‘God and Mammon’ religious protest and educational change in New England from the Revolution to the Gilded Age

Abstract

I hasten at the start to point out that I am not an ecclesiastical historian, but a historian of America who is interested in church history since the field in which I work - educational history - desperately needs to be studied in a wider historical context. Then, as now, educational ideas, and the functions people ascribe to education, cannot be dissociated from the political, social, and economic background. Of all the many factors bearing upon the evolution of education in New England from approximately the 1780s to the 1880s religion was in several ways of central importance. Most studies have been interested in the religious nature of the mass of colleges founded from 1780 to 1860. My interest here is entirely different. Although the rhetoric naturally changed in emphasis, it seems to me that right from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century religious forces in New England, but of course not just there, used schools and colleges as cardinal agencies in efforts to restrain secularism and a growing materialism.