One Accident, One Mistake: Evangelicals, Religious Establishment, and American Political Development

Abstract

It is widely conceded that the Supreme Court has struggled to create a coherent, consistent set of principles on which to base its decisions about the relationship between Church and State. This paper argues that what would help bring conceptual clarity to this contentious set of issues is a historically informed theory that can be labeled developmental, or structural. It presents such a theory by examining two sets of facts: First, a fact that most constitutional scholars have overlooked–that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified during a period of relative religious calm in between periods of great evangelical fervor, namely the First and Second Great Awakenings (the “accident”). Second, as is well known, that the framers did not foresee the development of stable political parties (the “mistake”). This essay first briefly summarizes the state of the law in this area, and then examines the ways in which the Second Great Awakening combined this accident and this mistake to transform American culture and politics, including electoral politics, and the implications of that transformation.

Keywords:

• First Amendment
• Religious Establishment
• evangelicals
• American political development
• Constitutional Law

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Keith Bybee, Carol Lasser, Charles Anthony Smith, Philippa Strum, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. __ (2022).

2 For a discussion of the attitude of Trump voters toward the relationship between religion and politics, see Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), xx and passim. For a fascinating discussion of why evangelical voters are willing to overlook Trump’s obvious character flaws and moral lapses, see Tanya Marie Luhrmann, “Evangelical Voters,” in Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power, and the Republic at Risk, ed. Eric Klinenberg, Caitlin Zaloom, and Sharon Marcus (New York, Columbia University Press, 2019). According to Luhrmann, Trump fits the biblical narrative of the “flawed vessel,” and, at the same time, signals the chaos that is expected to precede Christ’s return to earth.

3 For a discussion of the history and contemporary standing of evangelical versus non-evangelical Christian sects, see David A. Hollinger, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022). For a discussion of the social conservatism of some contemporary evangelicals, see John W. Compton, The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

4 On school prayer, see Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962); Abington v. Schempp, 371 U.S. 213 (1963), Wallace v. Jaffree. 472 U.S. 38 (1985). For vouchers, see Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002). For Christian displays, see Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980), Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984), County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989), Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S 677 (2005), McCreary County v. ACLU 545 U.S. 844 (2005).

5 See Epperson v. Kansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968), Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).

6 See Santa Fe School District v. Doe, 530 U.S. 200 (2000): Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 612 (1971).

7 Aguilar v. Felton (1985).

8 The phrase originated in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury, CT Baptist community; see Noah Feldman, Divided By God (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 23.

9 Analysts have given increasing attention to the growth Christian nationalism in recent years. A good introduction is Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: Norton, 2007). See also Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) and Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

10 Ibid, 216.

11 See Simon Schama’s discussion in The American Future: A History (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 152–59, 160–171.

12 See Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263 (1981).

13 See Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661 (2010).

14 See Zorach v. Clausen, 343 U.S. 306, 312–13 (1952). See also Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 98.

15 Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4.

16 Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

17 Justice O’Connor in Lynch v. Donnelly stresses the importance of subjective feelings of standing in one’s community, but says that the display of a Christmas crèche on public property does not present problems in that regard–a prime example of the lack of logic in these kinds of cases. See 485 U.S. 668, 687. For a discussion of the messages of exclusion government can send, see Corey Brettschneider, The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents (New York: Norton, 2018), 132.

18 406 U.S. 205 (1972). On the ins and outs of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, see Kent Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, Volume 2: Establishment and Fairness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Feldman, Divided by God, 201ff; Stephanie E. Russell, “Sorting Through the Establishment Clause Tests,” 60 Missouri Law Review 60 (1995).

19 On the importance of social facts to constitutional decision-making, see my discussion in A Theory of Liberty (New York: Routledge, 1992).

20 Historians occasionally make brief note of the accident of timing, but do not then emphasize the implications for either law or politics. See Walter A. McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585–1828 (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 323; Schama, America’s Future, 168, for examples.

21 For an alternate interpretation of the role of religion in America’s formative years, see Rogers M. Smith, Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 153.

22 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 257.

