Sin, Repentance, and Confession in Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Polemics

Abstract

This chapter describes the American Protestant reactions to the Catholic understanding of sacramental confession. That reaction is analyzed within the context of the heritage of the Protestant Reformation’s understandings of sin, repentance, and confession. The chapter demonstrates how the Protestant Episcopal Church in the late eighteenth century and American Lutherans in the early nineteenth century transformed the inherited Anglican and Lutheran traditions on the confession of sins to a priest or pastor. In the nineteenth century, sacramental confession became a central polemic issue, because for American Protestants that doctrine seemed to violate the Protestant understanding of justification by faith alone. The Protestant polemic was based on biblical, theological, legal, disciplinary, and historical issues. But, in some cases, the polemic made sensational charges on the immoral and evil political and social consequences of the practice of sacramental confession. Salacious accounts of confessional practice became a part of the polemical record.