The Protestant Interest
and the Reformation in America
“If, then, your prince or temporal lord commands you to hold with the pope, to believe this or that, or commands you to give up certain books, you should say, “It does not befit Lucifer to sit by the side of God. Dear Lord, I owe you obedience with life and goods; command me within the limits of your power on earth, and I will obey. But if you command me to believe, and to put away books, I will not obey; for in this case you are a tyrant, and overreach yourself, and command where you have neither right nor power,” etc.”
-Martin Luther, On Secular Authority (1523)
“There is no doubt but the Claim of Parliament of Authority to make Laws binding on the Colonists in all Cases whatsoever, includes an Authority to change our Religious Constitution, and establish Popery or Mahometanism if they please in its Stead: but, as you intimate Power does not infer Right.”
-Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Mather, July 7, 1773
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what I’m calling the long reformation as it existed in the minds of eighteenth-century Americans. Their conception of themselves has to be understood as historical, that they were continuing and completing the Protestant Reformation or rather that the Reformation and Revolution were the same event. This is a running, still inchoate thesis of mine and I’m going to continue it here. My forthcoming book, Political Protestantism (Canon Press), is focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It doesn’t get into America. That will have to wait for the sequel (if there is one).
What I’m positing below is that part of my book’s argument, viz., that Protestantism is fundamentally a political identity, is demonstrated by the endurance of that identity into the eighteenth century. Protestantism has theological distinctives, but it was a political claim, and those claims were themselves doctrinal. When other distinctives became more loosely held, the political claims remained (and evolved). That’s the best I can explain it right now. Perhaps, you’ll get the gist of what I mean after reading what follows in conjunction with my prior essay linked above. In a sense, I’m just (properly) putting the Whig ideology in contact with the Protestant interest and the intense filial piety of New Englanders especially.
On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress published an Address to the People of Great Britain, chiefly authored by John Jay. It declared the “cause of America” to be “the object of universal attention.” At the time, its cause was still self-professedly in service to the “general welfare of the British empire.” Hence, the address to those who were “descended from the same common ancestors,” and beneficiaries of the same rights, liberties, and constitution. The colonists had been maligned, they said. They wanted to explain themselves directly to their brethren and also assert the sacred “benefits secured to the subject by the English constitution.” Cold and vast as the Atlantic was, no disparity of rights had been introduced by its expanse.
Accordingly, they insisted that parliament was “not authorized by the constitution to establish a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets, or to erect an arbitrary form of government in any quarter of the globe.” Following the conclusion of the French and Indian War, the Congress suggested, certain “wicked ministers” and “evil counsellors” in his majesty’s government had conspired against the “Protestant cause” and liberty itself. The two were the same really and both were synonymous with America.
First, they had extracted revenue. Then, trade was disrupted, novel taxes were imposed, charters were revoked, royal governors were appointed, Boston was blockaded, and so on. This part of the story of the “ministerial plan for enslaving us” is familiar. There was also “another act” that extended the “dominion of Canada.” It was not simply that this dominion would be “disunited” from the colonies. The complaint was that its governance would be “detached from our interest by civil as well as religious prejudices” and that it was “daily swelling with Catholic emigrants.” If it became a formidable dominion, it would threaten the “ancient, free Protestant colonies.”
The Quebec Act was a conduit of slavery. Everyone understood it this way and railed against it. Anti-papal animus was a central feature of the American founding. The same founders who condemned bigotry saw no contradiction in hurling invectives at Rome. This is known and usually written off as intellectual inconsistency or moral failing, like the African slavery question. This conclusion is unsatisfying.
The question is how “popery” was understood and, by extension, how “Protestantism” was understood. Both held political meaning. Popery and “arbitrary power” went hand-in-hand just as popery and “superstition” were synonymous. As John Adams put it, “Liberty and Popery cannot live together.” How could liberty-loving Protestants “forbear complaining of it”? All dreaded popery’s proximity. That is, of the establishment of “a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Almost by definition, a slave was someone subject to “arbitrary and Popish government.”
John Adams had complained of the same thing in his diary three years prior. The “barriers against Popery, erected by our Ancestors” were being destroyed, “to the hazard even of the Protestant Religion.” The rights of juries and elections—the involvement of the people in lawmaking and adjudication—now under fire, were the primary barriers of the English constitution against popery. These things all went together.
Adams’ fuller explanation is found in his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law (1765). There he identified two sources of tyranny: the “Romish clergy” and the feudal lords. Of the former, Adams had to say:
“the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy, that ever was conceived by the mind of man, was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just; and will be allowed to be so, when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had intrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure—with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality—with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes—with a power of deposing princes, and absolving subjects from allegiance—with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven, and the beams of the sun—with the management of earthquakes, pestilence and famine. Nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine, the flesh and blood of God himself.”
By feudalism, Adams means dependence on and servitude to kings and princes and lords. This system of governance was a compliment to the papacy. The two were joined in a “wicked confederacy.” Adams uses “ecclesiastical and civil tyranny” as a “synonymous expression” for this reason.
“It seems to have been even stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute every thing in their power to maintain the ascendency of the priesthood; and that the spiritual grandees, in their turn, should employ that ascendency over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds, a blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy.”
This was the tyranny that kept Christendom in darkness: liberty, knowledge, and virtue “seem[ed] to have deserted the earth.” Until, that is, “GOD, in his benign providence, raised up the champions, who began and conducted the reformation.” But Adams clarifies that this deliverance and the ensuing struggle was not about religion only.
