Secularists, Religion, and Government in Nineteenth-Century America

In the revolutionary era it was both inevitable and prudent for the new states and then the nation to avoid giving new establishment powers to any one church, and only three New England states carried legal church-state partnerships into the nineteenth century. Institutional separation, however, did not keep religion out of politics, and the fudges that normally characterize democratic processes did not mix easily with the truth claims made by religious dogma or with the moral imperatives by which many religious people set their public compasses. Conflicts were thus inevitable, and Timothy Verhoeven takes us through several in this study. Most importantly, he argues against—or, more accurately, around—the emergent historical orthodoxy that an informal religious establishment arose out of the pervasively evangelical consensus of a pervasively evangelical citizenry. Verhoeven's chief evidence is that whenever this “informal establishment” asserted its power (for instance over Sunday mail deliveries, religious observances in public schools, slavery, and—interestingly—Sunday opening of Chicago's Columbian Exhibition of 1893), it elicited opposition campaigns that were often both successful and, significantly, ideologically consistent. The secularist or separationist opposition included the irreligious (such as Robert G. Ingersoll) and the anticlerical (such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton), but included church people as well. Fundamentalists such as Primitive Baptists and Seventh-Day Adventists and liberal Protestants who were proud enough of the American experiment in separation to defend it. The opposition also included slavery's clerical advocates who argued, politically, that churchmen should not dabble in politics. Covering as it does the “long” nineteenth century (from Virginia's 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom to the controversy over the Prohibition amendment), the book is episodic in nature, but Verhoeven's evidence for a persistent secularism holds it together. His interests in nineteenth-century European parallels and in the light and shadows cast by New England's regionalist historians also provide other, and noteworthy, unifying themes

Democracy · Ideology · Opposition (politics · Orthodoxy · Political science · Politics · Religious organization · Separation of church and state · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies