No Bishop, No King, No Millennial Republic

Abstract

No Bishop, No King, No Millennial Republic A. G. Roeber (bio) Mark Y. Hanley. Beyond a Christian Commonwealth: The Protestant Quarrel with the American Republic, 1830–60. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. x 210 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds. Religion in a Revolutionary Age. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1994. xvii 350 pp. Notes and index. $39.50. Historians of Protestantism in what became the United States have long assumed that, sooner or later, religion drove politics. British observers in the 1770s believed, as do some British historians today, that the American Revolution was the work of Congregational and Presbyterian rascals whose machinations merely echoed the nonconformist cry, “No bishop, no king” of their forebears. Thus, patriots drew their inspiration from the evangelicals who cheered on the revival of international Protestantism that had included George Whitefield’s transatlantic tours. Doubting specialists have pointed out, with limited success, that all opponents of evangelicalism did not become Loyalists, and that most New and Old Light/Side protagonists had departed for judgment by the time of the Imperial Crisis. The suspicion remains deeply rooted, nonetheless, that a millennial marriage of republican politics and evangelical religion came to dominate the Protestant ethos of post-Revolutionary America. Patricia Bonomi’s subtle reworking of this idea in Under the Cope of Heaven (1986) provided a refined affirmation of the Revolution’s religious roots. The triumph of revolutionary dissent constitutes a real — not an imaginary — case of American exceptionalism for Bonomi, a theme she reiterates in her essay in the Hoffman-Albert collection. Her singular contribution has been to expand the horizons of historians seeking to understand eighteenth-century religion in North America beyond the earlier New England focus. Bonomi provided a synthetic and cosmopolitan perspective anchored in the proper transatlantic eighteenth-century Christian context. Whatever their disagreements, scholars now concur that this transatlantic perspective did inform the overwhelmingly Protestant ethos in which the Revolution occurred. 1 [End Page 202] Jon Butler’s alternative scenario in Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990) concurs with Bonomi’s transatlantic contextual argument, but dramatically departs from it to contend that the Revolution was a “profoundly secular event” (p. 90). Butler continues to advance (again, in an essay in the Hoffman-Albert collection) a vision of weak, imported European Protestantism in North America. Held up only by bootlegged authoritarian institutions, Euro-Protestants crushed alternative “religions” both Native American and African. The legitimacy of Euro-Protestant institutions and beliefs was called into question by a secular Enlightenment-inspired Revolution Butler sees hijacked by evangelical pirates in the early nineteenth century. That century belonged to his denizens of various sectarian and visionary Protestant hothouses. Only by the Civil War did a triumphant “mainstream” evangelical religion emerge as handmaiden to bourgeois, capitalist society. Whatever the suasive power of these two models, neither makes much room for critical distance from emerging American political culture within an increasingly parochial North American Protestantism. In the hands of the incautious, a supposed happy marriage of evangelicalism and republican politics has produced two equally bizarre images of early-nineteenth-century American Protestantism, each in its own way hostage to a millennialist theme. Either early nineteenth-century capitalist thugs emerge, the Whiggish builders of “benevolent empire” bent on patriarchal political, economic, and social dominance of both churches and states. Or, alternatively, unpleasant evangelical white males who as vulgar Jacksonians plundered environment, women and children, Native Americans, African-Americans, and Catholic immigrants remained unswayed in conscience by any critical theological distance from the political and social free-for-all created by the Revolution. Only the most marginalized, self-proclaimed prophets or persecuted emerge with a shred of moral integrity in this literature. The essays on religion and Revolution begin to question the adequacy of these scenarios. Some of the authors reflect a predictable fascination with the tried and true — evangelical revivals, New England women, slavery and African-American religion, the supposed alienation of working-class believers from mere bourgeois conformity to a Protestant ethos. Paul Conkin’s lonely piece on Priestley and Jefferson reminds that not everyone was enamored of...