It looks like I am not the only one raising questions about the Whig narrative in American religious history. Over at U.S. Intellectual History, David Sehat writes:
The Whig quality of this still salient narrative is particularly striking when it comes to religion in the United States. As I argued in an earlier post, many writers connect the story of American religious freedom to the broader story of the American democratic experiment. Because the broader American narrative maintains such a Whig cast (at least in popular historical writing), much scholarship on the role of religion in public life portrays religion as an essentially emancipatory force. Religious communities, so the story goes, were central to reform movements by appealing to transcendent ideals in order to challenge unjust social orders. It is through religious movements, in other words, that American liberalism expanded.
But this generally progressive narrative of American religious history has led historians to overvalue the religious sources of reform while simultaneously underestimating the extent to which religious sensibilities formed a critical bulwark in the promotion and protection of illiberalism.
Sehat reminds us that John Stuart Mill, the author of the 1859 work On Liberty, was actually critiquing the failure of the United States to uphold religious liberty.
The illiberal impulse of nineteenth century religion did not escape the notice of John Stuart Mill. Mill is often portrayed as a quintessential nineteenth-century political thinker whose classical liberalism stands in as the reigning philosophy of the era. Yet he did not see himself that way. In his rousing 1859 tract On Liberty, Mill claimed simply that all political theory should start with the recognition that “the individual is sovereign.” Anglo-American political thought, according to Mill, had failed to do that and seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. He feared in particular what he characterized as “the engines of moral repression” that he saw gearing up in modern society. The growing number of religious believers strove to gain “control over every department in human conduct” or at least to minimize “divergence from the reigning opinion.” He pointed to the requirement in Britain (similar to the United States) that witnesses must swear belief in the existence of God and a future state of rewards and punishments to testify in court, the increasing prevalence of temperance legislation, the expansion of Sabbath laws, and the crusade against Mormonism, as examples to the mounting religious coercion that seemed to parallel the expansion of evangelicalism. Claiming that it was “not difficult to show, by abundant instance” that “the moral police” presented a danger to the “liberty of the individual,” Mill saw himself not as someone who sat comfortably in a century that honored his social philosophy but rather as a clarion voice who was critical of the nineteenth-century norm.
I am looking forward to reading Sehat’s forthcoming book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom.
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