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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2018
Northern Protestant leaders are commonly portrayed as uncritical scions of a cultural Obsession with “progress” that reached high tide in the two decades before the Civil War. Convinced that the United States held a divinely appointed commission to usher in Christ's millennial Kingdom on Earth, ministers supposedly sanctioned the nation's material and political development as integral to spiritual advancement. While they served their American flock a füll portion of Christian moralism to sustain this collective destiny, only a few renegade naysayers—such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne—remained sensible to human limitations and challenged a pervasive clerical frenzy of “progressivism, bravado and boasting.” Mainstream Protestantism's accommodative spirit, in other words, dulled its “critical edge” and rendered its message subservient to what one scholar calls a “nationwide ritual of progress.”
1. Marty, Martin, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1970;Google Scholar repr., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977), 123-25; Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), xv.Google Scholar
2. Marsden, George, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 50.Google Scholar For works with a varying emphasis on Protestantism's accommodative spirit, see, for example, Mead, Sidney, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 141-42;Google Scholar Stavely, Keith, Puritan Legacies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987),Google Scholar especially the introduction and Chapter 7; Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979),Google Scholar Chapter 7; Goen, C C, Broken Churches, Broken Nation (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985);Google Scholar Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, especially 86-88; and Tuveson, Ernest, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar Older studies include Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Willett, Clark, and Co., 1937);Google Scholar Troelstch, Ernst, Protestantism and Progress, trän. W. Montgomery (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986);Google Scholar and Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise ofCapitalism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926).Google Scholar
3. See, for example, Hatch, Nathan, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977);Google Scholar and Moorehead, James H., American Apocalypse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
4. Hatch, Nathan, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 14.Google Scholar
5. Wlebe, Robert, The Opening of American Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 257-90.Google Scholar
6. Hurst, James Willard, Law and the Condition ofFreedom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 7.Google Scholar
7. Christian Reflector (Boston), February 26, 1840. This Regulär Baptist publication later merged with the denomination's Christian Watchman to become the antebellum North's most prominent Baptist weekly in the 1850's.
8. “Progress,” Christian Observatory 3 (November 1849): 509-10.
9. The social purpose driving the new European thought, exemplified by Feuerbach, is discussed below.
10. Porter, Noah, “The New Infidelity,” New Englander 11 (May 1853): 277-95.Google Scholar Porter became a leading authority on Continental thought. Porter combined clerical duties with a professorship at Yale in 1846 (and later became president of Yale in 1871), and, together with Samuel Harris and Theodore Woolsey, he made the New Englander a major outlet for attacking the “new infidelity.” Occasionally the Journal acknowledged disagreement over defensive strategies. See “The Sphere of the Pulpit,” New Englander 15 (February 1857): 135-53.
11. Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the American Bible Society (New York, 1850), 119-20.
12. James, John Angell, “Spiritual Religion the Surest Preservative from Infidelity” in Lectures Delivered before the Young Men's Christian Association, 184849, vol. 4 (London, 1876);Google Scholar see also Pearson, Thomas, Infidelity: Its Aspects, Causes, and Agencies (London, 1853), 379-82.Google Scholar
13. See, for example, Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956);Google Scholar and Miller, “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in The Shaping of American Religion, vol. 1, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 322-68. The political jeremiad's prescriptive structure—central to Miller's explanation of Puritan religious purpose—typically affirmed a covenanted community's collective spiritual obligations, charted the human failures that invoked God's wrath, and demanded communal repentance to restore divine favor.
14. Stout, Harry, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
15. Works that emphasize the political jeremiad as a vehide for linking extreme nationalism and civic consciousness with the Protestant mission include Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad; Hatch, The Sacred Cause; and John Berens, Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640-1815 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978). By examining the changing focus and purpose of the jeremiad by mid-century, I find a much sharper Protestant conflict with the culture at midcentury, one driven more by core religious concerns than by ministers’ nationalistic zeal.
16. English divine Thomas Pearson already detected a shift toward the term “secularism” instead of “infidelity” in the 1850's. See Pearson, Infidelity, 593608. On the post-Civil War debate, see Marsden, Fundamentalism; Welch, Claude, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985);Google Scholar and Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941).Google Scholar
17. Marty, Martin, The Infidel (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1961);Google Scholar and Marty, Righteous Empire, 93,118-25.
18. Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the American Bible Society (New York: 1851), 106.
19. Porter, “The New Infidelity,” 282.
20. Harris, Samuel, “Infidelity: Its Erroneous Principles of Reasoning,” New Englander 12 (August 1854): 342-43.Google Scholar
21. Methodist Quarterly Review 8 (October 1856): 549.
22. Lutheran Observer (Baltimore), October 5,1849,159.
23. Biblioteca Sacra 8 (January 1854): 401.
24. Schmidt, Henry, ‘Infidelity: Its Metamorphosis, and Its Present Aspects,” Evangelical Review 5 (January 1854): 401.Google Scholar
25. Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Eliot, George (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).Google Scholar
26. Ludwig Feuerbach, cited in Karl Barth, “An Introductory Essay,” in Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, xi; Feuerbach, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in The Essence of Christianity, xliii.
27. Tiffany, Charles, “Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity,” Biblioteca Sacra 14 (October 1857): 751.Google Scholar
28. “Christian Doctrine the Sole Basis of Christian Morality,” Christian Review 7 (September 1842): 323,328-29.
29. “An Introduction,” Christian Review 14 (January 1849): 4-5.
30. Nevin, John, “Man's True Destiny,” Mercersburg Review (October 1853): 511, 519.Google Scholar Under the leadership of editor Nevin (1849-53) and Philip Schaff, the Review advocated the historic, Christocentric basis of faith. The Reviews sophisticated assaults on Protestantism's drift from the Reformation heritage sparked controversy and expanded readership beyond denominational boundaries.
31. Ibid., 510-11.
32. Goodrich, William, “The Preaching for the Age,” New Englander 12 (February 1854): 18–19.Google Scholar This recognition, at times, produced spirited correspondence, such as that between John McClintock, editor of Methodist Quarterly Review from 1848 to 1856, and Auguste Comte. As early as 1828, Disciples of Christ founder Alexander Campbell collaborated with Robert Owen in the public staging and subsequent Joint publication of their Debate on the Evidences of Christianity. On Comte and his exchanges with McClintlock, see Charles D. Cashdollar's fine study, The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 93-141.
33. Compare below to Harris, Samuel, “Dependence of Populär Progress on Christianity,” New Englander 5 (July 1847): 433-51.Google Scholar
34. Harris, Samuel, “Demands of Infidelity Satisfied by Christianity,” Biblioteca Sacra 13 (April 1856): 272,285.Google Scholar Under the direction of Andover's “New School” theologians, the professional quarterly defended Congregational orthodoxy and sparred regularly with “Old School” rivals over Calvinist doctrine.
35. Ibid., 285,306.
36. Ibid., 285.
37. Ibid., 294-95,313.
38. Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, ‘The Danger of Separating Piety from Philanthropy,” New Englander 13 (August 1855): 331,337.Google Scholar
39. Ibid., 329,331.
40. Ibid., 334.
41. Ibid., 338.
42. Ibid., 340-41.
43. Wayland, Francis, “The Doctrine of Expediency,” Biblioteca Sacra 1 (1843): 302.Google Scholar This piece departs from the innocuous wrist-slapping that characterized his 1837 treatise on American material excess (The Moral Law of AccumulaHon). It adumbrates Wayland's growing conviction that American materialism and the unprecedented “perfect freedom of the individual” were practically dedaring faith's irrelevance. Wayland remained committed to Whig principles, abolitionism, and educational reform in the 1850's, but his religious jeremiads scolded believers for confounding temporal aims with the transcendent, Spiritual mission of Protestantism. This epitome of academe (from whom came such works as Elements of Moral Science and Elements of Political Economy) declared “preaching” superior to “teaching,” extolled the Baptists’ populist roots, and distinguished sharply between Spiritual and material progress. “The kingdom of Christ,” Wayland often insisted, “is extended as the number of true believers is increased …, and in no other manner” See Wayland, “The Church of Christ” in Salvation by Christ (Boston, 1859), 324-25. See also Wayland, Sermons to the Churches (New York, 1858); Wayland, “The Apostolic Ministry,” (Rochester, 1853); Wayland, “Report to the American Baptist Missionary Union,” Baptist Missionary Magazine 34 (July 1854): 218-26; and Francis and Wayland, L. L., AMemoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Wayland, vol. 2 (Boston, 1867), 186-90.Google Scholar For a view that Stresses Wayland's civic role as an “academic moralist,” see Meyer, D. H., The Instructed Conscience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
44. Wayland, “The Doctrine of Expediency,” 325-28.
45. Hatch, The Sacred Cause.
46. Daniel G. Corey, “History of the Bible,” n.d., Record Group 1217, American Baptist Historical Society, Rochester, New York.
