Thomas Kidd presents us with a picture of American colonial activity as 'popular morality' in the face of general British unlawfulness and tyranny. The vulgar and immoral actions of the British Empire were reflective of what minister Stephen Johnson would call "a most venal, covetous and arbitrary spirit of unlawful ambition" (102).

How was America different, in the minds of its inhabitants, from the atrocity of Britain?

Certainly, some colonists believed that the fight for freedom in itself had been allowed by the Almighty, as Kidd notes, "Americans became convinced both that God permitted the conflict because of Americans' immorality and that the trouble also sprang from deep-seated corruption in the British government" (103).

At what point did enough become enough, so to speak, for the colonists?

It would seem that Kidd points to the Stamp Act of 1765, alongside the Intolerable Acts of 1774, in looking for the straw that broke the camel's back. 

God and Money

In the introduction to his book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution Thomas S. Kidd asserts that “at the time of the founding of the United States, deists and evangelicals (and the range of believers in between) united around principles of religious freedom that were key to the success of the [American] Revolution”. Included in these principles, which according to Kidd “connected far-flung and widely varied Americans” are the ideas that churches should not receive financial support from the government and that virtue is necessary to sustain a Republic.

Kidd’s Chapter 9 explores the disestablishment of America’s State churches. Kidd describes the process by which the funding of churches, primarily those of Congregationalist and Anglican denomination, through the assessment of taxes was discontinued. In reading Kidd’s Chapter 9 I was surprised to learn the extent to which churches of particular denominations were supported by taxes prior to the American Revolution and in the early days of the American republic. Kidd describes how the separation of church and state was championed by both evangelical preachers and deist politicians, supporting his assertion that “far-flung and widely varied Americans” during the revolutionary period agreed that churches should not receive financial support from the government. But if religious institutions are so important to maintaining virtue, which in turn is important to upholding a fine-functioning democracy, as Kidd argues throughout the book, then would an imperiled democracy imply some adjustment to the institutional boundaries of religion and government in America?

A Virtuous Republic

I was particularly interested in Thomas Kidd’s discussion of how the leaders of the Revolution saw virtue as playing an integral role in the success of the new republic.  Religious rhetoric was an important way of rallying support around patriotic causes, but, even more than that, it was an essential building block of the new government.  This relationship worked both ways: republicanism was the most virtuous form of government, but it also required virtue to work.  Without a virtuous citizenry, despotism would reign.  This intertwining of republicanism and virtue persisted past the Revolution itself; Kidd shows how it was a major feature of Alexis de Tocqueville’s commentary on America. 

However, what I found most interesting was the complex relationship between religion and virtue.  If virtue is defined in its relationship to the public, does it matter what people believed privately?  Kidd points out that Tocqueville himself was “utterly pragmatic about the role of religion in society, writing that it did not matter whether a society accepted the true religion, as long as it accepted a publicly useful one.”  With this in mind, was religion an important motivating factor for those who fought for independence, or was it more of a universal language—a way for Americans to communicate, understand each other, and imbue their cause with meaning?  For example, Kidd cites Benjamin Rush, a Patriot from Philadelphia, who states that , “He would prefer that America’s youth learn the principles of Islam or Confucianism than learn no religion at all.”  Though Rush may have been exaggerating for effect, I think his statement forces us to look at whether it was religious beliefs or the more cultural dimensions of religion that motivated colonists.

In other words, Kidd focuses on the public usefulness of religion.  Does this mean that all religion is public?  Is there a private dimension to religion?  And, if so, does this private dimension just not matter when it comes to politics?

Brother Bear.

According to Kidd an Anglican from Wales named Ewer inaccurately spoke about the colonists saying that "in the American wilderness they had lost faith and morality, living like 'infidels and barbarians'" Ewer's statement probably spoke truth, at least in that he thought it was true, if nothing else. Ewer's statement leads me to a couple different questions: My first question is very similar to Josh's question. Essentially, how 'religious' was this war for the British? Ewer, at least, seems to be speaking from a religious viewpoint, but Kidd discredits his statement as inaccurate, and we don't have many examples within God of Liberty about the Brit's religious backing for the war.  

