The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self

Abstract

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self Gideon Mailer (bio) Evan Haefeli, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2021. viii + 383 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Twenty years ago, while I was studying at Cambridge University, my accommodation overlooked a college chapel that had once been a victim of Puritan iconoclasm. The chapel of Peterhouse was consecrated in 1633 by supporters of Archbishop William Laud and his Beauty of Holiness movement. Unsurprisingly, its quirky Renaissance-Gothic synthesis did not appeal to the thousands of Parliamentary troops who were quartered in Cambridge during the English Civil Wars, nor the newly appointed "Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition" for the Eastern Association, William Dowsing (1596–1668). Though Dowsing succeeded in removing statues of angels and cherubs from the chapel in 1643, High-Church-leaning Peterhouse fellows managed to hide the Flemish stained-glass panel that depicted Rubens's Le Coup de Lance, which they reinstalled after the restoration of the Stuart royal line in 1660.1 Ten years after gazing at that chapel roof, during my two-day campus interview for a job at the University of Minnesota, I included its iconoclastic story in my response to a question from a search committee member. I had been discussing how the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish parliaments had created a bi-confessional British state, which provided a model of jurisdictional pluralism for dissenting Protestants in North America. But the professor asked me to rewind one century to consider how the 1603 Regal Union between the English and Scottish monarchies might also help us to understand the origins of religious pluralism in colonial North America and the nascent United States. I used the chapel story to illustrate a warning that I offered to students: be careful mining seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish history for the disestablishmentarian roots of British imperial life and American religious pluralism, or even the notion that multiple religious establishments might cohere within a single political union. As demonstrated by the deployment of authority by William Dowsing, iconoclastic Puritans shared a tendency for [End Page 7] centralized statecraft and bureaucratic control with their Laudian adversaries, even as they sought to devolve some forms of power to local Congregational churches. Those who opposed the nature of the Anglican establishment of religion did not necessarily repudiate public and civic support for religious authority in principle, nor hold tightly to grand theories of religious pluralism. Following my Peterhouse vignette, therefore, I suggested that civic leaders in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia were likely to have demonstrated similar ambiguities in their approach to religious pluralism during the foundational period of their colonies. But I was not able to support my assertion with any historiographical reference. I certainly raised a knowing eyebrow as I played an audio recording of President Ronald Reagan's speeches from the Oval Office, which claimed that the liberty of religious conscience had spearheaded the American Founding during the 1770s and the destruction of "Godless communism" during the 1980s; and that those successes were rooted in the work of pilgrims to America such as the "early freedom man" and Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop.2 Yet I could not yet point to any Americanist who had examined conceptual similarities between the work of mainland English leaders and the constrained approach to religious pluralism among settler elites in Anglican Virginia, Puritan New England, or Catholic Maryland during the first half of the seventeenth century. Instead, I quickly turned to the more familiar historiographical terrain of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the contingency of Lockean contractual theory, and their influence on the freedoms enjoyed by dissenting Protestants in British North America. Patriots eventually complained that the British Kingin-Parliament had afforded too many religious liberties to French-speaking Catholics in the territory of Quebec, which included Indigenous lands in present-day Minnesota. Notwithstanding the move towards disestablishment in the nascent United States, I finished with a flourish, some Patriots looked back to the Glorious Revolution as they opposed London for expanding religious pluralism in the British imperial realm.3 If I had had recourse to Evan...