American Creation and the New England Orthodoxy

I need to update my blogroll, but while I dither about that I’ll say that one new blog I’ve been watching is American Creation, organized “to promote discussion, debate and insight into the religious aspects of America’s founding.” Nine different writers post on the blog, including two founders of the American Revolution Blog; Prof. Jonathan Rowe, known for his libertarian blogs; and Ray Soller, who researches the myths and realities of the first presidential oath.

The topics range from Caitlin GD Hopkins’s recent discussion of the evolving form of New England gravestones to Rowe’s quotation from Prof. Philip Munoz on the original understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment establishment clause, to take examples from only the past week. A fair number of posts involve debunking statements from members of the modern Christian right, but then there are a lot of those to debunk.

As I research New England’s Revolutionary experiences, it’s impossible to miss how much the region’s religious heritage played into the rebellion against civil authority. Most towns had only one place of worship, a Congregationalist (according to later terminology) meeting-house rooted in the English Puritan tradition. That system gave New England church members more practice in daily democracy than most other people in the world, as Lori Stokes discussed. In the 1600s the Puritans overthrew and executed one British king; while most of the eighteenth-century Empire viewed that English Civil War as a Bad Thing and Oliver Cromwell as a dangerous dictator, on Boston’s School Street his name and portrait adorned one of the most prominent taverns in town. The idea of limiting royal authority in favor of locally chosen policies came relatively easily to eighteenth-century New Englanders.

At the same time, that religious heritage created a society that was intolerant, discriminatory, and close-minded. Among the issues that burned hottest for the region’s Congregationalists was whether the Church of England would appoint a bishop for America (shown in the political cartoon above, courtesy of the Library of Congress) and whether Catholicism could be the established church in Québec. In sum, New England Whigs objected heartily to any concessions to other people’s religious worship. Bostonians still looked down on celebrations of Christmas but enjoyed the raucous, anti-Catholic Pope Night celebrations.

One of the biggest challenges for New England leaders was to win over and work with people of other beliefs. Samuel Adams was as close to a Puritan as one could find in the 1770s, but he managed to pull off that political feat, allying with the deist Dr. Thomas Young and the Anglican James Bowdoin in Boston, and convincing the First Continental Congress that he wasn’t as much of a bigot as they suspected. Even so, he and most of the people in the region (outside Rhode Island) sought to preserve the power of New England’s Congregationalist orthodoxy, including state support for the majority church, bans on theater, and rules against work and travel on Sundays. As a result, other regions took the lead in establishing religious freedom in the new U.S. of A. while New England became known for old-fashioned bigotry—until the Unitarian upheaval.

Those tensions, paradoxes, and changes are part of the Revolution’s history, and it’s good to see American Creation examine them from so many potential angles.