A Nation Under God: The Politics of Moral Reasoning in New England, 1776--1850

From 1776 to 1850, New England's religious believers, across the religious spectrum, thought that the American republic depended not merely on religion, but on correct religion. A political and intellectual history of early national religion, this dissertation maintains that religionists struggled to construct "a nation under God" in accordance with competing ideologies of moral reasoning grounded in conflicting interpretations of God's will. Formative disputes over the social and political impact of the content of belief were centered on the rise of liberal rationalism, the spread of belief in universal salvation, the promotion of traditional supernaturalism, the meaning of conversion in the context of religious enthusiasm, and the emergence of a broad sense of evangelical identity. The imperatives of individual and national salvation demanded a relationship between religion and the state in which religious truth could prevail and religious error be combated. By situating the key contours of disestablishment, sabbatarianism, and antislavery amidst the conflicts of moral reasoning that linked them, this dissertation argues that New Englanders transformed an inherited ideology of state-supported religion into the ideology of a "religion-supported state." Rather than embodying a sudden departure from establishmentarianism to voluntarism, the religion-supported state preserved and amplified the concern over religious truth that underwrote state-supported religion, adapting voluntary civic and political mechanisms to induce the state to act in accordance with God's will. Disestablishmentarians and erstwhile establishmentarians alike articulated this ideology, expecting to leverage the collective will of religious believers into political influence. Debates over disestablishment raised an enduring question: not whether, but how religion and the state should interact. Voluntary moral associations, exemplified in sabbatarianism, arose parallel to state-supported religion. Only by the 1830s was state-supported religion almost universally depicted as detrimental to religious truth. Antislavery represented the culmination of the idea that the nation must be shaped according to a proper understanding of God's will. Disestablishment, sabbatarianism, and antislavery were fundamentally battles over the politics of moral reasoning, intended to decide whose interpretation of religious truth would prevail in the nation.