“Is Not This a Paradox?” Public Morality and the Unitarian Defense of State-Supported in , 1806–1833

nathan s. rives

N 1832, after an abortive attempt during the prior year, the I Massachusetts General Court succeeded in passing a con- stitutional amendment to abolish the nation’s last remaining tax-supported religious establishment.1 No one failed to notice that, while nearly every other group in the commonwealth fa- vored disestablishment, Unitarian legislators from the denomi- nation’s eastern strongholds were set on blocking it. And when, per constitutional requirement, the amendment came up for a second vote in 1833, once again Unitarian lawmakers re- sisted passage. Among the holdouts were all nine senators, and alone registered twenty-one nays.2 Massachusetts Uni- versalists, often lumped together with Unitarians but steadfast in their disapproval of the establishment, claimed to be mysti- fied by the Unitarians’ stubborn attachment to state-supported religion. An editorial in the widely circulated Universalist

I would like to thank Kyle Bulthuis, Gabe Loiacono, Mark Noll, the anonymous reader and the editors at the NEQ, as well as the participants and audience at the 2012 American Historical Association panel where an early version of this essay was presented. 1I use the term “establishment” more or less synonymously with the term “state- supported religion” to refer to the support by the state at various levels of government of (a) particular denomination(s) through legal privileges and tax levies. The problem of civil disabilities for certain religious groups, which persisted in many states even after the end of state-levied tax support, is not considered here. 2See Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 9 March 1833,p.146.

The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVI, no. 2 (June 2013). C 2013 by The New England Quarterly. All reserved.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 233 magazine the Trumpet remarked, “[The Unitarian] denomi- nation has professed to aspire to liberality, and to maintain un- restricted religious . None have declaimed more against tyranny under the name of religion. . . . The voice of all de- nominations is heard in petitions for a modification of this part of the Constitution, with the exception of the Unitari- ans, the professed guardians of religious liberty. Is not this a paradox?”3 The seeming paradox lay in the fact that, like Universalists, Unitarians associated religious liberty with religious , with from traditional dogma.4 Unitarians had long con- tested putatively illiberal forms of orthodox (usually Calvinist) evangelical theologies. In 1830, Congregationalist Moses Stuart, a professor at Andover Theological Seminary, complained that Unitarians were busily “accus[ing]” the orthodox “of a settled design to invade the religious of this community, and to force upon them, sooner or later, a creed which was framed in the dark ages, and is worthy only of them.”5 Universalists shared Unitarians’ disdain for Calvinism and also advocated for the positive development of moral character over the negative inducements of damnation and hellfire; by the 1820s, more- over, Universalists had largely abandoned trinitarianism for a (small-u) unitarian theology.6 But when it came to abolishing

3Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 3 November 1832,p.75;seealso25 June 1831,p.206. Ann Lee Bressler argues that by the 1820s Universalists had assumed the leading role in the movement to abolish state-supported religion in Massachusetts. See her The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2001), p. 35. The Universalist role is widely discussed in a central text on New England disestablishment: William G. McLoughlin, New England , 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 4The leading work on is Bressler’s Universalist Movement.Historians have long noted the similarities between Unitarians and Universalists; Bressler has co- gently argued for their differences, pointing out that their divergent theologies shaped divergent ideologies of social and moral order. Janet Moore Lindman, “‘Bad Men and Angels from Hell’: The Discourse of Universalism in Early National Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 31.2 (Summer 2011): 259–82, highlights the prevalence of Universalism outside New England. 5Moses Stuart, A Letter to William E. Channing D.D. on the Subject of Religious Liberty (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), p. 12. 6The writings of Hosea Ballou heavily influenced American Universalists’ accep- tance of a unitarian (small “u”) theology. See E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America:

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 234 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the presumably illiberal establishment, Massachusetts’ Unitari- ans inexplicably balked. They balked because, in some areas of the commonwealth at least, Unitarians had inherited the establishment, while Univer- salists continued to be sidelined as dissenters. Massachusetts’ church-state partnership, legally defined, dated back to the sev- enteenth century. Referred to in New England as the “Standing Order,” the alliance was dominated by Congregationalists, with Presbyterians in a supporting role. But by the 1820s, orthodox evangelicals and Unitarian liberals were battling one another, church by church. And as the orthodox withdrew in some Mas- sachusetts communities to found their own religious societies, they abandoned their support for the Standing Order because it no longer served their needs; Unitarians, in their turn, con- tinued to hoist the standard, even though it seemed heavy with tradition and dogma. Certain aspects of the complex phenomenon of disestab- lishment have been previously explored by scholars. Conrad Wright and Daniel Walker Howe have ably analyzed Unitarian theology and moral reasoning, and William G. McLoughlin, Peter S. Field, and Jonathan Sassi have traced the tortu- ous downfall of the Standing Order.7 But in grappling with the demise of state-supported religion, historians have tended to frame it in terms of an establishment-voluntarist binary, whereby establishmentarianism is viewed as conservative, eli- tist, and backward-looking—an apology for an elite-centered social order or hierarchy in an era of religious populism— and voluntary religious affiliation is seen as a positive exten- sion of post-Revolutionary liberalism, democratization, or the

Christian Thought from the Age of the to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 10; on Ballou, see esp. pp. 227–33. 7Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955); Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Phi- losophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); McLoughlin, New England Dissent; Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intel- lectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Pub- lic Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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spread of .8 To be sure, the elite Unitarian pro- ponents of Massachusetts’ Standing Order were never reluc- tant to consolidate their authority, but many also advocated voluntarism in various avenues of public life.9 Still, coming into their possession as surely as the communion silver, the Standing Order offered Unitarians an irresistible tool, ready to hand, for delivering religious truth and promoting the pub- lic morality they considered a core element of their theol- ogy. Their defense of state-supported religion, then, grew less from imperatives rooted in political or social advantage than from their belief system, and in the arguments they fash- ioned in the early national period, we can trace Massachusetts

8The democratization thesis is best known from Nathan O. Hatch, The Democra- tization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), but he does not deal in any systematic way with disestablishment. Mark A. Noll argues for a “natural affinity . . . between key evangelical convictions and a polity of disestablish- ment” in America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 174. But even this point must be considered in light of the fact that evangelical Congregationalists and many Presbyterians were staunch opponents of disestablishment until their favored establishments seemed to be working against their theological priorities. Thomas S. Kidd offers short, state-by-state vignettes on disestablishment within a narrative arc toward religious liberty in God of Liberty: A Religious History of the (New York: Basic Books, 2010). On religion and republicanism, see John F. Berens, Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640–1815 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978); Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. chaps. 13 and 14; and Noll, America’s God, chap. 4. On disestablishment generally, see Thomas E. Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776– 1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Mark Douglas McGarvie, One Nation under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State (DeKalb: Northern University Press, 2004); James H. Hutson, Church and State in America: The First Two Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). In Crisis of the Standing Order, Field writes, “the Brahmin clergy of Boston . . . transformed God’s covenant with the Puritan nation into a class compact with a privileged elite” (p. 110). 9The “elites” involved were not simply a social elite but what Richard J. Carwardine has called a devotional elite—the people “within the churches, from all social classes, who took their religion most seriously” (Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America [1993; repr. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997], p. xix), that is, clergy and motivated laity, including newspaper and magazine editors and contributors (not all of whom were clergy). Public discourses, controversial literature, and religious periodicals were important forums in the disestablishment controversy.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 236 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Unitarians’ understanding of the Standing Order as an expe- dient means to capture the high ground and to further their religious ends.

