The Religion of Democracy, by Amy Kittelstrom

Amy Kittelstrom examines the overlapping ideas, personalities, and relationships of seven key figures associated with what she calls the American Reformation. Her study concentrates on the 19th century, when Puritanism had already become New England Congre­ga­tionalism, which then informally divided into two separate streams: the liberal and the neo-Calvinist or evangelical.

Kittelstrom’s interest is in the liberal stream, which, she argues, emphasized three tenets of the American Reforma­tion: the priority of individual judgment in all religious matters, the value and necessity of moral agency, and a commitment to open-minded inquiry. These ideas were incipient in the European Reformation, and they had singular significance for the Christian (and later post-Christian) Reformation that took root in New England and gradually became, in the ambiguous phrase first used by William James, “the religion of democracy”: the liberal tradition was a religion well suited both to the formation of democracy and to the development of what might well be called the religion of democracy.

Kittelstrom illustrates her argument with a rich study of her seven figures, who are situated along a spectrum of religious liberalism. She begins with John Adams, whose peculiar conservatism was based on his adherence to the liberal tenets of his Congre­ga­tional faith: the individual as moral agent, the duty of the individual to seek truth, and the fallibility of all absolute claims to truth.