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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Grasso, Christopher, author.
Title: Skepticism and American faith : from the Revolution to the Civil War / Christopher Grasso.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017038186 (print) | LCCN 2017058966 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190494384 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190494391 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190494377 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Church history—19th century. | United States—Church history—18th century. | Skepticism—United States—19th century. | Skepticism—United States—18th century. | United States—Religion—19th century. | United States—Religion—18th century. Classification: LCC BR525 (ebook) | LCC BR525 .G665 2018 (print) | DDC 277.3/081—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038186 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Karin
Note on Sources ix
Introduction 1
CONTENTS
PART ONE REVOLUTIONS, 1775 – 1815
1. Deist Hero, Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution 25
2. Souls Rising: The Authority of the Inner Witness, and Its Limits 65
3. Instituting Skepticism: The Emergence of Organized Deism 97
4. Instituting Skepticism: Contention, Endurance, and Invisibility 118
PART TWO ENLIGHTENMENTS, 1790 – 1840
5. Skeptical Enlightenment: An American Education in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania 159
6. Christian Enlightenment: Eastern Cities and the Great West 193
7. Christian Enlightenment: Faith into Practice in Marion, Missouri 227
8. Revelation and Reason: New Englanders in the Early Nineteenth Century 250
PART THREE REFORMS, 1820 – 1850
9. Faith in Reform: Remaking Society, Body, and Soul 279
10. Infidels, Protestants, and Catholics: Religion and Reform in Boston 323
11. Converting Skeptics: Infidel and Protestant Economies 357
PART FOUR SACRED CAUSES, 1830 – 1865
12. Political Hermeneutics: Nullifying the Bible and Consolidating Proslavery Christianity 397
13. Lived Experience and the Sacred Cause: Faith, Skepticism, and Civil War 441
Epilogue: Death and Politics 480
Appendix: Grounds of Faith and Modes of Skepticism 493
Acknowledgments 507
Notes 511
References 593
Index 633
NOTE ON SOURCES
I have preserved spelling, capitalization, and punctuation from the original sources. In a very few instances, I have supplied clarifications within brackets. Full citations of the primary sources appear in the notes. Citations of secondary sources are shortened in the notes, with full bibliographic information available in the references list.
Skepticism and American Faith
Introduction
The sceptic and the christian, Robert Dale Owen and Origen Bacheler, argued for ten months in the pages of the Free Enquirer, a freethought newspaper, in 1831. Their discussion articulates many of the major issues marking the relationship of skepticism and faith from the era of the American Revolution to the Civil War, when these two terms were used to organize a field of thought and experience the way the poles of a magnet arrange metal shavings tossed onto a piece of paper. “I was brought up by a kind and strictly religious mother, in the very lap of orthodoxy,” the sceptic wrote. But the more he read and reflected, the more convinced he became that nature was “silent regarding the doings, the attributes, nay the existence of a God.” Turning away from the “ghostly dreams and disquieting imaginations” of the churches, he felt freed from religious anxiety. He stepped forward publicly as the sceptic to challenge religious dogmas so that others might be freed, too. The christian countered: “It was once my unhappy lot to be for a time a Sceptic.” But then he became convinced that the Bible really was the Word of God, and that God’s Spirit was at work in his soul and in the world. He thought it his duty to help others similarly free themselves from the “snare” of skepticism.
Each man knew that beneath the intellectual debate they were conducting about the existence of God, the nature of humanity, and the possibility of revelation ran a current of personal psychological experience. But each knew, too, how the concerns about religious skepticism and faith also flooded over and transformed a much broader social, economic, and political landscape. Religion was not just false, the sceptic argued, but dangerous. “It excites fears that are without foundation; it consumes valuable time that can never be recalled, and valuable talents that ought to be better employed; it draws money from the layman to support a deception; it teaches the elect to look upon their less favored fellow creatures as heathen men and publicans, living in sin here and doomed to perdition hereafter; it awakens harassing doubts, gloomy despondency and fitful melancholy; it turns our thoughts from the things of this world, where alone true knowledge is to be found: worse than all, it chains us down to antiquated orthodoxy and
forbids the free discussion of those very subjects which it most concerns us to discuss. If such a religion be a deception, its votaries are slaves.”