My second question deals with the texts we read a few weeks ago about the Great Awakening's influence on the Revolution. Was the Great Awakening influenced at all by American Indian religions? Did the emphasis on the Holy Spirit that came about during the Great Awakening come from the Indians emphasis on the spirituality of life?

Also, I thought this article was kind of funny and relevant:

http://www.nashville.com/news/national-news/its-time-for-americans-to-accept-that-their-revolution-was-a-failure-and-renounce-it

Heritics of the New World Unite!

I found chapter 4 to be particularly interesting.  In it Kidd ties evangelicalism to the beginnings of revolution.  One aspect of Kidd’s argument can be extrapolated throughout American history:  the “free-market” of religious economy.  In response to being called a heretic by an established church, the plaintiff has no recourse but to respond in kind and appeal to a higher judge: God.  Once all are heretics no one has authority.   A state sponsored established church had traditionally used the states sword as means to silence dissent and present it as divine intercession.  The state was an agent of God’s authority.  Evangelicalism added an additional source of authority, the people.  By leaving established churches and spreading new and unique ideas of Christianity the itinerant preacher’s converts where proof of their righteousness.  These new Christians’ growth validated their existence.  By protecting the individual’s right to choose from this “marketplace”, colonial leaders, like Jefferson, were ensuring that colonial values would become attached to the new Christianity and ensure an American civil religion.  Naturally, the churches which most closely reflected regional and social norms would thrive.  Jefferson’s motivation to create this “free-market” is wonderfully reflected in the quote on page 188, “ ‘Almighty God hath created the mind free.’  Jefferson based religious voluntarism on the example of Jesus, who possessed the power to coerce people to follow him yet choose not to do so.”  Persuasion should be unfettered in the religious landscape as Jesus himself exemplified.  The tongue in check statement by Jefferson, who disavowed Christ’s divinity and the existence of miracles, is hilarious and speaks precisely to the “odd coupling” of Evangelicals and Enlightenment leaders.  Here again a heretic makes a biblical argument for heresy.  As seen through the present day. the Church which reflects the principals of the day will thrive; whether that means preaching a message of prosperity today or millennialism at the end of the 18^th century.

Tyranny of the Majority

I find Kidd's use of Tocqueville very interesting. At the time of Tocqueville's observations, the 2nd great awakening was at its peak. Dissenting denominations were on the rise and the circuit riders were making their rounds creating an all new class of clergy. To most Americans during this time the "mainline" churches and its clergy represented the tyranny of an elite class. It can be assumed that the sentiments of Americans in the post-revolutionary period toward an elite, educated, state-funded clergy were less than warm. Earlier in Kidd's book, he writes of John Adams' disdain for the kind of evangelical christianity sweeping the country and in his closing chapter he includes Jefferson and Tocquville amongst its critics. However, he states that the nation DID NOT fall under a "tyranny of the majority." I speculate that this might not be entirely the case. The common man, the majority of Americans began to reject mainline congregations, calvinism and their high value of education. As Kidd points out, Calvinists believe that people "were not naturally disposed towards virtue." How does the rise of arminianism (and the change in dominant Christian thought/practice) affect the relationship between the republic and its religious citizens? Did the republic change or adapt to the change in Christian and religious thought?

America was Founded by Conspiracy

   I fear my post may be very similar to Alan's, as I had very similar questions as to the validity of these anti-catholic conspiratorial theories promulgated by preachers and patriots alike.  I will try to approach this question from a different perspective.  Kidd seems to buy into the validity of these conspiracies, saying that "mobilizing the people at large required a broader, religiously urgent appeal" (91) Essentially, he believes these conspiracies and millenialisms as true concerns because it pushed the public into action more than the more "Common Sense" arguments.  This might be more of a psychological question, but what effectiveness do these sorts of arguments have? Clearly most people did not fear Catholicism as much as claimed, as American ended up allying with France.  And, while I can't speak for the millenialists, (and the 19th century saw quite the surge in millenial ideas) the fact that the world continued to exist could dispell those concerns.
   Did the colonists go to war for anti-Catholicism, or was anti-Catholicism injected into the more reasonable arguments because of the culture? I know that recruitment was a constant concern for the colonists in the Revolutionary War, could the anti-Catholic rhetoric simply be attributed to the "shotgun method"? Just throw whatever you can think of at them and hope something sticks, or was this a calculated effort?

