Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Katherine Carté’s monograph, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, offers a stunning response to the question of religion’s role in the American Revolution. Rather than center the religiosity of America’s founding or the religious beliefs of Revolutionary actors, Carté instead emphasizes the disintegration of the “scaffolding” supporting British imperial Protestantism. By “scaffolding,” Carté means that an interlocking system of religious and government institutions bound Protestants to one another across the British Empire. Protestant institutions of various denominations enjoyed privileges within this system, whether in the form of monetary support, social networks, or certain civil protections (5). The American Revolution severed these connections, as collaborative relationships and Protestant institutional work could not withstand the violent disruptions of war and diverging political projects. After the war, Britain was forced to reconsider the organization of its Protestant empire while America was left to resolve the tension of a religious identity newly informed by both revolutionary politics and an imperial inheritance.To accomplish this work, Carté adopts an institutional approach focusing on clergy and political leadership. However, institutional should not be understood as impersonal. Rather, Carté’s top-down approach illuminates the relationship between governance and Protestantism across the British Empire. Carté argues that an overemphasis on any one denomination and its leaders obscures the true nature of Britain’s “mixed establishment” (10) that tolerated several different expressions of a core Protestant structure, even as those groups experienced varying degrees of antagonism and competition across the empire. Thus, when Carté elevates individual leaders, she does so to great effect, thoroughly exploring their motivations for commenting on governmental affairs beyond the relatively neutral terms of fast day sermons and exhortations that stressed peace and imperial unity.Indeed, throughout this capacious study, Carté positions civilians’ expectations that their religious leaders would use their public pulpit for political ends against the personal and professional risks clergy faced. Clergy members were well aware of the weight their partisan opinions could carry, as well as the potential for alienating their communities or offending government leaders. Carté offers a particularly salient example of this tension in her analysis of the decision to appoint Jacob Duché as the first congressional chaplain in 1774. Though Congress had engaged in prayer prior to Duché’s arrival, Congressional leaders were conscious that a minister’s presence would lend additional credibility to their political aims even as they realized the potential for turning off would-be supporters by elevating one denomination’s clergy over another. According to Carté, Duché’s Anglicanism offered the comfort of familiar British Protestant ritual, while his moderation and Pennsylvania origins endeared him to the members of a uniquely American political body (158).Carté similarly probes this strategic employment of religion to political end in her analysis of the evolving role anti-Catholicism played on both sides of the Atlantic. On the American side, Carté follows the shift from protests over the 1774 Quebec Act to the full embrace of Catholic France as a military ally. In 1774, colonists bemoaned the proposal’s allowances for French Catholics in newly British Quebec, accusing Britain of abandoning its defense of Protestantism. Yet Carté positions outrage over the Quebec Act as having as much to do with timing as religious antagonism, coming as it did on the heels of the widely despised Coercive Acts. Colonists were acutely aware of the political efficacy associated with accusations of popish influence, and readily employed it to express their displeasure with perceived British overreach. Such rhetoric gradually lost its potency as the war stretched on, however, and Patriots readily welcomed the military support from Britain’s Catholic former foe, France, effectively doing away with the last vestiges of a religious identity formed around an imperial defense of Protestantism.Britain, for her part, continued to grapple with anti-Catholicism, a trend that the author argues ultimately damaged Protestantism’s credibility as a basis for governance. Loyalists reacted viscerally to the Franco-American alliance: Benedict Arnold even claimed that the supposed Patriot embrace of Catholicism spurred his betrayal (258). However, the most significant episode of British anti-Catholicism was the 1780 Gordon Riots. The riots began with the Protestant Association’s walk to Parliament, lead by Lord George Gordon, to present a petition calling for the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, a measure in no small part intended to replenish the British Army with new Catholic enlistees. Mob violence targeting Catholics and government institutions erupted over several days. Following military intervention, Protestant leaders framed the violence as a lawless perversion of religion spurred by political ambitions rather than a faithful defense of Protestantism. Carté argues that such an explicit separation of religion and politics alongside Parliament’s embrace of Catholic relief represented a shift in British self-conception. The Gordon Riots—and the preceding riots that took place in Scotland between 1778–79—confirmed the growing instability of Protestantism as a basis for political unity.Thus the compounding devastations of war destroyed the imperial scaffolding that bound North American Protestants to the Mother Country, even as that scaffolding was also falling apart in Britain. In her final chapters, Carté cleverly reframes the postwar explosion of new Protestant denominations and disestablishmentarian efforts across North America not as the beginning of a new religious era but as the concluding chapters in this imperial story. As the American people flocked to new awakened congregations and viewed disestablishment as a symbolic rejection of British authority, the explicit links between Protestant churches and government institutions weakened. That is not to say that the author claims that religion played any less of a prominent role in American public life or that politicians did not capitalize on providential language. Rather, she concludes by stating that the missionary turn of the nineteenth century and the awakened church movement united white Protestants around the language of “religio-racial” unity in place of imperial unity (365) as they actively worked to forge new transatlantic connections. A deeply nuanced and meticulously researched view of the erosion of British imperial Protestant scaffolding, Carté’s work is sure to influence scholarship on religion and the American Revolution for years to come.

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