The christian answered that the fears that religion excited were necessary to keep bad people in check. And religion had other crucial social benefits. “The time, talents, and money devoted to the subject, are vastly overbalanced by the good effects on society, to say nothing of futurity. Thus it is of immense advantage to the world in a temporal point of view. It does not turn our thoughts from social duties, but affords a most powerful incentive to vigilance therein. It does not forbid the discussion of any subject, or hold us back from following truth, lead where she may; but, on the contrary, it directs us to ‘prove all things, and hold fast that which is good.’ ”
Time and money; power and persecution; freedom and obligation; blindness and insight: the stakes for a society, for a people, were high.1
The Personal and the Political
His family and friends thought he was dying, so a local minister came to ask the pale, sick young man questions about his faith. A divinity student, he gave orthodox answers to the pastor’s questions about doctrine—orthodox for his mideighteenth-century New England town, where something like Puritan piety still passed for religious common sense. Even on what he thought might be his deathbed, though, he could not reveal his secret: he had long been wandering in what he would later call the “cloudy darksome valley” of religious skepticism. His skeptical turn had not been prompted by a public debate or even by private conversations with friends or acquaintances. He had internalized the dialogue of skepticism and faith from his reading. As an intellectually voracious college student and then a tutor he had read not just the standard Puritan divines but their liberal and deist critics, as well as the new enlightened philosophy and science. His studies had forced him to confront an awful, unspeakable idea: What if the Bible was not the revealed word of God after all? What if Christianity, like other religions, was merely “nothing but priestcraft and artificial error?”2
Ezra Stiles recovered from his illness, returned to his faith, and eventually became a clergyman. But after the American Revolution he watched with grave concern as other doubters came out of the closet and started to achieve positions of social prestige and political power. This development was especially worrisome at a time when states were reframing the relationship between religion and government. Few critics of Christianity were as outspoken as Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero from Vermont who published Reason, the Only Oracle of Man in 1785, a book that urged readers to discard the warped theologies derived from ancient biblical fables. Yet Stiles saw dangerous trends
in voters who were indifferent to a candidate’s religious opinions and opposed to the state patronizing Christianity. From his own experience and from his observation of the broader national scene, he understood that the relationship of religious skepticism and faith was at once an intellectual concern and a matter of personal psychological struggle, a pressing social issue and a potentially explosive political problem for the new American republic.
On the eve of the Civil War, the relationship of skepticism and faith was still fraught—intellectually, psychologically, socially, and politically. A young teacher in Alabama wanted to believe but doubted the claims of the Bible and the Christian churches. She had read the new biblical criticism from Germany that seemed to expose the scriptural accounts as myths, the Romantics who tried to reenvision Christianity by reducing it to poetic truth, and the Transcendental philosophers who turned to worship a divinity in man and nature. But more fundamentally, she chafed at a Christian culture that cast women as particularly sinful and powerless. Mag Barclay—the alter ego of author Alice Hayes Mellen in the autobiographical novel The Female Skeptic (1859)—ultimately learns how to vanquish doubt and pride through submissive love. The romance, though, is also a parable about the Union during the sectional crisis. Mag the feisty Northerner realizes that she must channel her reformist energy into conservative patriarchal and proslavery forms, submitting to the biblical authority of her Southern husband and coming to terms with slavery as a necessary evil in God’s plan for America.
