**The core of this essay derives from the historical scholarship of Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity, particularly 170-179**
Around the time of the War for Independence, the Reformed faith was flourishing in America. Despite growing rationalism within the Anglophone world, which often married Whiggery to the new divinity, the Congregationalist churches weathered the Great Awakening, primarily through the influence of the affective Jonathan Edwards. Perhaps the greatest theologian from Columbia, Edwards married old-fashioned Evangelical Calvinism with the New Sciences. Not beholden to the scholastic Aristotelian method (that had fallen out of favor as new methods of logic, science, and metaphysics advanced), Edwards had pursued new ways to make sense of God's sovereignty within a Newtonian(esque) universe. This essay is not on Edwards, and will not further develop his thought, but the man helped create a resurgence in an older style of thought with new characteristics, against clergymen who had dampened emotional fervency.
When Independence came, many New England ministers flocked to the banner of Patriotism. The sense of unity that the Congregationalists gathered, to defend what was left of godly New England against the changes within the British Empire, was impressive. Even those outside the Standing Order, such as Baptist Isaach Backus, accepted Edwardsian Calvinism entirely (with the exception of paedobaptism). While the Standing Order had made room for Unitarians and Calvinists, there was a generally unified sense of biblical authority, couched in the sober learning brought from Puritan heritage, that brought many American Protestants together against the Erastian/Secular turn in Parliament (ranging from the Quebec Act's indifference to Catholicism to the growing disease over an empire in India). That was how New Englanders saw it anyhow. Combined with the functioning alliance between Deists and Evangelicals for classical republican government across the colonies, the Americans persisted.
But Calvinism would not. This would be a remarkable about-face, for at the end of the war, the moderate divinity of Edwardsian (developed further under Samuel Hopkins) had rapidly boomed. While Unitarians were content in their higher positions of influence, the Standing Order was still a tool (often combined with an infusion of Presbyterians) to advance the Evangelical faith. While Harvard was increasingly seen as a lost cause (founding Andover Seminary in response), many moderate Calvinists hearkened to the Federalist banner, a fervent faith combined with concerns for order. It seemed that the world of classical republicanism was crashing down, not only from threats of foreign Frenchmen, preaching the equalitarian creeds of Jacobinism, but also domestic agents criticizing Washington in the name of the people. Jefferson became the great bugbear, a sympathizer to all things deplorable. While from a different commonwealth tradition (often similar to Anti-Federalists who lamented Aristocracy), Jefferson advocated for land distribution (or access) and the importance of yeomenry. But more so, Jefferson allied to a spirit of secularization, which often received support from the rustic sects that absolutely despised America's Calvinist Consensus. Hotheaded Evangelicals of a new spirit targeted American Calvinists until they were utterly uprooted. Thus, the bizarre alliance of revivalists with anti-establishment unitarians/deists dealt a deathblow that was never quite overcome.
What happened? It was a complete attack upon a system of divinity that began with God's sovereignty, rather than man's innermost spiritual need. This united anti-Calvinists across a wide board: Methodists, Christian Restorationists, Mormons, Baptists, and Infidels. Their complaints could be formed into a basic schema:
1) Calvinists endorsed the classical-republican/Federalist status quo
2) Calvinists criticized/scrutinized personal religious experience
3) Calvinists focused on arcane speculative doctrines (e.g. predestination)
4) Calvinist clergy had pretensions to authoritatively judge on scriptural matters
This hatred of Calvinists in the early Republic led to a sacralized endorsement of Jeffersonian politics. These revivalists sought to destroy missionary societies (domestic and foreign), sabbath observance, subsidized education for the ministry, and the illegality of Sunday mail. Part of this, sadly, was the general difficulty understanding the purpose of predestination. Speculative divinity was often warped to the point of being a bizarre fatalism. In America's classless agitation, there was not only a push to tear down any legal distinction but also any recognition of natural talent, The lowborn preachers of Revival disdained any attempt to allow Human effort, which ironically meant a praise of Man's naked capacities. Calvinist emphasis on original sin, and its subsequent corruption, placed a damper on the infinite aptitude for renewal that Jeffersonians (as the American Girondin, echoing a not-quite Jacobin canard) embraced. It was not unusual for a converted revivalist to exclaim, as one did in Lynn MA, "why, then I can be saved!" Gloomy Calvinist piety (or misremembering it as such) gave way to exuberance that the whole world could be transformed in the blink of an eye. What unified revivalists (and infidels) was a contempt for Calvinist "passive" piety, where one must fixate on one's unworthiness and God's sovereign good pleasure to save. There was no time for the Holy Spirit (or, perhaps in their view, there was no time for a slow-moving Holy Spirit), action was needed today. Discipleship gave way to gospel liberty, where an uncoverted sinner went from baptized to preacher in a matter of days (if not hours)!
