The founding fathers and the place of religion in America

Abstract

The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. By Frank Lambert. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 328. Cloth, $29.95.)Frank Lambert's study of in the experimental years of early America does not so much break new ground as provide a useful synthesis of existing opinion on an important and complex subject. His main argument is that, after a lengthy period when European settlers tried to replicate the religious patterns of the old world, the founders of the new United States gave up such efforts in favor of an unregulated system: rather than designing a church-state framework of their own, [they] endorsed the emerging free marketplace of religion (8). In setting out this argument, Lambert makes some use of the rational choice theories of sociologists like Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (e.g., The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy [1993]), but most of his evidence is historical, and most of his concern is to chart the changing expectations and attitudes of settlers and citizens in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A special strength is his use of what Adam Smith wrote in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) about church-state relations. Smith's great treatise on political economy analyzed European church life as a series of self-contained monopolies, but then set out a theoretical case for why competition among churches would benefit in the same way that competition in the marketplace benefits the economy. When the book goes further to show how the colonies' ministers of established churches worried about trade-because of how it drew parishioners into a broad Atlantic world unencumbered by the clerical oversight of any one church-Lambert underscores the close fit between Smith's economic theories and colonial religious practice. Lambert's wisdom in using Smith to describe the emerging unregulated religious life of the United States is a highlight of the book.As might be expected from the author of major studies on George Whitefield (Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 [1994]) and colonial revivals of (Inventing the Great [1999]), Lambert's most effective chapters detail the effect of the revivals in loosening religious monopolies inherited from the old world and preparing the way for the much freer religious atmosphere of the revolutionary era. The stories have been told before, but Lambert is still helpful on how itinerancy, the charismatic persona of Whitefield, and the Awakening's egalitarian ideal of church life all undermined the long-standing assumption that there should be only one church in each place. Although it is too sweeping to assert that with the arrival of George Whitefield in 1739, parish boundaries crumbled all over the colonies (135), Lambert is nonetheless on solid ground as he charts the broadly transformative effects of the Awakening on church practice as well as on personal spirituality.Much of the book rehearses the well-known stories of Puritan establishments in New England, the exceptional character of Roger Williams's experiment in Rhode Island, the countervailing Anglican establishments in the southern colonies, William Penn's deliberate move toward religious freedom in his colony, and the inadvertent but influential drift toward religious pluralism in the middle colonies. Lambert also canvasses the vicissitudes of colonial church-state practice, including New England's new charter of 1692 (which resulted in the irony of tighter royal control undermining monolithic ecclesiastical control) and of the Penn family's trials in Pennsylvania (which, at least for many observers on both sides of the Atlantic, showed why giving up religious establishments was such a bad idea). …