As it was for Stiles, the triumph of faith in The Female Skeptic is the key to private, social, and national happiness. Ethan Allen in the 1780s and John R. Kelso, a Methodist minister in Missouri who renounced his faith in the 1850s and fought Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War, argued instead that Americans needed to use skeptical criticism to finally “break the bonds of superstition” in order to be free. These are just four voices in a cacophonous dialogue whose polarized extremes mask the fact that the experience even of those who stepped forward to debate was usually an oscillation between varieties of doubting and believing.3
For spiritual power and authority, Christians looked up to God through His Word, they looked to fellow followers of Christ as they built Christian communities, and they looked within themselves for the work of the Holy Spirit. But skepticism attacked the authenticity of the scriptures. It challenged the idea that either the special love that Christians shared or the historical success of the church attested to the truth of doctrine. It contested the notion that subjective experience could evidence contact with things supernatural and divine. This was the framework of experience, discussion, and debate for Stiles and Allen at the birth of the Republic; it remained the basic framework as Mellen and Kelso watched the Republic begin to unravel.
Only from a considerable distance, though, can Stiles’s experiences in the Yale college library, the quasi-fictional Mag’s on an Alabama plantation, Allen’s in a Vermont tavern, and Kelso’s at a revival campsite in backwoods Missouri be called similar. The problem of skepticism and faith in the United States from the 1770s to the 1860s needs to be seen not just as a contest of opposing ideas but as lived experiences: lived religion, and lived irreligion, too. This book examines how individual people moved back and forth on the continuum of skepticism and faith, as well as between engagement and indifference. It attends to what they said and asks how their faithful or skeptical attitudes played out in the daily practices of their complicated personal, social, and political lives in their specific communities.
To consider skepticism and faith on the ground and in the lives of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Americans goes beyond the confines of traditional intellectual history.4 The struggles of skepticism and faith can be found even where they are least expected: in the diaries of a Freewill Baptist preacher in Vermont during the first years of the nineteenth century, for example, or hidden in plain sight among the prolific publications of a health reformer in the 1840s. The accumulation of such stories—not just as religious biographies but as tiles in a larger mosaic of American cultural politics—suggests that the skeptical habits that converted believers struggled with lingered in the broader society as well. By the time Abraham Lincoln had turned from his earlier skepticism to see himself as an instrument of Providence, and Christian soldiers in North and South marched off to war, the triumph of American faith over deists, infidels, and doubters might seem complete. But the nature of that faith, the manner of its apparent triumph, and the character of the skepticism that had only been temporarily quieted by the noise of war had all been shaped by the preceding decades of dialogue.5
The tense dialogue of skepticism and faith did evolve, however much the closet dramas of Ezra Stiles the eighteenth-century clergyman and Mag Barclay the antebellum female skeptic might seem to share the same basic plot. In Mag’s America, though a female skeptic was considered a “monster,” a violation of feminine nature, skeptical arguments against traditional religious claims about God, humanity, and revealed truth were considerably more common in the masculine world than they were in Stiles’s day. The American faith that Mag hoped would reunify North and South was necessarily much vaguer than the Trinitarian Protestantism that Stiles had hoped would unite the country after the Revolution. It was a faith stripped of nearly all doctrinal content save love for a divine Father and a trust that fellow Christians could quietly, privately work out their own salvation on their own terms. It was a faith that manifested a sentimental reverence for biblical authority while at the same time trying to keep scripturally grounded disputes from curdling social relations or poisoning political debate. It was a faith, in other words, however emotionally satisfying in
private life, that as a public ideology seems to have been hollowed out by the very skeptical critiques it claimed to have vanquished.6
Hiding Doubt and Silencing
Skepticism
Both the christian and the sceptic assumed that religious skepticism was far more pervasive than the number of uncloseted, vocal “infidels” would suggest. The sceptic attributed the silence of most skeptics to the power of Christian persecution. Because a Christian majority shamed, shunned, and punished doubters, the “progress of orthodoxy is ostentatiously announced; the progress of heterodoxy is rapid but silent. A conversion to Christianity is trumpeted all over Christendom; a conversion to scepticism is hardly whispered to one’s next door neighbor.” The christian instead thought that so many skeptics kept their doubts hidden because they lacked moral courage.7