In his book God of Liberty; A religious History of the American Revolution, Thomas Kidd provided an insight into the civil spirituality of Colonial America. He argued that this civil spirituality was the "framework in which to define, justify, and fight a war and establish the new American nation" (Kidd, 9). He also argues that previous wars and religious movements united the colonists in their views of Protestantism, anti-Catholicism and liberty, and those were enclosed in a realm in which politics and religion converged in order to render a balance between state and citizens.
If power corrupts kings and bishops, to what extend was it safe to consider religion (and its theologies) a source (main) of virtue for the proper function of the state?

Asking the "Odd Fellows" if this is a Christian Nation?

I found the description of Thomas Jefferson and John Leland as the “religious odd fellows” intriguing.  Kidd mentions this “friendship” numerous times throughout the book.  He states, “To say that Jefferson and Leland made religious odd fellows is an understatement.  Leland had devoted his life to saving souls and would estimate at the end of his career that he had preached about 8,000 sermons” (5) and “baptized 1,278 converts and itinerated distances across America that together would add up to three trips around the Earth...”(208)  Jefferson, on the other hand, did not believe that the blood of Jesus would save him or anyone else, although he attended church regularly as president” (5).  Yet, Leland “was his most outspoken Baptist supporter” (239).

In the epilogue, Kidd states that “whether by emphasizing the need for the virtue, claiming God’s providential blessings,or articulating equality by creation, clearly, religion played an indispensable role in shaping the origins of the American Republic.  Although leaders from Thomas Jefferson to John Leland held highly dissimilar personal beliefs, Americans united around public religious principles to inspire the Revolution and to articulate the basis for American rights” (253).  

Kidd then asks what appears to be the million dollar question:  “Does the national significance of these precepts mean that America was founded as a Christian nation?” (253)  

Given the fact that this question is so prevalent in today’s political and religious culture, should a historian attempt to answer this question? Kidd provides a great answer, stating yes, but that “the founders’ religious agreement was on public values, not private doctrines” (254).  However, should one attempt to answer it?  Is there any contemporary evidence that this question – not questions such as was the Constitution Christian enough, etc – was even asked in the Revolutionary Period?  See Google N-Gram results.  Can historians, judicial scholars, etc in today’s hyper-pluralistic society ask questions like this to answer modern questions?  Would Leland and Jefferson both find this question odd had it been asked of them?  Was that really why the war was fought?  Would Leland and Jefferson both say that we are missing the point?

Was the Revolution only a religious war for the Americans?

Before I got deep into the text of God of Liberty, I continually found myself being dogged by the feeling that Kidd might be overreaching in his arguments about the active role of religion in the Revolutionary war itself.  As I got farther and farther into the book, those feelings decreased, as he brought more and more sources to bear on the subject. By the end of the book, I got the distinct feeling that as Kidd saw it, no part of the war and the events leading up to it were not religious, at least from the point of view of the American patriots.

I wonder though, how did the British think about the war? Possibly more importantly, how did the Loyalists think about the war?  While some Americans apparently thought that the Quebec Act was the beginning of a "long-feared European plan to destroy Christian liberty" in the colonies, how did the British see this development, as it had to do with religious liberty?[1]  Did Loyalists see the passage of this law as a sinister plot of the British Parliament, did they see it as a praiseworthy development in religious freedom, or were they split down the middle?  We don't know, as Kidd does not address these questions.  While I think the book makes an excellent contribution to helping us see the Revolution and its aftermath in a different light, as an especially religious war for some of the Colonists, I am left to wonder how much we lose by only viewing the religious content of the war from the point of view of patriot colonists.


[1] Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: a Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 67.

Perceived religious conspiracy in revolutionary America

In chapter 3 ("The Pope, the Devil, and All Their Emissaries"), Kidd does a nice job drawing together several different anxieties afflicting the American colonists in the middle of the eighteenth century. Kidd ties together irritation surrounding the growth of Anglican bureaucracy in the colonies, British handling of Quebec after the Seven Years War, and general anti-Catholicism. On the basis of this bundle of concerns, Kidd makes the case that revolutionary fervor in the American colonies benefitted tremendously from prevenient anti-Catholicism and the efforts of many colonial pamphleteers to tie Anglicanism and the government in England to Catholicism.

