<i>The Religion-Supported State: Piety and Politics in Early National New England</i> by Nathan S. Rives

In 1779 John Adams was tasked with drafting a constitution for the new state of Massachusetts. Adams dutifully attended to his assignment, penning an almost complete draft. When it came to the proposed Article III of the constitution addressing religious freedom and the state's religious establishment, Adams reputedly demurred and deferred to a committee to draft the ultimate language. Although Adams agreed with the idea of the state maintaining a “mild and equitable establishment” that promoted virtue through a funded “publick religion,” he was also aware of the contentious nature of tax-supported religion. Massachusetts finally ceded its practice of religious establishment in 1833, the last New England state to do so. That event could be interpreted as the final victory for the Jeffersonian model of church-state disengagement and the independence of civil society from religion. But as Nathan S. Rives ably demonstrates in The Religion-Supported State: Piety and Politics in Early National New England, that interpretation would be wrong.Rives convincingly argues that the assumptions that underlay the New England religious establishments—of the necessity of a public morality, based on Protestant virtue, to maintain civil society and of the suppression of religious error—did not disappear with disestablishment. Rather, New England transitioned from maintaining a contentious system of official “state-supported religion”—which divided orthodox Protestants and evangelicals, and then Congregationalists and Unitarians—to an acceptance of a “religion-supported state,” as the book's title declares. Rives maintains that the idea of a religion-supported state received greater consensus among former adversaries, which then laid the groundwork for the moral reform movements of the nineteenth century.Rives’ term and title, “religion-supported state,” is more than a clever play on words on the traditional notion of a “state-supported religion,” which existed in nine of the original colonies. It signifies both a continuance of and a transition from the way that contemporaries viewed the public role of religion in society. Even after disestablishment, people remained convinced about perpetuating religious truth for the betterment of civil society.Few topics are as hotly debated in academia and in the courts as the meaning and significance of religious disestablishment at the state and federal levels between 1776 and 1833. In 1947 the United States Supreme Court did a disservice to the historical method by declaring that the Jeffersonian-Madisonian schema of church-state separation was the dominant model for constitutional disestablishment, suggesting that disestablishment was then and there complete. Rives joins scholars such as John Witte, Jr., Daniel Dreisbach, and Vincent Phillip Muñoz in contesting both contentions (propositions that separationist scholars including David Sehat and I also dispute). Although the New England establishments were unique for their longevity and entrenched nature, Rives shows that the presumptions underlying the “New England Way” during the first third of the nineteenth century were not necessarily outliers. Members of the standing order, Rives demonstrates, gave up on their former establishment when it ceased to be workable. They did not, however, abandon their concern about ensuring that religious truth prevailed over religious error. As he writes, “disestablishment appears to be part of a larger and longer conversation, not just about religious liberty or tolerance or pluralism, but about the place of religious truth in civic life” (5). Disestablishment conveniently allowed them to find common ground with evangelical dissenters though the operation of moral reform societies.Writing a new book on New England disestablishment takes some chutzpah, considering the long shadow cast by William G. McLoughlin's monumental two-volume New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (1971). But as Rives convincingly shows, the assumptions that underlay New England's assessment system did not disappear with disestablishment as McLoughlin's title suggested. As they adapted, those assumptions grew more transferable to the rest of the nation where formal disestablishment had long been completed. Although Rives argues for the resiliency of those assumptions, one surprising omission in the book is a more detailed discussion of how New England's religious intellectuals spread those ideas as they came to occupy pulpits and professorships in the mid-Atlantic and midwestern states.The Religion-Supported State is exhaustively researched; the extensive number of early letters and sermons documented and discussed is truly impressive. The book nicely discusses the interplay between the various denominational groups—Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Universalists, and Unitarians—and then the shifting political alignments. The final chapters of the book focus on how orthodox and evangelical Protestants came to justify moral reform as the tonic for addressing religious error, with specific application in the areas of Sabbath enforcement and abolition.In the book's epilogue, Rives maintains that the idea of a religion-supported state “still thrives in the twenty-first America in many venues” (243). That idea is demonstrated through the alignment of conservative Christians with the Republican Party and the advancement of various hot-button “moral” issues in the political realm such as abortion and gay and transgender rights. Although history “may present us with no easy solutions,” Rives observes, the “enduring danger which early national New England's story warns is in moral and religious dogmatism, [and] in the imposition of inflexible first principles bestowed from on high as if human beings had nothing to do with their interpretation” (247).