Readers of the standard religious histories of the period, however, might wonder if there was even much religious skepticism for Owen and Bacheler to be arguing about. At about the same time that the sceptic and the christian published their Discussion, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that Americans were skeptical about everything but religion. Many commentators in the years since have echoed Tocqueville. The United States, where churches thrive, supernaturalism sells, and spirituality can trump other issues at the ballot box, has long been considered the Western world’s exception to the secularization and disenchantment that was commonly thought to attend modernity. Historical explanations during the Cold War looked to the nation’s supposed Puritan heritage. Interpretations at the end of the twentieth century focused instead on the decades after 1776. In the early Republic, according to one prominent account, American Christianity was democratized, its surge of religious revivals revealing a religious movement that absorbed and redirected the radical, egalitarian, populist, individualistic energies of the Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, according to another, as proselytizers vigorously competed for adherents in a denominational free market, a higher proportion of Americans formed closer associations with Christian institutions, ideas, and practices than ever before. According to a third, Americans created a powerful intellectual synthesis fusing republican political ideology, Common Sense moral reasoning, and evangelical Protestantism. A rich and deep literature shows us how the evangelicalism that emerged from what is mislabeled the “Second Great Awakening” shaped the politics of the second party system; how activist Protestantism fueled the great movements for social reform; how religious faith and scriptural argument underpinned proslavery, antislavery, and every conceivable moral argument; how Christian views of Providence and Creation dictated
understandings of nature, history, and progress; and how pious sentimentalism was the beating heart of family life. Christianity refined the genteel, rocked the cradle of the middle class, and provided both comfort and a language of resistance for the poor, the oppressed, and the enslaved.8
But in the early twenty-first century the tangle of American commitments to democracy, capitalism, and religious faith emerging out of the first fourscore and seven years of the nation’s existence deserves another look. If the United States had long troubled the theoretical distinctions between the “religious” and the “secular” that seemed to fit Western Europe, now these categories seem dubious not just for America but in general, not just for the postmodern present but for the past, too. Rather than categories helping to describe the development of modern society, the “religious” and the “secular” are labels that risk distorting the meaning of historical evidence. Paying more attention to what people in the past actually said and the relationship between how they talked and how they lived may reveal different conclusions about broader transformations—and continuities—in American society and culture.9
Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible by histories that stress the era’s overbearing “evangelicalism,” or the “secularization” happening behind people’s backs, or the assumption that skepticism was for intellectuals, while ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. The standard historical accounts might give a nod to heterodox Enlightenment ideas in the late eighteenth century that would soon be swept away by the evangelical tsunami, and perhaps glance at a few fringe figures who continued to bob for air in its wake. Some of the Founding Fathers—notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—were deists who believed in a Creator and in morals derived from nature but not in the divinity of either the Bible or Jesus. While these gentlemen tried to keep their heterodox views to themselves, small groups of other deists, inspired by Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1794), organized a few deistical societies and published newspapers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The socioeconomic transformations wrought by new markets and new modes of industrial production after 1815 launched a new generation of social and religious radicalism. From the mid-1820s to about 1840, some social reformers identified themselves as religious skeptics and freethinkers—or “free enquirers”—who doubted or denied most of Christianity’s claims about God, man, and salvation. As with the deists, the free enquirers’ energies were divided between criticizing traditional (supernatural) religion and trying to offer an alternate vision. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, even that fringe threat of organized freethought had faded.10
Christians called the skeptical deists, free inquirers, and doubting seekers “infidels,” a pejorative term that some would proudly adopt. Certainly the efforts of these small groups of infidels were dwarfed by the legions conducting
religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Just as certainly, though, the experiences and beliefs that these infidels embraced and that many other people wrestled with have been overshadowed by the dominant narratives of the nation’s religious past. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, the reasons why and how the skeptical critique continued to haunt American Christianity need to be explained.11