23 On contemporary evangelicals and politics, see David Ricci, Politics Without Stories: The Liberal Predicament (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), esp. 103ff; Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (New York: Grove Press, 2008); William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Clyde Wilcox, God’s Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right (New York: The New Press, 2004); Sara Diamond, Road to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2018), Ch. 2. On the possibility of fissures in the bond between evangelicals and today’s Republican party, see Paul A. Djupe and Ryan L. Claassen (eds.), The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelican-Republican Coalition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).

24 William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Ch. 3; Marc A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), Ch. 4; Marc A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), Ch. 3–5; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), Ch. 1; Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

25 Quoted by Bonomi, Cope of Heaven, 160.

26 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 79.

27 Ibid.

28 Kidd, Great Awakening, xv-xvi.

29 Ibid., xvii.

30 McLoughlin, Revivals, 54.

31 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 164.

32 Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: Penguin, 2007), 101. Wills cites Marc A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 162. See also sources cited above, n. 25.

33 Wills, Head and Heart, 103.

34 McLouglin, Revivals, 61.

35 Ibid.

36 Kidd, Great Awakening, 13.

37 Ibid., 14. See also Noll, America’s God, 45.

38 Delbanco, Death of Satan, 81.

39 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 128.

40 Ibid., 128.

41 McLouglin, Revivals, 46. See also Kidd, Great Awakening, 13ff. and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 27–32.

42 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 128.

43 Because God still chose those who would be saved, the theology of Edwards can still be described as Calvinist. But the theology of the Revival, unlike that of the Puritans, taught that God was willing to save those “who truly repented of their sins.” McLoughlin, Revivals, 98.

44 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 129.

45 Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 109.

46 Morone, Hellfire Nation, 8.

47 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 131.

48 America’s God, 43. See also Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism, passim.

49 For a discussion of Calvinist predestination, see David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12. On the importance of the availability of cheap land, see McLoughlin, Revivals, 50.

50 Wills, Head and Heart, 112.

51 Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: Norton, 2005), 43.

52 Bonomi, Cope of Heaven, 158ff; Feldman, Divided by God, 51.

53 Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 609.

54 Noll, America’s God, 267.

55 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 609. See also Morone, Hellfire Nation, Ch. 1–7.

56 Wills, Head and Heart, 3.

57 Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) 4, 10.

58 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 2, 194.

59 Marc A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 83.

60 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 195.

61 Bonomi, Cope of Heaven, 15 reports that even Thomas Paine’s deep criticism of the Bible became popular among working people during the Revolution.

62 Johnson, History, 108.

63 See Bonomi, Cope of Heaven, 124.

64 Kidd, Great Awakening, xiv.

65 Noll, America’s God, 163.

66 Kidd, Great Awakening, 10.

67 See also Bonomi, Cope of Heaven, 160.

68 Kidd, Great Awakening, xv, 289. On stratification see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).

69 Noll, America’s God, 214.

70 Wood, Radicalism, 145.

71 Ibid., 115.

72 Ibid. On the eschatological element in American political thought at this juncture, see Benjamin T. Lynerd’s definition of “republican theology” in Republican Theology: The Civil Religion of American Evangelicals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 42, 100, 112–114.

73 Wood, Radicalism, 116.

74 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 134.

75 Wilentz, Rise, 19.

76 See also James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, 269.

77 Johnson, History, 110.

78 Fitzgerald, Evangelicals, 24.

79 Radicalism, 330.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 329.

82 See Frank Lambert’s discussion of “the individual as a maker of religious choices” in The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 178. Lambert argues that for both the constitutional framers and evangelicals at the time, the “individual must be free in matters of faith.” That evangelicals would support such a position is only logical, since, at the time, they were dissenters from more established churches. See also Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, p. 21; Feldman, Divided by God, Ch. 1; Mcdougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 327; Wills, Head and Heart, Sec. IV.

83 Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, 23, quoting John Witte Jr., Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005), 59–60.

84 See Lambert and other sources listed note 83. On state establishments, see Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution 23; Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), 32–33 and 246; Lambert, Founding Fathers, 195; Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: Norton, 1997), 118ff., and Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 64. Three essential points can be made about these state establishments: First, that they were relatively lax compared with nationally established churches then extant in European nations; as Lambert reports, the existing establishment laws “rested lightly on Americans’ shoulders, in comparison to those in Europe.” 195. Second, all of these state laws were abolished before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, many–including a Supreme Court majority– argued, restructured federal-state relations on this and many other questions. Third, and most relevant for present purposes, whatever the legal status of state churches, evangelicals in and after the Second Great Awakening created in effect a societal hegemony of a certain brand of Protestantism; see below.

