Zephaniah Swift and Connecticut's Standing Order: Skepticism, Conservatism, and Religious Liberty in the Early Republic

Abstract

SHE American ambivalence about the proper relationship between church and state, an ambivalence so marked and longstanding that, in part, it serves to define the national character, has its roots in the contradictions of the Revolutionary generation. An apparently incongruous alliance of rationalists and pietists in the Revolutionary movement provided the impetus for abolishing state religious establishments in the south. After disestablishment, however, a pattern of multiple establishment, whereby public support was provided for a number of religions, was also widely practiced, even into the early years of the republic. In the decades following the Revolution the anomalous alliance between rationalists and pietists unraveled as new alignments opened avenues of power in a more pluralistic political culture. Partisan politics no less than philosophical and religious differences shaped people's understanding of church and state issues. Part of that story is well known. In the 1790s pietists and their orthodox old light opponents, fearing widespread infidelity, joined forces against rationalists to build a Christian America. Less noted are the carefully reasoned decisions of rationalists of deist and anticlerical views, some New England judges, who defended the surviving church establishments. For such judges of conservative politics and liberal religion, church-state issues were part of a wider context of conflicting views on political culture and social order. No less important, as jurists they discussed the relationship between religion and public order within the context of a wider discourse on the nature