More significantly, many observers in the early Republic looked beyond the strident infidels to note the entanglement of skepticism and faith as a central issue in American culture. In 1840, Orestes Brownson, sounding like the sceptic a decade earlier or Ezra Stiles in the 1780s, argued that “there is not much open scepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount” that “[is] concealed” and “untold.” Other commentators came to similar conclusions. One in the 1820s believed that “the number of decided infidels, is probably much more limited than that of a sort of skeptic who are content to remain suspended in doubt whether the Christian revelation is true or false,” but who for the time being continued to respect Christianity as the custom of the country and an amiable superstition. A decade later, the Christian Secretary prepared a series of articles attacking skepticism and infidelity because the editors agreed with that central point. A long essay in the Spirit of the Pilgrims focused not on outspoken freethinkers or closeted skeptics but on the way that doubt could hollow out Christianity from within. Newfangled ideas encouraged Christians to doubt one traditional doctrine, qualify a second, and throw out a third, until believers had “been gradually and unconsciously drawn away from their old belief. . . . They begin with doubting; they next give up, and are finally in danger of ending in the disbelief of almost everything but that they are themselves very exemplary believers.” In the 1850s and early 1860s, commentators worried about English translations popularizing German biblical criticism and philosophy; they also began to be anxious that the skeptical habits of scientific inquiry were “impinging on the religious beliefs of the Christian public.”12
Because of the entanglement of skepticism and faith, then, seasoning the narrative of American religious history with the stories of a few vocal freethinkers is not enough. Self-proclaimed deists, skeptics, and freethinkers were so threatening because they gave voice to the doubts Christians had about their own faith or about the fidelity of the fellow in the next pew. Putting skepticism back into the story of American religious history in this period involves attending to both the “not much” skepticism that was open and avowed and the “vast amount” that observers insisted was hidden and silenced. Certainly the specter of the dangerous infidel threatening the religious foundations of society was conjured by paranoid Christians and put to work by cynical politicians. Some did anxiously exaggerate the threat, such as the Calvinist apologists who blamed Universalists for
destroying the grounds of faith, and the Universalists who blamed Calvinists for the same. Others exploited popular fears of anti-Christian subversives, such as the Federalists who tried to link Jefferson’s deism and the horrors of the French Revolution to Republicanism, or the Whigs who later tried to tar the Workingmen’s movement with religious infidelity. But the story of the relationship of skepticism and faith is more than the tale of a few marginalized freethinkers and artificially induced moral panics. Religious skepticism touched—and in some cases transformed—many more lives than we might expect in the early American republic.
Framing the Discussion
What is “religion?” What is “skepticism?” Robert Dale Owen, writing in the early 1830s as the sceptic, argued that theological terms like “religion” and “God” were often ambiguous or meaningless, and he tried to clarify what he, at least, was talking about. “I speak here of Revealed Religion; that is, of a belief in supernatural beings, one or many, to whom worship and obedience is rendered; and not of ethical codes or moral precepts. . . . I speak not of other religions than our own [Christianity], because I am, in a measure, unacquainted with the details of their history.” The christian, Origen Bacheler, argued that the “skeptical” position actually collapsed into either deism or atheism despite the so-called skeptic’s attempt to sit on the fence, or, even more often, the term signified nothing at all: “No doubt if the truth were known, many of those converts who pass under the name of Sceptics, would . . . be found to have ‘no fixed opinions of any kind.’ ” The two positions—skeptical inquirer and religious believer—were easier to recognize socially and colloquially than to sharply define in formal debate.13
“I am an unfortunate being called a sceptic,” wrote a correspondent to Robert Dale Owen’s Free Enquirer in 1830, “ which word, I learn from the dictionary, to mean one who doubts. ‘Doubts what?’ said I, and my church going neighbors replied, ‘what is taught in the churches.’ ” Learning from natural history that whales had small gullets, he had concluded that the biblical story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale must be a fable akin to Jack and the Beanstalk. Perhaps the other biblical stories, and Christianity itself, were fables, too? It makes little sense to try to root this writer, who was “young in both years and learning,” too carefully in a specific philosophical tradition. In such lower-altitude discussions, the term “skeptic” was applied to those who doubted the primary grounds of Christian faith—the Bible, the church, or personal spiritual experience—and were persistently unpersuaded by the foundational claims of their churchgoing neighbors.14
The passive voice—how skepticism “was applied” or “was discussed”—reflects a generalization about how language operated and concepts were formed. But it masks who had more power in such dialogues and was usually able to set the terms of discussion and debate. The writer signed his letter as “Sceptic,” which was “the name pinned to me by my neighbors.” They did not pin the label upon him as someone who questioned the abstract category of “religion” but specifically as a person who doubted “what is taught in the churches.” Still, calling him a skeptic meant something different than calling him unorthodox or a heretic. He was not challenging mainstream belief with an alternate religious vision, as a Jew, a Muslim, a Mormon, or a pagan. Using a simple fact about the natural world to wonder if the biblical stories were fables and to doubt “what is taught in the churches” put him outside “religion” entirely—not just from the perspective of the churchgoing neighbors but for the Young Sceptic himself, who recognized that he was being labeled as something “sinful” and “dangerous.”
