7/27/2023 0 Comments Amadine barb![]() ![]() This is because it posits religion against atheism.īut, first, it is still unclear to me what the Federalist leaders were opposing. But, it would seem, the Federalist trajectory that Den Hartog identifies, whatever its contours, presents interesting theological problems. Southern Federalists, not having religious establishments to defend like their New England counterparts, “limited religion in their politics.” Unitarian Federalists, being Unitarian, emphasized a moralistic order with rather less religious intensity. Not every trajectory from “republican happiness sustained by Christianity” to a “combative” stance to the support of voluntarist groups was quite as intellectually tumultuous as Dwight’s. A pan-Protestant work of awakening and reform would be the new solution for the problem of unbelief. These voluntary societies also tended to be “evangelical,” not strictly denominational. Dwight became an officer in the American Bible Society. Dwight’s efforts would turn towards revivals and voluntary societies that, in being local organizations connected to national bodies, looked like the Federalist Party, but were no longer political. England will be saved from ruin,” Dwight cautiously ventured. In any case, Jefferson, the Democrat-Republican, would become president. This had caused “infidelity, irreligion, faction, rebellion, the ruin of peace, and the loss of property.” Den Hartog gently suggests that Dwight “overplayed hand.” By 1798, Dwight, while President of Yale College, tied them all together: from Voltaire to d’Alembert to Diderot to the Illuminati to Masonic lodges. The Federalist trajectory is exemplified in the career of Timothy Dwight, the Congregationalist minister who’d compared the American Revolution to the cause of Israel and envisioned the new nation as a happy New England village with “republican happiness sustained by Christianity.” Then came an awareness of both the French Revolution and the menacing Democratic-Republican coalition. American Christianity would retain its “combative” origins, though, in being continually defined against the threat of atheism. ![]() Faith in America then became, as Den Hartog puts it, “more individualistic, voluntaristic, and issues-oriented” - more “evangelical” and recognizably Victorian. (Of course, the Illuminati had to be involved as well.) Eventually, these anxious Federalists, their political options fast diminishing after 1800, started reform societies. This contagion already seemed present in menacing Jeffersonian guise. And it only had a little to do with sex.įrom the 1790s, Federalist writers worried about a migration of unbelief from Revolutionary France - that the opera singer enthroned in the Cathedral of Notre Dame as the goddess of Reason might find sisters within New England’s more provincial, less ornate Congregational spires. Jonathan Den Hartog’s new book, Patriotism & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation, shows that intense religious argument, particularly about infidelity, has been part of the history of the United States nearly from the start. Philip Larkin famously said that sexual intercourse began in “nineteen sixty-three,” and many Americans doubtless imagine that religious controversy migrated here soon after the post-coital cigarette. ![]()
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