47. John Santee, “Signs of the Times,” Mercersburg Review 7 (July 1853): 293.
48. Bode, John, The American Lyceum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 78;Google Scholar Wiebe, Opening of American Society, 166.
49. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:328-29.
50. Norton, Wesley, Religious Newspapers of the Old Northwest to 1861 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977);Google Scholar Richards, Leonard L., Gentlemen ofProperty and Standing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 71–72 Google Scholar. Richards emphasizes the significance of this print “revolution” for the abolitionist movement.
51. Ulrich, John, “Signs of the Times,” Evangelical Review 7 January 1853): 350-53.Google Scholar The author is William Cowper.
52. Bode, The American Lyceum, 12.
53. Ibid., 185-200.
54. Ibid., 225-28.
55. Emerson cited in Mead, David, Yankee Eloquence in the Midzvest (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), 17.Google Scholar On liberal and Unitarian ministers’ exploitation of lyceums and the populär press, see Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 82–87,227-56.Google Scholar Douglas emphasizes the cultural critique of the northeastern liberal and Unitarian dergy's message as derivative of their own self-inflicted cultural marginalization. Substantive, hard-edged religious combat with the culture, according to Douglas, disintegrated in tandem with Calvinism and yielded a tendentious literary alliance of ministers and female writers whose innocuous, sentimentalized message ironically reinforced commercial, capitalist culture.
56. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 29-30. See also Cayton, Mary Kupiec, “The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 92 (June 1987): 597-620.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
57. Donald Scotf s essay on the lyceum explains its role in shaping a common, democratic forum for debate. Scott, however, minimizes Protestant anxiety toward the democratization of mind represented by the movement. See Scott, 'The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 791-809.
58. Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the American Bible Society, 120-21; reprinted in Lutheran Observer, August 29,1851.
59. “Circular Letter,” Minutes of the Ontario Baptist Association, September 25,1851, American Baptist Historical Society, Rochester, New York, 12-13, 16. Nathan Hatch argues that an optimistic, populist thrust put Protestants on the cutting edge of new mass communication techniques in the opening decades of the nineteenth Century. I am interested here in the more uncertain and critical Protestant assessment of democratic discourse that appeared by mid-century, one generated by shared religious anxieties and consequently evident among New England Congregationalists as well as western New York Baptists. See Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 125-61.
60. On the Forty-eighters’ experience and influence in the United States, see Zucker, A. E., ed., The Forty-eighters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950).Google Scholar
61. Ulrich, “Signs of the Times” 350-53.
62. Simeon Harkey, sermon to the General Synod (Pittsburgh, 1859), 18.
63. Lutheran Observer, September 28,1849,156.
64. Zucker, ed., The Forty-eighters, 60-64,161-62.
65. “The Revolutions of 1848,” Methodist Quarterly Review 8 (October 1848): 547.
66. Alexander, James, “Our Modern Unbelief,” in Alexander, Discourses on Common Topics of Christian Faith and Practice (New York, 1858), 19–20.Google Scholar Alexander cited the sermons as not “occasional” but part of the “routine” of the pulpit ministry.
67. Ibid., 24,40-43.
68. Ibid., 17.
69. Christian Secretary (Hartford), October 6,1843.
70. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Celestial Railroad,” in Mosses from an Old Manse (Boston, 1884), 213,224-26,219.Google Scholar
71. Christian Secretary, March 3,1843.
72. New Englander 5 (January 1847): 56.
73. In revising some of his earlier conclusions, Timothy L. Smith suggests that recent “chauvinistic” interpretations have pushed antebellum religion's alliance with the larger culture's material agenda beyond what the evidence will bear. See Smith, Afterword to Revivalism and Social Reform, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); see also Smith, “Righteousness and Hope: Christian Holiness and the Millennial Vision in America, 1800-1900,” American Quarterly 31 (Spring 1979): 21-45.