Although Reverend William Bentley (1759–1819) of Salem, Massachusetts, disliked the radical deist critique of Christianity that Thomas Paine presented in his Age of Reason, Bentley, a loner theologically as well as socially, might well have agreed with Paine that “my own mind is my own church” (Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings [New York: The Library of America, 1995], 666). At least this is the impression we get from the erudite, beautifully written, and much-needed biography of Salem's prolific proponent of “Christian naturalism.” Based largely on Bentley's published four-volume diary (some 2,300 pages) and his 1,200 handwritten sermons, J. Rixey Ruffin has reconstructed the intellectual and social life of a free-thinking Unitarian, one whose views of a fully human Jesus and a noninterventionist God placed him on the outermost edge of Christianity. What Ruffin finds is a declension story: in the two decades after Bentley took over the pulpit of Salem's East Church in 1783 and began preaching his version of rational religion, his would-be converts rejected his Socinian version of an entirely human Jesus and the notion that God had not intervened in the world since biblical times. As Salem's mainstream liberal Protestants clung to the supernatural beliefs they preferred, Bentley found himself increasingly isolated and irrelevant, occupying “a category of Christians that was his alone” (61). Bentley “had created a new interpretation, a new faction of Christian ontology of which he was the only representative” (72). He was “a one-man faction of reasonable Christianity” (76).

Bentley's theology did take risks, but he was neither unprecedented nor alone, as Ruffin points out elsewhere in the book. Inspired by the Socinian Unitarianism coming out of England, especially that of Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey, Bentley joined forces with his former college roommate and lifelong friend, James Freeman of Boston's King Chapel, to disseminate the many Unitarian sermons and tracts arriving from England. If Bentley was indeed “the only person who believed what he did about the attributes and powers of God” (76), he certainly did not know it. His own reworked catechism and hymnal, without any Trinitarian references, went through numerous printings, and the minister could hope that some in his congregation were persuaded by what he preached with conviction for thirty-five years.

Ruffin makes clear that Bentley had good reason to feel appreciated rather than isolated in his Salem community. Principled and outspoken in his stand on religious tolerance, Bentley argued for the rights of those he disagreed with (Universalists and Catholics, for example) to worship as they pleased. He was explicitly anti-dogmatic, allowing the baptism of children whose parents were not baptized. He also performed baptisms at a person's home and on days other than Sunday. “Most radically of all,” Ruffin explains, Bentley “was willing to baptize children born or conceived out of wedlock without requiring a confession of sin by the parents” (84). Sympathetic to sinners who made mistakes, Bentley believed the desire to act virtuously was enough to merit baptism for oneself or one's child. And so it was that Bentley baptized more children in Salem than any other minister.

Bentley had not always shown such generosity of spirit, and Ruffin documents the dramatic shift in Bentley's perceptions of hierarchy and social justice. In the 1780s, Bentley was an aspirant to elitism from Harvard who blamed the poor for the “miserable life which their vices have brought upon them” (57). He found it “highly scandalous” that the wandering poor should seek relief in Salem and “that our public street should be infested with vagabonds” (57). Bentley also denounced Shays's Rebellion as a lawless and sinful “war against society,” and he lectured his congregants that “our social happiness will ever be commensurate with our submission to the established authority” (60). But, in the 1790s, Bentley's views took a turn. He supported the French revolution even when others became disenchanted. And when, during the embargo of 1794, American merchants chose self-interest over the good of the commonwealth, Bentley was deeply disillusioned. He distanced himself from the wealthy and their pursuit of property, seeing instead—apparently for the first time—how the poor were unfairly disadvantaged. By the late 1790s, Bentley had shed his former allegiance to the Great Chain of Being. Rousseau was right; social hierarchy was a human construction, and inequalities of wealth should be reduced.

Ruffin admirably combines the intellectual, social, and political history of Salem in the 1790s. We learn that Bentley became Salem's spokesman for republicanism, publicizing his views from the pulpit as well as in the local Republican newspaper, the (misnamed) Impartial Register. By 1800, “Bentley's congregants were poised to join the party whose ideology he had been preaching for so long” (143). He made “good friends” (143) along the way, one of whom, an East Church parishioner named Jacob Crowninshield, was elected to Congress in 1802. Two years later, congressmen elected Bentley chaplain of the House of Representatives, an honor Bentley declined (just as he turned down the offer in 1805 to teach at the proposed college in Washington), presumably because he felt comfortable, needed, and effective in Salem. Ruffin credits Bentley with playing “a singularly important role” in the rise of the Republicans in Salem (153).

Bentley's importance as a public figure makes all the more intriguing Ruffin's depiction of the 40-something Bentley as a lonely and marginalized figure when the book closes in 1806. (Bentley would live 13 more years, “cut off completely from his liberal colleagues, isolated, ridiculed, and despised” [183].) Ruffin asserts that “Bentley's brand of Republicanism—a rational, libertarian, Christian Republicanism—had come to an end.” Now that the party had gone mainstream, “they no longer needed a fringe radical who was becoming something of an embarrassment” (163). It is true that the congregation at East Church was shrinking when other churches in town were growing. But why were Bentley's Socinian views so off-putting now, when they had not been in the years before? (For an account of how Arian Unitarians in America sidelined and sabotaged the Socinian Unitarianism imported by Priestley, see Jerome D. Bowers, Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008].) Ruffin's answer has to do with what more orthodox versions of Christianity offered the faithful: “real psychological relief could be gained from a conviction in the universality of the depraved material soul and the promise of heavenly bliss for converted Christians regardless of station” (168). Because Bentley's rationalism held no such emotional solace, it “failed at providing what the faithful seek from their faith” (174). Ruffin attributes Bentley's social isolation to his theology—the minister experienced a belated fall from social grace due to his barren Christology.

To those who wonder whether Bentley's personality had anything to do with his shrinking popularity, Ruffin has an answer: rational religion has emotional repercussions for its adherents. Ruffin, who likely knows Bentley's writings better than anyone else, describes Bentley as emotionally impoverished and unable to experience real passion. But just after saying that Bentley himself admitted, or at least feared, that his “unlimited commitment to the rational life has left him unable to fall in love” (172), Ruffin shows that Bentley did fall in love, and that “his heart had broken” (173). This odd contradiction may have its source in Ruffin's own assessment of rational religion. He repeatedly asserts that “Christian naturalism failed” (170, 173, 174). For Ruffin, rationalist religion “removed much of the ability that Scripture does have to instruct, console, and, indeed, enlighten” (174–175). Rationalism's theology and theodicy remain without meaning, without divine purpose, offering its adherents “a universe governed by a God unable or unwilling to help them” (179). The book's title, A Paradise of Reason, turns out to be tongue in cheek.

Ruffin's forthright critique of Bentley's Socinianism may distract readers more sympathetic to the idea and its longtime champion in Salem's East Church. Even so, Ruffin's opinions do not detract from the power of the book to illuminate the life and times of an important and previously overlooked figure of the American Enlightenment. This is a carefully researched and vividly presented history of a man whose unorthodox religious beliefs and republican politics both contrasted with and significantly influenced Salem's Arminian and Federalist majority. Ruffin shines in his re-creation of the social and religious world of Salem in the early Republic, and he has reintroduced us to a figure worth studying for the creative and possibly idiosyncratic ways he melded rationality and religion. A Paradise of Reason will prove valuable for scholars of American Protestantism, Enlightenment-era ideas about reason and revelation, and political culture in the early Republic.