'No religion, but social': Religious societies, social religion, and the creation of the social category in England and America, 1580--1750

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Christians in England who were impatient with the pace of reform on the national level established a new associative religious practice to promote the further reformation of individuals on the local level. This practice, which came to be known as religious conference, helped to reshape religion in seventeenth-century England and North America, as participation in religious conference came to be seen as an integral part of proper Christian piety. At first, the participants in religious conference did not possess an adequate vocabulary precisely and consistently to identify their new associative practice. By the 1670s, however, they had adopted an explicitly social vocabulary to describe what they now called "religious society.";This dissertation argues that the practices and discourses of the early modern religious societies helped to reconfigure the public and private spheres, creating in the process a new category of human experience: the social. The first part of this dissertation examines journals and diaries that document the associative practices of the religious conferences and religious societies. Borrowing an analytic vocabulary from the literary scholar Michael McKeon, it argues that the early seventeenth-century practice of religious conference was tacitly social; it prefigured the later social category but lacked the explicitly social vocabulary of the latter. The practice of religious conference was so thoroughly adopted by English Puritans and New England Congregationalists that it came to be seen as a necessary component of a truly pious life. The second part argues that the religious conferences and religious societies exceeded the accepted definitions of private religious gatherings and incited a debate over what constituted a public religious assembly. The language used by advocates of the religious conferences and religious societies to describe and prescribe associative religious practices, moreover, constructed those practices as explicitly social. The treatises and sermons thus reveal the existence and the nature of an explicitly social category and, at the same moment, an explicit conceptualization of "social religion." The social category is therefore not timeless and universal but emerged at a specific historical moment, the late seventeenth century.