John Quincy Adams at Prayer

Abstract

At seventy-three years old, John Quincy Adams embarked on a winter lecture tour to share his views “On Faith” and drew on his “intercourse with the world” to describe the “many liberal minded and intelligent persons—almost persuaded to become Christians” whom he had met. So powerful was Adams's religious message that when his youngest son came across the manuscript years later, he simply docketed it: “Two sermons/JQA.” The speech, delivered from Boston to Salem and Hartford to Brooklyn—but never printed—laid out his decades of seeking and the formulation of Adams's own theology. Overall, Adams came to believe that man's unity of faith, hope, and charity could defeat earthly ills and clarify choices in the early republic's burgeoning religious marketplace. “Faith must have its bounds, and perhaps the most difficult and delicate question in morals is to define them clearly,” Adams said, praising the American government's nonintervention in forming official articles of faith. “But allow me to say that this unbounded freedom of religious faith, far from absolving any individual from the obligation of believing, does but impose it upon them, with a tenfold force.” This insight was especially true of Adams's own religious history. Therefore this essay offers a reintroduction to America's sixth president based on the diverse circles of prayer that he moved through, and the religious poetics that he created to narrate that pilgrimage. It ends with a glimpse of the curious afterlife that American religious culture assigned to him.