Then as now, “religion” was a contested term, but some of the players in this contest had considerably more power and authority than others. If the Young Sceptic had also consulted his dictionary for an authoritative definition of religion, he would have found it described from the perspective of Christian theology: religion “in its most comprehensive sense” included “a belief in the being and perfections of God, in the revelations of his will to man, of man’s obligation to obey his commands, in a state of rewards and punishments, and in man’s accountableness to God; and also true godliness or piety of life, with the practice of all moral duties.”15 Had he turned to an encyclopedia as well, he might have found a newer, less explicitly Christian, comparative definition, though it was built from the scaffolding of theism: it explained that the term signified duties performed for “one or more superior beings” who were believed to “govern the world,” and upon whom, the religious person believed, “the happiness or misery of mankind ultimately rests.”16 By the time the Young Sceptic wrote to the newspaper in 1830, some who were called or called themselves “liberals” began to chafe against such parochial understandings of religion and what it meant to be religious. They tried to cast off the references to superhuman beings and broaden the definition of religion to mean, for example, “ ‘the tendency of human nature to the Infinite’ . . . manifested in the pursuit of perfection in any direction whatever.” Such transcendent ideals could be marked as “sacred” and thought to create dispositions in people that oriented them in the world and offered a meaningful path through life—intensifying joy, perhaps, or helping them confront suffering. If religion could be defined so broadly as to include any such orienting ultimate concerns, then even those pinned as skeptics by their churchgoing neighbors could be legitimately called “religious,” too.17
Most Christians would have none of this. If merely the tendency of human beings to try to perfect themselves was “religion,” one wrote, then “the ‘pursuit of
perfection’ in the art of rope-dancing is religion.”18 Christians argued among themselves about how religion connected knowledge, belief, sentiment, and practice. But they insisted that it primarily and fundamentally invoked man’s relationship to God. “Natural” religion—what human beings could discern about this relationship using only their natural faculties, without the Bible or Christian teaching—was at best incomplete and more often dangerously confused. Other attempts to worship and obey the Divine Being (or, mistakenly, beings) were actual religions but false ones, they argued. Nontheistic ways of finding allegedly meaningful paths through life did not deserve to be dignified by the label “religion” at all. True religion, these dominant voices in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury American discussion contended, was recognizably Christian: God and the Bible, souls and the church. One needed not just ideals to motivate ethical action but an all-powerful being who would reward and punish and a savior who could pardon the sins of flawed creatures; not just forces to admire in nature but a Father to love and obey as a child loves and obeys his parent. Only such a religion could connect cosmic order and the depths of an individual soul, and could link even the lives of the poorest and meekest to the grand meaning of human existence and history.
