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Senior Honors These Alli Harrington Putting the Light on the Hill: Protestant Intellectualism as Elitism in the Denominational Status Race of the Nineteenth Century An Honors Thesis for the Department of American Studies Allison Smith Harrington Tufts University, 2014 INTRODUCTION Last night, I presented a three minute description of my thesis to my peers and professors in American Studies. Perhaps not surprisingly, I experienced a tremendous amount of difficulty figuring out how I would present a snapshot of my year-long work. A simple explanation proved difficult when most people have very little context for Christian Universalism in the 18th century. The denomination has all but disappeared from public view, and is altogether invisible at Tufts, despite its close association with the school. In the modern era, many people conflate Christian Universalism with Unitarianism, or assume their memberships were always linked. My paper relies on falsifying this claim. I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of history I felt I needed to provide to describe the major tensions I chose to explore regarding these two denominations. Why is it so difficult, I thought, to explain this whole thing...and why do I even bother? Well, I guess, because even as we actively try to obscure early American history’s close linkage with Protestantism in its many forms, its legacy is everywhere. When I chose to explore the early history of Tufts, and the role of Christian Universalism in its founding, I realized I was taking on years of American religious history. When we talk about the academy, and its liberal and enlightenment associations, we cannot separate it from its entrenchment in Protestant piety, Protestant intellectualism, and perhaps most salient for this paper, Protestant classism. The invisibility of Protestant thought in our collective conceptions of higher education just goes to show how normatively Protestant we are, particularly as educated Americans. The principles on which early American colleges were founded into the late eighteenth century, are Protestant principles. The ways in which we understand democracy, political participation, ii privacy, freedom, in reading and understanding the arguments for and against them, are Protestant frameworks. Like most ideologies propagated by the elites, these strains of thought become normative, they become the backbone of structures that are difficult to dismantle, and they become indistinguishable from what is rational. In trying to parse out the politics of the founding of Tufts, I found that the arguments in support were familiar arguments about creating exceptional individuals who would contribute to the American republican spirit. They are the arguments we still make today for our extremely exclusively and cost prohibitive higher education system. I found that the arguments against the founding of private higher education are the voices that we obscure from this period of history: the ones who, despite strongly held humanist feelings about defending the dignity of man, were keenly aware of the intellectual hierarchy that exclusive education breeds. Rarely do we frame our own deeply held American beliefs in the context of a deeply Protestant founding, but even more rarely do we acknowledge that the voices who survived from this time were the elitist ones. Not only has Protestant normativity obscured our understanding of early arguments surrounding the spirit of America (a Protestant nation), but elitism within Protestantism has obscured many of the more populist, and egalitarian, messages of the time. I’d like to thank everyone who helped me with this work. To my readers, Professor Lisa Lowe, and Professor Lemons, thank you for your helpful comments along this process. I wish I had utilized your help and support more. Thank you to Professor Tom Chen for supporting me and for being a very sympathetic companion and guide throughout this project. Thank you to Professor Jean Wu, for her support during thesis class time, but, in particular, for the two iii amazing classes I took with her where I learned so much about confronting the past with a critical eye, and moving forward with a compassionate one. Thank you to my advisor, Professor Heather Curtis, who first sparked my interest in American homegrown religion, and who helped me to understand so much about our collective American history. Through American Studies I have learned how to understand American exceptionalism, not as a means for humanist social disciplining, but as a pure acknowledgment of our unique, communal, history of power and oppression. Thank you to my mother, to whom I complained a lot, I’m sure you are happy that this is over. To my sister, Rebecca, you are the smartest person I know, thank you for always listening to my ideas, and for being such a constructive force whenever we talk. Through this paper, I proved to myself that I am able to put my thoughts on the page, even when they are clamoring to remain in abstraction. Through this paper I learned to be an empathetic reader of history, and I challenged myself to truly understand these stories that we, as Americans, rarely disentangle, at least not in public life. Throughout the writing of this paper I challenged the romantic notions we have surrounding higher education. I argued that through its exclusivity, college has maintained the magical status of being “transformational,” of creating better men, while really it is a way of furnishing the elite with the rationale for their continuing rule. Ultimately, though, there is something fundamentally transformative about intellectual inquiry. I learned so much while writing this paper, and being able to construct a viewpoint around that knowledge was extremely meaningful to me. I hope that whoever reads this will learn also. While I still remain dubious about the value of highly exclusive liberal arts education, I can say that through writing this paper, I feel as though I have been transformed through iv learning, not by learning to think like a good normative Protestant, but by learning to think outside of being a good, normative Protestant. v CONTENTS Introduction and Acknowledgements………………………………………….ii Methodology…………………………………………………………………..1 I. The Rational Divide………………………………………………………...4 II. The Great Awakening and Higher Education………………………………13 III. Were They But Trained and Balanced by Any Systematic Education…….23 IV. Conclusion: The Problem with Liberalism………………………………..44 vi Methodology In this paper I examine how and why American Christian Universalists came to found Tufts University in 1852 as their first, and primary, institution of higher education. Through historical analysis, I locate the establishment of Tufts within its broader context in American religion, higher education, and within the Christian Universalist movement. In doing this, I uncover some of the philosophical tensions at play in the founding of Tufts as a site for elite, non-sectarian, learning in 1852. I explore how the denominationalism of the late 18th and early 19th century led to higher education as a benchmark for elitism within the competitive religious market, how liberal thought, in particular, signified upper class Protestantism. I will examine how and why Christian Universalists were relatively late to the game in the creation of Tufts and how its founding impacted the future of the denomination. Ultimately this paper reveals the challenges that higher education presents to the separatism and populism that pervaded Universalist thought from its inception. Documents such as letters, sermons and treatises served as my first entrance into understanding Christian Universalism. These were most easily accessed through books like Ernest Cassara’s Universalism in America: A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith and other documentary histories of Universalism. Though rarely presenting a united perspective on the defining arguments surrounding the Great Awakening, Universalists were active throughout the 18th century in developing their theology surrounding universal salvation. By the early 19th century, they were participating in the great ideological debates of the early 19th century, particularly as they related to issues of human rights such as slavery . Through engaging in these dialogues and through their largely informal meeting of minds, learned Christian Universalists produced prolific amounts of writing, sermons, and articles. The Universalist tradition, from its inception as a home-grown American strain of Christian thought, was amorphous in membership, and lacking in creed or doctrine. For this reason in particular, Universalist writings are key to identifying the spirit of American Christian Universalism at any given time in its history up to this point. By highlighting key language and dominant themes in Christian Universalist writing I further reveal the contradictions at play in the founding of an educational institution. Along with its helpfulness in identifying the ethos of Universalism, reading and analyzing printed source materials was equally crucial in my understanding the establishment of Tufts College. The decision to found Tufts, where it would be located, and how it would be funded, is recorded through the Universalist General Conventions, sermons, and correspondences between some of the most influential Universalists of the day. Russell Miller’s history of Tufts, A Light on the Hill, helped me to understand previous perspectives on Tufts founding and the intricacies of some of the major arguments. In addition to applying a critical lens to this decision
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