85 George L. Frazer, The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 220.

86 Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1989), 17.

87 Noll, America’s God, 164.

88 Ibid.

89 Holmes, Faiths, 44. See also R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick, Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Life (New York: Norton, 2018), xiii–xiv, 15.

90 See Wills, Head and Heart, Ch. 9 and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 38, 48, 122, 124, 163, 184, 197.

91 Wills, Head and Heart, 155.

92 Ibid.

93 Holmes, Faiths, 49.

94 The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 37.

95 Wills, Head and Heart, 6.

96 Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, 18.

97 The literature on republicanism is vast. A good starting point is Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On Madison’s relationship to republicanism, see James P. Young, Reconsidering American Liberalism: The Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 58ff; and Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 298.

98 Kramnick and Moore, Godless Constitution, 82.

99 Ibid., 150.

100 Howard Gilman, Mark A. Graber, and Keith E. Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights and Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 37.

101 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 312.

102 John W. Compton, The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 19.

103 Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (New York: Random House, 2017), 12.

104 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 312.

105 May, Enlightenment, 61.

106 Ibid., 64, 346–47. On the general wedding of theology to a Lockean rationale for limited government, see Lynerd, Republican Theology, 4.

107 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 280.

108 Wills, Head and Heart, 117.

109 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 281.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid., 281–2.

112 Noll argues that Witherspoon favored Hutchinson and Reid over other Scottish philosophers, such as Hume, because they demonstrated that Enlightenment thought was compatible with “at least the broad outlines of received Christianity.” Noll, History of American Christianity, 154. See also May, Enlightenment, 61–65.

113 History of American Christianity, 154. On Madison and Witherspoon see also Robert Louis Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

114 On Witherspoon’s teaching in moral philosophy, see Greg L. Frazer, Religious Beliefs, 39–46: “Students were more impressed by how Witherspoon taught than by what he taught.” Frazer described Witherspoon’s thought as “rationalistic and naturalistic,” becoming even more so when he left Scotland for Princeton. See also Lynerd, Republican Theology, 82–87, who also argues that Witherspoon’s journey to America altered his thinking, and May, Enlightenment, 346–47. On Witherspoon see also Waldman, Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty (New York: Random House, 2009), 95–96.

115 Feldman, Three Lives, 10.

116 Ibid., 10–11.

117 See Waldman, Founding Faith, Ch. 11.

118 Feldman, Three Lives, 13.

119 Simon Schama, American Future, 165; emphasis in original. For Madison’s and Jefferson’s struggle for religious disestablishment in Virginia, viewed by many scholars as precursor of the First Amendment, see also Green, Second Disestablishment, 37–41, Lambert, Founding Fathers, 209, Feldman, Three Lives, 62–67. The struggle in Virginia produced Madison’s famous “Memorial and Remonstrance,” and early and classic defense of religious freedom. On the struggle in Virginia see also Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, 23.

120 Sanford Levinson, An Argument Open to All (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 43. See also John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), Ch. 3, and John T. Noonan, The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 76–7.

121 For a recent analysis stressing the extent to which the framers expected a wise elite to dominate politics, see James Miller, Can Democracy Work (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Ch 3.

122 See Levinson, Argument, 194, citing Federalist #51.

123 Ibid.

124 Wilentz, Rise, 40ff. See also Wood, Empire of Liberty, Ch. 4.

125 John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Ch. 2.

126 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 59.

127 See Eric R. Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 112, who reports that Jefferson hoped that deism would replace the evangelical beliefs of sects such as Baptists.

128 McLouglin, Revivals, 98.

129 In 1790, the trans-Allegheny population was 100,000. By 1820, it was 2,250,000. Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front 1790-1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 7.

130 On the cotton gin, see Fitzgerald, Evangelicals, 50; Lepore, These Truths, 72; McDougall, Freedom, 319, 395, 400; Wilentz, Rise, 146, 220.

