Religion and the American Revolution is a timely contribution to the historiography of the rise and fall of the first British Empire. Its nuanced arguments place the Imperial Crisis in the multiconfessional context of the colonial British state that had developed since the seventeenth century. Carté questions the once-dominant narrative that the American Revolution was indebted to earlier generations of English Puritans who fled religious persecution by establishment-minded leaders. The book offers a key methodological insight that complicates such a story: historians should consider all religious actors in the imperial realm of British North America from the 1760s through the early 1770s, rather than cherry picking those few ministers who made a religious case for opposing Britain in response to cases such as the Stamp Act crisis.
What Carté describes as the “scaffolding” of power and authority in the British imperial realm had allowed different Protestant leaders to negotiate local forms of public and civic support for their respective denominational or theological concerns. Rather than opposing British interventions such as the Stamp Act or worrying themselves too greatly about the prospect of a “Sitting” Anglican Bishop on the western side of the Atlantic, according to Carté, they remained remarkably silent on those matters. Those who did object were often comfortably positioned in colonies without royal governors, such as Connecticut and Rhode Island, showing how popular political culture influenced their decisions as religious leaders. Only after the Stamp Act was repealed and the Sitting Bishop controversy dissipated, Carté reminds us, did colonial American religious leaders feel more comfortable with days of Thanksgiving and pulpit speeches that corresponded with patriot ideas. And even those cases tended to reflect their desire for public and civic support for religious authority—a confessional status that was indebted to their earlier experience of imperial British institutions that were not inherently opposed to local civic provisions for denominational groups.
Complementing the archipelagic insights of John Pocock and the “New British History,” as well as the work of scholars such as Ned Landsman, Colin Kidd, and Alan Macinnes, Carté's book reminds readers that eighteenth-century North American history was often bound by the context of a bi-confessional British state. The latter had evolved from 1603 through 1707 to include two separate national churches under one crown, as well as myriad local contexts in which Protestant denominations claimed to enjoy some sort of civic support for their institutional endeavors. Before the Revolutionary era, figures such as John Erskine and Jonathan Edwards happily networked with each other across denominational boundaries thanks to institutional frameworks that also allowed them to distinguish their confessional identities and to enjoy local forms of established prerogative.
The multiplicity of competing disestablished denominations in the new American Republic, Carté suggests, was more a consequence of the Revolution than necessarily a sign of that which stimulated many religious leaders to support the formation of an independent confederation in the first place. By the 1790s, the benefits of older imperial structures became less apparent. African American Protestant leaders, for example, became less likely to stress the worth of local or state establishments for their personal ministerial standing or their denominational status. And so Carté notes a conflict between two impulses, the first of which was inherited from the imperial British framework. On the one hand, many Americans desired (Protestant) public leaders through religious tests or standards for office. Others, on the other hand, felt that such an approach was no longer practical. Unlike during the imperial era, they noted, Protestantism had become more of a theological term than a political marker for rights and contractual obligations in local civic contexts. The tension between these approaches became part of the national conversation over the following two centuries. Positive memories of the scaffolding of imperial Protestantism remained in a nation that no longer maintained the structure to fulfill such a framework.
As is to be expected in any work that covers such conceptual depth and magnitude, there are emphases in Religion and the American Revolution that are open to critique or that are likely to stimulate modified narratives or confounding examples. For example, the suggestion that Congregationalists enjoyed structurally similar establishments to Anglicans and Presbyterians in the imperial realm may overlook key contextual differences. Future work might also pay greater attention to the way theological and spiritual languages interacted with the institutional frameworks that Carté so deftly elucidates. Patriot ministers often stressed how the Revolutionary crisis signaled the universal depravity of mankind and warned against any notion that their disestablished state somehow distinguished the unregenerate moral status of its citizens from subjects on the eastern side of the Atlantic. It would be interesting to consider how that continuity spoke to their ongoing and often wistful recollection of provincial evangelicalism within the British imperial realm. It is also worth considering those instances where colonial religious leaders used the institutional mechanisms of the British Empire to compete in heated controversies rather than to network in favor of Protestant unity. In Philadelphia, for example, the move toward American independence accompanied—and was even stimulated by—a three-way fight between Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Quakers. In Virginia, a structurally similar story could be told about the increasing rivalry between some Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans.
It is also exciting to consider how Carté's work might help us to assess the ideological origins of terms such as federal and confederal in the new American Republic. Such ostensibly secular political terms may have been partially rooted in the confederal experience of religious establishments and institutions in the early British Empire. Britain's multiconfessional union granted religious institutions a form of parallel autonomy in a loosely confederal structure, despite the growth of more centralized federal political and economic power in London. Rather than religious actors following the lead of secular political agendas, the structural design of multilayered political frameworks in the independent American republic may have been inspired in part by the earlier negotiation of confederal institutional independence by religious groups in the imperial British state. It is a strength of Carté's work that future scholars will be inspired by her findings to consider these and other questions.
