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Evangelicalism, Anti-Catholicism, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's The ✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ “One Language in Prayer”: Evangelicalism, Anti-Catholicism, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/3/468/1792165/tneq_a_00209.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 neil meyer N 1832, Harriet Beecher left her home in Litchfield, Con- I necticut, and along with other members of her family followed her father, Lyman, to Cincinnati, Ohio. Reverend Beecher, who was being installed as the first president of Lane Theological Seminary, was concerned that the western territories, with their heterogeneous populations and influx of immigrants, were vulnerable to undue Catholic influence. If the “cheap and effectual education of the children of our na- tion” were neglected, he warned in A Plea for the West, “the Catholic powers of Europe intend to make up the deficiency,” until, by the “powerful action of foreign influence and intrigue,” America’s Protestant religion and republican liberties were de- stroyed.1 Twenty years later, Lyman’s son Edward sounded thesamealarminhisThe Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended, in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (1855). Rome “is organizing seductive and proselyting [sic] systems of education,” he cautioned, “and aims by means of them to corrupt and enlist in their vast schemes the children of Protestant parents.”2 I would like to thank colleagues Justin Rogers-Cooper, Jesse Schwartz, and Sari Altschuler for their thoughtful feedback on this article. And a very special thank you to New England Quarterly editor Linda Smith Rhoads for her insightful and attentive editorial work. 1Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1835), p. 165. 2Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended, in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (Boston: Stearns and Co., 1855), p. 15. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXV, no. 3 (September 2012). C 2012 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 468 ONE LANGUAGE IN PRAYER 469 In December 1858, Harriet Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing began appearing serially in the Atlantic Monthly. Although the novel is generally examined for the ways in which Stowe dis- tances herself from New England Calvinism, less attention has been paid to how it engages with her father’s, her brother’s, and her era’s anti-Catholicism, particularly insofar as it is involved with education and, especially, female education. The convent, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/3/468/1792165/tneq_a_00209.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 or nunnery, became for detractors like the Reverends Stowe the site of seduction, where emotionally vulnerable young women could be lured into error by means of ecstatic religious prac- tices. In leveling that charge at the Catholic Church, the Stowes and others sought to recover for mainstream Protestantism a clear-headed rationality they felt had been threatened by the emotional excesses of the Second Great Awakening. In her sentimental novel set in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, Harriet reverses that process, using emotion as a means to bridge the gap between the old-time New England religion, its evangelical manifestations, and the progenitor of both, the Roman Catholic Church. Writing to his daughter Catharine as she shepherded a re- vival at her Hartford Female Seminary in 1826, Lyman Beecher cautioned, “The very high state of excited feeling, though ex- tremely natural among young Christians, and powerful in its effects while it lasts, is too hazardous to health to be indulged, and necessarily too short-lived to answer in the best manner the purpose of advancing a revival.” He urged her instead to encourage a state “which does not ruffle the passions, and is compatible with the most cool and collected state of mind, both for planning and for action, and, at the same time, predisposes for earnest prayer, and for speaking to stupid and awakened sinners a word in season.”3 In a letter to Edward that same year, Lyman modeled the proper response to religious renewal 3The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher (1864), ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 44. 470 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY when he praised his congregation for being “so full and solemn” during a revival.4 Traditional criticisms of contemporary revivals—their “false conversions,” theatricality, and “spiritual delusion”—were am- ply set forth by Presbyterian minister and theologian John Williamson Nevin (1803–86)inhis1843 tract The Anxious Bench.5 The title refers to the revival technique of calling forth Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/3/468/1792165/tneq_a_00209.