On December 10, 1811, during the twelfth session of Congress, Rep. John Randolph of Virginia launched a verbal assault on the Committee on Foreign Affairs for its call for troops against England. A resolution for a standing army, he harangued, was a declaration of war and stood against the very ideals of the Republican party. As the vocal leader of the “Old Republicans,” Randolph was a sort of self-appointed prophetic figure, calling his people back to its original Jeffersonian principles.1 Therefore, when the Episcopalian defined what he believed to be the essence of republicanism against its heresies, what transpired on the floor of the House was a mix of political theater and religious sermonizing. Clinging to “the ark of the Constitution” and holding firmly to the “doctrine that Republics are destitute of ambition,” he excoriated his fellow Republicans for their “want of moderation” and lack of honor. “Gallant crusaders in the holy cause of Republicanism!” he mocked. “Such Republicanism does indeed mean anything or nothing.” For the so-called “War Hawks,” he charged, republicanism was merely self-interest. However, in Randolph’s mind, republicanism was rooted in something much deeper and more ancient. “If we must have an exposition of the doctrines of Republicanism,” he exclaimed, “[we] should receive it from the fathers of the church, and not from the junior apprentices of the law.”2 Ultimately, republicanism belonged to religion, not to legal philosophy or political science. Randolph was reaching back to the church fathers, not to the founding fathers. For Randolph, as for most Americans, the concept of republicanism was birthed in the Greek and Roman republics yet embodied fully in Christianity itself. Republican character traits like prudence, restraint, temperance, fortitude, dignity, disinterestedness, and independence were Christian virtues.3 Christianity was a republican religion.With a republicanized faith (or at least his version of it), Randolph wielded biblical passages for his old school Jeffersonian purposes, including the defense of slavery. Accusing his younger, self-interested partisans of setting a dangerous example for their slaves, Randolph drew from the book of Genesis: “You have deprived him of all moral restraint, you have tempted him to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, just enough to perfect him in wickedness; you have opened his eyes to his nakedness; you have armed his nature against the hand that has fed, that has clothed him, that has cherished him in sickness; that hand, which before he became a pupil of your school, he had been accustomed to press with respectful affection.”4 In the third chapter of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil after being tempted by the Devil, discovering their nakedness and rebelling against the Almighty. Ironically, in Randolph’s version, it is the slave who fulfills the role of fallen Adam and the slave-owner who plays the part of both God and the Devil. In his interpretation, slaves were formed in the image of their owners, but their owners were not always conformed to the republican image of their Creator.But was there really such a thing as disinterested slaveholding? Could one slave-owner lecture another for his lack of “restraint”? And could the generation of 1776 rebuke the generation of 1812 for their “war spirit”? With the authority of the Bible, republicanized Christianity allowed the slave-holding Randolph to scold his younger counterparts for their self-interest while preserving the right to seek his own. After attacking “standing armies, loans, taxes, navies, and war,” he concluded his diatribe by asking, “What Republicanism is this?”5 In the new republic, it seemed, not even the Republicans were agreed upon the nature of republicanism. Whatever it was, it was bound up with the very definition of Christianity itself. Two hundred years after Randolph’s screed to the House of Representatives, the ubiquitous ideology known as Christian Republicanism is still more described than defined. While the terminology is known to most historians of the early republic, very few have attempted to explicate its unique theology or to identify its various religious, moral, and even racial permutations in the church. In short, Christian republicanism was much more than just a set of political or social commitments.6 This article provides an introduction to Christian republicanism, tracing its beliefs, defining its boundaries, and chronicling its lifespan in the early republic when it flourished in the American mind.

1. “Our Republican Experiment”

As the most celebrated intellectual and moral movement in the early United States, republicanism was ironically one of the most difficult to define. Although Randolph had spelled it with a capital “R,” for instance, most Americans did not associate republicanism with a particular party. Even Timothy Dwight, the so-called Federalist “Pope” of New England, once described himself to George Washington as “so independent a republican, and so honest a man, as to be incapable of a wish to palm myself upon the world under the patronage of another.”7 Dwight eventually dedicated his epic poem Conquest of Canaan to the first president, “The Saviour of his Country,” whom he portrayed as a modern Joshua.8 But republicanism was not necessarily synonymous with patriotism. Swiss-born Presbyterian pastor John Joachim Zubly believed that Christians should resist unjust taxes and even published a sermon on the eve of the Revolution entitled The Law of Liberty. Zubly was elected to the Second Continental Congress from Georgia but opposed American independence, giving up his seat. He was a so-called “Whig-Loyalist” despite “being borned and bred in a Commonwealth” and hoping that his fellow Americans would “not be unacquainted with republican Govt.”9 As historians have noted, republicanism did not preclude monarchy though it did transform it.10 Nevertheless, for most loyalist clergy, “anarchy” became a code word for republicanism.11

The republicanization of American Christianity was distinct from the so-called “democratization of American Christianity” as outlined by Nathan O. Hatch. Although, as its opponents often noted, republicanism carried with it many egalitarian forces, the moral energy of republicanism brought Christians together for various causes and compelled them to centralize authority as much as it brought them to de-centralize authority. The republican ethos animated high Calvinists and low church revivalists alike. As one of the chief opponents of the revivalism and popular religious movements of the Second Great Awakening, Horace Bushnell disavowed the “extreme individualism” of his generation. Yet, the father of American religious liberalism also exhorted the students at Andover Seminary, “We shall be men of the nineteenth-century, not of the first—republicans, men of railroads and commerce, astronomers, chemists, geologists, and even rationalizers in the highest degree.”12 For some, republicanism meant returning to a more classical era. For others, it meant embracing the present.

Republican values like personal morality, individual responsibility, freedom, and equality were embraced so thoroughly by American evangelicals as they preached the importance of faith and the rebirth that republicanism often became a watchword for evangelicalism. However, like the evangelical tradition itself, republicanism was not a homogenous movement and influenced established and disestablished churches alike. For instance, Devereux Jarrett was an Anglican minister in Virginia who welcomed and even imitated the emotional preaching of the Methodists. Nevertheless, despite his evangelical sympathies, Jarrett did not approve of the populist and anti-authoritarian spirit of the age, which he identified as republicanism, lamenting in 1794, “in our high republican times, there is more levelling than ought to be.”13 As the spirit of the age swept over the American people, the lower orders of society no longer yielded an instinctive deference to the religious authority and nobility as they did in patriarchal England.14 On the other hand, evangelicals in the Episcopal Church (the Anglican Church in America reconfigured in 1789) identified more strongly with republicanism. By 1853, Episcopal clergyman Calvin Colton boasted that the “genius of the American Episcopal Church is republican.” Rev. John Alonzo Clark declared, “Every one now begins to see that the principles of our [Episcopal] church are in most delightful harmony with republican government.”15 Republicanism was thoroughly embedded in early American evangelicalism, extending its reach into the older, more formalist denominations.

Between the revolutionary and Civil War eras, republicanism was more assumed than defined, and it was not the intellectual property of white males only. Historians have demonstrated how black founders such as Bishop Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church “often presented themselves as the consummate representatives of republicanism.”16 Congregationalist Lemuel Haynes, the first African American ordained in any denomination, urged “true republicanism” upon his hearers and acknowledged “that civil authority is in some sense, the basis of religion.”17 As John Randolph suggested in his screed to the House, even slave-owning whites expected that their republican values would be passed on to their slaves in some way, so long as black republicanism did not conflict with white supremacy. On the other hand, abolitionists like Baptist David Barrow believed that republicanism prohibited slavery. In a 1798 Circular Letter explaining his departure from Virginia to Kentucky, Barrow insisted, “I wish that all masters, or owners of slaves, may consider how inconsistently they act, with a Republican Government, and whether, in this particular, they are doing, as they would others should do to them!”18 According to Barrow’s logic, republicanism was but an extension of the second commandment to love thy neighbor. Despite lacking a universal definition, the republican ideal was so powerful that it shaped both sides of the slavery debate, taking Christian form. Even Baptist Basil Manly Sr., who owned forty slaves, confessed, “Slavery seems to be utterly repugnant to the spirit of our republican institutions.”19 Nevertheless, Manly opposed both emancipation and colonization and virtually any effort to limit slavery.

With such a wide spectrum of political, theological, racial, and social beliefs under the same ideological umbrella, sometimes the best way to describe republicanism was by its appearance: you knew it when you saw it. Or, rather, when you didn’t. When Presbyterian-turned-Catholic Fanny Calderon de la Barca, the Scottish-American wife of a Spanish ambassador, visited the legislative hall in Mexico City in 1839, she described it as “as anti-republican-looking an assembly as I ever beheld.”20 Indeed, republicanism even had its own sound. Shortly after the Revolution, officials in the colony of Sierra Leone believed that the preaching of black American Dissenters like Moses Wilkinson and David George was too “republican” and therefore subversive to public order.21 Ultimately, even though republicanism was derived from the Greek and Roman republics and crossed international waters, it was mostly understood to be an American phenomenon. Benjamin Rush, a last-minute delegate to the Continental Congress and a devout evangelical Presbyterian, wrote to a friend that the Declaration of Independence inspired the Philadelphia militia to “be actuated with a spirit more than Roman,” implying a kind of American superiority.22 The people of the United States had not invented republicanism nor could they always agree upon its meaning, but they were perfecting it with the help of the church. And when the vast majority of Americans spoke of American Christianity or republican religion, they meant the Protestant church. “There is no religion on the face of the earth, consistent with republicanism but the Protestant,” declared minister William Cogswell.23 In Boston in 1831, Lyman Beecher stated unequivocally, “Republicanism and Catholicism . . . are incompatible with each other.”24

Republicanism was, like Protestant Christianity, meant to be seen and heard. In an 1844 sermon to Congregational ministers in Massachusetts, Edwards Amasa Park announced, “This connection between sacred things, and freedom in civil, is well understood by transatlantic observers of our republican experiment.” Just as the Puritans had sought to display pure and undefiled religion before the eyes of an apostate Anglican church, the world was once again invited to witness free religion take place in America.25 But this time it had a name: republicanism. In Park’s view, not just the United States but American Christianity itself was a “republican experiment.” In the same sermon, Park offered his own concise definition: “This is American Christianity. It is in sympathy with the broadness of our lakes, the expanse of our prairies, the length of our rivers, the freeness of our government, the very genius of our whole social organization. A narrow-minded religionist is no true countryman of ours.”26 Although distinct, Christianity and republicanism coalesced in the American mind because they both helped explain the American experience, from its lakes to its rivers to its “social organization.” In some sense, the citizens in America were as free from kings and tyrants as its Christians were free from “popery” and sin and as its settlers were free from boundaries and barriers. Each of these freedoms mutually reenforced the importance of the others.

For this reason, Mark A. Noll has noted “the unusual convergence of republicanism and Christianity in the American founding,” identifying a so-called “Christian republicanism” that dominated and even molded the church. “American Christians,” Noll insists, “despite substantial conflict among themselves, took for granted a fundamental compatibility between orthodox Protestant religion and republican principles of government. Most English-speaking Protestants outside the United States did not.”27 Noll is by no means the only scholar to identify the wedding of republicanism with American Christianity in the new American nation. In The New England Soul, for example, Harry S. Stout concluded that, during the Revolution, “The American people, it was clear, were bound by ties of common ideology, not a common religious faith.”28 James P. Byrd has argued, “By the end of the Revolution, colonists had shaped not one republican Bible but many republican Bibles.”29

However, while most scholars have sought to explain the effects of republicanism on church and state and its relation to the Revolution, very few have defined or expounded upon the republicanization of American Christianity in its everyday faith and practice. Republicanism colored more than Christian politics and patriotism. It imbued Christians’ view of God, salvation, and even themselves. It shaped their understanding of history, their code of ethics, their Calvinism and Arminianism, and other modes of thinking that could not always be detected in political sermons. In turn, these changes had a profound effect upon Christian living in America because, as historian Perry Miller once stated, “the mind of man is the basic factor in human history.”30 Republicanism was brought to bear upon the American mind—and the American conscience—with as much force in religion as it was in politics.

In the revolutionary and post-revolutionary generations, it was generally understood that Enlightenment Christians were a thinking people, and if the latest ideas and trends in the intellectual world could not be sublimated into Christian thought, they were more than likely not reasonable or cogent enough to be accepted and believed. University of Vermont president James Marsh wrote to English Romanticist Samuel Coleridge in 1829, “in this country, the most practical and efficient mode of influencing the thinking world, is to begin with those who think from principle and in earnest; in other words, with the religious community.”31 In some ways, the dialogue between Christianity and republicanism was inevitable. In The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994), Carl J. Richard argues, “The strict dichotomy between classical republicanism and liberalism which has dominated Revolutionary and early republican historiography for the past generation undervalues the complexity of the relationship between the two intellectual constructs, underestimates the human propensity for inconsistency, and ignores the contribution of Christianity to the founders’ thought.”32 At least in America, even the most heretical of “infidels” were not unaffected by Christian beliefs. Although republicanism found its origins in the classic republics of ancient Greece and Rome and was championed by non-Christians, it should come as little surprise that a Deist like Thomas Jefferson would still consider himself a Christian of some kind (albeit of a naturalistic sort).33 Richard adds, “Although many of the founders held unorthodox religious views, they sometimes interpreted classical virtue in a Christian light.”34 Christianity was likewise an indomitable intellectual and moral force in American life, regardless of someone’s personal belief in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, classical ideas were not simply shaped by Christian beliefs; Christian beliefs were imbued with classical ideas. If Thomas Jefferson could adapt his republicanism to some form of Christianity, Protestants could certainly adapt their Christianity to some form of republicanism. As John Adams reflected to his rival Jefferson in 1815, “The Revolution was in the minds of the people.”35 Indeed, American Christianity could not escape that intellectual Revolution.

More than simply a school of political thought, republicanism was a moral philosophy that ultimately sought to answer the question “how should a people live inside a republic?” This question might seem a bit simpler today than it appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After all, America was, in the words of Edwards Amasa Park, a “republican experiment.” Although, as historians have often noted, the New England colonies composed “quasi-republics” under the rule of the English crown, the United States became something much different once it shed monarchial authority and ratified a Constitution.36 That a people could elect their own representatives and presidents and that power could be vested in (white male) citizens was an idea that many in Europe believed was neither practical nor tenable. As a result, Christian and non-Christian thinkers frequently responded to the accusation that republics could not last without some form of monarchy or oligarchy.37 From the pulpit, the response was the same: Christianity was vital to the survival of a republic. Republics might come and go, but a Protestant republic was God’s will and could not be shaken.

For instance, when famed Congregationalist-turned-Presbyterian preacher Lyman Beecher preached against intemperance (which he often associated with Roman Catholicism), he stressed the fact that Christianity was “indispensable” to a healthy republic. “It is admitted,” he declared, “that intelligence and virtue are the pillars of republican institutions, and that the illumination of schools, and the moral power of religious institutions, are indispensable to produce this intelligence and virtue. But who are found so uniformly in the ranks of irreligion as the intemperate?”38 In other words, without intelligence and virtue, the republic would fail. And without Christianity, intelligence and virtue would disappear. For American Christians, the answer to the question of virtue—and the only hope for the United States—was Christianity.39

“The best place to begin to understand the views of the revolutionary generation is with a look at the word ‘virtue,’” explains Thomas E. Ricks in his First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. “This word was powerfully meaningful during the eighteenth century.” According to Ricks, “The founders used it incessantly in their public statements. The word ‘virtue’ appears about six thousand times in the collected correspondence and other writings of the Revolutionary generation, compiled in the U.S. National Archives’ database, Founders Online (FO), totaling some 120,000 documents. That’s more often than ‘freedom.’”40 Americans were a people seemingly obsessed with virtue. Therefore, a better way of asking the republican question would be “how should a people live virtuously inside a republic?” If Americans could not be a certain kind of people, they would not be a people at all.41 As Gordon S. Wood has shown, republicanism encompassed all spheres of an individual’s life, including both private and public virtues. On one hand, while admirable and serviceable to the greater good, virtues like prudence, frugality, and industry still allowed people to promote their own interests. On the other hand, “the virtue that classic republicanism encouraged was public virtue.” Wood explains, “Public virtue was the sacrifice of private desires and interests for the public interest. It was devotion to the commonweal…. Republicanism thus put an enormous burden on individuals. They were expected to suppress their private wants and interests and develop disinterestedness—the term eighteenth century most often used as a synonym for civic virtue.”42 A republic demanded a moral standard from its citizens that was not required in a monarchy. In this sense, to be an American was both a privilege and a responsibility. The relationship between liberty and virtue was somewhat circular: virtue was made possible by liberty, and liberty demanded virtue. In 1802, Savannah pastor Henry Holcombe pointed to this vital connection in Georgia’s Analytical Repository when he stated, “I need not prove, for it is evident, that without religion there can be no virtue; and it is equally incontestable, that without virtue, there can be no liberty.”43

Americans during this time conceived of the virtuous person as the individual who sought to promote the well-being of others above their own. In fact, other than single words like “liberty” and “virtue,” no phrase was invoked more often by the Revolutionaries themselves than “the public good.”44 With virtue as its guiding principle and the public welfare as its goal, republicanism was not so much a codified list of beliefs about the political nature of a republic so much as a set of moral ideals and values that permeated the American mind. Between America’s founding in 1776 and its rupture in the Civil War, republicanism quite naturally became the ethos of American Christianity. The exalted virtues of the classic, non-Christian republics were adopted as inherently Christian, and the teachings of Christianity were cast in a republican frame. Republicanism was Christianized, and Christianity was republicanized. This process gave birth to a distinctly American faith.

2. Virtue and Disinterestedness

“The principle of the universal equality of human rights, with one lamentable exception, has here been fully recognized,” President Francis Wayland boasted to his students at Brown University, noting the evil of slavery. “But does any one believe that our constitution can endure, if it rely for support on nothing but the natural love of justice in the human bosom?” Republics did not flourish by good intentions alone, reasoned Wayland, one of the leading moral philosophers of his generation. “Nay, abstract from this people the influences diffused abroad by the religion of Christ, abolish the Bible, the Sabbath, the instructions of the sanctuary, abandon us all to the natural workings of the human heart, and let any one ask himself how long such a government as our could possibly exist.”45 Pardoned of their sins and called to good works, Christians in the early republic fully subscribed to the idea that a people must be virtuous in order to remain free and must be religious in order to remain virtuous. After all, what hope was there to understand virtue without belief in Jesus Christ, the ultimate public servant who had sacrificed himself for the world? Who could practice public virtue but the people who had been commanded to be “slaves of all” (Mark 10:44)? The fate of the infant nation and the “virtuous cause of America” rested upon the simple faith of Christians.46

Therefore, in many ways, the republicanization of American Christianity began with the sacralizing of virtue, a theme on which President Wayland frequently sermonized. Over the course of his presidency, Wayland preached to his students about the “principles of virtue,” the “power of immaculate virtue,” “self-denying virtue,” “public virtue,” the “virtue of the community,” and, of course, the “Savior’s virtue.”47 In The Elements of Moral Science (1841), his moral philosophy textbook, Wayland devoted an entire chapter to “The Nature of Virtue.” In order to demonstrate that biblical teachings were the bedrock of virtuous living and essential for the public good, the concept of virtue was consecrated as fundamentally Christian. Ministers spoke of “holy virtue” as God’s ultimate aim for humanity.48 Arch-revivalist Charles Finney, ever in pursuit of Christian perfection, simply concluded, “Virtue is holiness.” These were “synonymous terms” in his mind, both concerned with “moral perfection” and “conformity to the law of God.”49 Republicanism was not a new teaching for the church, but the same command from God to “be holy as I am holy” (Lev 11:44). To be virtuous was to simply believe and obey the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Whereas Puritan Jonathan Edwards had taken a more metaphysical approach in The Nature of True Virtue (1765), defining virtue as “benevolence to being in general,” his descendants were much more concerned with baptizing republican virtue, or at least demonstrating that classical republican values found their fullest expression in the Christian religion.50 For instance, when William Allen preached at his grandson John Wheelock Allen’s installation service at Evangelical Trinitarian Church in Wayland, Massachusetts, in 1841, he began by reminding the audience of the true source of virtue. “The Gospel without doubt contains the most perfect system of morals, enjoining all the various virtues, which are essential to the welfare of individuals and to the general benefit of society,” Allen posited. He continued, “but then the moral virtues are represented in the Gospel as the result of faith in Jesus Christ, or the consequence of love to him,—so that we may say, with the earnestness of the Christian poet,—‘Talk they of morals? O, thou bleeding Love!—The grand morality is love of Thee.’”51 As a graduate of Harvard (1802) and president of both Dartmouth College (1817–1819) and Bowdoin College (1820–1839), Allen knew the value of studying Greek and Roman literature. As an accomplished biographer, he also knew the importance of history. But Allen made a significant distinction between classical virtue and Christian virtue. In his mind, Christianity offered “the most perfect system of morals” and “moral virtues” because it was grounded in love to God. Although Greek and Roman philosophers and poets knew something of virtue and “talked of morals,” these were incomplete without the “bleeding Love” of the gospel. Allen’s sermon text revealed the way he viewed the relationship between Christian and non-Christian virtue: “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them, which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23–24).

During the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, Christian ethics were in large measure republican ethics, as the concept of disinterestedness shaped the most heterodox of founders as well as the most orthodox of clergymen. For example, on March 5, 1773, Unitarian John Adams wrote in his diary that his defense of British soldiers in the so-called Boston Massacre was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested Actions of my whole Life.”52 Years later, in 1791, the Deist Thomas Jefferson told George Washington that Adams was “one of the most honest and disinterested men alive.”53 Interestingly, Trinitarian Christians spoke in a similar manner to describe the work of God. In 1798, when the Reverend Samuel J. Mills reported the “unusual religious appearances” in the town of Torringford in the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, he happily noted that God had awakened dozens of sinners to the sovereignty of God and “the duties of unconditional submission and disinterested affection.”54 And the emphasis upon disinterestedness did not seem to fade in the earliest decades of the republic. So fond of disinterestedness was Charles Finney in the twilight of his ministry that he was convinced that there was “no true love but disinterested love.”55