Yet when discussing the importance of Christianity to American society at large, most commentators focused less on the term “religion” than on “faith.” A deist writer in 1804 complained that “religion,” as commonly understood, was “a complex idea compounded of three things totally distinct from each other”: rituals, metaphysical propositions, and moral codes. Perhaps champions of a Christian America preferred to speak of “faith” rather than “religion” because the latter suggested instituted modes of worship and other practices—precisely those things that the First Amendment seemed to say that the government could not establish. Defenders of a faith-based society wanted to confirm the link between metaphysical propositions and morality without getting tangled in denominational and political debates about proper forms of worship. One writer in 1837 noted that “to mention the word religion in connection with politics” stigmatized one “as the enemy of free institutions, of the rights of man, and, of course, of the rights of conscience” and conjured “all the horrors of the Inquisition.” The primary line of defense against skeptical critique, therefore, was usually a vague invocation of religious faith—a trust and confidence in divine direction—that was said to undergird not just particular denominational affiliations but basic morality and virtuous American citizenship. This basic American faith, often hailed as the bedrock of American society, usually resembled a kind of lowest-common-denominator Protestantism, as Catholics and others liked to point out.19
The relationship of skepticism and faith framed the discussion—and the experience—of the Young Sceptic and his churchgoing neighbors. People argued
about the different grounds of faith and distinguished different modes of skepticism (topics treated at further length in the appendix). In general, skepticism was more than fleeting doubt; it was doubt highly reflective, intellectually elaborated, perhaps regularized as a default attitude, and directed specifically toward the claims of religious faith. But if more than doubt, skepticism was less than “secularism,” at least not the explicitly nonreligious cultural program promoted under that name after 1851 in Britain by George Jacob Holyoake. As a modern scholar has recently written, “Skepticism (of the nonepistemological variety, epistemological skeptics positing that knowledge is impossible) is merely another name for agnosticism”—“agnosticism” being a term coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869. The Young Sceptic in 1830 may have doubted the authenticity of the Bible, the reliability of his neighbors’ allegedly spiritual experiences, or even the existence of God without necessarily being able to envision or articulate an alternate way of being in the world. Religious commentators answered this skepticism with appeals to faith. The faith they invoked was more than mere belief in a set of ideas about God and humanity, the world and history; it was also a personal attitude of trust or confidence associated with those ideas. Faith was more than belief but less than religion, the latter including the elaboration of “practical duties” such as worship and other obligated behaviors proceeding from the relationship to God.20
Debate, Dialogue, and American History
The christian and the sceptic, Bacheler and Owen, described their early 1830s Discussion as a debate, a contest between two champions of opposing positions. “No subject is thoroughly investigated, and settled on an immoveable basis,” the christian wrote, “till it has been assailed at every point, and has met and repelled its assailant at full strength; till on it the belligerents have met, and measured swords, and done their mightiest.” The sceptic used similar terms. But the two also described their exchange as a dialogue, a more open-ended inquiry. “Let us therefore, like rational creatures,” the christian urged, “calmly approach these subjects, not to overthrow or upbuild this, that, or the other, but to examine, to investigate, to see how things are.” The sceptic assured his interlocutor that he wanted to seek truth wherever it could be found, “within the pale of orthodoxy or without it; in religion or in skepticism; under the form of popular virtue or of moral heresy; in the histories of all ranks as of all countries. My single object is, not to find truth in this creed or in that system, not in the code of one country or the customs of another, but, wherever it be, to find it.”21
Debaters expect a decisive outcome, as with two gladiators battling in an arena. The christian in particular imagined his readers as an audience of
judges, each of whom would determine a winner and a loser. He believed that the debate, as with advocates in a courtroom or legislators in Congress, ought to produce an outcome. Actual debates between skeptics and believers were sometimes staged as public performances, as when Robert Dale Owen’s father, the freethinking Scottish industrialist and reformer Robert Owen, debated the Rev. Alexander Campbell (Disciples of Christ) for eight days in Cincinnati in 1829, or when Dr. William Sleigh defended Christianity against a tag-team of infidels in a six-evening New York City debate in 1835. In both cases, the audience at the conclusion was asked to choose a winner (the public show of support for Christianity was unanimous in the second debate and nearly so in the first).22