Certainly, we've seen abundant evidence of colonial anti-Catholicism, not just at second-hand in Kidd but first-hand in Thomas Paine's Common Sense. There's no doubt in my mind that colonial passions could run very high against the Roman Catholic Church and anything that looked much like it. Nevertheless, I was struck by the extent to which colonial behavior (as described by Kidd) resembled not so much that of people taking reasonable and calculated steps to preserve a valued religious way of life as that of conspiracy theorists. To be sure, Kidd adduces an abundance of ham-fisted behavior on the part of the British that provoked Congregationalists, Baptists, and others. But it takes a mind committed to finding a conspiracy to look at such crass and crude steps as the Anglican establishment took and see an insidious Catholic menace. Indeed, had there really been an subtle plot with any chance of success at all, wouldn't that plot have needed to be a little more subtle? But this step of reasoning is frequently overlooked in conspiracy theories: obvious and ill-managed bungling is taken to be only the tip of an otherwise well-concealed iceberg, never mind the implausibility of such bunglers directing a crafty plot. "They just want you to think they're incompetent!" And no amount of evidence of incompetence can persuade otherwise.

In other instances, colonial religious judgments do not seem to have been so determinedly irrational. It did not take a great leap of imagination or presumption of guilt to associate, say, Benedict Arnold with Judas Iscariot after Arnold was caught. (Kidd 123-124) This seems a reasonable (if highly religious) evaluation, and of an actual, documented conspiracy, too. Was it the case that colonial anti-Catholicism was simply so violent that the mere mention of the word "bishop" made them lose their minds? No, clearly not: the colonists allied willingly enough with Catholic France. Were colonists vigilant to the point of paranoia, such that they saw conspiracy around every corner? No, because again, those colonists would likely have noticed more of the actual British scheming during the revolution if they had been. Were colonists so naive that they blithely accepted the word of Patriot pamphleteers when the latter insisted on a vast Catholic conspiracy? Maybe, but that rests on interpreting the colonists as being far less discerning than we savvy twenty-first century Americans are. I'm reluctant to equate the quality of being past with the quality of being simple. More than anything, I wonder whether anti-Catholic conspiracy theories really provided a substantial support for revolution, or whether instead it is more the case that, once Parliament and the crown became the perceived enemy of certain publishing Americans, Parliament and the crown were associated, on an ad hoc and frequently implausible basis, with another hated enemy, the pope in Rome.

Essential just for the masses?

In God of Liberty, Thomas Kidd details the individual lives of America's founding fathers, but more importantly to his work, he illustrates their religious and political ideologies. Kidd summarizes the similarities of their beliefs in his Epilogue as he describes those of Alexis de Tocqueville. Kidd says, "in [his] combination of personal doubt but public support for religion, Tocqueville manifested a view of religion unlike that of several prominent founding fathers, including Jefferson. Jefferson and Tocqueville personally abandoned traditional orthodoxy, while maintaining that it was essential for the masses to keep believing in Christianity..."[1].
Many American political leaders of the late 1700s held relatively deistic beliefs, however found it "essential" to the success of the American Republic for the "masses" to subscribe to a more Christian faith--the more spirited and convicted the better. However, it appears that Washington, Jefferson, and others only tolerated and Christianity. Did they consider minimal belief in God and religious rhetoric enough to keep themselves from the clutches of corruption, but expect more from the masses?
Certainly America was a republic that belonged to the people, however the founding fathers clearly had considerable influence over the nation. How do they reconcile their minimal beliefs with their clear commitment to religion in the lives of Americas in the avoidance of American tyranny?
I find it interesting that many of them believe so strongly that people need Christianity in order to remain moral and maintain the republic, but do not subscribe to the same religion for their own morality and republicanism.

