Disestablishment came late

The Crisis of the Standing Order

Peter S. Field, 1998

Peter Field’s thesis was that the Standing Order in Massachusetts self-destructed in a war between proto-Unitarian “Brahmins” and orthodox Congregationalist leaders. The Brahmin ministers represented the interests of their supporters, the Boston merchant elite, and developed a high literary culture to meet their needs. The orthodox establishment, seeing their influence and authority slipping, attacked the Brahmins in an attempt to retain their role as intellectual rulers of the state and its neighbors in New England.

Field noted early on that Puritan practice had banned ministers from holding secular office, so their authority rested entirely on their leadership role in the intellectual life of their society. He says the ministers of the “Standing Order gained cultural authority in direct proportion to society’s uncoerced adoption” of their ideas. It’s ironic that the story of the orthodox fight to retain control in Massachusetts was filled with their (futile) attempts to coerce. It was not until they had completely hit bottom that Lyman Beecher convinced them to try revivalist persuasion. But then, the Congregationalists weren’t really interested in reaching the middle class until the Brahmin ministers stole the upper class from them.

Field proposed a “social history of intellectuals,” that treats the idealism of intellectual historians with a big dose of skepticism (if not cynicism) while retaining a focus on intellectuals as not only agents, but as a class (which he observes is missing from Marxist analysis). As a “new-class” theorist, Field argued with Weber that “ownership of the means of production is not the sole measure of the social division of labor.” He sought to undermine the “belief that intellectuals are heroically engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth,” but it was unclear to me whether he proved his case. Jedediah Morse was a really nasty guy in Fields’ story, but I’m not sure he was insincere.

What was clear was that the increasingly public disagreements between the orthodox clergy and their urbane, polished, and increasingly rich adversaries made it obvious to anyone paying attention in the early decades of the 19th century that the ministry was filled with partisans. This devolution of the Puritan edifice into competing sects eliminated their claim to cultural dominance and divine inspiration. It’s incredible to me that Jedediah Morse managed to survive the Illuminati hoax with any credibility at all – and that might be a topic for further study.

The fight over the Hollis Professorship of Divinity in 1805 began (in a rare moment of physicality) with the completion of the West Boston Bridge, Nov. 23rd 1793. The orthodox leaders fought viciously, but lost control of Harvard. I wonder though, did they really have it before? Field mentioned that David Tappan’s pupils were among the brightest lights of the new Brahmin ministry. Was Field finding an abrupt change where there was really a slow evolution? Similarly, Field said no reasonable Federalist believed Morse’s Illuminati story. So what was going on? Who were the orthodox ministers talking to (besides themselves)? Were they shaping public opinion? At what point did the Brahmin elitist ministry lose touch with regular people? Or was it ever in touch with them? Probably not through the Athenaeum or the Anthology. And what about western Massachusetts? Revivalism began there in the 1790s, long before Beecher moved to Boston. Jonathan Edwards preached in Northampton.

Field passed quickly over the first Great Awakening, saying it was a great threat to the Standing Order but not how. He placed the ministers firmly on the side of the revolutionists (and said that until the Committees of Correspondence, they were nearly the only conduits of information), which again illustrated a very Boston-centric focus. Most of the western ministers were Tories until they had no choice, and some remained Loyalists. Maybe highlighting Chauncy, Mayhew and Thacher gave Field an origin story of orthodox ministers’ views of their role in politics. But in the Puritan colony, this would have been taken for granted. The survival of these ideas after the revolution is the issue.

Field mentioned several items that did not fit smoothly into his interpretation, like the fact that Joseph Hawley brought a bill to the General Court in 1777 to disestablish the church, but “he could not muster enough support even to bring it to the floor for a vote.” Field credited the clergy with defeating the 1778 Mass Constitution, but didn’t provide any context. William Gordon, chaplain of the Court, got himself fired for criticizing the constitution in the papers and thirteen ministers attended the convention as delegates of their towns. Where were these towns, and what was the agenda of the ministers? Lots of western Massachusetts towns instructed their representatives to block the constitution if possible; but not over religion. How did religious objections stack up to civil ones? Field didn’t discuss this.

