Pulpit and Nation by Spencer W. McBride

Author:Spencer W. McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

“The People Must Be Taught to Confide in and Reverence Their Rulers”

The Federalist Party certainly benefited from the partisan activity of ministers in state-established churches, as well as those from denominations that had recently been disestablished. This was particularly the case in Massachusetts. But in other states, such as Virginia, many in this same clerical demographic supported the Republican party. Why did the Federalist message of deference to elites and the preservation of established hierarchies appeal so much to some of these ministers but not to others? In the case of Virginia, the appeal of Federalism to such clergymen was mitigated by more pressing social and religious concerns.

The ministers of the state-established Congregationalist Church in Massachusetts made up a group commonly called the Standing Order. Though state law prohibited clergymen from holding public office, the ministers of the Standing Order wielded substantial cultural authority and dominated their society through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Massachusetts ministers were rarely wealthy, yet the laity respected and commonly deferred to them because they were among the most educated men in the colony and were charged with using biblical exegesis to explain and justify the colony’s unique culture. To be a Congregationalist minister in mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts was to be at or near the top of the social ladder.3

But as the turn of the nineteenth century approached, the Standing Order slowly drifted into crisis. Several political and social developments assaulted the power of Congregationalist ministers, but the most threatening of such in the 1790s and early 1800s were cries throughout the country for the disestablishment of state-sponsored churches. These cries were loudest south of Massachusetts, where, in the aftermath of the Revolution, many of the new state governments embraced religious liberty as a basic human right. But there was also a growing movement for disestablishment within Massachusetts led by Baptist ministers such as Isaac Backus. The state’s Baptist population had steadily increased since the Great Awakening and was growing increasingly impatient with the stranglehold the Congregationalist Church held on power.4

Many Congregationalist ministers in Massachusetts joined their counterparts in neighboring Connecticut in publicly rejecting the language of religious liberty and freedom of conscience that Republicans championed. They claimed that such language was merely a façade masking a sinister Republican plot to destroy religious life in the United States. In this sense, religious liberty and all that the phrase implied was a contagion that would eventually infect their state if the philosophies of men such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were allowed to dictate government policy. Reverend Ludovicus Weld, for instance, called Republicans “destroyers” who sought to dismantle the country by pretending to be “The Friends of the People” who desired to “break the shackles of tyranny.” Reverend Asahel Hooker similarly argued that the Republicans sought “great things for themselves . . . under the profusion of smooth words, and fair professions of regard to ‘the rights and liberties of the people.’” But once they obtained positions of power, Hooker warned, they would “wage war against

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