Indeed, one of the primary reasons that the principle of disinterestedness pervaded the evangelical mind in America is due to the perception that self-love had begun to pervade the world around them. By the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville reported that self-interest had become “universally accepted” in the United States, as the country encountered a “market revolution” on the coast, a rising slave plantation economy in the South, and increasing land speculation in the West.56 For Separate Baptist Isaac Backus, the War of Independence was rooted in self-love—on both sides. According to Backus, “Self-love, under the specious name of government and a concern for the public good, has moved and now moves the Britons to act towards us like incarnate devils. And self-love in this country, by sinking our public credit, has exposed us to greater danger than all their fleets and armies could do.”57 Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century, American theologians had a litany of reasons to suspect that self-love had become a popular and even celebrated concept in their market-driven generation. 1776 was the year Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations wherein he argued that human ambition and avarice were actually a social benefit. In 1788, even the framers of the United States Constitution prided themselves in their ability to tailor the new government to the natural self-interest of human beings. In The Federalist No. 51, James Madison asked, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The respective offices must therefore be designed “in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”58 Socially, politically, and economically, American Christians inhabited a world that seemed to welcome self-love as a public good.59

Against the idea of selfish ambition, churches preached sacrifice. Christians in both the North and South responded to the greed and ambition around them by stressing disinterestedness as a key characteristic that distinguished the godly from those of the world. In Charleston, Baptist Richard Furman urged his congregants to exercise a “love of disinterested virtue, and generous conduct, excited by every engaging motive.”60 In New York, Rev. Seth Williston declared, “In deciding on the character of our personal religion, the grand inquiry must be, Is it disinterested?”61 Samuel Hopkins’s Edwardsean concept of “disinterested benevolence” was so popular in American religious culture that it crossed nearly all denominational lines and was even utilized by the so-called “father of Unitarian Christianity” William Ellery Channing.62 While his mentor Jonathan Edwards had sought to balance disinterested benevolence with self-love, Hopkins abandoned the concept of self-love altogether, insisting that Christians should be willing to be damned for the glory of God! In Hopkins’s mind, the only way to be sure that someone repudiated their own private interest was if they were willing to lose their own soul for Christ’s sake. Although Jonathan Edwards Jr. did not adopt his teacher’s extreme view, he too emphasized disinterestedness, claiming that “the nature of true religion [is] in a disinterested spirit.”63 In the American mind, to be religious was to be virtuous, and to be virtuous was to be disinterested.

But disinterestedness required a bit of limelight. Seeking to be virtuous for the good of the infant nation, Christians in the early republic often expressed their determination to maintain an “enlarged public spirit,” convinced that it was their duty to reform their communities according to the Word of God.64 Just as John Winthrop had exhorted the Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1630 to be a “city on a hill,” Christians in the early United States believed they too were called to live out a visible, public faith. In addition to the biblical command to “love one another” (John 15:12), and rooted in the Puritan vision of a Christian commonwealth, voluntary societies and moral reform groups arose out of the republican ideal of a virtuous and free society. Along with the federal and state-by-state disestablishment of religion, the so-called “benevolent empire” that arose in the new republic was erected upon a republicanized Christianity which emphasized the free exercise of religion as the highest form of virtue. In turn, if certain Christians did not appear to promote the common good, they were criticized for their self-interest and lack of virtue. For example, when frontier missionary John Mason Peck arrived in Liberty, Missouri, in September 1824, he painted the local settlers as uneducated and ungodly:

The people who have settled this district are chiefly from Kentucky and Tennessee, sadly destitute of public spirit, and manifest a great degree of apathy toward benevolent institutions, even when they are obviously intended for their own benefit. More than one hundred of these families are believed to be entirely destitute of the Scriptures, yet when I explained—after preaching—the design of an auxiliary Bible society, the need and the benefits of it, and then urged its formation, no one stepped forward and offered to engage in it. In Ray and Clay and Lillard counties, little or nothing could be effected.65

Peck correlated a “public spirit” with a willingness to improve and educate society. In Peck’s mind, the settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee were not just poor Americans; they were questionable Christians who had neither a desire to serve the community nor a will to promote the gospel. Peck spent most of his life contending against anti-missionary Baptists, whom he associated with a lack of “public spirit,” and who, ironically, were indwelled by a republican spirit of their own.66

In order to exercise Christian virtue, one had to be willing to be a somewhat public figure, beginning with church attendance. Sabbath observance was yet another demand of a republican society because it strengthened the character and discipline of the people. If the people of Massachusetts stopped observing the Sabbath for half a century, Williams College President Zephaniah Swift Moore asked in 1818, “what would be its religious and moral character? Go to those places within the limits of the United States, where there has been no Sabbath for only half that period, and they will tell you.”67 Like Peck, Moore believed in the power of social reform and voluntary societies to calibrate the moral compass of America, most especially on the frontier. If Americans could not cultivate a “public spirit” at church, they would not do so in society. In the South, the connection between church and society was no less strong, demanding that the pastor exhibit republicanism and public virtue in its purest form. As E. Brooks Holifield has demonstrated, “the minister was to become a public self. He was to conform, without hypocrisy, to the expectations of the improved and elevated classes. Indeed, he was to identify himself, without reserve, with his public role.”68

The role of public virtue in a republican society casts an even greater light upon the evil of slavery in the early republic and the contradiction that existed between the nation’s ideals and its institutions. Without their freedom, slaves were not simply deprived of basic human dignity and civil rights, but they were also unable to exercise public virtue. They inhabited a republican society and were instructed in its ideals, but without access to them. For example, how could one practice disinterestedness without the possibility of self-interest? Sacrifice seemed like an empty concept for someone who owned nothing. Even pro-slavery theologians considered whether virtue was possible for slaves. In a published sermon entitled The Rights and the Duties of Masters (1850), Southern Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell concluded, “The question is—not whether it is the state most favorable to the offices of piety and virtue—but whether it is essentially incompatible with their exercise. This is the true issue.”69 Thornwell, who viewed the conflict over slavery as a war between “Christianity and Atheism,” obviously did not believe virtue was unattainable to the slave. Nevertheless, regardless of one’s position on the slavery issue, for many black and white Christians, the morality of slavery hinged on the extent to which slaves could exercise virtue. To deprive a human being of virtue was, at least in part, to deny them of their faith.

