“An End to Unjust Inequality in the World” the Radical Tradition of Progressive Evangelicalism

Church History Church History and and Religious Culture 94 (2014) 505–530 Religious Culture brill.com/chrc “An End to Unjust Inequality in the World” The Radical Tradition of Progressive Evangelicalism Randall Balmer Dartmouth College, Hanover, nh, United States [email protected] Abstract Since the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has commonly been associated with conservative politics. An examination of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, however, suggests a different affinity. Antebellum evangelicals marched in the vanguard of social change with an agenda that almost invariably advocated for those on the margins of society, including women and African Americans. Evangelicals were involved in peace crusades and the temperance movement, a response to social ills associated with rampant alcohol consumption in the early republic. They advocated equal rights for women, including voting rights. Evan- gelicals in the North crusaded against slavery. Although Horace Mann, a Unitarian from Massachusetts, is the person most often associated with the rise of common schools, Protestants of a more evangelical stripe were early advocates of public education, including leaders in Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky. Some evangelicals, including Charles Grandison Finney, even excoriated capitalism as inconsistent with Christian principles. Keywords Evangelicals – progressivism – American politics – American public religion With the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, evangelical political activists cast their lot with conservative causes, and evangelicals have over- whelmingly favored Republican political candidates. While some recent schol- arship has demonstrated the precedent of both conservative and progressive evangelicalism earlier in the twentieth century, fewer scholars have contrasted the political agenda of those evangelicals associated with the Religious Right © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09404002 506 balmer with the tradition of progressive evangelicalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Evangelicals in a previous age, especially during the antebellum period, aspired to reform society according to the norms of godliness and devised cre- ative ways to act on their benevolent impulses. This reforming zeal, coming out of the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, is usually—and correctly— associated with postmillennialism, the notion that Jesus would return after the thousand years of righteousness predicted in the New Testament book of Reve- lation. The focus of this study, however, lies not so much on theological under- pinnings as on the striking differences in policy and predilection between the Religious Right and evangelical activists of an earlier era. In 1856, Methodist preacher Elijah H. Pilcher entertained an embarrassment of political options. Shortly after his conversion during a camp-meeting revival at age ten, Elijah Pilcher had resolved to enter the ministry. He assumed his first post, as a Methodist preacher on the Nicholas Circuit in southern Ohio, while still a teenager, preaching twenty-eight times a month. Assigned to the Ann Arbor Circuit at age twenty, Pilcher began his distinguished career in the Territory of Michigan. As president of the board of trustees, in 1841 he laid the cornerstone for the first building of what would become Albion College, chartered as “The Wesleyan Seminary at Albion and Albion Female Collegiate Institute.” The school admitted both sexes, but it paid particular attention in its early years to the education of women. A passionate advocate for public education, Pilcher agitated for the expansion and the enhancement of public schools in Romeo, Michigan, and he was appointed to the board of regents for the Uni- versity of Michigan in 1845, a post he held until 1851. Pilcher signed on to the temperance movement in 1830; his only objection to the local Ann Arbor chap- ter was that they did not advocate total abstinence. On the contentious issue of slavery, Pilcher vigorously opposed the Fugitive Slave Law and, according to his son and biographer, “was always on the side of humanity and freedom.” In 1852 he published a pamphlet entitled “The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law.”2 1 See, for example, Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservativism (New York, 2012); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York, 2012); David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia, 2012). 