Across the theological spectrum, New England’s Congrega- tionalist clergy had historically defended state-supported reli- gion. In 1780, as Massachusetts worked through the process of ratifying a constitution that ultimately enshrined the state’s reli- gious establishment, liberal Congregationalist Simeon Howard spoke for liberals and orthodox alike. He admonished the leg- islature to carry out its constitutional duty: “Rulers should en- courage [religion and virtue] not only by their example, but by their authority . . . [and] should have power to provide for the institution and support of the public worship of God, and pub- lic teachers of religion and virtue.”10 State-supported religion was necessary, as Howard put it, “to maintain in the minds of the people that reverence of God, and that sense of moral obligation, without which there can be no conscience, no peace or happiness in society.”11 In other words, state-supported re- ligion was requisite to religious liberty, if it were not, indeed, its very foundation. Although the gave way to the steady po- litical attrition of the Jefferson and Madison years and, after the War of 1812, collapsed, in the 1790s, Federalism provided an ideological umbrella under which Congregationalists of all stripes could shade themselves.12 But even by the Revolution,

10Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council, and the Hon- orable House of Representatives of the State of Massachusetts-Bay, in New-England, May 31, 1780, being the anniversary for the election of the Honorable Council (Boston: John Gill, 1780), pp. 23, 24. Howard was a proteg´ e´ of liberal Arminian Congrega- tionalist Ebenezer Gay. Robert J. Wilson III describes Howard as a member of a “third generation” of Arminian ministers who, in effect, bridged the gap in Congre- gationalism between eighteenth-century liberal Arminianism and nineteenth-century liberal-rationalist Unitarianism. See Wilson, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), pp. 188–90. 11Howard, A Sermon before the Honorable Council, p. 24. 12Hatch makes this case in Sacred Cause of Liberty, a judgment reinforced by Sassi, who points out that Congregationalists in the Standing Order maintained considerable

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 237 the term “Congregationalist” revealed much less about one’s theological positions than it once had. The Congregational churches were fracturing into liberal Arminian, orthodox New Divinity/Edwardsian, and moderate “Old Calvinist” camps. Meanwhile, the more liberal theologies were aligning with or absorbing Enlightenment rationalism.13 Despite these widen- ing divisions, in 1806, when orthodox (and Federalist) Samuel Shepard vaunted the commonwealth’s religious liberty in an election sermon delivered before Governor Caleb Strong and the Massachusetts General Court, Congregationalists of all per- suasions applauded. “Our religious privileges are singularly great,” Shepard reflected. “In this land the principles of re- ligious toleration are generally understood and embraced, and the rights of conscience and enquiry are held peculiarly sa- cred.”14 Shepard’s sense of toleration was in keeping with a conservative definition of “establishment” that orthodox and liberals alike espoused at the time. Freedom of conscience, most acknowledged, was not inhibited by state-levied church taxes, for those who were not members of the tax-supported church were free to believe and practice their own faiths as they chose.15 But that same year, sparking outrage among the orthodox, liberal Henry Ware was appointed Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard.16 Orthodox ministers like Samuel Worcester

political unity despite theological differences until around 1800 and that the Standing Order was not seriously threatened in its political dominance until then (Republic of Righteousness, pp. 22, 25–26). 13Citing Ebenezer Gay, Jonathan Mayhew, and the “mature Charles Chauncy” as examples, Holifield detects “an increasing respect for reason” from the mid– to late eighteenth century (Theology in America, pp. 128–29). He offers a helpful, subtle dis- cussion of the theological differences among liberal, New Divinity, and “Old Calvinist” thought in chap. 6. 14Samuel Shepard, A Sermon, Preached . . . on the anniversary election, May 28, 1806 (Stockbridge: H. Willard, 1806), pp. 16–17. 15Given such a widely accepted assumption, defenders of the Standing Order some- times maintained that New England’s state-supported religion was not, in fact, an “establishment” at all. See, e.g., Jeremy Belknap, sermon, 19 February 1795, Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston, Mass. 16Ware had assumed the pulpit in Hingham, Massachusetts, upon the death of Ebenezer Gay and, as Wilson points out, “steer[ed]” Gay’s liberal Arminian congregation “into Unitarian waters.” Wilson discusses the connections between

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 238 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY responded by refusing to exchange pulpits with their liberal col- leagues, and in 1808 a new theological seminary was founded in Andover to offer a traditional alternative to the errant Har- vard.17 Thereafter, the orthodox and moderate Calvinist camps steadily converged, while the Congregational liberals, Armini- ans, and rationalists coalesced around what would become Unitarianism.18 The theological gulf between orthodox and Unitarian Congregationalists continued to widen in the next decade, as each camp sharpened its theological pronounce- ments as well as its criticisms of the opposition. In his 1817 sermon TheBibleaCodeofLaws,which he preached at the ordination of Sereno E. Dwight in Boston, Lyman Beecher thrilled the orthodox with his spirited assertions of Calvinist doctrine—including the trinity, Christ’s substitutionary atone- ment, the depravity of man, and the need for regeneration “by the special agency of the Holy Spirit”—leavened with assaults on the rising number of Unitarians, whom Beecher obliquely cast as those who “tortured” the Bible “into a supposed con- formity with reason.”19 But the best-remembered moment of the theological divergence between orthodox and Unitarians occurred at Jared Sparks’s ordination in Baltimore in 1819,an event attended by Unitarian clergy from across New England. William Ellery Channing, whom Beecher described as the

eighteenth-century Arminianism and nineteenth-century Unitarianism at great length in his Benevolent Deity, p. 238. On the controversy over Ware’s appointment, see Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, pp. 252–80. 17Timothy Dwight specifically applied the term “orthodox” to the theology to be taught there. See his A Sermon Preached at the Opening of the Theological Institution in Andover . . . , September 28th, 1808 (Boston: Farrand, Mallory, and Co., 1808), p. 14. 18Field argues that it was far from inevitable that orthodox and moderate Calvinists would come together; Andover was the prompt but reunion took time (Crisis of the Standing Order, pp. 165–67). On the Unitarian coalescence, see Holifield, Theology in America, pp. 197, 207–14; Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, pp. 135–60, 252;and Wilson, Benevolent Deity, esp. chaps. 7–9. 19Beecher, a Connecticut native, did not migrate to Boston until 1826, but his celebrity in the orthodox-Unitarian cut across state borders by 1817.Seehis The Bible a Code of Laws (Andover, Mass.: Flagg and Gould, 1818), pp. 26, 16. Beecher later described the reaction to his sermon in The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher (1864), ed. Barbara M. Cross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:258.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 239 Unitarians’ “idol,” delivered the ordination sermon, which E. Brooks Holifield has called the “manifesto” of the burgeoning movement.20 Channing vehemently rejected original sin, infi- nite guilt, substitutionary atonement, and trinitarianism as a bundle of errors. The Unitarian Christ was more than human but not divine; hence God was one, not three-in-one.21 Jesus’ teachings were principally moral, not theological. As the “Unitarian controversy” wore on, longtime friends and colleagues broke off relations, occasioning bitter feuds for institutional control. Disputes spilled over into parish life. In 1826, two different orthodox ministers refused to officiate at the funeral services of a Brooklyn, Connecticut, child because, although the mother was orthodox, the boy’s father had ar- ranged to hold the services in the Unitarian church, where he owned a pew.22 Peter Field has concluded that, rooted as it was in conflicting theological imperatives, “Congregational infight- ing killed the Standing Order.”23 But when Channing spoke in 1819, Massachusetts’ establishment remained intact, even though state-supported religion had been abandoned elsewhere in New England. Rhode Island never supported an established church. Vermont had dismantled its establishment in 1807.In the year of Channing’s sermon, both Connecticut and New Hampshire followed suit.24 Religious quarrels were implicated

20Beecher, Autobiography, 1:257; William Ellery Channing, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, May 5, 1819 (Boston: Hews and Goss, 1819); Holifield, Theology in America, p. 200. 21It is important to distinguish between unitarian (small “u”) theologies and the Unitarian denomination. American Unitarians were indeed small-u unitarians in their rejection of the trinity, but, unlike their English counterparts, their Christology was usually Arian (Jesus as more than a man but subordinate to God) rather than Socinian (Jesus as fully human). See Jerome D. Bowers, and English Unitarian- ism in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), and also J. Rixey Ruffin, A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 22Samuel J. May to Ezra Stiles Gannett, 15 February 1826, Ezra Stiles Gannett Papers, MHS. 23Field, Crisis of the Standing Order, p. 209. Field lays the blame for the schism at the feet of the orthodox (p. 180). 24I discuss disestablishment in all four states in my “A Nation Under God: The Poli- tics of Moral Reasoning in New England, 1776–1850” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2011), chap. 4.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 240 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in the fall of state-supported religion in each state; but quarrels alone, it seems, were not sufficient to topple Massachusetts’ Standing Order. Massachusetts’ religious establishment was grounded in Ar- ticle III of the 1780 declaration of rights (Part the First of the constitution), which stated that “the legislature shall . . . authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” To further that end, the legislature directed that towns and parishes levy a general assessment—that is, a tax on all citizens—that would be raised and disbursed for the support of Protestant religious organizations according to local conditions.25 But legal niceties complicated matters. A lawsuit involving the minister of a vol- untarily formed Universalist society, which made its way up to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1785, laid the problem bare. Were voluntary societies without a corporate charter from the legislature legally entitled to receive tax monies from the parish in which they were located?26 In 1786, the legislature stepped into the controversy by confirming corporate status on exist- ing parishes, which amounted to a gift to the Congregational churches.27 Voluntary dissenting churches were cast into legal

