The Attitude of Evangelical Protestantism
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BUT THEY DID NOT BUILD THIS HOUSE: THE ATTITUDE OF EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM TOWARDS IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES 1800-1924 BY WILLIAM J. PHALEN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of Professor James Livingston And approved by __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION BUT THEY DID NOT BUILD THIS HOUSE: THE ATTITUDE OF EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM TOWARD IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES, 1800-1924 By WILLIAM J. PHALEN Dissertation director: James Livingston This dissertation will examine the attitude of American Evangelical Protestantism towards immigration to the United States from its inception until the Immigration Act of 1924. It will also take into consideration the effect that the Roman Catholic Church had upon the evangelist’s thinking on the subject of immigration. The examination will include the formation of the evangelist’s ideas during the American antebellum period when evangelism became a primary part of the Protestant ethos. The dissertation’s chapters will outline the effect that this basically non- Protestant immigration had on American: cities, politics, and education. It will also deal with the evangelist’s chief adversary, the Irish and their control of the American Catholic Church as well as their control of politics in the large urban areas of the Northeast. Chapter four will take the reader through one of the evangelist’s primary organizations for recognizing and combating its problems, the Evangelical Alliance. A chapter also treats with an evangelical success; the enactment of a law against alcohol, a problem that the evangelists believed was primarily fostered by the Irish and German immigrants. Finally, the conclusion, which is split into two parts, one giving the necessity for immigration restriction from the viewpoint of the nativist, and the other from the ii viewpoint of the evangelist, a necessity which has been proven by the words of the evangelists themselves in their writings, speeches, and sermons. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………..………..ii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….iv Chapter 1. The Antebellum Years…………………………………………….…..19 Chapter 2. The Cities…………………………………………………………..….42 Chapter 3. Politics…………………………………………………………………63 Chapter 4. The Evangelical Alliance………………………………………………87 Chapter 5. The Irish……………………………………………………………….114 Chapter 6. Education……………………………………………………………...135 Chapter 7. Temperance……………………………………………………………156 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...177 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………232 Curriculum Vita…………………………………………………………………...249 iv 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation traces the formation of the evangelical Protestant attitude towards non-Protestant immigration into the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924. Much has been written about the conflicts between the immigrants and the American Protestants during the nineteenth century, most notably, Ray Allen Billington’s The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 and on nineteenth century immigration itself, the volumes of John Higham, but very little work has been done on the beliefs of the Evangelical Protestants towards the non-Protestant immigrants and their eventual support of a legal solution to the problems that they believed that this immigration brought, for which they could not supply a religious solution. Most of the proof in support of this attitude was supplied by the evangelicals themselves, in the form of: pamphlets letters, speeches, sermons, tracts, journal articles, and newspapers. The background of this attitude stems from the interaction of Protestants and Catholics in England and Ireland, but most pointedly the enmity between the two sects stems from their encounters in America. In the 1730s, Jonathan Edwards, the greatest of the American Calvinist theologians, feared that Catholics from Canada would overwhelm New England. Two decades later, the decidedly anti-Calvinist Jonathan Mayhew lectured at Harvard College that the Pope was not only an idolater and an idol, and the prime historical corrupter of Christian faith, but also plotted the destruction of British and American liberty and the restoration of the hated medieval Christendom. The conviction was intensified among Puritans by their dread of any church leadership, Anglican or Roman, which threatened the autonomy of the local Christian congregation.1A point that 1 Everett H. Emerson, John Cotton (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965) p.54 2 I will stress in this paper is that Anti-Catholicism was never purely a religious matter for American Protestants; it was from the onset a political fear as well. It was not simply a Catholic vs. Protestant however, but more specifically a situation in the United States in which the Catholic immigrant faced a group of Protestants known as evangelicals. The word evangelical itself had a long history going back to the “good news” of the Gospels and revived in Luther’s evangelische Kirche (or the German evangelical church). By the middle of the nineteenth century, America had become a stronghold of evangelical Protestantism, accomplished through revivals. Thousands of itinerant preachers – Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples, and others – went to the people, warning of damnation and holding out the promise of salvation. The revivals induced a theological confrontation that lasted throughout the century. The evangelicals abandoned the predestination doctrines of orthodox Calvinism and rejected the conservative, established Anglican (Episcopal in the United States), Catholic, and Lutheran dogmatism. Disputes over revivals broke out in every denomination, aligning the faithful into prorevival, or evangelical, and antirevival or liturgical camps. While this conflict was not the only divisive force in American religion, it was the most intense and long standing until the end of the century.2 The evangelists flatly rejected ritualism (or liturgicalism). They showed little regard for elaborate ceremonies, vestments, saints, devotions, or even organ music. Theologically the key to evangelicalism was Arminianism, the idea that all men can be saved by a direct confrontation with Christ (not with the church) through the conversion 2 Robert Cross, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge: Crown Publishing Group, 1972) p. 52-53 3 experience. The revival was the basis of growth – the preaching of hellfire, damnation, and Christ’s love and the “anxious bench” for remorseful sinners, the moment of light wherein a man joyously gained faith and was saved forever.3 The evangelicals cooperated in numerous voluntary societies; they banded together to distribute Bibles, Christianize the world, abolish slavery, and enforce total abstinence. By the 1860s, the Methodists, Congregationalists, Disciples, United Brethren, and the Quakers were predominately evangelical. The Episcopalians and Catholics were predominately liturgical. The Presbyterians were fragmented with liturgicals in control of the Old School and evangelicals in control of the New School. The Baptists had no central authority to provide theological unity, but probably most were evangelistic. Lutherans were divided into three camps: the German Lutherans were liturgical, the old- stock Lutherans were evangelical, and their General Council attempted to steer a middle course. The bridge linking theology and politics was the demand by evangelicals that the government remove the major obstacle to the purification of society through revivalistic Christianity. Specifically, the evangelicals demanded Sunday blue laws, the abolition of saloons, and in the prewar era, a check on the growth of slavery, or even its abolition. Many evangelicals, identifying the heavy influx of Catholic immigrants (especially the Irish) as the chief source of the corruption of politics and the decay of the cities, and ultimately as a barrier to the success of the revival movement, also supported nativist movements. The liturgicals opposed Sunday laws and prohibition, denounced 3 William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism (New York: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005) p. 34 4 abolitionists, and avoided nativist movements. The church, they insisted, should attend to morality, not the government.4 The liturgicals’ fears were well founded. Beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, the evangelicals established a grass-roots network of reform societies that demanded governmental action against slavery and saloons. In the late 1830s, the evangelicals renounced the concept that moderation in drinking was an acceptable social standard; they demanded total abstinence and total legal prohibition of the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages, including wine and beer. After 1855, the evangelicals largely abandoned temperance movements to concentrate on slavery It seems reasonable to hypothesize that when party lines reformed in the 1850s, the great majority of evangelicals entered the Republican Party while the great majority of liturgicals became Democrats. This Republican-evangelical and Democratic-liturgical pattern was also reinforced by postwar political issues, mainly the fact that after Reconstruction, the primary goal of the evangelicals had become the moral reform of society, beginning with the