As they defined the expected return for denominational freedom, early national clergyman contributed to what historians have increasingly described as an implicit bargain between public political institutions and Protestant churches. In exchange for the free exercise of their religious institutions, thanks to the ostensible separation between church and state, a consensus emerged that they ought to excite moral order among those who might later assume positions of political and civic authority. Religious teachers and ministers advocated an Augustinian division between civil and spiritual bodies while also outlining the intended public effect of that division. As Nathan S. Rives has shown in his important new book on the religion-supported state, the ambiguity of that implicit bargain was exposed in New England by the continuation of tax-supported religion into the early 1830s.
Though New Englanders found themselves in a free marketplace of religion, competing interpretations of religious truth were buoyed by contiguous fears about religious error as theologians and laymen tried to make sense of the public interest of matters such as Sunday laws and antislavery activism. As a result, a range of groups from “Standing Order” Protestants to Unitarians campaigned for ongoing religious support for their institutions, so that they might affect more accurate conceptions of morality among future public leaders—so that their vision of objective morality might win out over lesser visions.
Before 1800, as Rives reminds us, Dissenters in New England were primarily Baptist. Keen to define the individual's role in working out salvation, they accused proponents of religious taxation of communalizing the salvation experience and thus encouraging religious error. They stood against the Standing Order—an elite Congregationalist establishment that received tax support and that would try to maintain power through its alliance with Federalist politicians through the early nineteenth century. But rather than rejecting Baptist critiques entirely, according to Rives, they adopted Baptist terminology—particularly its discussion of religious liberty. They did so to define the validity of public financial support for ostensibly disestablished institutions, to prevent moral error among leaders. Without that support, those leaders might then threaten the liberty of conscience that Baptists championed. But they were often accused of special pleading to support their own civil power.
Rather than focusing on religion as a proxy for public authority, Rives reminds us to consider theological debates on their own terms and to note their contribution to the ongoing dispute over tax-funded religious institutions. From the 1790s through the 1820s, discussions about the relative balance between external divinity and personal agency in affecting salvation, the nature of the afterlife, and other similar doctrinal issues were inflected with what Rives describes as the “politics of disestablishment.” Without financial support for their theological teaching, future leaders would act morally and illiberally.
Ironically, according to Rives, the rise of Unitarians in Massachusetts provided a final stimulus for state-supported religious institutions. The Congregational Standing Order became increasingly divided over the familiar tension between God-centered and Arminian approaches to the moral will. As a result, its leaders were not well positioned to provide a robust response to the expiration of religious taxes in their state in 1833. Unitarians, conversely, found themselves as the loudest advocates of state funding for public religious institutions, usually Unitarian-run schools.
During the same period, representatives from decentralized moral interest groups and voluntary associations made sure to avoid public opposition to tax funding for their institutions or even the top-down regulation of moral behavior through Sabbatarian edicts. As part of the implicit bargain in an ostensibly disestablished state, they underscored the financial support that they might still deserve. Even as some came to oppose state taxation support, they were loath to oppose state-imposed Sunday laws.
Moving to the period between 1830 and 1850, Rives even connects New England antislavery ideology to the debate over state support for religious institutions. When radical abolitionists demanded state intervention against slavery, they could also build a platform to support top-down financial contributions to religious organizations, or to oppose such a construct. This is a wide-ranging account of the early national rivalries that were stimulated by theologians and politicians as they sought to maintain public support for their subjective visions of objective moral truth.