25“A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Mas- sachusetts, 1780,” in Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Jack N. Rakove (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), pp. 89–90. Sassi has commented that the ap- parently contradictory reasoning between Article II of the declaration of rights, which guaranteed freedom of conscience, and Article III reflected a “purely political compro- mise between those favoring religious liberty and those for the establishment, aimed at getting everyone on board to ratify the constitution of 1780”(Republic of Righteousness, p. 23). 26The case, John Murray v. Inhabitants of the First Parish in Gloucester, involved multiple hearings and appeals and ultimately produced rulings that denied Murray’s status as a legal minister. For discussions of the case, see John D. Cushing, “Notes on Disestablishment in Massachusetts, 1780–1833,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26.2 (April 1969): 173–81; and McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1:642–45. 27“An Act Regulating Parishes and Precincts, and the Officers Thereof,” 1786, chap. 10,inActs and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1836; repr. Boston: Wright and Potter, 1893).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 241 limbo; settling their status would involve further lawsuits or require that they petition the legislature individually for in- corporation. Their pains were multiplied when, in 1800,the General Court passed a new law affirming that only corporate parishes could receive funds from the general assessment.28 Republicans, who briefly dominated the General Court in 1807 and 1808, introduced a bill to exempt dissenters from local parish taxes if they belonged to another church, incorpo- rated or not. The bill failed. Dissenters continued to sue for the right to assign their taxes to their own denominations, but the Supreme Judicial Court rebuffed such efforts in 1810.Ledby Federalist Theophilus Parsons, the court ruled in Barnes v. Fal- mouth that unincorporated churches were merely self-created voluntary associations, not publicly chartered bodies, and there- fore not eligible to receive taxes.29 Similar rulings galvanized Republicans’ discontent. Turning the issue to their advantage in the elections of 1811, they captured the legislature once again as well the governor’s seat, to be occupied by Elbridge Gerry. That June, the legislature passed the Religious Freedom Act, which retained the general assessment but liberalized the distribution of levied funds, now allocated pro rata to support each resident’s own minister and denomination, whether in- corporated or not. To that end, residents filed a certificate of membership with their town clerk to specify the religious body to which their tax monies should be given.30 By permitting voluntary churches to receive taxes, the 1811 law resolved the incorporation issue that had been at the heart

28“An Act Providing for the Public Worship of God, and Other Purposes Therein Mentioned, and for Repealing the Laws Heretofore Made Relating to this Subject,” The Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Passed from the Year 1780, to the End of the Year 1800, 2 vols. (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1801): 2:931–33. 29Thomas Barnes v. The Inhabitants of the First Parish of Falmouth (6 Tyng 334 [1810]). On the Barnes decision and its relationship to legal doctrines of incorporation, see Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 53–54. The Barnes decision was not novel; the Supreme Judicial Court was hearkening back to arguments made in the Murray case in 1785. See McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1:642–45, 2:1084–89. 30Commonwealth of Massachusetts, An Act Respecting Public Worship and Reli- gious Freedom (n.p., 1811).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 242 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of the legal conflict since the 1780s. Still, it proved only tem- porarily satisfactory, as orthodox and Unitarians began draw- ing their theological battle lines during the remainder of the decade. In 1815, fearing that they were losing control of their own churches, orthodox ministers proposed to the General Association of Massachusetts a “Consociation” of Congrega- tional churches, patterned more or less on Presbyterian synods, which would be empowered to enforce traditional dogma in the churches.31 The plan was not adopted. Unitarians hoped that Congregationalists of all persuasions might continue to coexist in a loosely formed confraternity that nonetheless preserved the Standing Order. The orthodox, on the other hand, questioned the benefits of huddling with their liberal brethren. Alarmed at the rapid spread of liberal anti-Calvinism and rationalism, they were concerned to maintain the purity of orthodox Congrega- tional belief. Since the 1811 law afforded financial protections to voluntary churches, withdrawing from liberal-leaning congre- gations and establishing new churches was now an option for the diehard orthodox, but secession would leave their erstwhile churches in the hands of the liberal interlopers. Dissenters noted the irony: members of the Standing Order, particularly the orthodox, could now find themselves victims of their own establishment—as, indeed, they did. Hence, after 1811, legal showdowns entered a new phase. Although previously the Standing Order and dissenters had fought one another on the battleground of incorporation, now battles erupted within the Standing Order, where orthodox and Unitarians clashed over control of the incorporated churches. The most portentous case revolved around Jonathan Burr, a Congregational minister in Sandwich who converted to ortho- doxy and alienated the liberal majority in his parish, which voted at a parish meeting to dismiss him. A church commit- tee, dominated by orthodox members, disputed the parish vote, and Burr sued the parish. In 1812 the Supreme Judicial Court

31The chief author of the proposal, though not its only advocate, was Jedidiah Morse, then pastor of the church in Charlestown, Mass. The entire text, containing lengthy scriptural justifications, was reprinted in Panoplist and Missionary Magazine, August 1815, pp. 245–50.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 243 sided with the parish and found Burr’s dismissal legal. The rul- ing hinged on the distinction between church and parish: the church was a body of covenanted or professing members, and the parish was a geographically defined municipal unit to which the church was legally attached. The minister of the church was not merely pastor to its members; his contract was with the parish, not the church, and the voters of the parish were vested with the final right to settle and support him in his min- istry.32 Thus, in the long run, by tying Congregational churches to their parishes, the legislature’s 1786 decree of incorporation foundered on the rocks of religious schism. Because all taxpay- ing voters, if not affiliated with another church, were bound by the state’s establishment laws to contribute to the upkeep of the parochial church, and because church members might com- prise only a small proportion of the entire parish, the members could be overruled in their preference of a minister. Where formal membership skewed orthodox but unaffiliated residents were predominantly Unitarian or otherwise disaffected from or- thodoxy, the Burr decision redounded to the detriment of the orthodox, not just that year in Sandwich but, by virtue of legal precedent, throughout the commonwealth and in the years to come. The effects of Burr were evident in the next decade when the court issued its decision in Baker v. Fales (1821), widely referred to as the “Dedham case” because it involved a dispute in that town over church property. The orthodox had seceded, but they claimed that they still represented the original church. Unitarians countered that the church belonged to the parish and its residents; thus, the new “voluntary” orthodox church had no claim upon its former property. Referencing Burr, the Supreme Judicial Court, headed by Isaac Parker, reiterated that the incorporated church was legally inseparable from the ter- ritorial parish; therefore, all church property remained within the control of the majority of parish voters, in this case now the Unitarians. The orthodox were convinced that the Dedham

32Jonathan Burr v. The Inhabitants of the First Parish in Sandwich (9 Tyng 277 [1812]).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 244 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY case was a Unitarian plot; indeed, one pamphleteer accused Parker of plagiarizing a Unitarian magazine when framing his opinion.33 Subsequent controversies did little to improve the fortunes of the orthodox. In 1826, Groton’s ailing orthodox minister, Daniel Chaplin, requested that his parish invite a colleague to assist him in his duties. When the parish voted three-to-one to install a Unitarian over the wishes of the orthodox majority of church members, Chaplin vehemently objected. Groton eventually set- tled the matter peaceably, but it had roused sentiments that the orthodox sought to codify. Convening an ecclesiastical council, they determined that the Unitarians, in departing from tradi- tional doctrine, had in effect established a new denomination and, thus, had no right to elect the minister of a Congregational church. Election rights should properly be vested in the church and not in the parish as a territory. With a nod to case prece- dent and the wording of Article III of the declaration of rights, which called for religious taxes to support “teachers,” the coun- cil split hairs: it conceded that the parish could elect “teachers” but maintained that only the congregation could elect a pas- tor, or head of the church.34 The Unitarian Christian Examiner fumed, “The point in dispute . . . was brought simply to this; Shall a parish once Orthodox, and changing its opinions in the proportion of three to one, be compelled to settle an Orthodox preacher? This was the Groton case stripped of all the disguise thrown around it.”35 At fault were “Connecticut casuists”—a swipe at Lyman Beecher, coauthor of the council’s decision— who “accustomed to a state of things, in which ...theclergy hold all the power, and the people are accounted as nothing, have been in a time of excitement imported into this State.”36 The parish rights secured in the commonwealth’s constitution