What good was Calvinism? It was the power of the entrenched, it was an enemy of enlightened-scriptural common sense. Raising questions about Adam's covenant headship or the order of decrees was scholastic babble; what mattered was moral transformation now, salvation hic et nunc. Calvinism was hard and bizarre; revival was clear and easy. Barton Stone, before he took a Kentucky synod with him into restorationism, was distressed, perplexed, and bewildered in the labyrinth of Calvinism. Despite the popular orientation of Edwards and Hopkins, which combined emotion with learning, the revival preachers were disdainful of this graced aristocracy. Calvinism was educated and total, with no room for the unlearned and puzzled, and therefore it must be wrong. If the paradoxes of the sovereign God and the free-will of Man were too much for the Jeffersonian man, than so much worse for the paradoxes! Methodists and Baptists made ready a system of practical development for the common man, that preachers who had some formal education often found themselves disenfranchised from ministerial opportunities.
The hatred against any sense of privilege mobilized an unending train of seething against the new popes, priests, and capitalists of the Calvinist "machine" -- the Standing Order as the inheritor of the mantle of Rome, Byzantium, and Canterbury. John Leland, Jefferson's Baptist devotee, raged thus:
"The missionary establishment, in its various departments, is a stupendous institution. Literary and theological schools, Bible and tract societies, foreign and domestic missions, general, State, country, and district conventions, Sunday School Unions, etc., are all included in it. To keep it in motion, missionary boards, presidents, treasurers, corresponding secretaries, agents, printers, buildings, teachers, runners, collectors, mendicants, etc. are all in requisition. The cloud of these witnesses is so great that one who doubts the divinity of the measure is naturally led to think of the locusts in Egypt that darkened the Heavens and ate up every green thing on earth. This machine is propelled by steam (money), and does not sail by the wind of heaven."
The level of disgust and contempt (and, perhaps, jealousy) is beyond measurement. For Leland, the Calvinists were evil because they were effective. They were demoniac locusts because they lacked total spontaneity. It was sin to have any order. The irony among these critics was that their popular demagoguery often came with an authoritarian iron fist. There are no schools or sects, we're returning to the Truth (and if you disagree with me, you're out!) and that was that. The Calvinist introduced a weight that was hard to overcome, now married to institutional expansion that followed many Yankees westward into the Old Northwest. Success? Order? That smacked of a conspiracy, a conclusion that ardent Jeffersonian Workingmen warned their Philadelphia readers of, to fear the clerical aristocrats. The watchdog Theophilus Gates, Yankee and publicist, warned his readers thus with a republishing a Universalist article:
"We entertain not a shadow of doubt that the leaders of the orthodox party . . . are determined on governing the nation. The supreme power is the grand end and aim of all their plans and labors. Every society which they have formed, from the American Education Society down to the ten thousand cent and mite societies throughout the land, are but so many strings, pulled by every person whether man, woman, or child, whom they can press or persuade into their service, the ultimate design of which is to draw them into power."
Gates did not represent a particular counter-current in Christianity, so much as the counter-current itself. His faith was anti-Calvinism. Thus, as the founder of the journal The Reformer, Gates had pursued a united front against any Calvinist orthodoxy. Printing Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, Quakers, Disciples of Christ, and Free-Thinkers, Gates would accept anyone who decried the Calvinists. Gates even supported the Antimission Baptists in their crusade to stop evangelism. Why? Because evangelism was intrusive, the idea to improve or uplift the degraded was elitist, when all they wanted was to be left alone by easterners. There simply was no such thing outside the local church, an entirely voluntary affair, that could not be encouraged, supported, or subsidized without the rallying cry of "Aristocrat!" against the heretic. Churches that sent missionaries were haughty and should simply mind their own business. Everyone was free to choose what they wanted, and any effort to sway someone this way or that way was a betrayal of the gospel and the American revolution, which often went hand in glove. The democratic ethos that continued to explode over the early nineteenth century was nothing less than the march of Christ's church. Efforts to influence or train clergy were odious, the conspiracy of Federalists to make a pope and Calvinists to make a king.
