Joseph Slaughter on Katherine Carté’s *Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History*

Katherine Carté’s first book, Religion and Profit, arrived just as the new history of capitalism took off amid the devastating 2008 financial crisis.[1] It is a fascinating tale of Moravian businesses funding their indigenous missions, distinguished by its Atlantic contextualization. Similarly, Carté’s second book, Religion and the American Revolution, is a timely Atlantic story. While it is not groundbreaking to argue that prior to the Revolution, protestants on both sides of the Atlantic were connected in a myriad of ways – historians of North American Christianity have acknowledged as much for decades – Carté’s work impressively demonstrates how, and to what degree local, national, and imperial governments fostered an “imperial protestantism” by “intertwining” British government and religious institutions, through overlapping networks of Anglicans, dissenters, and awakened protestants.[2] (10) These networks formed through personal correspondence, institutional projects, and voluntary societies. While the Church of England supplied the largest institution of the first network, Anglicans also connected through the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and the Associates of Dr. Bray. Although their Atlantic connections rested more firmly upon personal relationships and correspondence, dissenters networked through the Dissenting Ministers of the Three Denominations, the Protestant Dissenting Deputies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (the New England Company), and the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Even though awakened protestants relied even more heavily upon correspondence in creating their networks, they did network though institutions such as the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor.

Carté argues that an imperial perspective helps us understand historians’ overemphasis on the divisions between different sects of colonial-era Protestants, neglecting the degree to which these British citizens shared an imperial protestant identity (vice solely Puritan, Anglican, or Presbyterian). This is more than a stuffy ivory tower argument – if she is correct, Carté’s arguments should change how most of us write about and teach early American history. How so? Over the past decade, historians have increasingly emphasized an imperial, transcontinental interpretation of the American Revolution which has minimized the significance of ideology, religion, and traditional “turning points” such as the Boston Massacre or Tea Party.[3] At the same time, numerous scholars of American religion have effectively reemphasized the role of Christianity in the American Revolution.[4] Religion and the American Revolution deftly reconciles and harmonizes these two perspectives.

Religion and the American Revolution is unabashedly an institutional history. It is not an intellectual history, a history of “lived religion,” or a story of laypersons. Consequently, Carté admits hers is a story of “educated, privileged, white, and male” figures, but she argues this is necessary to understand imperial protestantism’s structures and scaffolding – and its subsequent destruction (in America) during the Revolution. (12) Mostly helpfully, this imperial perspective of American religion answers questions such as how virulently anti-Catholic British colonists could support a diplomatic and military treaty with Catholic France in 1778. Carté’s answer is that Congress could not tie its legitimacy to protestantism in the manner of the British Empire. The Revolution ruptured these bonds in America (already fraying since the Seven Years’ War), and the Founders consciously side-stepped formally establishing religion in the Articles of Confederation. Consequently, partnering with a Catholic nation was not incomprehensible, as the legitimacy of the new American government was not tied to protestantism in the way it was in Britain. This was a departure from the previous decade, where imperial protestantism meant that most American ministers did not protest the Stamp Act, or otherwise push rebellion, despite the attention a few outliers attracted. Instead, Carté argues ministers were “reactive,” not “guiding public sentiment,” but “working within the structural imperatives” of imperial protestantism which “sometimes restricted their options.” (126) Attempting to forestall a rupture, protestant networks continued to speak out against division, but by 1776, the structure and scaffolding collapsed, and local conditions set the terms for how religious leaders responded to the events of 1773 and beyond. For many, it meant a withdrawal from imperial protestantism’s relationships and institutions.

Carté concludes that this collapse of imperial protestantism in North America reflected the transforming religious order of the new United States, where Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopals declined, and “awakened” sects, foremost the Baptists and Methodists, emerged as the new dominant groups by the mid-19^th century – groups that had no connection or interest in joining the old order. While this story typically revolves around revivalism, disestablishment, and a marketplace of religion, Carté emphasizes these arguments should be placed within an institutional, international context – the destruction of the older protestant networks created a fertile new ground for revivalist movements that “spun away from, rather than toward, the centers of governmental power…in the new United States.” (290) Similarly, new missionary work developed within national boundaries, not broader Atlantic protestant networks like they had before the Revolution.

Religion and the American Revolution is more than a reorientation of how we should think about the nation’s founding. At a time when it is not uncommon to hear conservative American protestants, including prominent evangelical pastors, claim that “the hand of God directly” and uniquely founded the United States (along with ancient Israel), Carté’s rejoinder that the British Empire “was also seen by its leaders, religious and political, as promoting God’s plan in a sacred history” is sorely needed.[5] (8) The heritage of imperial protestantism renders American religious nationalism unexceptional, even as the Constitution established a nation disconnected from religious institutions. We have been left with the resultant tension ever since.

[1] Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

[2] Although many scholars have applied the label “evangelical” to protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Carté’s preferred term of “awakened protestants” is more historically useful and accurate. In this review, I follow the author’s stylistic choice to not capitalize “protestant.”

[3] For example: S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (New York: Norton, 2016); and Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York: Norton, 2014).

[4] For example: Spencer McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016); James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010); and John A. Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[5] Jack Hibbs, “Happening Now featuring Charlie Kirk,” Real Life with Jack Hibbs (March 2, 2022), 15:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIaXEI1yQtY&t=955s (accessed May 24, 2022).