33Vindication of the Rights of the Churches of Christ, First Printed in the Spirit of the Pilgrims (Boston: Pierce and Williams, 1828), reviewed in Christian Examiner and Theological Review, July–August 1828,p.303. 34The Rights of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts—The Result of an Ecclesiastical Council Convened at Groton, Massachusetts, July 17, 1826 (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1827), p. 61. 35Christian Examiner and Theological Review, March–April 1827,p.153. 36Christian Examiner and Theological Review, July–August 1828,p.306.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 245 were, in short, a guarantee of democracy that would protect Massachusetts’ Standing Order against the onslaughts that had felled it in the neighboring state to the south. In 1823, the legislature had amended the 1811 law to make it easier to form new religious societies and to guarantee that a person could not be taxed by a society to which he did not belong. Any new resident who did not join a church, however, would be considered a member of the town’s oldest religious society—which, in the vast majority of cases, was Congregation- alist. The bill liberalized the general assessment requirement but ensured that residents did not escape their duty to support religion in one form or another. Still, in verifying membership and assigning tax obligation, the 1823 law continued to rely on the certificate as the requisite legal instrument. This cre- ated further legal dilemmas. The 1811 law had stipulated that a committee of the religious society certify membership; the 1823 law went on to specify that one could transfer one’s obli- gation by submitting to the clerk of the old society a certificate signed by the clerk of the new one. But how should a society determine how certificates were to be issued? Must they be given to anyone who applied for membership?37 The Burr decision had made it clear that the residents of a parish controlled the parish church. But now, in principle, Massachusetts citizens could leave or join a church entirely at will, even crossing town or parish lines to do so if they chose. This new development opened the way for some unpleasant shenanigans. In one case, a number of Unitarians and Univer- salists joined an orthodox parish and then tried to oust the min- ister. In another, an orthodox man sued the parish in Malden for refusing to give him a certificate of membership because its members did not want him among them. Lyman Beecher, now occupying a pulpit in Boston and editing an anti-Unitarian magazine, blamed the problem on “lax members of our old

37“An Act in Addition to an Act Entitled ‘An Act Respecting Public Worship and Religious Freedom,’” Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Passed by the General Court, 1823, chap. 106. The requirements and complications of the 1823 law are discussed in Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 13 November 1830,p.78.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 246 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY societies, who seldom see the inside of the meeting-house,” who “furnish a convenient corps for the Unitarian aristocracy to collect from the highways and hedges, when it may become necessary, to overwhelm the majority of the real supporters of the Gospel.”38 But dissenters were equally concerned. The Uni- versalist Trumpet worriedly imagined a “floating population” of religious disturbers who joined and left parishes willy-nilly in order to “overrun and outvote all the churches and societies and dissipate their funds and desecrate their temples and altars.” If current conditions persisted, all were in peril, for “the parishes and religious societies in this State are not in the enjoyment of religious liberty. They cannot preserve their own existence. They are liable to be destroyed at any time.”39 Unitarians, unsurprisingly, blamed the woeful state of affairs on the orthodox—not just their leaders but their theology. A schism in a parish, argued the Christian Register, usually be- gan with “[a]n Orthodox clergyman, by the use of an Orthodox creed, exclud[ing] all from his Church but Orthodox converts.” To prevent their defection from the orthodox faith, he threat- ens them with “everlasting perdition,” denounces Unitarians as “infidels and worse than infidels,” claims that Unitarians reject all for “human reason” and that “a mere outward morality is all [Unitarians] hold to be necessary.” Despite his best efforts, a significant number of his parishioners ultimately reject orthodox doctrine. When it comes time to elect a new minister, “[t]he Orthodox are a minority, and a Unitarian com- mittee is chosen. This they deem a great hardship—a cruel invasion of their rights.” A Unitarian minister is elected, the orthodox secede, and the Unitarians of the parish, “who have so long paid their part for Orthodox preaching, are left to bear the whole expense of public worship, and nothing is left undone that can lessen their numbers and weaken their ability.”40 In their rage for theological purity, the orthodox were destroying state-supported religion. If the orthodox wished to complain of

38Spirit of the Pilgrims, April 1828, pp. 172–73. 39Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 13 November 1830,p.78. 40Christian Register, 26 February 1831.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 247 the decline of piety in New England, then, they should well look to themselves for dividing the churches and squabbling over the resources needed to fund God’s work. When orthodox clergy countered that their secession was in fact a form of “ex- ile” from their own churches, Unitarians pointed out that their exile was self-inflicted.41 As the 1820s wore on and liberalism made more and more inroads, the orthodox despaired of the commonwealth’s abil- ity to safeguard the religious establishment that had nurtured their theological mission for almost two centuries. What else could they do, argued Moses Stuart, but withdraw from com- munion with those who accused them “of bigotry, of gloomy superstition, of dark and fraudulent designs on the religious liberties of our country, of worshipping a God who is a tyrant, of propagating horrible and blasphemous ideas of the Divin- ity, of worshipping a God who is no better than the devil[?]”42 In an odd pairing of bedfellows, the orthodox now joined the cause of other dissenters, including Baptists and Universalists. Baptists, who had arguably suffered the longest under New England’s establishment laws, accepted their new allies with a certain degree of self-satisfaction. “For many years, our Con- gregational brethren, both Arminian and Orthodox, were slow to discern the injustice and wickedness of this conduct towards the Baptists. Late events, however, in which the Orthodox have felt the hand of oppression from the Unitarians and men of the world, have led them to see the evil, because they have felt its pressure on themselves. Their sufferings have done them good.”43 As the orthodox abandoned their positions and the Unitar- ians were left to defend the Standing Order on their own,

41Spirit of the Pilgrims, February 1831,p.61; Christian Register, 26 February 1831. 42Stuart, A Letter to Channing on Religious Liberty, pp. 23, 26. 43Christian Watchman, 25 March 1831,p.46. See also an article reprinted from the New York Journal of Commerce in the orthodox Boston Recorder, 20 November 1833,p.188: “Formerly, what are called the ‘Orthodox Congregationalists’ were the greatest sticklers for this provision, because they thought it would induce many to attend their churches, who otherwise would not attend any church. . . . The Orthodox Congregationalists have at length come to see the true bearing of the provision and accordingly are anxious to have it repealed.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 248 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY momentum gathered to bring it down. In June 1831, the Mas- sachusetts House of Representatives voted by a large majority to excise the language in Article III that vested the legislature with the power to make provision for public worship, leaving “the people of this Commonwealth” to do so voluntarily. Some were concerned that the proposed constitutional amendment retained a clause from the 1780 text that reserved the “exclusive right of electing their public teachers” to “religious societies,” fearing that the Supreme Judicial Court would continue to in- terpret the passage in a way that gave parish residents the right to elect ministers over the wishes of church members.44 In any event, eastern Unitarians remained steadfast in their opposi- tion to the amendment. The house passed it by the necessary two-thirds majority, but it failed in the senate. The amendment that finally did pass both house and senate in 1832—over the objections of an unfavorable report of the senate judiciary com- mittee, chaired by Unitarian Leverett Saltonstall of Salem—not only eliminated religious taxation but defined “religious soci- eties” so as to make it clear that churches had “the right to elect their pastors or religious teachers.”45 Some Unitarians began to see the writing on the wall; a few defected to the disestablishmentarian position and helped pass the long-contested amendment in 1832 and 1833.The weariness in a January 1833 Christian Examiner editorial is palpable:

Every body knows that . . . laws, in respect to religion in particular, and religious institutions, have become, generally speaking, as impo- tent as they are obnoxious. Under these circumstances it may well be doubted, whether it is expedient to keep up the semblance of an authority, . . . the only probable effect of which will be to provoke and exasperate some, to excite the jealousies of others, and to afford

44Proposed amendment reprinted and concerns about language on “teachers” noted in Spirit of the Pilgrims, December 1831,p.647;seealsoTrumpet and Universalist Magazine, 25 June 1831,p.206. 45Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Articles of Amendment, art. XI (emphasis added); senate committee report reprinted in Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 25 February 1832,p.138.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 249

a handle to disorganizers generally in their appeals to popular feeling and prejudice. In fact, the editorial went so far as to rebut the pro- establishment arguments of other Unitarians, some of which the editors had made themselves over the years and some of which were reiterated in an opposing point-of-view in the same issue! “Above all,” the editorial concluded, “we rely on the over- rulingprovidenceofGod...thatHewillnotsufferthechurch . . . to be prevailed against by the gates of hell.”46 Ultimately, they began to come around to the view that dissenters took in the beginning: God would take care of his own. Such last- minute changes of heart demonstrate that, in the context of schismatic discord and its concomitant legal convulsions, even some Unitarians were coming to see state-supported religion as a liability. The means were, in their eyes, failing to achieve the desired ends.

