Twice-told tales
Imagine this: A group of American Protestants uses its numerical superiority and cultural currency to fight what it sees as increasing liberalism and secularization in elite society. Ideological zealots, they demand that local laws and public rituals encode biblical principles. Only Christian morality, they claim, can promote the social virtue upon which the American republic depends. This group attaches itself to the conservative national political party.
But despite the group's efforts, the shifting winds of politics takes its toll over two decades. The progressive political party assumes control of national politics. The conservative clergy begin to fight among themselves. They form new alliances along ideological rather than institutional lines: a sort of ecumenism of the cultural conservatives aligned against liberalism. Rebuffed by national politics, they engage in a protracted effort to reform society through personal evangelization, missionary organizations and moral reform societies. Eventually they channel their efforts away from party politics to a critique of the national government and to the promotion of Christian citizenship on a more local level. Through it all, they are convinced that divine providence uniquely guides American history.
Sound familiar? Isn't this the story of conservative-evangelical politics from the Reagan years through the Clinton administration? It is also the plot of Jonathan Sassi's book, but his subjects are the Congregationalist clergy of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island from 1783 through 1833. Sassi's cast of characters reads like a list straight out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel: Eliphalet Porter, Zabdiel Adams, Heman Humphrey, Hosea Ballou and Zephaniah Swift Moore, to mention but a few.
