The Fall of the Massachusetts Standing Order and the Rise of the Boston Brahmins

Abstract

Field's social history of aims to demystify the life of the mind, undermining the notion, held by the intellectuals themselves or by the historians who write about them, that these thinkers and writers were heroically engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth (p. 7). Ideas were important to these clergymen, Field concedes. However, what we need in order to better understand the transformation of New England in the early Republic, he contends, is not another study of theology, ideology, ideas, and mentalite, but analysis of a more powerful motive force: the basic self-interests of clergymen as members of a thinking class (p. 3). From this premise Field tells two intertwined stories about religious and intellectual life in Massachusetts between 1780 and 1833. The crisis of the Standing Order in his title refers to the bifurcation of Congregationalism, which finally led to its disestablishment in 1833 (Massachusetts was the last of the former colonies to separate church and state). As Unitarian and Trinitarian Congregationalists parted company, clergymen on both sides also reconstituted the cultural authority Field mentions in his subtitle. Theologically liberal Unitarians, clustered mostly around Boston, replaced state sanction with the patronage of elite merchants and became genteel apostles of what Field describes as an indigenous secular high culture (p. 12). Conservative Calvinists serving poorer congregations reluctantly relinquished tax funding, embraced religious voluntarism, and concentrated on evangelical revivalism and reform.