From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
The Republic's Debt to Religion
The Free World shouldn't turn its back on its Christian heritage.
I celebrated Easter at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn, where on Feb. 5, 1860, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher mocked slavery by auctioning from the pulpit the nine-year-old girl "Pinky" (later Mrs. Rose Ward Hunt of Washington, D.C.). By accident of travel, on Palm Sunday I attended Boston's Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison gave his first antislavery speech on July 4, 1829.
The association of these two historic Congregational churches with the abolition of slavery is a symbol of how profoundly religion has shaped the American nation. The lesson, once digested by children in McGuffey's reader, needs in this age of "progress" some reflection at the end of Holy Week and Passover.
The antislavery movement was fueled by religion, as one family shows. Such was the influence "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that Lincoln is said to have called Harriet Beecher Stowe "the little woman who started this great war." The Rev. Lyman Beecher was father to Harriet and Henry Ward and also Edward, pastor of Park Street Church when Garrison spoke there. While not militant enough for Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher nonetheless helped ship state-of-the-art rifles to Kansas, the battleground state, in crates labeled "Bibles." To this day, gun collectors refer to Sharp's Carbines as "Beecher's Bibles."
Henry Ward Beecher, though, was brought to Brooklyn specifically to found an antislavery congregation. A major financial backer was Lewis Tappan, the wealthy businessman prominently featured in Stephen Spielberg's "Amistad." The film displayed the religious element as an almost comical band of protestors, though Tappan, the brains and money behind the court decision freeing the Amistad slaves, was a man from a deeply religious background.
From time to time these impulses have surged to lay a moral basis for later political developments. The First Great Awakening started in 1734 with the revivalist sermons of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Mass., and was broadcast by the Rev. George Whitefield, who preached 175 sermons in 75 days over a distance of 800 miles. The religious ecstasy of audiences disturbed conventional clerics, but the "New Light" churches revitalized religion in the colonies, and also led to the founding of Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth.
This religious example of dissent and democracy supported the American revolution. A Library of Congress exhibition now on the Web reports that religion offered "an assurance to the average American that revolution was justified in the sight of God." While the Founding Fathers are often thought of as deists, they were quick to invoke God--"endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"--and did not think twice about holding religious services in the Capitol building. In his famous and influential sermon, "Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers," the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew of Boston's West Church preached that resistance to tyranny was a "glorious" Christian duty.
The Second Great Awakening shook the frontier, with 23,000 people gathering for a week of preaching at the great revival at Cane Ridge, Ky., in 1801. Back East few adherents broke into shudders or fell the ground "slain in the spirit," but at the same time Yale turned back to religion under Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edward's grandson. Dwight's strict Calvinism did not keep him from speaking out against slavery and for the rights of women, two of the great social causes of the Second Awakening. Another was temperance, which in due time proved overly idealistic and had much to do with the decline of enthusiastic religion in the middle of the last century.
These events were not isolated in America. The time of the First Great Awakening was also the time of John Wesley and the rise of Methodism in England; indeed, Wesley had read Edwards's sermons. Max Weber, of course, is famous for his "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." And in the newly published "Wide as the Waters," Benson Bobrick argues that the English Bible licensed people on both sides of the Atlantic to think for themselves, and without it "there could not have been democracy as we know it, or even what today we call the 'Free World'."
At the turn of the century, there seems to be a budding interest in religion both spiritual and temporal. This is no longer confined to the fundamentalists or suburban megachurches. The current issue of Christianity Today reports on the academic success of overtly Christian historians; Wheaton's Mark Noll has been appointed to a new position devoted to evangelical scholarship at Harvard Divinity School.
And last year Nobel Prize economic historian Robert Fogel published "The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism," arguing that we are in the midst of a new wave of religious renewal that is having profound political and economic effects. He follows religious historian William McLoughlin in finding a third awakening in the "Social Gospel" movement culminating in New Deal reforms. I would put myself among those who view the latter as largely a secular movement, and the evangelicals in the trenches do not share Mr. Fogel's optimism about the wave of the future.
Still, these signs of a new secular interest in religion are intriguing and must be healthy. For a half-century now intellectual life and the courts have been profoundly hostile to religion in any public manifestation. This is a sorrow, for it represents the republic turning its back on its own heritage.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