Congregationalist warfare exposed the ideological paradox at the heart of the Standing Order’s defense. That defense had always ostensibly rested on the contention that the state was supporting Religion (as a whole), not a religion (in particu- lar). Such a claim was disingenuous, of course, for the choice to support one or any religious group necessarily implied the choice to exclude others. As the Universalist Magazine insisted in 1821, “There is nothing more evident than that if it be a necessary policy of the state to support, by law, the christian religion, it is equally necessary that either the state constitution or legislation on that constitution, should particularly define the doctrine of christianity.”47 This was a point no less salient for having been initially advanced by dissenters. Indeed, orthodox Congregationalists naturally found the defense of “religion” less appealing when their own religion was racked by theological schism. For their part, Massachusetts Unitarians (as Jonathan

46Christian Examiner and General Review, January 1833, pp. 346, 347, 350. 47Universalist Magazine, 6 January 1821,p.111.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 250 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Sassi has observed) continued to embrace the Congregational- ist “corporate ethic,” especially its equation of public religion and morality.48 But the corporate ethic was never religiously neutral, and the Congregationalist schism deepened its various shadings. Unitar- ians and orthodox alike insisted that public morality emerged from religious truth. But William Ellery Channing’s election sermon before the Massachusetts legislature in May 1830 showed how readily political speech channeled religious contro- versy. Channing vocally deplored “sectarianism” and particular- istic “bigotry,” but he did so only after delivering a disquisition about the dangers of religious falsehoods and evils that ran to three pages of his subsequently published text. He denounced violence, priestcraft, and martyrdom but, more pointedly, the “fearful . . . influence over the mind” characteristic of religious “tyranny.” “The dread of inquiry which it has struck into supe- rior understandings, and the servility of spirit which it has made to pass for piety” Channing regarded as worse than “the fire, the scaffold, and the outward inquisition.”49 He did not men- tion his orthodox or Calvinist foes by name—but this was the same language he and other Unitarians had used to denounce evangelical doctrines elsewhere, and it is hard to imagine that anyone would have missed the similarity. Pious public morality would flow from “religion” only if that religion was not the prod- uct of theological error. And even as Unitarians recognized that state-levied tax dollars would not flow to their churches alone and called upon orthodox secessionists for mutual toleration, they remained certain that the state-supported order was criti- cal to the advancement of their moral and theological priorities. Indeed, in the early nineteenth century, as most states with- drew the requirement for public funding and churches were

48Sassi ably weaves observations about Unitarian establishmentarianism into an analysis of the creative tensions between the social conservatism and religious liberalism of the Unitarians’ “corporate ethic.” See Republic of Righteousness, pp. 154–63. 49William Ellery Channing, A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 26, 1830, before His Excellency Levi Lincoln, Governor, His Honor Thomas L. Winthrop, Lieutenant Governor, The Honorable Council, and the Legislature of Massachusetts (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830), pp. 25–28.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 251 obliged to seek and survive solely on free-will contributions, Massachusetts Unitarians were unconvinced that voluntarism was at all efficacious. New England’s religious institutions, they argued, owed their durability to the state-supported “system.” Voluntary religion flourished only to the extent that it was an- chored by the state-supported foundation.50 After all, when sheltered by the Standing Order, evangelical reformers had in- sisted that voluntary moral reform was rightly a supplement to—not a substitute for—state-supported religion.51 Unitarians saw the orthodox evangelicals’ advocacy for new laws and in- stitutions to promote religion and moral order as a paradox in itself. A. B. M., who contributed a seven-part defense of the establishment to the Unitarian Christian Register in October and November 1832, marveled that so many would reject state- supported religion but continue to uphold laws prohibiting blas- phemy, profaneness, and above all, sabbath violation.52 Another writer pointed out that disestablishmentarian arguments for the separation of church and state could be leveled against sabbath laws in general.53 It could also not be ignored that evangelicals continued to uphold laws demanding that religious oaths be sworn in courts of law, a requirement that deprived Universal- ists and atheists of the right to serve on juries on grounds that their oaths were invalid and an affront to the moral order.54 Hence, contended Unitarians, it was entirely inconsistent to en- force some religious duties by law while refusing to bolster the very foundation of religious duties by funding public worship. The fundamental need that the Standing Order fulfilled, Uni- tarians fervently maintained, was to ensure the presence of an educated, settled ministry. Although urban churches might

50Christian Disciple, 1 January 1821, pp. 40–41. 51See my “A Nation Under God,” esp. chap. 5. 52Christian Register, 20 October 1832,p.166. 53Christian Disciple, 1 January 1821,p.33. 54For example, in an open letter to Channing advocating disestablishment, orthodox Moses Stuart maintained that civil disabilities relating to jury service should continue to exist “where a man denies the existence of a God, or of a state of future rewards and punishments. In such a case, we do not see how the obligation of an oath can have any binding force at all” (A Letter to Channing on Religious Liberty, p. 14).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 252 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY remain strong without the steady, predictable revenue that tax- ation afforded, poorer regions and rural areas might be hard hit. “Are we told that in other States the clergy are supported and labor faithfully without the aid of the law?” noted the Chris- tian Register. “This is true only of the cities and larger places in those States. Who does not know that through wide regions, not a church-bell is heard, not a preacher settled, nor a parish formed? Do we desire such a scene in our Commonwealth?”55 To those who pointed south for models of voluntarism’s suc- cess, the Unitarian Christian Disciple retorted, “While in the capital of Massachusetts the proportion of settled ministers is one third less than in the state at large, in the Southern States this proportion is more than reversed.” In other words, in Massachusetts, settled ministers were more evenly distributed across the state, while in the South they were heavily concen- trated in towns and cities, and so rural areas were underserved. Issued in 1821,theDisciple’s findings came only a few years af- ter both New Hampshire and Connecticut had abolished their own religious taxation, and the editors saw signs that southern conditions were drifting northward. “Has the number of set- tled ministers been increased, or are the meeting-houses more crowded . . . [in] these states . . . now that the shades of a legal establishment have been swept away?”56 The number of settled ministers was the critical point; itinerants—of which there were many, especially in the South—and revivalists certainly did not count.57 By removing legal supports for ordered religion and an educated ministry, disestablishment gave the advantage to uneducated enthusiasts. “Ignorant ministers are driven almost by necessity to fanaticism,” Channing declared. “Unable to in- terest their hearers by appeals to the understanding, and by clear and judicious and affecting delineations of religion, they can only acquire and maintain the ascendancy which is so dear

55Christian Register, 13 October 1832,p.162;seealsoChristian Examiner and General Review, January 1833,p.361. 56Christian Disciple, 1 January 1821, pp. 40–41. 57On the central role of itinerant ministers (especially Methodists) in the expansion of Christianity in the South, see Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 253 to them, by inflaming the passions, by exciting a distempered and ungoverned sensibility, and by perpetuating ignorance and errour.”58 Unitarians’ anxiety over enthusiasm has sometimes been dis- missed as elitism; however, their attitude proceeded from a desire not for exclusion but for uplift. As Channing insisted, religion should seek not simply to appeal to the masses but to refine their understanding as well. “[I]f in a cultivated age religious instruction does not partake the general elevation,” he explained, “it will be slighted by the very minds whose influ- ence it is most desirable to engage on the side of virtue and piety.”59 Congregationalists had long agreed that the ministry’s intellectual qualifications should exceed those of the common populace. Lyman Beecher observed that uneducated minis- ters would have difficulty “command[ing] the attention” of better-educated people of higher social standing.60 Speaking at the opening of Andover in 1808, Timothy Dwight acknowl- edged that “The Truth of God, alone makes men free from the bondage of sin and death. But he, who is to preach it, must know what it is; or he will never be able to communi- cate it to his hearers.”61 Nevertheless, the orthodox embraced enthusiasm, at least insofar as it helped them engage would- be converts in the spiritual immediacy of revivals. Education might be required to comprehend the intellectual claims of or- thodoxy, but it could not in itself induce the regeneration that evangelicals saw as inseparable from moral conversion.62

