Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England

Abstract

Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England. By Charles P. Hanson. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Pp. x, 277. $35.00.) New England's Moral Legislator. Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817. By John Fitzmier. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 261. $39.95.) The topic of religion during the formative years of the Republic continues to draw the attention of historians. Both books reviewed here constitute efforts to incorporate religious history into the fabric of American history. Charles Hanson's Necessary Virtue evaluates the decline of antiCatholicism in conjunction with the French alliance of the American Revolution. Certainly the French alliance posed significant ideological problems to New Englanders, whose long-standing hostility to France and Catholicism led them to view the Quebec Act as a concession to the Antichrist. Once the Revolution began, however, many New Englanders were willing to dispense with their anti-Catholicism, or at least to modify its vehemence. Participants in the expedition to Quebec responded to the religion of the inhabitants with a mixture of curiosity and tolerance. More tellingly, after France joined the United States, New Englanders found ways to justify this arrangement by imaginative twists of logic to show that Catholicism per se really was not that dangerous. Although Hanson concedes that religious tolerance was not uniform or securely lodged by the close of the eighteenth century, Catholics, especially within the Boston area, could practice their religion without interference. Hanson further suggests that this willingness to relax their anti-Catholicism is evidence of a pragmatism among the revolutionaries that perhaps superceded their religious motivations. The central weakness of this book is that Hanson treats New England Congregational clergy as a unified body, which they most certainly were not. By the revolutionary era, New England Congregationalists were divided into liberals, who were well on the way to Unitarianism, moderate Calvinists, and Edwardsians. Among the Edwardsians, the Hopkinsians (or New Divinity) engaged in their own variations of Calvinist logic. Within these groups clergy were divided into smaller factions, with some people such as Timothy Dwight not fitting in any category. Except for a brief aside on Charles Chauncy's Universalism, Hanson bypasses these disputes, making no effort to place his sources within the context of their specific religious beliefs. Some of his characters, such as Henry Cumings, John Eliot, Jeremy Belknap, or James Dana, were later to emerge as leaning toward Unitarianism. Other men, such as the elder Joseph Buckminster, Samuel Cooper, or David Tappan, were Trinitarian but known for their moderation and toleration. Unfortunately, the Hopkinsian faction is largely excluded from this study; given the fact that Samuel Hopkins's Treatise on the Millennium (1792) argued that the Church of Rome epitomized Antichrist, it would have been interesting to see how these numerically significant ministers responded to the French alliance. Even if they only remained silent, that fact might have been worthy of notice. …