[1] Kidd, Thomas S. God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Sacredness

   The title of Dr. Byrd's book, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution," brought my thought back around to the question we asked, and have continued to ask, since the beginning of the course, which is "what makes a war sacred?" The answers that we found with King Phillip's War and with Juster's definition seem to have often led us back to the question of intensity.  However, the readings for this week do not mainly point in that direction.  Although we only read an excerpt of Dr. Byrd's book, it seems to me that we read very little that pointed towards "new and sometimes bizarre forms of sacred violence,"[1] except for maybe the conduct of the two brothers fighting against each other that ended in a scalping.[2]  Instead, in Dr. Byrd's narrative and analysis, we are led back to Juster's assertion that the main target of sacred war in the colonies were "Words and objects, not people."[3]  In my post on August 28th, I suggested that in many ways, it was more effective for colonists to attack their enemies by attacking "their symbols and reality, and dominating them by replacement of those symbols with their own."[4]  We see this clearly in Dr. Byrd's book, where the colonists attacked the royalist interpretations of scripture, and replaced them with their own understandings of those texts.  In attacking these symbols of religious and political authority, the colonists were reordering symbols and recreating their own reality.  

  My question, then, is where does this leave us?  Can we, from what we have read so far, come to even a tentative agreement, about what the definition of a sacred war is?  Does the "sacredness" of war come primarily from the manipulation of religious symbols, or is there more to it than that?

[1] Susan Juster, “What’s 'Sacred' about Violence in Early America? Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World,”Common Place, October 2005., accessed August 28, 2013, http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-01/juster/.

[2] James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: the Bible and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44. 

[3] Juster, "What's 'Sacred' about Violence in Early America?

[4] Joshua W. Jeffery Sr., “Symbolism and Power,” Religion and War in American History (blog), n.d., accessed September 19, 2013, http://religion-and-war-in-america.blogspot.com/2013/08/symbolism-and-power.html.

Understanding texts

Reading Dr. Byrd’s book raised some interesting questions for me about how we are to understand people’s relationships with text.  As we can see in Revolutionary America, as well as throughout history in general, people can use religious texts to argue a variety of different viewpoints.  This has been said so often that it has become a truism.  In the case of the Revolution, both patriots and loyalists alike pointed to their favorite Biblical passages in order to justify their stance.  In this way, text could turn into a rhetorical tool: Thomas Paine, for instance, a radical known for his contempt of scripture, used religious arguments in his own favor, employing them as tools without necessarily believing them.

However, Dr. Byrd’s book suggests that to write off the colonists’ use of scripture as a mere tool to justify already-held beliefs would be a mistake: indeed, it would ignore the deep connections that many colonists felt to the Bible: “For them, the Bible was not a distant, ancient text, it was an engaging, universal drama, relevant and realistic” (9).  Instead, Biblical texts acted as a lens through which colonists understood the war.  In Dr. Byrd’s telling, then, ideas do matter.  As we saw earlier in Jill Lepore’s work, texts can give meaning to the fighting of war. 

While I am readily convinced that ideas do matter, that religious texts can give meaning to people’s experiences, it becomes more difficult when we try to pinpoint how this happens. At the heart of this question seems to be a fundamental tension between ideas and delivery.  Were colonists convinced by the ideas presented in sermons, or did they imbibe a more abstract sort of sensibility that linked Protestantism, patriotism, and republicanism? Dr. Byrd, for example, points to the historiographic debate over the role of revivals.  Did revivals make intellectual contributions that underpinned the Revolution, or were they act more as breeding grounds of a new sensibility, an egalitarian spirit that infused the attending crowds with religious and patriotic zeal?

Perhaps to start to understand these questions, we have to historicize what we mean by texts.  For modern readers, separating the ideas from the delivery seems easy, but is it possible to do the same thing for a sermon, the very form of which combines ideas and delivery in order to reach its audience? 

Paine and Gain

                I am writing this after Dr. Karen King’s lecture and I imagine that my subsequent statements and reflections cannot but be colored by her musings on martyrdom. Such remarks are especially salient in light of this week’s readings. Certainly they help bring that which was lingering up to the fore, namely the question: what is worth dying for? Could, say, a tax on paper products ever possibly provide reason enough to shed one’s blood, or even that of another person? What, if anything, can justify violence?