131 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 199. On Paine see also Ratner-Rosenhagen, Ideas, 58.

132 See Hatch, Democratization, 57.

133 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 592.

134 See Wilentz, Rise, 450–51; Johnson, History, 55, 303–05; Lepore, These Truths, 208–10.

135 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 594.

136 Ibid., 590. Wood reports that when Aaron Burr, who was “the heir of several generations of Presbyterian divines,” was elected Vice President in 1801, he was criticized for not having set foot in a church for a decade. He was advised to go to church, and he did, as did many other relatively unreligious leaders of the day, including Noah Webster and the Southern jurist St. George Tucker.

137 Lynerd, Republican Theology, 2, 102. See also Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 74, 598.

138 One scholar writes of the period that “the most revolutionary change in nineteenth century America was the conversion of the nation from a largely dechristianized land in 1789 to a stronghold of Protestantism by midcentury. The revivals did it.” Richard J. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 62.

139 Wood, Empire of Liberty, 592–94.

140 Ibid., 597.

141 Ibid.

142 John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 58.

143 Ibid., 58–59.

144 Morone, Hellfire Nation, 124.

145 Wolffe, Expansion, 60.

146 Ibid., 89.

147 Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). On the class basis of the revivals, see Morone, Hellfire Nation, 104.

148 Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12.

149 Ibid.

150 Hatch, Democratization, 64.

151 Ibid., 14.

152 David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 130.

153 Miller, Life of the Mind, 5–6.

154 Ibid., 7.

155 McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 382.

156 Hatch, Democratization., 222.

157 Andrew Koppelman, Defending American Religious Neutrality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 30.

158 Fitzgerald, Evangelicals, 4.

159 For a discussion of the concept of hegemony and its application to the law, see Douglas Litowitz, “Gramsci, Hegemony, and the Law” (2000 BYU Law Review 2). The concept originated with Antonio Gramsci and was adopted and refined by a number of Critical Legal Theorists over the course of the last 40 years.

160 Green, Second Disestablishment, 162, quoting People v. Ruggles, 8 Johns. 290 (N.Y. 1811).

161 See Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry, A History of the American Constitution (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1990) 67–68, 200–1, 370; Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 147–48, 169, 200–01, 223–24; Peter Charles Hoffer, A Nation of Laws: America’s Imperfect Pursuit of Justice (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 39. In general, see Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Touchstone, 2005) and Harry Potter [sic], Law, Liberty, and the Constitution: A Brief History of the Common Law (Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2015).

162 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 275.

163 Ibid., 277.

164 Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 237.

165 Tocqueville, Democracy, 278.

166 Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 98, 121.

167 Miller, Life of the Mind, 68–95.

168 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 165, 280, 284.

169 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1977), 40–49.

170 Wills, Head and Heart, 301, 166, 378, 489.

171 Wilentz, Rise, 350–51.

172 Morone, Hellfire Nation,130.

173 David W. Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 139. On millenialism see also McLoughlin, Revivals, 76–78, 176–79.

174 McLoughlin, Revivals, 128–29.

175 See also Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage, 2007), 114. Lilla discusses “the mystical and messianic impulses” that “burst forth” regularly in the West. 254. See also Morone, Hellfire Nation, who describes cycles of fanaticism in great detail.

176 Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 198.

177 Morone, Hellfire Nation, 124.

178 David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford, 2011), 57.

179 Green, Second Disestablishment, 94.

180 Beecher quoted in Ibid.

181 Morone, Hellfire Nation, 124ff.

182 Ibid., 57.

183 Ibid., quoting Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Skepticism (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 79.

184 Wilentz, Rise, 351.

185 Green, Second Disestablishment, 94.

186 Ibid.

187 Ibid., 107.

188 Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1957), 16.

189 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 60–61. See also 86.

190 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 52.

191 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 278.

192 Johnson, History, 509.

193 Smith, Revivalism, 34.

194 Ibid., 37.

195 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 280, 284, 285, 287.

196 Porterfield, Corporate Spirit, 101.

197 Lepore, These Truths, 208.

198 Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 111.