58[William Ellery Channing], Observations on the Proposition for Increasing the Means of Theological Education at the University in Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: n.p., 1816), p. 10. 59[Channing], Observations on Theological Education, p. 8. 60Lyman Beecher, An Address of the Charitable Society for the Education of In- digent Pious Young Men for the Ministry of the Gospel (New Haven: n.p., 1814), p. 6. 61Dwight, A Sermon Preached at the Theological Institution in Andover, p. 16. 62Strictly speaking, regeneration and conversion were related but distinct theological concepts. Regeneration referred to the receipt of divine grace; conversion signified moral transformation actuated by the exercise of faith. But evangelicals did not always rhetorically observe the fine line between the two; enthusiastic revivalists in particular tended to conflate them into a moral language of regenerative conversion whereby both events happened at once. A useful discussion of the distinction can be found in Anne

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 254 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Unitarians, for their part, understood conversion as a moral process, not as the potential result of a one-off moment of regeneration. A pamphlet entitled Essay on Conversion, orig- inally published in 1819 in the Christian Disciple, defined conversion as a “change of character”: “the renunciation of erroneous sentiments, and the adoption of true principles, the purging from the heart every evil affection, and the introduc- tion of others which are virtuous and holy.”63 Such a definition was not significantly different from one evangelicals might of- fer, but Unitarians objected that orthodox theology (or “Calvin- ism,” as Channing and others scornfully put it) so emphasized human depravity and the need for regeneration that morality became separated from faith. For the orthodox, complained Henry Ware, regeneration “professedly superseded morality, or tacitly undermined it.” The result, Channing thought, was that “a sense of the infinite importance, and indispensible ne- cessity of personal improvement is weakened.”64 Where, then, was the incentive to exert one’s will toward moral improvement if human beings were depraved and ultimately dependent on the caprice of a deity for the exercise of virtue? Unitarians, on the other hand, Channing explained, “regard [Christ] as a Saviour, chiefly as he is the light, physician, and guide of the dark, diseased, and wandering mind.” One was de- livered from sin by adopting virtue, not through substitutionary atonement.65 Unitarians were emphatic about the critical role of “benevolent virtues” in true Christianity. Channing admitted,

C. Loveland, “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought,” Journal of Southern History 32 (1966): 178. My understanding of orthodox “enthusiasm” in revivals follows Noll’s definition of enthusiasts as “those who sought direct concourse with God” (America’s God, p. 228). 63An Essay on Conversion, First Published in the “Christian Disciple” (Boston: n.p., 1819), p. 5. 64Henry Ware, A Sermon Delivered before the Convention of Congregational Min- isters of Massachusetts at their Annual Meeting in Boston, May 28, 1818 (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1818), p. 12, and Channing, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, p. 20. 65Channing, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, p. 20. On a later occasion, Channing noted, “Spiritual freedom . . . is not a negative state, not themereabsenceofsin....[I]tismoralenergyorforceofholypurpose...liberating the intellect, conscience, and will” (A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 26, 1830, pp. 6–7).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 255 “We attach such importance to these [virtues], that we are sometimes reproached with exalting them above piety.”66 Virtue was liberal and rational, not the object of passion and enthusiasm. To leave religion “to feeble and ignorant advo- cates, to men of narrow and unfurnished minds” was to risk being “overwhelmed by the ignorant and fanatical.”67 Hence, while it was ultimately in the interest of all denominations to create a stable ministry, Unitarians were concerned with the domination of religious instruction by itinerants and revivalists in a way that evangelicals, and even Universalists—who, as Ann Lee Bressler has shown, relied heavily on itinerant preaching until the 1850s—were not.68 For, as Channing concluded, “An enlightened ministry is the only barrier against fanaticism.”69 “Improvement,” the catchall term for religious liberalism’s goal of moral and social refinement, may have seemed the preserve largely of the well-established, the fortunate, and the aspiring middling sort, but Unitarians’ insistence upon it was not merely social but theological in its import, for improvement did not end with this life.70 To better understand the Unitarian theology of the afterlife, it helps to compare its conception to that of Universalism, whose defining doctrine was the ultimate universal salvation of all mankind, although there was some disagreement on whether sinners might first endure purgato- rial punishment.71 Unitarians and Universalists alike shunned the notion that the afterlife might involve a literal burning or

66Channing, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, p. 23. 67[Channing], Observations on Theological Education, pp. 8, 9. 68On the Universalist definition of regeneration and its effect on moral benevolence, see Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, pp. 14, 26; on the Universalist reliance on “spiritual controversy” and itinerancy, and the shift of the 1850s, see pp. 55–58, 80–81. 69[Channing], Observations on Theological Education, p. 8. 70Daniel Walker Howe elaborates on the meanings of self-improvement and argues that such ideas grew increasingly widespread in the early nineteenth century. See his Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 71Bressler discusses the contention between the majority “ultra-Universalists,” who averred that there was no punishment after death, and “restorationists,” who argued for limited future punishment aimed at moral reformation—a position that, as will become clear, is quite close to the majority Unitarian view of the afterlife. However,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 256 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY hell. Unitarians maintained that God’s punishment, such as it was, was inflicted on the conscience. Nathan Parker poetically preached that the unrighteous dead would “carry a hell within their own bosoms.”72 Eternal retributive torture was not wor- thy of the liberal deity. As the Unitarian Christian Examiner insisted, “[W]e yield to none in the unmixed aversion which we feelfortheCalvinisticdoctrineofhelltorments....Consid- ered . . . as literally true, and to be literally carried into effect, we look upon it, as, beyond all question, the most horrible dogma ever conceived or uttered by man.”73 Such arguments could as easily have come from the mouth of Hosea Ballou, the theological giant of early nineteenth-century Universalism. A few Unitarians were indeed attracted to the doctrine of uni- versal salvation. (Channing opined that any Unitarian “tender- ness to this doctrine” was the understandable, if unfortunate, outcome of their radical abhorrence of Calvinism.)74 In fact, there was enough theological agreement between Unitarians and Universalists that Ballou criticized Unitarians for failing to follow their own doctrines to what he perceived as their logical conclusion.75 But Unitarians kept their distance. Historians have noted that Unitarians and Universalists were separated to some extent by social status and location: the former were better represented among well-to-do urban New Englanders; the latter tended to be poorer, often farmers or urban laborers.76 Unitarians,

restorationism did not become the majority position of Universalists until the 1850s. See Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, pp. 42–48. 72Nathan Parker, ASermon,PreachedatConcord,before...theLegislatureofthe state of New-Hampshire, June 3, 1819 (Concord: Hill and Moore, 1819), p. 12. Parker actually occupied a pulpit in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but he had close ties to Massachusetts Unitarians. 73Christian Examiner and General Review, May 1830,p.462. 74William Ellery Channing to Ezra Stiles Gannett, 2 May 1833, Channing Papers, MHS. 75See Hosea Ballou, Commendation and Reproof of Unitarians (Boston: Henry Bowen, 1829); and Holifield, Theology in America, p. 218. 76Bressler discusses the socioeconomic context in which Universalism first emerged but rightly criticizes the tendency to reduce the differences between Universalists and Unitarians primarily to social location. See her The Universalist Movement in America, pp. 7, 21–23.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 257 however, measured the distance between themselves and Uni- versalists with a theological yardstick. The Christian Examiner observed, “That many Unitarians are Universalists, and that many Universalists are Unitarians is not denied; but it is de- nied that there is any natural or necessary connexion between the two systems.” New England Unitarians held varied opin- ions, but their “high notions of the liberty of the human will, ma[d]e it almost impossible for [them] to look forward to a universal restoration to holiness, except as a contingency,” that is, if the sinner were granted the opportunity to repent after death. Such an attitude followed from the commonly held Uni- tarian belief that the afterlife was “nothing but a continuation of our moral ” in this life.77 The primary usefulness of a concept of the afterlife, Unitar- ians held, was to induce correction. The Christian Examiner explained, “Every one will receive as much enjoyment or pain, and for such a length of time, as he deserves, and needs for his moral improvement.”78 Sin would “retard irretrievably” one’s chances at moral progress and restoration; given such reason- ing, most Unitarians found it difficult to admit of universal salvation.79 Whereas Universalists defined the future state in terms of universal divine mercy, Unitarians did so in terms of the potential for universal moral advancement. It was a subtle but important difference. Whatever distaste the two religious groups shared for the notion of a God who judged anyone worthy of eternal retributive punishment, Unitarians largely recoiled from Universalism’s defining doctrine. Channing, for one, remarked on its dangers in correspondence with his friend and proteg´ e´ Ezra Stiles Gannett. “I consider the growth of Uni- versalism as the most threatening moral evil in our part of the