For this reason, blacks were much more prone to speak of “holy Freedom” than “holy virtue.” While Christian slaves were not barred from some level of private virtue (i.e., temperance, frugality), even these were limited apart from liberty. Like most Christian groups, African American Christianity underwent a republicanization in the early republic that shaped the black vision of the Christian life, but with less of an emphasis upon virtue as the means of sustaining the republic. While white Christians were speaking of the “public good,” black Christians were securing their very existence and the future of their own communities. Many slaves believed that if they could but possess the republican ideal of freedom, they could then achieve virtue in a free society. After Abraham Lincoln signed a bill on April 16, 1862, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, Daniel Alexander Payne’s welcoming address to his fellow blacks presented the beautiful potentials of a republican life:

Enter the great family of Holy Freedom; not to lounge in sinful indolence, not to degrade yourselves by vice, nor to corrupt society by licentiousness, neither to offend laws by crime, but to the enjoyment of a well-regulated liberty, the offspring of generous laws; of law as just as generous, as righteous as just—a liberty to be perpetuated by equitable law, and sanctioned by the divine; for law is never equitable, righteous, just, until it harmonizes with the will of Him, who is “King of kings, and Lord of lords,’ and who commanded Israel to have but one law for the home-born and the stranger.70

Having attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, been ordained by a Lutheran Synod, and then having joined Richard Allen’s A.M.E. Church in 1841, Payne believed that freedom without faith was no freedom at all. But with their new “holy Freedom,” blacks in Washington, DC could make their own choices and live their own virtuous lives. In warning his brethren against vices like “indolence” and “licentiousness” and unregulated liberty, Payne was extolling the republican ideals of prudence, restraint, and moderation. He believed that all of these virtues “harmonized” with the will of God and the teachings of the Bible. Many African Americans believed that they now had the opportunity to exercise at least some degree of virtue in American society. Whether they would receive honor, the highest republican ideal, was still another matter. Proponents of colonization like John Hough of Middlebury College argued that, for free blacks, “No station of honor or of authority is accessible.”71 Ironically, in the land of the free, it seemed the blacks were either deemed capable of republicanism and consigned to chains, or considered incapable of republicanism and therefore best suited to be shipped to Africa.

African American Christians were “as desirous of freedom” as their white brothers and sisters.72 As a result, their republican aspirations were often just as strong, and they condemned slavery because it was both anti-biblical and anti-republican. When slaves were finally emancipated in the state of New York in 1827 after an 1817 law became effective, Nathaniel Paul, pastor of the Hamilton Street Baptist Church in Albany, celebrated the historic day by lauding the “spirit of pure republicanism” that had finally sprouted from the seeds of liberty planted in 1776. In Paul’s view, slavery robbed both slaves and slave-owners of their virtues. Explaining republican ideals in a biblical frame, Paul averred,

After the fall of man, it would seem that God, foreseeing that pride and arrogance would be the necessary consequences of the apostacy, and that man would seek to usurp undue authority over his fellow, wisely ordained that he should obtain his bread by the sweat of his brow; but contrary to this sacred mandate of heaven, slavery has been introduced, supporting the one in all the absurd luxuries of life, at the expense of the liberty and independence of the other. Point me to any section of the earth where slavery, to any considerable extent exists, and I will point you to a people whose morals are corrupted; and when pride, vanity and profusion are permitted to range unrestrained in all their desolating effects, and thereby idleness and luxury are promoted, under the influence of man, becoming insensible of his duty to his God and his fellow creature.73

According to Paul, by prohibiting slaves the right to “obtain his bread by the sweat of his brow,” slave-owners denied them not only the virtue of “liberty and independence,” but industry and the divine gift of work, as instituted by God in the Garden of Eden. Conversely, by affording white men such “absurd luxuries of life,” slavery created a people “whose morals are corrupted,” impugning the very ideals of their religion. The republicanization of American Christianity, as illustrated by Paul, took place not simply in white churches, but in black congregations, who likewise sought to fulfill “his duty to his God and his fellow creature.” Ironically, blacks may not have yet been citizens in the United States, but many already shared a similar vision of a godly commonwealth.

Not surprisingly, the virtues that were extolled among black and white Christians in the early national period were ultimately applied to Christ himself. Republican virtues were cast theologically. In Grace Consistent with Atonement (1785), Jonathan Edwards Jr. contended that Christ’s death on the cross satisfied public justice, which he defined as comprehending all moral goodness and “every other virtue, as truth, faithfulness, meekness, forgiveness, patience, prudence, temperance, fortitude, &c.”74 This was republican justice. In Edwards’s version of the atonement, Jesus Christ becomes the classic republican public servant, seeking the good of the cosmic community at the expense of his own life. The cross was, in some sense, republicanism on display. Although historians have written extensively on the freedom for which Christ died and how Americans readily connected their political liberty with spiritual liberty, almost no one has examined the way that Christians during this period republicanized the way that Christ died. The younger Edwards was by no means the only New England theologian to turn Jesus Christ into George Washington, so to speak. In fact, theologians often described Christ’s atonement as if he were one of their local officials. In The Scripture Doctrine of Atonement, Proposed to Careful Examination (1785), Stockbridge pastor Stephen West asserted that the purpose of the death of Christ was to show “his regards to the good of the great community over which he presides.” In a remarkably republican analogy, West explained, “Whenever the supreme Magistrate neglects the execution of the laws, he loses the confidence of the people; and his regard to the public welfare becomes suspected. No one can confide in his public spirit, when he suffers the disturbers of the peace to go unpunished: for ideas of true regard to public good, as necessarily connect punishments with crimes, as rewards with virtue.”75 Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, was a republican leader. Models of the atonement were drawn from a number of republican and patriotic images of the day. Founder and president of the Massachusetts Missionary Society Nathanael Emmons even illustrated the necessity of the atonement with an anecdote about George Washington himself.76 During the republicanization of American Christianity, the concept of virtue was elevated to new importance, and for a people who valued sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, Jesus Christ inevitably became the model republican. From this seminal idea of godly virtue, American Christians would revolutionize the doctrine of God, man, and seemingly everything in between.