                Beyond that, I am immediately struck by rhetoric, specifically that of Thomas Paine. For instance, the introduction to the section of his pamphlet entitled “Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs”: “In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.” Now, to assert the absence of rhetorical manipulation is, and has been since antiquity, the act of rhetorical manipulation par excellence. It is at the heart of the would-be orator’s attempt at an appeal to ethos, and the founding fathers knew their classics enough to realize as much. But what about the rest of Colonial America? Who was Paine’s audience? I fear that the answer to this question leads, like a boomerang, back to my opening musings on martyrdom.

"The political value of biblical rhetoric"

The phrase "Even presidents such as Thomas Jefferson saw the political value of biblical rhetoric," carries heavy and troubling implications. Jefferson, sometimes characterized as a Deist and hardly a Christian by any orthodoxy, revered Thomas Paine, later declaring Paine's The Rights of Man  the answer to "the political heresies that have sprung up among us." Benjamin Franklin, another "founding father" and a Deist preferred the separation of common, everyday life and religious tradition (especially evidenced in his time galavanting about in France). So why would enlightened men like Paine and Jefferson turn to "God" in the time of revolution?

As Dr. Byrd mentions, Paine wrote that "the Old Testament  was a 'history of wickednes' and more appropriately judged 'the word of a demon than the word of God." So why would a man on the opposite end of the religious spectrum from men like John Adams (a man who actually opposed an established, long-term military) use the term "God" seventeen times in addition to the biblical characters of Israel, Samuel and David to motivate an opposition to the tyranny of England? I think it can be drawn from Dr. Byrd's phrase at the beginning of this writing; propaganda and political manipulation. Was a tradition of the manipulation of the lower classes by the use of popular religious institutions established during the revolution? Did patriotism and nationalism replace protestant Christianity as the popular religious tradition post-revolution AND was this simply a manipulation by the country's elite (who, if Paine is any example, did not seem to actually believe what they were writing)?

Little Lion Man

It seems that through manipulation of the sermon Paine, and perhaps others, were able to incite the colonists to turn patriotic. Dr. Byrd emphasizes in his book the importance of the sermon during war, and especially during the Revolutionary War, - he says that “preachers took up arms… turning their pulpits into weapons.” Washington saw the important of the sermon, which is obvious through his emphasis on maintaining talented army chaplains. Dr. Byrd says that the reason for A Common Sense’s success was because it was more like a sermon than a pamphlet. However, A Common Sense was not a sermon, it was a pamphlet that was written like a sermon. It was read out loud to people all over the colonies, so it was treated more like a sermon. In our society it is very rare for people to read aloud. We are expected to read on our own. We might hear sermons in church and if they are good we will tell our friends to podcast them, but we wouldn’t read it to them. This is an experience of which we are mostly unfamiliar and perhaps it is because we are a (mostly) literate society. And so I pose the question: If Paine had been a part of a fully literate society would A Common Sense have had as much of an impact as it did in that society? Or was it the settings that the pamphlet was read, the communal settings, which made it so impactful?  

Common Sense use of the Bible

Both readings illustrate the malleability of the Bible in American History.  This was the first time I read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in its entirety and had I not been aware of his staunch deism and latter literary critiques of the Bible, I would have guessed him a trained minister.  However, Paine’s skill, resembling an effective minister, is rhetoric and no effective argument for such a drastic step as revolution would be complete without use of the Bible as a foundation text in American history.  It is this ability to have a thesis and then find Christian scripture to validate it that was so fascinating.  As Dr. Byrd points out toward the end of chapter five, the same passages that were used to vilify British colonial rule are immediately used to justify the emerging continental government.  In Paine’s argument he wants to suggest the cause of revolution was a forgone conclusion and the time for reconciliation with Britain has passed.  But, Paine’s pamphlet suggests much to the contrary, as he is directing his diatribe to the “undecided” people or states that are least invested in revolution.  The use of scripture is integral in making the case even if Paine would prefer that philosophy alone was sufficient.  This tactic of the Bible as proof text is nothing if not consistent up to modern day.  And like the revolutionary leaders used passages trumpeted by loyalists immediately after victory, the context makes the verse important to society, not the other way around.  It appears that revolutionary leaders were aware of their appropriation of loyalist passages and this was not concerning.