77Christian Examiner and General Review, May 1830, pp. 460, 461, 461–62. 78Christian Examiner and General Review, July 1830,p.228. 79Christian Examiner and General Review, May 1830,p.462.In1840, for example, when the Methodist Zion’s Herald dared Universalists “to produce a single Christian author from the days of the Apostles down to 1818, in which the doctrine of no punishment of any kind after death, is even so much as asserted[,]” the Unitarian Christian Register reprinted the challenge. See Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 10 October 1840, as pasted into the diary of Ezra Stiles Gannett, vol. 21 (1840), Gannett Papers, MHS. See also Holifield, Theology in America, p. 213.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 258 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY country.” Universalist doctrine, Channing declared, was “more mild to the multitude” than was Deism or outright atheism.80 Although the importance of positive inducements to this- worldly morality was not lost on any denomination, for Uni- tarians moral improvement was a central religious imperative. Spiritual freedom, Channing explained, “is the attribute of a mind, in which reason and conscience have begun to act. . . . [T]he spiritual freedom which Christ came to give . . . consists in moral force, in self-control, in the enlargement of thought and affection, and in the unrestrained action of our best pow- ers.”81 “[C]rimes are guarded against,” opined the Christian Disciple, “not so much by those fears, which hold back the villain from perpetrating what he has conceived, as by the pro- duction of those moral habits and feelings, which prevent the very formation of guilty designs.”82 Downplaying the negative restraints—that is, the fear of eternal punishment—that evan- gelicals preached to spur right behavior, Unitarians held com- mon cause with their Universalist brethren, but—and it is an important distinction, one that bears repeating—Unitarians of- fered redemption only conditionally. Men were created “for in- definite spiritual progress,” Channing insisted. The body turned inevitably to dust, but “the intellectual and moral life . . . is to endure forever.”83 Any lack of proper, lifelong religious instruc- tion might prove a permanent setback for the moral salvation of the world’s sinners. And so Massachusetts Unitarians had a very practical reason for resisting the removal of state support from their churches. For Universalists, regeneration was reduced simply to accept- ing the doctrine of universal salvation, which would presum- ably change the heart of the converted; in the end, all would be redeemed. Evangelicals, meanwhile, relied heavily on the enthusiastic supernaturalism of revivals to spread their mes- sage and win adherents. Neither Universalists nor evangelicals

80Channing to Gannett, 2 May 1833, Channing Papers, MHS. 81Channing, A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 26, 1830, pp. 7, 10. 82Christian Disciple, 1 January 1821,p.28. 83Channing, A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 26, 1830, pp. 14, 5.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 259 perceived a significant threat in disestablishment, but Unitari- ans certainly did. The Christian Disciple worried in 1821 that if the people opted for disestablishment and religion went into decline, “a system of rational and regular instruction and wor- ship could not be restored.”84 In an article in an 1832 issue of the Christian Register, an anonymous writer insisted:

[I]t is our solemn conviction that from the hour in which our religious institutions shall stand in this new position [i.e., lacking state support], our ancient assemblies for divine worship will decrease, and in time, numbers of them will cease their existence. The sweet sounds of the church-going bell on the sabbath, shall be gradually exchanged for voices of rioting and mirth. A fitful enthusiasm will send out its inconstant ministrations, instead of these regular thrice-blessed religious instructions.85 In retrospect, the Unitarians’ fears seem exaggerated. But vol- untary religion was still a fairly new concept in Jacksonian America, especially in New England. And in the early 1830s, Unitarians could point to the growth of religious skepticism in Boston, a movement led by ex-Universalist Abner Kneeland. The Christian Examiner warned that skeptics “will find the work of overthrowing or undermining religious institutions far easier, if they are left unprotected by the government.”86 Spir- itual freedom, which Channing rooted in liberal morality, was “the great end of society and government.”87 Thus, government could ill afford to relinquish its support of true religion, which would allow enthusiasts, sectarians, and skeptics to have free reign over society.

The Unitarians’ inability to defend state-supported religion was not, in the event, so serious a defeat as many had feared.

84Christian Disciple, 1 January 1821, pp. 41–42. 85Christian Register, 10 November 1832,p.178. 86Christian Examiner and General Review, January 1833,p.358. On Kneeland’s organization, lectures, and newspaper in Boston, see Christopher Grasso, “Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 22.3 (Autumn 2002): 485, 487–88. 87Channing, A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 26, 1830, p. 11.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 260 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Outside of their strongholds, Unitarians had never attained the numbers of their evangelical contemporaries, but they extended the influence of their moral reasoning in other ways. To name one example, Unitarians had long advocated education as an indispensable means to moral improvement. The leadership of Unitarians like Horace Mann proved instrumental in shaping a system of state-funded common schools in Massachusetts in the late 1830s, a model that would be widely copied nation- wide.88 If not through state-supported churches, then, moral improvement might be achieved through tax-funded schools. And in the end, Unitarians readily embraced voluntary means to promote movements such as asylum reform and antislavery. The “paradox” could be resolved: new means could be discov- ered to accomplish the desired ends, ends embedded not just in social policy but in theological imperatives as well.89 But before those means were set in place, the Unitarians rallied around the Standing Order as the most expedient guar- antor of moral order. Once the orthodox withdrew to defend their theological prerogatives, they effectively left the Unitari- ans holding the keys. But default is not a sufficient explanation for the Unitarians’ commitment to the Standing Order. Nor are claims for the defense of a religiously inflected social elitism;

88Howe has persuasively argued for the disproportionate “cumulative effect” of Unitarianism on America’s religious and cultural milieu in the antebellum period. See his What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 613–31 (“cumulative effect,” p. 617). 89I am grateful to Mark Noll for the insight about Horace Mann and educational reform in the wake of disestablishment. I am not suggesting that common schools were simply a reaction to disestablishment, merely that their purpose, in the eyes of advocates like Mann, also channeled concerns for moral improvement into the public sphere and dovetailed with the imperatives of Unitarian moral reasoning and theology. Indeed, because Mann’s pedagogy dismissed evangelical notions of original sin, his opponents accused him of foisting Unitarian philosophies on children (see Neem, Cre- ating a Nation of Joiners, pp. 130–34). Daniel Walker Howe discusses the connections between religion and state-funded education in “Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 22.1 (Spring 2002): 1–24 (on Mann’s role, see pp. 20–22). For further insights into Mann’s educational advo- cacy, see Barbara Finkelstein, “Perfecting Childhood: Horace Mann and the Origins of Public Education in the United States,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 13:1 (Winter 1990): 6–20. On Dorothea Dix’s asylum reform, see Howe, What Hath God Wrought, pp. 603–6, 629; on Unitarian antislavery and its theological inflections, see my “A Nation Under God,” chap. 6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 261 orthodox clergy, too, numbered among the social elite of New England and became ardent disestablishmentarians. A dogged oppositionality might also be advanced as an incentive to the Unitarians’ establishment views: if the orthodox were abandon- ing the establishment, all the more reason to uphold it. Indeed, evangelicals’ passionate opposition to state-supported religion could be seen as another form of enthusiasm to be resisted. Geography was an additional factor, compounded by the irony that in Unitarian-heavy Boston particularly, the collection of taxes for public worship was rarely enforced! Unitarians in the eastern part of the state, then, had little experience to suggest that the establishment was anything but a force for good.90 Geography, in fact, introduces a peculiar wrinkle.91 The Uni- versalist Trumpet observed in 1831 that “among the friends of the alteration [of the constitution] we are happy to find many of all denominations—Baptists, Methodists, Orthodox, Univer- salists, Unitarians, &c.” But “[t]he orthodox in the western and the Unitarians in the eastern part of the state oppose it.”92 The Trumpet was onto something: the areas of the state in which it noted the stoutest defense of state-supported religion were where orthodox Congregationalism had largely escaped internal strife (the Connecticut River Valley) or where Unitari- anism (Boston and throughout Suffolk County) had attained dominance. In other words, where discord had been avoided or where it had been overcome, support for the establishment remained relatively firm.93 Local conditions mattered; they had an effect on the calculus of how theological priorities should be translated into public policy. The orthodox who clung to the establishment included William B. Sprague of West Springfield, who defended it in his 1825 election sermon. Religion depended upon its institutions,

