Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History by Katherine Carté

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History by Katherine Carté Michael Baysa Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021) The myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation continues to haunt contemporary political discourse and scholarship on the American founding. Historians have challenged and complicated these narratives in numerous ways, whether by tracking the varieties of Christianities that disprove any sense of a singular religion under which the nation was founded or by complicating the religious affiliations of influential figures who made decisions on the colonies’ stances on religious liberty and disestablishment. One tension that runs throughout, however, is the unclear relationship between theological rhetoric in the public sphere, the social upheavals that led to revolution, and the emergence of distinctly American institutions. In Religion and the American Revolution, Katherine Carté offers one important framework for understanding the connection between these forces by exploring how protestant power operates through networks and institutions. In eight chapters, the text charts a history of the American Revolution that begins with the seventeenth-century contexts of British policies that governed religious communities and ends at the turn of the nineteenth century as the newly founded United States grappled with the ways the American Revolution disrupted transatlantic religious networks. It contributes to debates about the [End Page 135] religiosity or secularity of America’s founding moments by highlighting the ways protestant figures and institutions participated in, rather than having necessarily influenced, broader British imperial initiatives. Instead of arguing that religious rhetoric fueled anti-British sentiments, the book contends that “the religious institutions and networks that spanned the distant parts of Britain’s empire had not, over the course of the 1760s, become tools in the organization of protests the way that colonial assemblies and committees of correspondence had” (167). Likewise, against narratives that assert the contributions of religious rhetoric to the ideological foundations for the earliest American political and legal institutions, Carté argues, “The ideal of national American religion that was advocated from the public pulpit stood apart from the structures of institutional protestantism, and its aspirational pronouncements lacked any clearly defined connection to the new national government” (205). In other words, public protestantism was contemporaneous with, shaped by, and helped spread revolution, but published religious rhetoric did not necessarily lead to colonists’ dissent or dissatisfaction with Great Britain. Religion and the American Revolution’s primary historiographical intervention lies in the ways it extends the geographies of religion in the founding of America to include Great Britain’s own complicated church and state arrangement. This mixed establishment, which Carté calls British “imperial protestantism,” is defined as “the system of government privilege, protestant institutions, and social networks that made Britain’s empire and its religion protestant” (5). It was protestant not because “imperial leaders based their policies on religious goals” but rather because “Britain’s religious leaders, those who guided its protestant institutions, societies, and networks, embraced the stability and expansion of the empire as their best vessel through which to ensure a thriving protestant world” (81). Central to this narrative is a rendering of protestantism as a kind of “scaffolding” whereby the British empire’s governance of religion enabled charitable societies, missionary organizations, and clergymen to rally across theological difference in order to buttress the state’s own power. The architectural metaphor of “scaffolding” works because it traces the ways protestant power is enacted discursively through networks of ministers, missionaries, and institutions— in other words, it is dynamic, contingent, complex, and fragile without being a cause or necessity. Such ways of thinking about the protestant quality of United States law, politics, and governance should be familiar to scholars of American religion studying later periods, but Carté opens room for scholars to consider how the new nation may have inherited the more formalized aspects of protestant imperialisms from British precedents. As Carté argues, the United States “was formed—abruptly and violently—out of another empire that was also [End Page 136] coded as religious, that was also seen by its leaders, religious and political, as promoting God’s plan in a sacred history” (8). As a history of Anglo...