According to Morison, there were “At least twenty-nine towns [that] distinctly stated their opposition to Article 3”, establishing the church. Hawley said:

it is far from indisputable, and positively denied by many, viz, That it is the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons to worship, &c….It is inconsistent with the unalienable rights of conscience, which rights are certainly unalienable, if mankind have, (as the first article avers they have) any such rights.

Field did not really deal with the gradual shift of attitudes observed by some at the time, and he credited the revolution with imposing a “limited moratorium on theological controversy” He did outline the family ties between the proto-Unitarians and the merchant elite, and made a good case that theirs was “as much a social as a religious enterprise.” In fact, this seemed to be the chief complaint of the orthodox. John Thornton Kirkland married the daughter of George Cabot; William Ellery Channing married Ruth Gibbs; Harvard professors Andrews Norton and George Ticknor married the daughters of Samuel Elliot; and Edward Everett married the daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the first millionaire in Boston.

Field said the wealthy Bostonians left politics when the Federalists were defeated and set about establishing high culture. But his chronology wandered back and forth from the 1790s to 1808 and beyond. This seems to undermine his claim that these groups were acting as self-aware, unified classes when they battled over the Illuminati in 1798 or David Tappan’s Hollis chair in 1803-5. Field said, “Almost to a man, Brahmin ministers had begun to eschew the kind of active participation in politics entailed in…election-day sermons and fast days.” But was that chicken or egg? Their patrons, the Boston merchants, were disaffected with politics after 1800. They weren’t looking for their ministers to rub their noses in their defeat. The Brahmin ministers might have faced a different set of expectations if Thomas Jefferson had been defeated.

“Theology,” said Joseph Stevens Buckminster, “is the subject upon which much of our genius and learning has always been employed, and not seldom wasted.” That’s funny, in a sort-of “Emperor’s New Clothes” way. The merchants and their ministers made a show of religion to please the society they lived in and advance their own social standing. What a shock to the orthodox, who thought it was something else entirely. Fifty years passed from the “visible sainthood” of the New Lights to the Anthology’s editorial policy of “useful knowledge and harmless amusement, sound principles, good morals, and correct taste.”

It is a sound point, though, that Boston was different from the rest of the state because its churches were NOT supported by taxes, but rather were all voluntary (a legacy of John Cotton?). As a result, those who contributed more expected to be treated accordingly, even if they were not “members” on the basis of a conversion experience. But Field didn’t explain how the half-way covenant mitigated the requirements for membership, or what effect that had. And again, Field admitted that John Adams wrote to Morse that the ideas that he complained were recent and Unitarian had been around for 65 years.

Field remarked that there were two distinct responses among the (nearly 100%) Federalist ministers. The Brahmins retreated from politics; the orthodox basically went nuts. Of course, the orthodox couldn’t retreat because the Brahmins had already made that move. Who were their constituents? What was their market? By 1820, even Morse’s own parish tired of his “engagements in, and encouragement of controversies [and] indiscriminate distribution of contradictory pamphlets and tracts.” They replaced him and he accused them of being “obviously Unitarians.” In a letter to Oliver Wolcott Jr. (July 13 1798), Morse went so far as to declare it was “necessary to exterminate [their] dangerous enemies,” the Boston clergy who disagreed with them and refused to knuckle under to Morse’s self-appointed authority. In his biography of Harrison Gray Otis, Samuel Eliot Morison said “neither Otis nor any other prominent Federalist subscribed to the [Illuminati] theory.” While they’d tried to support Morse’s attacks on the supposed republican plot, Federalist papers like the Columbian Centinal and Chronicle were nervous about their own credibility. “Embarrassed by his recklessness, they shut Morse out.” Maybe part of the problem ministers like Morse were having was they believed they were living in an earlier world, where the clergy was not only the sole source of information about the outside world for most people, but where the prestige of the clergy virtually guaranteed that whatever the pastor told his flock would be believed. Newspapers, pamphlets and broadsheets of the revolutionary era definitely widened the average person’s view of the world. But maybe the biggest damage was done by ministers like Morse, who showed themselves to be petty, partisan, and worst of all, miserably wrong.