3. Anti-Republicanism

As the zeitgeist of the early republic, republicanism was just as recognizable (if not more so) to its opponents as it was to its defenders. Not surprisingly, critics of republicanized Christianity were often from other countries or were ensconced in theological traditions firmly rooted in other countries. In one way or another, due to influences like loyalist Anglicanism or German mediating theology, these groups did not share the ethos that characterized American Christianity in the early national period. They saw republicanism either as a threat to their way of life, as an aberrant form of historic Christianity, or both. Yet, these dissenting voices in the church still had the effect of solidifying republican Christianity as a movement and further yoking republicanism with the spirit of America itself. In perhaps no other group was this more evident than in Methodism, a denomination with deep ties to the mother country. As Russell E. Richey has shown, “Prior to the Revolution, Methodists could, and for the most part did, simply ignore the state.” During the War of Independence, Methodists remained so “aloof” from the republican agenda that they were often suspected of loyalism and even persecuted for their “Tory imprint.”77 Bishop Francis Asbury, the only Methodist minister from Britain to remain in America during the war, remained in relative seclusion. Even Freeborn Garrettson, one of the first American-born Methodist preachers, adopted a pacifist approach. Therefore, the intellectual and moral movements taking place in the United States were not absorbed into the Methodist worldview as they did most other Christian groups. For example, in 1784, when Asbury read Georgia Baptist Silas Mercer’s Tyranny Exposed, he scoffed, “His is republicanism run mad. Why [be] afraid of religious establishments in these days of enlightened liberty?”78

Nevertheless, even the Anglicized, English-rooted Methodists could not stop the current of republicanism from flowing through the denomination, or at least from taking part of the denomination with it. In 1794, James O’Kelly established the Republican Methodist Church, breaking away from the British Methodism of John Wesley, who in 1790 had scoffed, “We are no republicans, and never intend to be.”79 Behind the fracture were the principles of the Revolution itself. In The Author’s Apology for Protesting Against the Methodist Episcopal Government, O’Kelly attacked the un-republican nature of episcopacy, comparing American Methodists’ relationship to Wesley to Americans’ relationship to the British crown. Spurning the canon law of the Methodist Church, which he referred to as “Wesley’s old general rules,” O’Kelly declared that “those rules, are no more the rules of the Methodist Church in America, than the British government is the civil government of Columbia.” Since the United States had gained liberty from England, argued O’Kelly, why would its churches then submit to England’s ecclesiastical authority? The Revolution had created a denominational crisis. O’Kelly sounded remarkably like an American pamphleteer when he reasoned, “The governors of the Methodist Episcopal Church, not only come into office without being elected by the suffrage of the people, but continue in office, so long as they please to walk by the rules themselves have made; and whenever they please to change their conduct, they can change their laws.”80 O’Kelly indicted the British Methodists for essentially the same offense committed by Parliament just two decades prior: tyranny without representation. As Richey explains, in this new version of Methodist religion, O’Kelly would “baptize republicanism. In that sense, O’Kelly’s protest and his critique belonged to this larger effort to adapt the ideology of the Revolution to Christian use and to give Christian direction to the nation.”81

But O’Kelly’s republicanism was more than simply American prejudice against Britain or anti-tyranny. Although his primary focus was on rights and liberties, the seminal ideal of virtue is still extant in his protest, underlying many of his arguments against the British Methodists. O’Kelly believed that republicans had the moral high ground:

As to my conduct, it may be traced through the American revolution. After the itinerant preachers fled from the south, for fear of danger; I labored and travelled from circuit to circuit, in North Carolina, to feed and comfort those poor distressed sheep, left in the wilderness…. I was taken prisoner by the tories, and robbed: I was retaken before day, by captain Peter Robertson, the great and noted whig. I was afterward taken prisoner by the British: The chief officer urged me to subject myself to my king. Although I was in his hands, I would not yield. He offered to release me if I would solemnly promise not to let any man know, asked or not asked, where the British army lay. I refused to do that. Then I was despised, and very near famished for bread. At which time I resolved through grace, to hold my integrity til death. My honor, my oath—my soul was at stake!82

In some ways, O’Kelly had undergone a spiritual and moral baptism during the Revolution. As a lone itinerant preacher in the South, he had experienced the weaknesses of the Methodists’ centralized polity in England. As a British prisoner, he had been plunged into a fiery trial that had tested his integrity, his honor, and indeed his Christianity. Consequently, when he emerged from the war, O’Kelly adhered to a style of Methodism that fused episcopacy and tyranny together as twin evils and merged republican virtues like integrity and honor together with faith. Without an inveterate sense of virtue, ministers like O’Kelly would not have attacked anti-republicanism so severely. By threatening liberty, British religious leaders were endangering Americans’ ability to exercise virtue and therefore impugning the ideals of Christianity itself. And as a virtuous people, it was an American duty to resist corruption. Before anything else, republicanism was a moral philosophy, not a defense of any written document or polity or creed.