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 those “anxious” about their spiritual state, separating them from the converted so that they might be more immediate and vi- sual objects of the prayers and interventions of the congrega- tion. Nevin saw the bench as, for Protestants, an ominously ritualistic event. The anxious bench might save souls, but to Nevin such public performances and the emotional responses they were intended to elicit, despite their popularity and effi- cacy, had revived not true faith but the excesses of the Catholic Church: “The Romish Church has always delighted in arrange- ments and services, animated with the same false spirit. In her penitential system, all pains have been taken to produce ef- fect by means of outward postures and dress, till in the end, amid the solemn mummery, no room has been left for genuine penitence at all.”6 Also troubled by the ramifications of religious enthusiasm was the influential Hartford pastor Horace Bushnell. He shared his reservations in his Christian Nurture (1847). Examining the underlying ideology of revivalism, which he insists is predi- cated on “extreme individualism,” he worries that “conversion is nearly everything with us.” The danger is that “we idolize such scenes, and make them the whole of our religion. We assume that nothing good is doing, or can be done at any other time. And what is even worse, we often look upon these scenes, and desire them, rather as scenes of victory than of piety.” Piety, Bushnell contends, is nurtured not in the theater of the revival but in the Christian home, where loving parents restore discipline and return privacy and moderation to daily Christian 4Beecher, Autobiography, p. 45. 5John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench: A Tract for the Times (Chambersburg, Pa.: Weekly Messenger, 1843), p. 23. 6Nevin, The Anxious Bench, p. 14. ONE LANGUAGE IN PRAYER 471 life. Much like Nevin, Bushnell contrasts the “domestic godli- ness” he advocates with Catholicism, specifically monasticism: “Hence, it is that monks have been so prone to persecution. Not dwelling with children as the objects of affection, having their hearts softened by no family love, their life identified with no objects that excite gentleness, their nature hardens into a Christian abstraction, and blood and doctrine go together.”7 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/3/468/1792165/tneq_a_00209.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 As these passages from the Beechers, Nevin, and Bushnell illustrate, in displacing their rejection of religious enthusiasm onto the practices and spaces of the Catholic Church, main- stream Protestant clergymen reveal that the institutionalization of evangelicalism helped fuel, for all its complexity, antebel- lum anti-Catholic sermonizing. Perry Miller has explained that “New Englanders had been severely scarred by criticisms of the First Awakening . and were resolved never again to let emotions get so out of control as to provoke ridicule.”8 Mov- ing toward a more institutional, less emotionally rich, process of Christianizing the American people, wary Protestant leaders identified Catholics and Catholic converts as practitioners of an affective ritualism they were actively trying to disavow. With increased immigration and state-sponsored extensions of the franchise, Catholicism loomed as a threat, as Lyman Beecher and others saw it, not only to Protestant religious practice but to Protestant political hegemony and sovereignty in the rapidly expanding United States. A particular cause for concern was Edward Dominic Fenwick, who had been con- secrated the first bishop of the new diocese of Cincinnati in 1822. Given his proximity, Beecher would have been particu- larly alert to Fenwick’s influence. In his A Plea for the West, however, Beecher demonstrated that the Protestants of Boston were just as concerned as those of Cincinnati. Quoting from the Quarterly Register of 1830, he drew the battle lines: “The missions of America are of high importance to the church. The superabundant population of ancient Europe is flowing toward the 7Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (1847; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 47, 21, 47, 98, 48. 8Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1965), p. 6. 472 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY United States. Each one arrives, not with his religion, but with his indifference. The greater part are disposed to embrace the doctrine, whatever it may be, which is first preached to them. We must make haste; the moments are precious. America may one day become the centre of civilization; and shall truth or error establish there its em- pire? If the Protestant sects are beforehand with us, it will be difficult to destroy their influence.” Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/3/468/1792165/tneq_a_00209.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 And yet, as the editor of the Register is quick to point out, Protestants must never drop their guard: “‘Mgr. Fenwick,’ adds the editor, ‘is laboring with an admirable zeal to combat this influence of the Protestant sects in the mission entrusted to him. Numerous conversions have already crowned his efforts; and he has even been able to establish a convent, all the nuns of which are Protestants, who have abjured their former faith.’”9 To further his efforts, Bishop Fenwick had solicited Europe in 1829 to help support the growth of Catholicism in the United States.
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