• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

INFIDELS AND EVANGELICALS

By the mid-nineties Jacobin assaults on the French church and Thomas Paine’s attack on the authority of Holy Scripture in The Age of Reason (1794) were finding a receptive audience among New York’s book- and newspaper-reading mechanics. Some gravitated toward Elihu Palmer, a blind Baptist preacher devoted to spreading deism among the working classes. Palmer’s association with New York began in 1788 when he was called to the pulpit of the Presbyterian church of Newtown, Long Island. En route from his native Connecticut, he preached a Thanksgiving Day sermon that proved him “ill adapted for a Presbyterian pulpit,” in the words of his friend John Fellows (Paine’s American publisher and Hocquet Caritat’s sometime business partner). “Instead of expatiating upon the horrid and awful condition of mankind in consequence of the lapse of Adam and his wife, he exhorted his hearers to spend the day joyfully in innocent festivity, and to render themselves as happy as possible.” After six months at Newtown, Palmer moved on to Philadelphia, joined the Baptists, and set up a Universal Society. He lost his sight during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and was run out of town the following year by “an immense mob” for attacking the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Returning to New York in 1794, Palmer treated the new Democratic Society to a raise-the-roof oration against clerical interference with the revolution in France. The society’s warm response convinced him to remain in the city, and later that same year, in a pamphlet defending Paine’s just-published Age of Reason, Palmer denounced Christianity itself as a system of “ignorance and credulity” designed to hold the lower classes in thrall and prop up monarchy. His alternative, the subject of frequent essays and addresses over the next decade, was a “natural morality” or “religion of nature” that acknowledged a divine Creator without violating the dictates of reason or subjecting its adherents to ecclesiastical tyranny.

A tireless organizer as well as publicist, Palmer founded a Deistical Society in the mid-nineties that actively recruited members from the city’s laboring population. He established two newspapers, the Temple of Reason (1800-1803) and the Prospect, or View of the Moral World (1803-5), that became the foremost vehicles of deistic thought in the country. In 1804 Palmer launched a “Theistic Church” and announced plans to build a Temple of Nature in Manhattan. This buzz of activity attracted other prominent deists to the city, including John Foster, the radical universalist and friend of Paine, and Dennis Driscol, a defrocked Irish priest who served as editor of the Temple of Reason.

Yet Palmer failed to ignite the mass movement he hoped for. Despite the crowds that initially turned out for his public lectures, membership in the New York Deistical Society dwindled to a mere handful of working people too poor even to pay their modest dues on a regular basis. Respectable mechanics and even hardened skeptics were shocked at his virulent disdain for Christianity. (He once scolded Christians that their “pretended Saviour is nothing more than an illegitimate Jew, and their hopes of salvation through him rest on no better foundation than that of fornication or adultery.”) Not surprisingly, Palmer’s allure soon paled alongside that of more temperate personalities like the Unitarian John Butler, who came to town in 1794, rented a hall on Cortlandt Street, and lectured before “truly alarming” crowds while the mainstream clergy railed against him from their pulpits. So, too, when Dr. Joseph Priestly, renowned both as a chemist and as a Unitarian advocate, visited New York that same year, he got a warm reception from the Tammany, Democratic, and other popular societies.

Neither Unitarians nor deists, however, were able to keep up with the itinerant evangelists who began trolling for souls among New York’s laborers, sailors, apprentices, and journeymen during the later 1790s and early 1800s. Prominent among these were Dominic van Velsor, known