Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [126]
Traditional churchmen were dismayed. According to one Anglican minister from South Carolina, “Pennsylvania and New England send out a Sett of Rambling fellows yearly…among this Medley of Religions—True Genuine Christianity is not to be found If there is a Shilling to be got by a Wedding or Funeral, these Independent fellows will endeavor to pocket it.” Virginia's Patrick Henry, also an Anglican minister, felt the same way: “ [T]hese itinerants…screw up the People to the greatest heights of religious Phrenzy, and then leave them in that wild state, for perhaps ten or twelve months, till another Enthusiast comes among them, to repeat the same thing over again.”
Then, in a flash, it was all over. By the close of the 1740s, the Great Awakening had largely petered out—but not before dramatically altering the colonial landscape. Many of the itinerants and their followers started their own congregations or joined minority sects like the Baptists; the ranks of dissenters exploded. Because the converts included not just “lower” and “middling” sorts but some prominent citizens, dissenters were no longer as stigmatized. Even strict Massachusetts became pluralistic. In 1747, one Bostonian reported that the churches in his city included three Episcopal congregations, ten “Independent],” “one French, upon the Genevan model, one of Anabaptists, and another of Quakers.” The Puritan dream of a single, uniform established church had been extinguished.4
The itinerant evangelicals, who had insisted on individual religious choice, had some unlikely successors: the nation's Founding Fathers. While adopting Latin pen names such as Publius and Fabius in open emulation of the Roman Republic, the leaders of the American Revolution were above all men of the Enlightenment. Although not necessarily irreligious, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and many others elevated reason over Scripture and were deeply critical of orthodoxy. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”5
Even before independence, the American revolutionaries had experienced the tangible benefits of tolerance. To have any chance against the British, the Americans had no choice but to field a religiously diverse army. As John Adams noted after the colonists’ victory, those who fought included “Roman Catholicks, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians, Priestlyans, Socinians, Independents, Con-gregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists; and ‘Protestants que ne croyent rien.’”
The Constitution adopted in 1789 by the Founding Fathers was truly radical. Going further than England's Toleration Acts, the representatives of the thirteen colonies deliberately refrained from making the Constitution a religious document or from establishing a single official church for the country. The only mention of religion in the original Constitution was a provision rejecting religious tests as a precondition for holding office.
The absence of religiosity in the Constitution produced outrage and charges of ungodliness and betrayal in many quarters. But the Founding Fathers—who were highly educated patricians, not necessarily representative of the general population—believed that free religious choice was the best way to avoid sectarian strife in a pluralistic society. Many of them, including Madison, were deeply influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith, who had written that, just as with unregulated markets