90Lyman Beecher, as well as Baptists and Universalists, spoke about unequal en- forcement too. See Spirit of the Pilgrims, December 1831, pp. 634–35; Christian Watchman, 13 May 1820; Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 17 March 1832,p.150. 91See Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 9 March 1833,p.146. 92Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, 12 November 1831,p.78. 93My assertion follows a similar observation in Sassi, Republic of Righteousness, p. 277,n.55.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 262 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Sprague maintained; thus “it is not an oppressive act in govern- ment to require that every individual should contribute to [the] support” of Christian public worship when the “benign influ- ence” of those institutions benefited all. He insisted that civil government could promote religious institutions on “ground common to them all” without delving into “the peculiarities of different sects.” Nevertheless, Sprague declared without hes- itation, “Not that I believe the faith of all denominations to be equally pure and good: far from it.” That one line exposed the insoluble paradox of the corporate ethic. Sprague argued for the utility of “religion,” although no one, including himself, believed in the equal utility of all . No wonder that, in the mid-1820s, Sprague’s establishmentarian position was rare among the orthodox; his defense of state-supported religion as “the spirit of the pilgrims,” a heritage from the seventeenth century, did not much appeal to those who felt oppressed by the Unitarian heretics of the nineteenth century.94 By contrast, to the north, in New Hampshire, Nathan Parker of Portsmouth delivered the election sermon in 1819 just weeks before the legislature opened debate on a bill to disband the Standing Order. Parker was a Unitarian. He had been present in Baltimore when Channing offered his momentous ordination address.95 Parker lamented the long “reign of ignorance” that Christianity had for centuries endured, with all the false and useless doctrines foisted upon humanity in that time. Estab- lishments, he concluded, were to blame. “[W]as not the reign of ignorance introduced by the very persons, who pretended to be the spiritual guides of the church, which Christ established? ...Yes:andhowwasthishumiliating despotism established? Ambition clothed herself with the sacred robes of the chris- tian ministry.” Parker did not insist, as Baptists frequently did

94William B. Sprague, The Claims of Past and Future Generations on Civil Rulers: A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 25, 1825, before His Honor Marcus Norton, Esq., Lieutenant Governor, the Honorable Council, and the Legislature of Massachusetts (Boston: True and Greene, 1825), pp. 28–29, 11. 95Henry Ware Jr., Memoir of the Rev. Nathan Parker, D.D., Late Pastor of the South Church and Parish in Portsmouth, N.H. (Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1835), p. xlviii.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 263 (and as orthodox Congregationalists in Massachusetts increas- ingly would), that establishments usurped the sovereignty of God. Rather, following a clearly Unitarian line of reasoning, he argued that establishments were deleterious to moral progress. [T]he magistrate cannot reach the springs of moral action. This must be done by the influence of Him, to whom rulers and people are alike amenable; and he will perform it by the influence of christian truth. . . . We believe that no good, but that infinite mischief would result from an attempt in the State to bind the conscience, or to take any religious sect under its particular patronage. The influence of christianity is moral. She employs a power stronger than the arm of civil authority.96 Parker embraced disestablishment in New Hampshire using an argument that, paradoxically, mimicked Massachusetts Unitar- ians’ resistance to it. Both approached the problem in terms of religion’s moral influence. But New Hampshire was not Massachusetts, and 1819 was not 1833. Though the New Hampshire establishment did not collapse without a fight, the timing of its downfall—the year in which Channing delivered his theologically defining sermon and in which the “Unitarian controversy” finally boiled over—allowed New Hampshire to escape the prolonged agony of a theological war in its courts and legislative chambers.97 Parker, the New Hampshire Uni- tarian, could accept disestablishment as consistent with his reli- gious priorities; most Massachusetts Unitarians could not unless they came to see the perpetuation of the Standing Order as a liability. Few did so until the bitter end.

96Parker, A Sermon, Preached at Concord, pp. 12, 14, 23. 97The New Hampshire laws governing state-supported religion had long been more liberal than those in Massachusetts: its constitution provided for state-supported public worship but explicitly exempted citizens from having to pay taxes to a denomination or sect not of their choosing. New Hampshire’s Supreme Court in 1803 muddied the waters in a convoluted decision that insisted upon a distinction between religious sects and “persuasions” within sects. Presbyterians, , Episcopalians, and Baptists were recognizably different sects and entitled to exemption. Methodists and Universal- ists, by contrast, were merely “persuasions” within other churches and thus ineligible for the same. The decision had arisen from a 1795 case in which Presbyterian John Muzzy was jailed for declining to pay a tax to support the Congregational minister in Amherst, New Hampshire. The case is discussed in McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 2:863–70.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 264 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY State-supported religion was compatible with Unitarian the- ology, but theological compatibility was not enough. There was nothing intrinsically establishmentarian about religious liberal- ism, as Universalists and Unitarians like Nathan Parker demon- strated; nor was evangelicalism naturally disestablishmentarian or voluntarist, as orthodox Congregationalists knew well. The key to the Unitarians’ defense of state-supported religion lies in their means-and-ends calculations, their conviction that the establishment remained the best vehicle available to advance their moral theology. That conviction was rooted in particu- laristic elements of their theology as well as, more broadly, their conception of religious truth and the social obligations it exacted. The Unitarians’ understanding of true religion was not exclusively sectarian, but it was also not universalistic. And their commitment to religious toleration did not imply that all religious beliefs were equally correct or conducive to morality. Some beliefs, to put it simply, were more right, more truthful in God’s sight, than others; such were better suited to sustain the moral health of a republican society. Beliefs and their pre- sumed moral effects were a package deal. The state need not force truth on others; it must, however, cultivate the ground in which religious truth could take root and flourish. Public morality could not flourish amidst religious error. The defense of establishments obtained whether one thought state-supported religion was an effective means to promote re- ligious truth or hinder religious error, thus shaping a stable, virtuous moral order grounded in, or friendly to, one’s theolog- ical priorities. William Ellery Channing maintained before the Massachusetts legislature in 1830 that “civil institutions are to be estimated by the free and pure minds to which they give birth.”98 Like Channing, most Massachusetts Unitarians under- stood that freedom was at best an offshoot of a public morality rooted in religious liberalism, and they feared that a volun- taristic approach to religion would put the purity of religious truth at a disadvantage. If the citizens of Massachusetts were not properly instructed to seek the truth and avoid error, then

98Channing, A Sermon, Preached at the Annual Election, May 26, 1830, p. 14.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021 THE UNITARIAN DEFENSE 265 freedom would surely become a curse rather than a blessing. If the state withdrew its tax-supported favors from religious in- stitutions, and indifference or enthusiasm prevailed, men and women thus deprived of liberal moral development in this life might also have little hope in the life to come. The “paradox” of Unitarian liberals’ defense of an illiberal religious establish- ment reminds us, then, that across the ages adherents of all persuasions have assiduously policed the theological and moral boundaries between (as they define it) religious truth and error. Religious and civil institutions in early national America took note. Thus it was; thus it is likely always to be.

Nathan S. Rives completed his Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 2011 and currently teaches at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. This essay derives from a larger study on the politics of religious truth and error in early national New England, which he is developing into a book manuscript.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00277 by guest on 30 September 2021