The Yale connection to this failure of the orthodox leaders is too good to pass by. Timothy Dwight demands a closer look. In addition, the careers of the presidents of Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams College probably have some surprises in them. Williams’ Griffin, with whom Charles Knowlton talked a couple of times while living in Adams, seemed to be up to his elbows in controversy in the 1800s and 1810s. And after chatting with Amherst’s president about his new book, Elements of Modern Materialism, Knowlton found himself arrested and thrown into the Amherst jail.

Morse’s Panoplist claimed to be the “antidote” to the wickedness and infidelity spewed by the Anthology. Morse wasted little time in calling for ministerial examinations to insure creedal uniformity. Without rigid enforcement of correct doctrines, he said, “liberty, free enquiry [and] private judgment [were becoming] instruments of infidelity, and a fair mask, under which apostasy from Christianity and hatred of all goodness have disguised themselves.” I wonder about this type of language. To who was he talking? Hatred of all goodness? These were other Congregational clergymen he was talking about, and the people who fill their churches every Sunday. Not some crowd of blood-drinking Satan-worshippers. Field didn’t really explain whom the intended audience for this type of rhetoric was, or how effective it was. Without that context, it just seems absurd.

The Andover Seminary’s creed, to which all faculty had to swear to uphold every five years, pledged “unswerving opposition, ‘not only to [[Atheists]] and Infidels, but to Jews, Papists, Mahomatans, Arians, Pelagians, Antimonians, Arminians, Socinians, Sabellians, Unitarians, and Universalists.” Basically, they hated everybody. For their part, the Brahmins “deemed the doctrinal hairsplitting of the orthodox distasteful, uncharitable, and anachronistic.” William Ellery Channing called the creed part of Andover’s “espionage of bigotry.”

Field pointed out that the “growing class nature of Massachusetts society may not have been the efficient cause, but it was certainly a necessary cause of the crisis.” He said the older (and increasingly female) Congregational communicants were less prosperous than their neighbors, implying that the time required to achieve (or demonstrate) their high level of religious devotion cut them off from worldly success. These people may have “believed that the shrinking number of public confessions signaled a serious decline in religiosity” in Massachusetts, as Field said. He didn’t show this, and it remains an area for possible research (in general, Field ignored the audiences of the clerics he wrote about, which is unfortunate). During the Dorchester conflict (when Codman refused to exchange pulpits with Brahmins as his parishioners wanted), the orthodox minister’s enemies are described as being “exceedingly fond of amusements.” Field pointed out this statement suggested an underlying class conflict, but again he did not describe how it was received. The ultimate secularization of the church occurred in this conflict, when wealthy parishioners demanded a say in the church equal to their contribution. This was the democracy the orthodox have been fighting all along.

Field mentioned the irony of ultra-conservative Boston elites fighting for liberal, democratic ideals in their churches. But maybe he was missing the point. Maybe the Brahmins’ position was like the Baptists’ during the revolution: they weren’t really against establishment and authority, they were against someone else having it over them. But the irony resolved itself when the 1821 Dedham decision ruled that the assets of the church belonged to the parish, not to the saints. At that point, the orthodox seemed to have realized Morse and his crew had done them no good. Morse disappeared very rapidly from the picture, to be replaced with Lyman Beecher. Beecher told them that establishment was against their interests, because they were now the outsiders. So, having nothing left to lose, the orthodox finally embraced their “age-old populist rhetoric concerning the ungodliness of the wealthy and the dangers of materialism,” creating what Field called “the American Religion.”

Abandoning establishment allowed the orthodox to pursue middle class people who had been drifting toward Baptist and Methodist sentiments. The ministers swallowed their pride and embraced revivalism, holding 116 meetings in Massachusetts in 1831. 81 “churches” (ministers and communicants) were “exiled” by parish revolts by 1833, according to a study made by the orthodox and presented to their General Association of Massachusetts Ministers. Was this the meeting Mason Grosvenor attended, which prompted him to attack “infidelity and licentiousness” in Ashfield? The 1832 meeting of the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational Ministers was held in Northampton and dealt extensively with temperance. Where was the 1833 meeting?

The 11th amendment to the Massachusetts constitution, disestablishing religion, went into effect January 1, 1834. This fits perfectly with my story of the issues in Ashfield (described in Peppermint Kings and An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy), and may explain some of the undercurrents and tensions behind them.