“the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent and bloody. IT was this great struggle, that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal Liberty, and an hatred, a dread, an horror of the infernal confederacy, before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.”
The “sensible people, I mean the Puritans,” carried the Reformation to America and the Reformation, for Adams, was the rejection of ignorance but also of the “cannon and the feudal system.” The Puritans may have been illiberal religious enthusiasts, admits Adams, but not only was this the “universal character” of Christendom at the time, such enthusiasm was the “great honor” of the Puritans. “[F]or I believe it will be found universally true, that no great enterprize, for the honour or happiness of mankind, was ever achieved, without a large mixture of that noble infirmity.” Such an undertaking as the first planters of the colonies embraced requires some level of enthusiasm. In any case, their policies and institutions, founded on reason and revelation, were wise and benevolent.
“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever.”
Their chief concern was biblical religion freed from superstition and corruption and, having levelled the “whole system of Diocesan episcopacy,” they demanded “industry, virtue, piety and learning” of their clergy. More able ecclesiastical men, in turn, conditioned the people for republican governance, just as the obsession with education inculcated the necessary learning and virtue for the same. Adams was convinced that no society in history had enjoyed such a proliferation of knowledge. “A native of America who cannot read and write, is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite, or a Roman Catholic… It has been observed, that we are all of us lawyers, divines, politicians, and philosophers.”
The Puritans weren’t averse to monarchy as such, Adams clarifies. They simply desired an accountable (and Protestant) monarchy, the kind Adams was able to describe as republican in his Thoughts on Government (1776). In many ways, the Americans exhibited extreme deference to this constitution even to the point of being “excessively cautious of giving offence by complaining of grievances.” It was a kind of Puritan endurance, modesty, and austerity that made these republican people, the descendants of the Puritans, reluctant to assert their rights or of suggesting correctives.
Adams could only encourage his countrymen to study sacred and secular history as their forbears had, but most of all to “Recollect the civil and religious principles, and hopes, and expectations, which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships, with patience and resignation!” Submitting to ignorance and tyranny now would be a “sacrilegious breach of trust.” Indeed, it was through the tyranny of the Stuarts that the Puritans had learned what true liberty was.
Forces were conspiring against America, where the Reformation had culminated, to reintroduce the twin tyrannies of cannon and feudal law and thereby subvert “the whole system of our Fathers.” The Stamp Act had merely been the first step, namely, an attempt to hamper the production of knowledge. Here we see something of the Lutheran spirit. Kings and lords may demand much, said Martin Luther, but if they ban books, they “presumptuously set themselves in God’s place” as lord of the conscience. Restriction of knowledge—at least good knowledge—was a hallmark of papal and feudal tyranny. The plan to subvert the Reformation, advised Adams, would surely follow if the opening volley of the stamp policy was not resisted.
This was the culmination of the Reformation which had never been fully accomplished in England. Adams cites Jonathan Mayhew’s 1765 Dudley lecture at Harvard in his Dissertation. Mayhew’s framing of the Reformation helps us understand the Protestant mind of late eighteenth century America.1
Mayhew outlines four types of idolatry. 1) worshiping a creature as if it was God; 2) worship a creature or “imaginary deities” as if it was equal to God; 3) “paying such service to creatures” in addition or even subordination to God; and 4) worshipping images of God as a conduit.
“Protestants have not accused Papists of the first and grossest kind of idolatry, or worshipping idols exclusively of the true God; but they have charged them with all the others.” Mayhew means the eucharist, praying to saints and angels, and use of images. He takes each “idolatry” in turn and at length.
And yet…
“Detestable as the idolatry of the church of Rome is, there are other of her principles and practices, as has been intimated, which more immediately affect the peace and order of civil society, the honor of princes, and the liberty and common rights of mankind. Our contro|versy with her is not merely a religious one: It is not, on our part, only a defence of the worship of one God by one Mediator, in op|position to that of a thousand demons or idols; of the authority of the sacred oracles, in oppo|sition to that of idle legends and traditions; and of sober reason in opposition to the grossest fanaticism: But a defence of our laws, liberties, and civil rights as men, in opposition to the proud claims and encroachments of ecclesiasti|cal persons, who under the pretext of religion, and saving mens souls, would engross all power and property to themselves, and reduce us to the most abject slavery.”
Popery was on the march in England, Mayhew reported. It was up to New England to preserve Protestantism from this encroachment. The namesake of the lectures, Paul Dudley, had himself been well aware of all this, Mayhew reminds us, viz., that for the Protestant, popery is not merely spiritual idolatry but political tyranny and it was the latter that most animated late eighteenth-century Protestants in America.
Adams often credited Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), along with James Otis, James Warren, Oxenbridge Thatcher, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams, as being a father of the revolution. He belongs on the “old revolutionaries” list. Adams admired Mayhew’s preaching generally, but it was probably Mayhew’s (in)famous sermon in 1765 that was blamed (rightly or wrongly) for instigating the mob attack on Thomas Hutchinson’s house. Adams wrote in 1775 complaining about the poor treatment of Mayhew by the press: “Dr. Mayhew was a Whig of the first magnitude, a clergyman equalled by a very few of any denomination in piety, virtue, genius or learning, whose works will maintain his character, as long as New-England shall be free, integrity esteemed, or wit, spirit, humour, or reason and knowledge admired.”