During the “Second” Great Awakening, an event which lasted for the first several decades into the new republic, the chasm between those who embraced republicanism and those who did not, steadily grew. While not all anti-revivalists were anti-republicans, many skeptics of revivalism began to associate the unrefined, individualistic, frenzied style of revivalists with republican Christianity. None were more critical of the Second Great Awakening than the proponents of the so-called Mercersburg Theology, a movement within the German Reformed Church which embraced German idealism, emphasized the centrality of the doctrine of Christ, and replaced the subjectivity of evangelical revivalism with the objectivity of church liturgy. According to John Williamson Nevin, professor of Biblical Literature (1830–1840) at the newly founded Western Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, “The fond notion which some have of a republican or democratic order in Christianity … is just as far removed from the proper truth of the gospel as any other that could well be applied to the subject.” For Nevin, it was Christ who shaped the church, not the church who shaped Christ. Ultimately, religion was not invented by human beings or conceived by earthly modes of thinking, but handed down by the ministry of Christ and the apostles. “The basis of Christianity, as it meets us in the New Testament,” he demurred, “is not the popular mind and popular will as such in any form or shape.”83 As a philosophical idealist, Nevin was just as hostile toward Scottish Common Sense Realism, which he also associated with republican religion.

Philip Schaff, Nevin’s protégé who was trained in Germany by such names as Baur, Tholuck, Hengstenberg, and Neander, even viewed Roman Catholicism as a check against the tide of republicanism in American evangelicalism, both of which he viewed as filled with theological and social extremes. Schaff, who was criticized for his sympathies with the Oxford Movement, believed that an unrestrained republican spirit had led to sectarianism and the atomization of American society. In America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character (1855), Schaff observed, “On the free Republican and Puritanic soil of North America the Roman Catholic Church, with its medieval traditions, centralized priestly government, and extreme conservatism, seems to be almost an anomaly, but is perhaps just on this account necessary and useful as a check and corrective for the extremes of Protestantism and religious radicalism.” Schaff believed that human bondage in the “freest country in the world” was likewise an “anomaly,” but his anti-slavery views were not so much the product of republicanism as they were governed by his Hegelian view of history and belief in human progress, both of which he had imbibed from his teachers in Germany.84 Schaff was not an abolitionist, but believed that “slavery will gradually die out of itself” and that the church should work with the state “to provide for a gradual emancipation of the slaves, by training them to the rational use of freedom, and by laws for the liberation of the new generation at a certain age.”85 After a visit to the Fatherland, Schaff explained the significance of the Civil War in terms of divine retribution: God had judged the United States for its centuries-long complicity in the evil of slavery.86

Yet, for all of Schaff’s critiques of American society and republicanized Christianity, he too adhered to certain republican ideals in his faith. He was, after all, from a republic. Schaff “contended that from the free air of Switzerland he imbibed a republican, if not quite a democratic, predilection, and so could see the United States as a sort of extended Switzerland.”87 In his preface to the first edition of America, Schaff stated plainly, “For religion is the deepest and holiest interest of man, and thrives best in the atmosphere of freedom. It is, in fact, itself the highest freedom.” In the American version printed in 1855, he concluded the preface with the maxim “No liberty without virtue; no virtue without religion; no religion without Christianity; Christianity, the safeguard of our republic and hope of the world.”88 Schaff had imbibed a fair degree of republican Christianity, albeit from a European vantage point. As he would relay to his colleagues in Berlin after ten years in the United States, despite the many evils that beset the American nation in its infancy, the United States was in fact the “world of the future.”89

4. Conclusion

In A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York 1815–1837, Paul E. Johnson refers to the epoch between Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as “a generation of change.”90 American Christianity during this period could be characterized in much the same way, as the spirit that indwelled American politics and culture also transformed its religion. That spirit was republicanism, and it reenforced the already tight link between the pulpit and the public square. In The Loving Kindness of God Displayed in the Triumph of Republicanism in America (1809), evangelist Elias Smith exhorted his listeners, “Venture to be as independent in things of religion as those which respect the government in which you live.” In Smith’s mind, to be an American citizen and to be a Christian were distinct, though overlapping, concepts. Thus, when Smith instructed the congregation to “be republicans indeed,” he was not simply being patriotic; he was speaking the dominant language of American Christianity.91 This process of republicanization began before the Revolution and lasted at least until the Civil War, when a predominantly Christian nation was ripped apart over issues like freedom, justice, honor, integrity, and so many other republican ideals that had buoyed their nascent republic in the antebellum period. Indeed, the vestiges of Christian republicanism could still be found after the war itself, guiding the American people in the midst of tragedy. One week after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Brooklyn pastor Henry Ward Beecher offered a word of encouragement to his congregants at Plymouth Church that would have made his father Lyman proud:

Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before; and the whole history of the last four years, rounded up by this cruel stroke, seems now in the providence of God, to have been clothed with an illustration, with a sympathy, with an aptness, and with a significance, such as we never could have expected or imagined. God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event, to all nations of the earth, “Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.”92

By the end of the nineteenth century, Christian Republicanism had survived in the United States, albeit in enervated form, offering to war-weary Americans the same beliefs and ideals that had carried the republic through its infancy. But much had changed. In many ways, republicanism gave way to Reconstruction, as a divided and less optimistic nation re-envisioned long-cherished concepts like freedom and the common good. By clarifying the dominant ideology of Christian republicanism that flourished in the early republic, Christians today can better understand how early Americans reconciled their religious, social, and political values, and why many of those values continue to persist in American culture today.