revolution in the 1770s, but the religious system was not a cause. Religious leaders were primarily reactive, but they were drawn into the conflict nevertheless. Religious establishment survived on the state level but was omitted in the new American federal system. The war left churches and international organizations in tatters. Even anti-Catholicism was a victim of the war, since the American government had depended so strongly on the French and their allies.In the United States a new generation began to create denominations. The Episcopal Church created itself apart from the Church of England and the Wesleyan movement established its own Methodist Episcopal Church in America. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, American denominations created, separate from the state, an agenda in concert with temperance, abolitionist, and global missionary societies.Methodist church historians should read this study with great interest, finding the roots of their movement clearly intertwined with the general narrative and providing the background for the emergence of the Methodists in America as the dominant expression of denominationalism prior to the Civil War.