Yet the sceptic’s and the christian’s adherence to the principles of free inquiry, and the give-and-take of the discussion as it progressed, nudged their exchanges more toward an open-ended dialogue. They did not strictly adhere to the fiction that a discussion has two, rather than many, sides. The performance did not simply rehearse arguments leading to a predictable conclusion: the triumph of one position over the other, as Truth over Falsehood. Nor was the dialogue a dialectic that produced a neat synthesis of the preceding thesis and antithesis. A dialogue could be a process of inquiry that was itself, as the sceptic wrote, a worthy voyage of discovery “beyond the inland sea of our own sect or party,” where we become “citizens of the world of opinion” by making acquaintance “with other beliefs besides our own” and being “introduced to more doctrines than we have been cradled in.”23
Similarly, the broader discussion of skepticism and faith in American culture from the nation’s founding to its great crisis in the 1860s had the character of both debate and dialogue, with partisans squaring off in contests that tried to simplify a set of more complex conversations and experiences. These public debates and dialogues, too, were, in part, representations of personal psychological experiences that were projected into the social realm or public sphere. Once there, they could also be internalized, creating, as the theorists of the dialogical self like to say, voices and positions in the landscape of individual minds.24
What provoked such discussions about skepticism and faith in the first place—whether in formally staged debates, dialogues in print, fireside conversations, or even in the minds of Americans who quietly pondered these questions? The christian thought that they arose from both natural inclination and moral obligation. Rational beings like to think, and social beings like to share their thoughts. And about the most vital of all topics—the meaning of life and the fate of the soul—they ought to articulate their reasons for belief or disbelief to each other, he argued. Moral beings, in addition, ought to support the cause of truth, and discussion and debate strengthened their own grasp of truth while helping to enlighten the ignorant, rouse the indifferent, and persuade the skeptical. Because the christian thought that religious belief and faith were so crucial to
moral practice, he believed that the discussion ultimately served to better lives both in this world and in the next.
The sceptic also celebrated the natural human inclinations to reason and converse. But he argued that religious beliefs ought to be sharply distinguished from moral practice. A person could not be forced to believe what he or she found unbelievable and should not be punished for failing to assent to a neighbor’s hopes and fantasies about a supernatural realm. A dialogue or debate about skepticism and faith might enlighten the deluded and embolden the doubter, but more importantly it could protest against the unjust political and social power of the Christian majority, which in subtle and not so subtle ways punished people for disbelieving, doubting, or believing differently.
The sceptic did not think that formal debates were a venue in which doubters in the audience would likely be inspired to rise to publicly challenge the Christian majority. Even debates in print might not change many minds. Public discussions were less tools to sway public opinion than signs that private opinions were already quietly changing. As much as any reasoned arguments, the insolence of the Christian clergy and the scandalous behavior of so many professing Christians were fueling doubts about the doctrines they professed. The movement of history in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, the sceptic believed, was the halting yet ultimately hopeful progress of reason and common sense over superstition and Christian hegemony. The christian, on the other hand, was confident that Christianity would only strengthen as America’s faith spread throughout the world.25
Ezra Stiles in the eighteenth century thought that because the modern age had so rigorously challenged all the grounds of faith, Christians in every subsequent generation would have to return to articulate and defend first principles and win the arguments again. In some periods, belief in the authenticity of the Bible, in the reality of Christian spiritual experience, and in Christianity’s historic mission to redeem the world might be so broadly accepted and professed as to become a kind of unquestioned common sense. But in other periods, when intellectual, political, or economic turmoil encouraged fallible and fickle human beings to doubt religious truth, Christians would need to return to the ramparts. Christian common sense and the debate with skeptics, then, would alternate from one historical moment to the next, like the diastole and systole, the pause and heartbeat, of the nation.
A mid-nineteenth-century writer, in contrast, thought that the tension between skepticism and faith had more to do with a fragile balance in the split personality of American character. “Skepticism or Superstition,” an article appearing in an 1858 issue of the Episcopal American Quarterly Church Review, argued that Americans had a “national proclivity to Skepticism.” This inclination was due to the population’s predominantly Anglo-Saxon lineage and was especially
