Since at least the time of Alexis de Tocqueville’s mid-nineteenth century study of the American system, scholars have been intrigued by the connection between religion – Christianity and its various denominations – and the creation of the United States. One of the foremost subjects that historians have undertaken regarding this relationship is the dynamic between religion in the American colonies and the American Revolution. Scholars and historians have wrestled with questions pertaining to the fundamental role of religion as inspiration for the Revolution and disagreed over such quandaries as the significance of denominational and regional differences during the period. This essay will trace the modern historiographical trends in the study of religion and the American Revolution, highlighting the debates and the disciplinary shifts which have shaped the trajectory of the scholarship. In the first half of the twentieth century the historical subject of religion’s role in the American Revolution was the domain of scholars preoccupied with the Enlightenment, who attempted to synthesize early American thought in order to comprehend how religious (and irreligious) men and religious rhetoric shaped (or did not shape) the revolutionary ambitions of the colonies. The initial scholar that most of the more recent historians are responding to in this debate is Perry Miller. Miller’s 1956 book Errand into the Wilderness was itself a response to Vernon L. Parrington and James Truslow Adams who had essentially interpreted the religious movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the Great Awakening, as rejected by the Enlightenment thinkers and the liberal clergy who had led the Revolution. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 16. Miller also interpreted more specific aspects of pre-revolutionary America in Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650 and The New England Mind, the latter of which appeared in two volumes. In Miller’s view, Parrington and Adams had done a great disservice to the state of American religious scholarship by discounting devoutly religious inspiration as a separate and significant factor in the American Revolution. As an example, the notion that the behavior of John Winthrop and Thomas Hooker, in founding Massachusetts and Connecticut respectively, could be understood in purely environmental or functional terms – with the religious component diminished - struck Miller as absurd. “On this matter there is no middle,” Miller wrote in responding to critics who had suggested there could be, “Parrington simply did not know what he was talking about.” Ibid., 17 Miller’s strong reaction to this interpretation no doubt greatly impacted a trio of his students at Harvard, Alan Heimert, Edmund S. Morgan, and Bernard Bailyn, who would proceed to shape the scholarship of religion’s role in the American Revolution for the next several decades. Arguably the most notable historian on this subject, Heimert refuted the views of Parrington and Adams while expanding the scope of his mentor Miller’s argument in his 1966 book Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Heimert articulated two of the major historiographical issues surrounding this subject: (1) Understanding and defining the perspectives of the various denominations and their role within individual colonies is an essential component for explaining religion in the American Revolution. (2) The Revolutionary-era debate over whether warfare was “Christian” is a complex and cumbersome historical topic that nevertheless must be confronted if scholars are to have any hope of understanding the religiosity of the Revolution. On these two points, Heimert’s methods must be distinguished from those of Miller. Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness is in part a broad synthesis of American religious history from the early years of the colonies through the first decades of the nineteenth century and in part a classic work of intellectual history, connecting the trajectory of America to literary trends and figures whose words and lives are meant to represent the movements. Since the book is largely a collection of Miller’s papers and other previous works, Errand into the Wilderness is often devoid of footnotes (the reason for which is, as he explains in a footnote, these are arguments and not monographs). The resulting effect is that of a work for which it is often difficult to get a sense of any veracity. By contrast, Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind is a towering testament to the power of sourcing. In order to explain the complicated relationship between religious piety and revolutionary spirit, Heimert provides thousands of citations – mostly sermons and lectures by religious leaders of the time – that bring to life the dialogue between Baptists and Calvinists and indeed internal discussions for each respective denomination. Fervently rejecting the interpretation of Parrington and others, Heimert asserts that the Calvinists – far from being non-actors – were fundamental to the democratic spirit that led to the American Revolution. “For thirty and more years,” Heimert wrote, “Calvinists had been urging men to leave or replace institutions that denied them the ‘greater good,’ and in the context of the 1770’s this great tradition came to mean liberty from English law.” Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 459. Therefore, crucial to Heimert’s analysis is not only his ardent disagreement with the then accepted historical interpretation that the rationalist clergy and Enlightenment thinkers had subjugated the Edwardsean evangelicals and brought about the Revolution, but that the radical and democratic ideals of the Calvinists were in fact necessary conditions for the actions of independence to take place. In this way, Heimert both halted the direction of the scholarship and further entrenched the position that his mentor Miller had taken, deepening the divide between the traditional approach and his own point of view. A second student of Miller’s, however, took decided issue with Heimert’s thesis. In presenting his own interpretation of this subject in The Challenge of the American Revolution, Edmund S. Morgan expresses a certain frustration with the state of the historiography: The American Revolution, we have been told, was radical and conservative, a movement for home rule and a contest for rule at home, the product of rising nationality and the cause of that nationality, the work of designing demagogues and a triumph of statesmanship. There were evidently many revolutions, many contests, divisions, and developments that deserve to be considered as part of the American Revolution. Edmund S. Morgan, The Challenge of the American Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), 89. Morgan’s chapter entitled “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution” was originally published as an essay in 1967 to articulate his notion of the Puritan Ethic – a seemingly all-encompassing moral, political, and behavioral force – which, to Morgan, explains every phase of the Revolution, from resisting Parliamentary taxation to the development of an American government and everything in between. In large part Morgan’s thesis seems designed to directly contradict Heimert’s interpretation of the radical evangelical influence on revolutionary actions. Morgan’s main contention is that the Puritan Ethic had little if any connection to Edwards’ “Calvinists” as they were portrayed by Heimert. Morgan argues that the constant and furious God of evangelicals held little meaning for most of the men in the Revolutionary generation. What those would-be revolutionaries had retained from Edwards and his followers, however, was the principle that Godly virtues equaled a successful nation; “[they]attributed the rise and fall of empires to the acquisition and loss of the same virtues that God had demanded of the founders of New England.” Ibid., 94. Hence, Morgan argues that the fomentation of Revolution was secular as it was not related to any recognizable biblical doctrine or the teachings of any evangelical leader. Beyond this fundamental disagreement, Morgan is critical of Heimert’s methods as well. First, Morgan calls into question Heimert’s sources, claiming that his evidence was cherry-picked to cast the Edwardseans as eager, hyper-patriots. Second, Morgan suggests that Heimert’s desire to cast evangelicals as drivers of the Revolution led him to read far beyond what reasonable interpretation would allow for. Edmund S. Morgan, Review of Religion and the American Mind by Alan Heimert, William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 24 (1967), 456. This criticism in particular foreshadowed the methodological debates that would lead to a sea change in the scholarship of religion and the American Revolution. Bernard Bailyn, who had published his own book on the origins of the Revolution the same year as Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind, directly confronted Heimert’s thesis in a 1970 essay which in ways harkened back to Parrington’s “secular revolutionaries” interpretation. Bailyn’s assertion centers around three prominent individuals with religious vocations and political will -- Reverend Andrew Eliot, the Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew, and Stephen Johnson, a pastor of the First Congregational Church of Lyme, Connecticut. The interpretation that Bailyn puts forth in “Religion and Revolution: Three Biographical Sketches” is that the philosophies of these men of the church combined with the events of their era connected them morally to the radical Whig politics, which sparked the Revolution. The importance of Bailyn’s argument within the historiography is that he viewed Heimert, and those scholars who agreed with him, as missing the larger context of the pervasively religious place in which the revolutionary spirit took hold. “The whole of American culture,” wrote Bailyn, ”was ‘religious’ in the sense that common modes of discourse in both ordinary life and high culture were derived from Protestant Christianity, and it is a gross simplification to believe that religion […] had a unique political role in the Revolutionary movement.” Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 104. Therefore, according to Bailyn, the Revolution was secular - though it was by nature wrapped in religious rhetoric - as that was within the worldview understood by most Americans during the period. Bailyn further emphasizes this nuanced approach by examining the biblical mythology that was employed as a handy political tool to inspire a revolutionary fervor. Nathan O. Hatch’s influential The Sacred Cause of Liberty : Republican Thought and the Millenium in Revolutionary New England followed closely in Bailyn’s wake both chronologically and philosophically. Published in 1977, Hatch’s work explores “the language of civil millennialism” as a means of interpreting the driving forces of the American Revolution. In Hatch’s view, historic millennialism took a new form in the Revolutionary period after the metaphorical lights went out on the Awakening in the decades before the Revolution. Hatch argues that the New England clergy contributed to Revolutionary ideology by borrowing heavily from British thought, and therefore were not simply philosophical descendants of Edwards and the Great Awakening. “In the early, 1770s, however,” Hatch notes, “the intellectual and emotional force of civil millennialism […] was brought to bear against England itself, as ministers linked apocalyptic vision to the cause of American liberty.” Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 53. The “civil” aspect of Hatch’s analysis echoes Bailyn’s critique of Heimert, in that the argument essentially reduces to the notion of religious rhetoric being used in the effort to gather political support for the Revolution. Hatch’s inspired thesis was part of a wave of new research which included a seemingly dichotomous pair of trending historical groups who were drawn to this subject. Both evangelical religious historians and the new cultural historians were brought to the subject of religion and the American Revolution for their own reasons. What came to be known as postmodern historians were intrigued by the premise of Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind, which suggested that by studying constructed worlds of the mind, a scholar might better understand a particular historical subject; by deconstructing the physical spaces, codes, signs, and languages of a certain period, the historical interpretations available unfurl infinitely. A perhaps more obvious group of historians – evangelical scholars – were also finding fascination with religion’s role in the American Revolution. Hatch himself was initially attracted to the Revolutionary period by the Edwardsean facets of Heimert’s foundational work, before ultimately diverging from his interpretation of the topic. The result of this perhaps unlikely convergence of historians was an explosion in the themes, perspectives, and studies regarding the religious component of the Revolution. Rhys Isaac’s groundbreaking 1982 book The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 was an attempt to do for “Old Dominion” what Perry Miller had done with New England four decades earlier. The challenge for Isaac was that the lack of traditional sources - those relied on by Miller - made a traditional history of Revolutionary Virginia nearly impossible, which indeed drew Isaac to the undertaking in the first place and explains the ethnographic approach displayed in the book. “The intention,” wrote Isaac, “has been to review in social-cultural context the double revolution in religious and political thought and feeling that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century.” Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 5. Isaac wrote and researched the book with the intention of not only presenting a fresh interpretation of the subject but also contributing a new method for understanding past people. Ibid., 7. Isaac ends the book with a “Discourse on Method” chapter which goes into great detail about ethnography and many of the technical aspects of new cultural histories. Isaac argues that the Awakening in Virginia challenged traditional hierarchical church and social structures which eventually led to political revolution. Through what Geertz called “thick description” Isaac reveals an alien world of crumbling aristocracy and the growing individualism that public memory recognizes as the “American” way. The frequent illustrations of architectural structures and careful examinations of social activities such as celebratory dances within the home and militia musters are examples of Isaac’s nontraditional sources used to offer insight into a very different world. Isaac eschews confronting the works of previous scholarship, presumably in the name of presenting something entirely new. About as explicit as Isaac gets with the historiography is his endnote mentioning of Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom as a useful source population and demographic information for seventeenth century Virginia. In a work which harkens back to the opposing theses of Alan Heimert and Nathan O. Hatch, Ruth H. Bloch’s Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 argues that the evangelical strain of millennialism indeed played a tremendous role in the eruption of the American Revolution. Bloch concludes, in part, that since the sheer volume of millennial rhetoric visible in pamphlets on the eve of the Revolution is in fact evidence that it united Christian denominations, the religiosity of the actions cannot in good conscience be understated. ``[M]ore Americans thought about the Last Days in the late 1750’s than ever before,” she writes, “moreover, the millennialism of the 1750’s cut across the religious divisions created by the revivals.” Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millenial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 22. Bloch asserts that, far from being separate or sublimated, religious millennialism in fact drove the fusion of evangelical Christianity and republicanism that then resulted in revolution. Published in 1985, Bloch’s Visionary Republic is therefore much more in line with Heimert and rejects the “civil” millennialism of Hatch and the outright secularism suggested by Morgan and Bailyn. Similar in conclusion to Bloch, Patricia U. Bonomi’s 1986 book Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America argues against the existence of any religious “trough” in the eighteenth century. Instead, Bonomi observes a resurgence in religious attendance outside of New England leading up to the American Revolution. Hence, one fundamental contribution she makes to the historiography is in getting outside of the traditionally studied region of New England and thereby suggesting a larger picture of religion and the Revolution. Bonomi confirms Bloch’s thesis concerning the role of millennialism in igniting American nationalism and, combined with what has previously been called the “liberal” clergy, sparked a call-to-arms. “No doubt millennial expectations and evangelical preaching helped to move a good many Americans into the patriot camp,” she writes. “But […] evangelical Calvinism and religious rationalism did not carve separate channels but flowed as one stream toward the crisis of 1776.” Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 188. Bonomi, thus, does not parse Bailyn’s “rational clergy” and the evangelical followers of Edwards in terms of the American Revolution. Instead, Bonomi suggests that it was, for all practical purposes, a singular religious movement that inspired the actions of the revolutionaries in colonial America. Also noteworthy of Bonomi’s thesis is her distance from Heimert and Miller in terms of the blanket treatment of Christian denominations during this period. Bonomi simply does not see the significance in separating the sects; the result of splintering was to highlight areas of agreement. Ibid., 219. The next decade saw a broadening of study topics in the historiography of religion and the American Revolution. An interest in gender as a device for new interpretations in historical scholarship led to nontraditional approaches to such traditional subjects as Revolutionary America. Susan Juster’s 1994 book Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England deconstructed two standard historiographical concepts – New England and the Revolution – in order to interpret historical gender dynamics. Juster’s major contention is that women in Separatist congregations at the conclusion of the Revolutionary period represented a threat to overturn the new, patriarchal order of America and therefore were subjected to gendered expectations and societal pressures that had largely not existed in the church previously. The religious power Baptist women held “unraveled in the revolutionary crisis of the late-eighteenth century, leaving evangelical women to bear alone the burden of dependency as men assumed their place in the governing structures of the new republic.” Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 13. (Juster therefore disagrees with Hatch’s other book on the subject, The Democratization of American Christianity, as the notion of a gendered democratization is conspicuously absent from his interpretation.) Disorderly Women engages heavily with the previous scholarship, due to Juster’s interest in evaluating the gender dynamics that have been missed by other historians of this topic. Harry S. Stout (who had published his own well-received book agreeing with Heimert - The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England - in 1986) and D.G. Hart edited a collection of papers from a 1993 conference on the influence of religion in American History. Published in 1997, New Directions in American Religious History recapped the historiographical trajectory of the subject with particular focus on explaining the expansion of Religious Studies departments and the eventual displacement of intellectual history by cultural history as divinity programs lost the research topic to mainstream universities. Beyond the excellent analysis of the scholarship of religion and the American Revolution, New Directions also offers an important argument by Gordon S. Wood. The aptly named chapter, “Religion and the American Revolution,” is in dialogue with the previous theses of Morgan and Bailyn, both of whom Wood finds to be stubbornly attached to the “secular” theory of the Revolution. “Much of the historical work of the past generation has therefore made religion seem to be of less importance to the Revolution than Enlightenment beliefs and political ideology,” writes Wood. “Yet this subservience of religion to other matters runs against much of what we know of the prevailing beliefs of ordinary people in this premodern age.” Harry S. Stout and D.G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 175. Wood is much-enamored with Hatch’s suggestion of the relationship between Christianity and the democratization of American society, though he frets over the dearth of “data” and details” concerning the religiosity of the Revolutionary generation. Ibid., 198. The ultimate point Wood makes is that the historiography of this subject lacks a more generalized overview, which to Wood’s mind may help scholars such as he to interpret the moving parts within the early American experience. A relatively recent book by Mark A. Noll offers exactly the type of broad synthesis Wood was requesting. Noll - whose 1977 book Christians in the American Revolution owed a large and acknowledged debt in both research and thesis to Hatch’s The Sacred Cause of Liberty - published The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity in 2002, which attempts to create a traditional narrative for the introduction and establishment of the Christian religion in North America -- Mexico and Canada included. Noll’s book is light on the subject of religion as a force in the American Revolution, no doubt a result of the breadth of his scope and his focus on Christianity as a primary subject. However, Noll argues significantly that “[m]ore religious debate occurred about whether to support the Revolution than most of the churches remembered, since after independence was achieved the churches were eager to demonstrate their solidarity with the new nation.” Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 58. This suggests that perhaps some of the sources that modern scholars would need in order to more fully understand the period were obfuscated on purpose, with forethought or impulsively, as a defense against possible nationalistic backlash or persecution in the tumultuous years after the Revolution. Noll here touches on, if briefly, an underappreciated potentiality within the historiography. Many of the historians who have chosen to study the role of religion in the American Revolution have neglected a discussion about the production of history. There is little if any mention of silences or darknesses purposefully created for social or political reasons at the time. Without a doubt, the historiography of this subject would be strengthened with more ethnographic studies in the vein of Isaac’s The Transformation of Virginia. (Certainly the South deserves far more cultural scholarship of that kind in this period.) There are undoubtedly many silences that can still be unmuted by innovative research and unfettered scholarship. The historiography of religion’s role within the American Revolution can be simplistically divided into the historians who viewed and later harkened back to the Enlightenment as an overwhelming force that supplanted the evangelicals of Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, inspiring a revolution and establishing a secular nation in the process, and those who followed Heimert and who were unable to shake the very obvious influence of Christianity in Revolutionary America. Of course, historians will continue to find original nuances to mine within the arguments of previous scholars and the historiography of religion and the American Revolution will refuse to be so simple. Mattson | 11