Converted Republic: Lemuel Haynes, Timothy Dwight, and the Anti-Racist Politics of the Republican Sermon

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores the under-examined philosophy of evangelical republicanism that preacher-reformers Lemuel Haynes and Timothy Dwight developed at the end of the eighteenth century. To demonstrate their evangelical critique of classical republicanism, Haynes and Dwight invented a new genre: the republican sermon, which allowed them to champion evangelicalism's understanding of disinterested virtue as a corrective to self-serving ambitions that dominated ancient republics. Civic republicans believed that elite white men were the only ones disinterested enough to contribute to politics and participate in the public sphere. By contrast, evangelicals transformed disinterestedness from an intellectual attribute to an affective quality available to all persons who had undergone a conversion experience. Because evangelical republicans vacate individual interests and consider all persons to be dignified and worthy of benevolence, their approach to condemning race-based injustices does not accord with the autobiographical impulse of antebellum genres like the slave narrative. Instead, evangelical republicans like Haynes protest slavery and racism by disinterestedly focusing on the suffering that all Black Americans collectively experience.