Uncivil rituals: Civil religion in New York City, 1780-1850

Middle-class and elite Protestants shaped civil society through their practice of what Tocqueville called the "mores" of American democracy, or rituals of values like civility and transparency. Freemasons, evangelicals, and liberal Protestants moved between denominational boundaries in order to cultivate the ritual life of civil society; and in associations like the Free School Society in antebellum New York City, they developed rituals of "civil religion." These rituals differentiated the work of church and state, but also established a religiously inflected civil society as the center of American democracy.;New York Freemasons after the American Revolution played a crucial role in establishing civil religion's distinction from Christianity by practicing secret rituals of initiation within their lodges that invoked the mythical origins of their fraternity. These initiations simultaneously bestowed civic and spiritual authority to the initiates, thus establishing Freemasonry as a necessary addition to the religious authority of civic leaders. After the 1820s, evangelicals replaced Freemasons' secrecy with transparency by staging associational conventions. Evangelicals dramatized their qualifications as leaders of moral reform by performing the procedural decorum of bureaucracy and thus demonstrated that civil religion compleimented the religious enthusiasm of revivals and church services but served a separate purpose of infusing democratic life with accountability.;Civil religion qualified evangelicals not only to lead, but also to aid those excluded from civil society. In an analysis of the American Seamen's Friend Society I show that society members developed rituals of benevolence, including writing sea hymns and joining sailors' prayer circles, which cultivated connoisseurship. Reformers' intimate knowledge of their subjects thus enabled them to speak on the sailor's behalf. Liberal Protestants also wanted to integrate the city's diversity into civil society, but instead of reforming the other, they tried to see through the other's eyes. Lydia Maria Child's work shows how they achieved this empathetic perspective through rituals of spectating and consumption, crystallizing in anti-slavery societies' Christmas fairs. Thus uncivil rituals, or the momentary inhabitation of incivility outside the boundaries of Protestant civil society, shaped the ritual life of civil religion.