Having Faith in the Political Order

Abstract

Having Faith in the Political Order Adam Jortner (bio) Jonathan J. Den Hartog. Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and the Religious Struggle in the New American Nation. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. xii + 262 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $49.50. Sara Georgini. Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xi + 284 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50. In the last four years of American political earthquakes, one unexpected tremor has been the realization that the fundamental Republican issues are not free trade and open markets, but rather the social and religious issues that many Americans had assumed were sideshows. It turns out that Republican officeholders and the rank and file are perfectly willing to accept tariffs and deficits in exchange for an embassy in Jerusalem, a Muslim ban, and restrictions on abortion. The change has confounded academics and pundits trying to make sense of the tectonic shifts of party realignment. Part of the problem is a limited intellectual framework with which to consider religion and politics. There is a vague sense among observers that religion functions as an addition to politics; policies receive support from various religious groups depending on how they affect that group. Religions, like any other civic faction, act in their own self-interest. There is a tendency to read this approach back into history (not without justification): Virginia Baptists supported Jefferson because he offered them disestablishment, evangelical Whigs opposed Sunday mails because it disrupted their worship, etc. There are other ways of looking at it, though. Religious groups may enter into politics as a religious duty in and of itself. Religious concerns here are not merely one of a bevy of interests with a seat at the table but rather preconditions for the entire system. Revolutionary theories of republicanism sometimes posited that republics rest on moral rather than political assumptions. In other words, politics and religion are not mere "influences" on each other; they are, for some believers, the same thing. Accepting this fact does [End Page 333] not make negotiating politics—then or now—easier, but it can open up new avenues for understanding as historians and perhaps for governing as citizens. Two recent books on this phenomenon in the revolutionary era attempt to do just that; both seek to discover how religion functioned in the American political order, even after it lost its constitutional role. Jonathan Den Hartog's Patriotism and Piety studies a host of prominent Christian Republicans—John Adams, John Jay, Timothy Dwight, Charles Pinckney, and Jedidiah Morse. This prosopographical approach should remind readers of Nathan Hatch, and indeed, Den Hartog describes his book as a history of the "Federalization of American Christianity" (p. 204). Patriotism and Piety traces the early republican case for vigorous, centralized support of Christianity, an effort Den Hartog notes was "a broad-based movement, composed of clergy and laity" (p. 3) and one that did not have a clear blueprint. While the freewheeling Methodists and Baptists mocked the traditional religious elites as defenders of old systems, Den Hartog insists that Federalist divines were creating new arrangements for church and state, rather than defending a stale and dying old order. Like their democratizing counterparts, Federalist Christians also had to find new languages, theologies, and organizations in the revolutionary age. Unlike their Baptist counterparts, political power became a central part of their belief system. Revolutionary providentialism merged with classical republican theory to produce this Federalized Christianity—which, Den Hartog notes, embraced Congregationalists, Unitarians, and evangelicals. If Jeffersonians thought the state protected worship by leaving the churches alone, Federalists countered that worship protected the state by nurturing republicanism. "From this Protestant morality would flow a republican virtue," they argued, "that would support the constitutional order" (p. 4). When the military and political fortunes of the American Revolution tottered in December 1776, for example, John Jay advised Americans to reform their morals: "When you have done these things, then rely upon the good providence of Almighty God for success" (p. 25). Jay sought to exclude Catholics from citizenship for much the same reason; the "damnable doctrine" (p. 24) that the church could absolve sins did not encourage virtue...