The Relationship Between Religion and Politics from the Colonial Period to Reconstruction

The Relationship Between Religion and Politics from the Colonial Period to Reconstruction

Introduction

In America, as throughout the world, the intersection between religion and politics has always occurred at several levels. First thoughts on the subject often go instinctively to major crises of church and state -- like the struggle between the Maccabees and the Romans in the second century BC, Constantine's battle to recognize Christianity in the early fourth century, the appeal in 1077 by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII in the snow at Canossa, the state-sponsored persecution of Protestants by Catholic regimes and Catholics by Protestant regimes in the sixteenth century, Roger Williams' protest against the early government of Massachusetts, and the resistance of the confessing German church to Hitler. Or we may think of more modern conflicts like those before the Supreme Court over prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. (1) At this level the issue is the exercise of authority between the institutions of government and the structures of religion. But such matters, which so often produce spectacular conflicts, are far from the whole story.

A second range of connections between religion and politics concerns more mundane political behavior. Especially in the Western democracies, political pundits and academic specialists have tried to fathom the relationship between religious beliefs, practices, and associations, on the one hand, and partisanship, voting, and political activity, on the other.(2)

Discussion

Religion in America, we like to believe, is not only freer than in Europe and the rest of the world, but has always been so -- or nearly always. One of the most enduring American myths -- I intend nothing pejorative by this term, which I use in the anthropological sense of a body of folklore or a series of stories that organizes the way a particular culture tries to understand the world -- remains the belief that this country was peopled largely by settlers fleeing religious persecution and yearning for the opportunity to worship openly and without fear. It was never that simple.(3) At one level even popular culture provides a corrective in the equally persistent stereotype of the Puritan as cold, hard, bigoted, unimaginative, humorless -- terrified by human sexuality and the enemy of all fun. "The Puritans hated bearbaiting," Thomas Babington Macaulay once remarked, "not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."(4) American undergraduates still respond warmly to this quotation. Like their elders, they prefer to believe both clichés about religion in early America.

Religion during the American Revolution responded flexibly to a shifting course of events, lending its authoritative vocabulary to legitimate an essentially secular process of change. On the other hand, however, ideological change occurred within a symbolic structure largely defined by the Calvinist experiential approach to salvation and providential understanding of the collective experience of God's people on earth. What happened in the Revolutionary period was that the conflict with Britain raised unusually ...