199 Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 47. On the Sunday school movement, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 40ff and Green, Second Disestablishment, Part IV. On anti-Catholic politics, which surged in the 1830s and 1840s, see James S. Kabala, Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic, 1787-1846 (London: Routledge, 2013) 181 and Sehat, Myth, 189.

200 Morone, Hellfire Nation, 302.

201 Ibid.

202 Porterfield, Corporate Spirit, 97.

203 Lepore, These Truths, 195.

204 Wilentz, Rise, 351. On the place of women in this new domestic order see Douglas, Feminization, who delineates in detail the alliance between middle class women and evangelical ministers.

205 Lepore, These Truths, 195. Fitzgerald reports that “early-nineteenth-century Americans drank prodigiously–perhaps four times as much as Americans do today. . . .” Evangelicals, 45.

206 Lepore, These Truths, 196.

207 On the Temperance movement, see Noll, History, 296; Lepore, These Truths, 195–96, 206, 228, 339–42; Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

208 Johnson, Shopkeeper’s, 137–38.

209 Ibid., 139.

210 Porterfield, Corporate Spirit, 103.

211 Johnson, Shopkeeper’s, 138.

212 Sehat, Myth, 190.

213 On the alliance between industry and the clergy, see also Fitzgerald, Evangelicals, 35ff.

214 Compton, Evangelical Origins, 20.

215 Fitzgerald, Evangelicals, 35.

216 On slavery, see Morone, Hellfire Nation, Part III; Wilentz, Rise, 351ff; Lynderd, Republican Theology, 4.

217 Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).

218 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 52.

219 Ibid., 50.

220 Mcdougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner, 507

221 507; see also Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 573. Howe characterizes the Whigs as consciously adopting the “publicity methods pioneered by evangelical preachers.” 579. On print networks see also Schlereth, Age of Infidels, 203.

222 Carwadine, Evangelicals and Politics, 507.

223 James B. Stewart, “Reconsidering the Abolitionists in an Age of Fundamentalist Politics,” http://works.bepress.com/james_b_stewart/7/, 9.

224 Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 580.

225 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 58 citing Paul Goodman, Toward a Christian Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

226 Ibid., 58–59.

227 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 51.

228 Ibid., 35.

229 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics., 45.

230 Ibid., 46.

231 Ibid., On the Whigs see also Schlereth, Age of Infidels, 203ff and Stewart, “Reconsidering,” passim.

232 Carwadine, Evangelicals and Politics, 35. On discrimination against Catholics see also Marsden, Understanding, 89.

233 Marsden, Understanding., 89.

234 See Jensen, Winning, Ch. 3.

235 The quotation is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_politics_in_the_United_States#Religion:_pietistic_Republicans_versus_liturgical_Democrats, based on data derived from Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

236 Kleppner, Third Electoral System, Ch. 5–6.

237 See James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington: Brookings, 1983), 167–68; Jensen, Winning, Ch. 3; Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970), 46–50. All draw on the work of Paul Kleppner, Third Electoral System. On Pietism, see also Johnson, History, 110. Of course, religion is never the only factor determining voter allegiances. For an overview, see James A. Reichley, The Life of the Parties: A History of American Political Parties (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

238 Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 251.

239 Lepore, These Truths, 350–53.

240 Marsden, Understanding, 91.

241 Ibid., 92. For developments in the relationship between evangelicals and politics in the twentieth century, see Fitzgerald, Evangelicals, Ch. 6–17; Wills, Head and Heart, Part V; Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History 1974–2008 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008); Noll, History, 373ff; Feldman, Divided by God, Ch 4; Lynerd, Republican Theology, p. 50ff. On the fear of immigration in the twentieth century see Noll, Scandal, 114ff. For an analysis of the move away from secular pluralism toward traditional Christian morality entailed in neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century ‘Democracies’” in Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, ed. W. Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

242 Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 15.

243 Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Ch. 3.

244 Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 95.

245 167

246 In Nancy L. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 25.

247 The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 200.

248 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xxvii.

249 On Madison’s intent, see Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3, 23.

250 On liberty of conscience, see Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, 5, citing Feldman Divided by God, 12, 20, 27–32, 42.

251 I am grateful to Keith Bybee for stressing this point.