2 James E. Pilcher, Life and Labors of Elijah H. Pilcher of Michigan: Fifty-nine Years a Minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1892), pp. 106, 118, 89, 116–117. Church History and Religious Culture 94 (2014) 505–530 “an end to unjust inequality in the world” 507 As the election year of 1856 unfolded, the Abolition Party in Michigan nomi- nated Pilcher to run for the position of superintendent of public instruction for the entire state. The Republican Party of Michigan proposed him for election as the state’s superintendent of public schools, although he declined the nom- ination in favor of his friend. Completing the trifecta, the state’s Democratic Party selected Pilcher for a seat on the state’s board of education. Even though Pilcher declined all three nominations, the Democratic Party kept his name on the ticket, and the minister garnered more votes than any of the party’s other nominees.3 Pilcher was hardly the only antebellum evangelical interested in political matters. “The gospel is adapted to promote the civil, social, and physical inter- ests of man,” S.H. Waldo, a minister in Dover, Ohio, declared in an address before the Society of Inquiry at Oberlin in 1849. “Civil government, where Chris- tianity has its appropriate influence, is framed for the promotion of the univer- sal good of the state, and not for the benefit of a few.” Waldo was utterly con- fident that a proper apprehension of the gospel led to the assertion of female equality against the prevailing norms of society. “But let the religion of heaven throw its happy influence upon a given community, and a woman is raised from the dust, polished like the cornerstone of a palace, and placed as a companion by the side of man,” he said. “The gospel is adapted to give our social nature development, tone, and purity.”4 The evangelical mandate for remaking society in the early decades of the nineteenth century built on postmillennial optimism and derived from a series of revivals that convulsed three theaters of the new nation: New England, the Cumberland Valley of Kentucky, and upstate New York, an area so frequently singed by the fires of revival that it became known as the Burned-over District. These religious stirrings, known collectively as the Second Great Awakening, lured thousands of Americans into the ambit of evangelicalism. The evangelical camp-meeting revivals in the South were by far the most enthusiastic and dramatic. Settlers would gather for several days of preaching, prayer, and hymn- singing. Contemporaries spoke of all manner of religious ecstasy. Many of the auditors who succumbed to the influence of the Holy Spirit, whether volun- tarily or not, were seized with various “exercises”: shouting, barking, singing, falling down. 3 Pilcher, Life and Labors, pp. 115–116. 4 S.H. Waldo, ‘The Evidence of the World’s Ultimate Reform,’ Oberlin Quarterly Review, 4 (July 1849): 288. Church History and Religious Culture 94 (2014) 505–530 508 balmer Revivals to the North tended to be more sedate, but no less transformative. The epicenter of religious awakening in New England was Yale College, where Timothy Dwight, president of the school and grandson of the redoubtable Jonathan Edwards, succeeded in turning students away from Enlightenment Rationalism and toward orthodox Christianity. Writing to his mother on June 11, 1802, Benjamin Silliman, one of the students, described Yale as a “little temple” where “prayer and praise seem to be the delight of the greater part of the students.” A correspondent for the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine sent details of another awakening at Yale in 1815, and Nathaniel William Taylor, then pastor of the First Congregational Church in New Haven, reported a more general revival in both the school and the town in January 1821. Even the Methodists took notice of the goings-on in New Haven, despite the fact that New England was hardly a stronghold of Methodism. A Yale student sent a dispatch to the Baltimore-based MutualRights and MethodistProtestant in 1831, noting that, “the state of religion was so flourishing” during yet another revival taking place at the college “that it appeared as if the revival would go on as a matter of course.”5 Due in no small measure to the agency of Yale graduates fanning across New England, newspapers began reporting revivals throughout the region, with datelines from such places as Troy and Cooperstown, New York; Woodbury and New Preston, Connecticut; Woodstock and Dorset and Bennington, Ver- mont; Bangor and Winthrop, Maine; Hanover and Portsmouth, New Hamp- shire; Pawtucket and Albion Mills, Rhode Island; Williamstown and Boston, Massachusetts. “We heartily rejoice in the conversion of sinners,” an article entitled “Glorious Intelligence from Vermont” recorded in the Christian Intelli- gencer. “From the smallest beginning,” Wooster Parker reported from Castine, Maine, “and in spite of bitterest opposition, God is building up his church here.” Methodists began to make inroads in New England. Presbyterians saw some success. Episcopal churches brought in new members. Baptists sent mission- aries to organize Sunday schools and congregations in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. “There has probably never been a time, when so many and so extensive revivals of religion existed in Connecticut, as at present,” the Mission- ary Herald reported in 1821. “We rejoice that the light of the gospel of Christ is 5 Quoted in George P.

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