The pressure to dechristianize American laws as fulfilling the gospel, the contempt for successful cultural evangelism, the hatred of learned opposition out of step with democratic norms, the rage of any kind of privilege whatsoever, the sole location of the Holy Spirit in the spontaneous, local, and emotional, all of these should sound remarkably contemporary for those with ears. The Calvinist orthodox did not fall because of these criticisms, they endured, but their fall came from the demographic pressures that had no counterbalance. Rapid westward expansions often destroyed the town-based alliance of Meeting Hall and Church that much of Yankee Christendom depended upon. Free Mason Lodges often replaced the social and fraternal function of the churches, thus creating a growing divide. As mechanics left for revivalist camps, the middling class found solace in the Enlightened Deism of the Lodge. As detailed in Paul Goodman's Towards a Christian Republic: Anti-Masonry derived from a reaction against this new form of theo-sociality. Almost prefiguring Q-Anon, moderate Calvinists like Timothy Dwight denounced the advance of Jefferson as the victory of an international cabal of Illuminati. The rise of Free Masonry (which, due to its glee in blasphemy and secularism attached to the Jacobins, caused George Washington doubt about the order) disturbed Evangelical Yankees. The revival camps took away the salt of the earth, now the lodge was snapping up public men of means. The counterrevolution was a failure (despite being the first successful 3rd Party movement), but it provided much of the steam for the anti-Jackson coalition that formed the Whig party.
Where did this new Whiggery come from? Despite the criticism of ardent Democrats, the Whigs were not simply quondam Federalists in their silk stalkings. It also represented many of these camp revivalists who had begun to cool down. By the 1840s, Methodists and Baptists had become respectable for the new dynamic middle class across the trans-Appalachia West. While many Evangelicals were wary of politics, not a few plunged into the Whig hostility to Democratic secularity, a strange coalition that held together High Church Episcopalians with Infidels who preached free love and the end to private property. Whigs were a diverse and incoherent bunch, but its Evangelical members often pursued Blue Laws and liquor restrictions (first in the [in]famous Maine Law). In a way, these revivalists had now begun to rebuild what they destroyed, which would finally be realized, after the catastrophic Civil War, in the 3rd Great Awakening of the later 19th c. But what was lost? When the Fundamentalists warred against the Modernists, how much fire power did they have to marshal? B.B Warfield? The last remnants of Princeton? J. Gresham Machen? These were but a minority who struggled to direct the Fundamentalists against the true target. But what did radio Pentecostals share with the Hodges? The possibility of synthesis between head and heart, between the elite and the masses, had been buried for centuries. Methodists, Baptists, let alone Mormons, Restorations or Quakers did not construct capable seminaries to broach the serious issues. Instead, the result was William Jennings Bryan appearing the ape in the Scopes-Monkey Trial. The rise of Bolshevism put the genie back in the bottle (seemingly), but such was a thin propaganda victory that later effortlessly eroded, despite whatever grandstanding and backroom politicking Billy Graham attempted. Thus lay America.
The point of this concluding genealogy is not to appear defeatist, as if the crushing of classical-republican Federalism and the Edwardsian/Hopkinsian Calvinism was the end of all good in America. Far be it! The flaws that brought them down were not only due to outsiders, but inability to hold men and rally an effective counter against the Jefferson-Jackson democratic surge. All was not lost, as the tradition persisted, in various forms, and carried on to participate in the attack on Modernism. Unfortunately, American Evangelical theology has done little until reinvigorated by Dutch emigres, who were willing to raise the sword against the Modernism in the Mainline without retreating into anti-intellectual pieties. All is not lost, but it's important not to lose the core lesson here. There are not a few Evangelicals addicted to the same idiot nostrums of the Revivalists, but without any of their simple pieties or sincere convictions. Lamentation for any attempt to have public Christian norms (whether hypocrites are induced or not, a product of any law or norm whatsoever), hostility to any effort to organize, an expectation for success through spontaneous and individual emotional outbursts, such fuels the imagination of today's New York Times Op-Ed Evangelical. Like the perverse attachment Baptists like Leland felt for Jefferson (who only held contempt for the beliefs of these nutters, even as he respected their rusticity), many deep-state Evangelicals love the pat on the head and the gratification for criticizing their confreres who dare question the postwar order's mythos.
One must not run from the disdain, but cherish it. One must not shrink from the crude appeals to the Gospel and Jesus, one must be willing to (patiently) argue to the point of exasperation. One must not cede a single inch to those who would rip up the foundations, only to rue that such foundations were ever touched. The mind must be consecrated to wage a holy war, every thought taken captive, with a sword emerging from the mouth. Let the past be an example for the living, as the siege of Hell's gates continues unabated.
