Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation

Abstract

AMONG historians of the last two decades it has become standard to classify the post-Revolutionary generation of religious humanitarians as conservative and self-serving. Fearful of rising currents of secularism and egalitarianism in the new nation, these churchmen, so many students would have it, mounted a campaign of religious evangelism and created a system of local and national religious and benevolent societies in order to preserve their own declining status and to regain their earlier colonial position as the moral arbiters of American society. Such a conclusion about the nature of religious humanitarianism was first advanced in 1954 by John R. Bodo and Charles C. Cole. Charles I. Foster and Clifford S. Griffin offered in 1960 important variations on the main theme. Each approached the subject from a different perspective. While Bodo and Cole organized their studies around individual representatives from the clergy and focused on sermons as their sources, Foster and Griffin centered on both ministerial and lay members of the interdenominational societies and focused on the societies' reports. Yet all agreed that when these religious humanitarians founded Bible and tract societies, or promoted temperance and Sabbath observance, or tried to aid the urban poor, what they wanted in reality was to gain power over society for their own conservative, if not reactionary, ends. It was the desire for social control, not improvement, which lay behind their seemingly benevolent schemes., Moreover, it has recently been customary to stress the differences rather than