Revolution as Reformation: Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832

By William Harrison Taylor, Bryan A. Banks, David Bebbington and 7 more

Essays that explore how Protestants responded to the opportunities and perils of revolution in the transatlantic age
 
Revolution as Reformation: Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832 highlights the role that Protestantism played in shaping both individual and collective responses to revolution. These essays explore the various ways that the Protestant tradition, rooted in a perpetual process of recalibration and reformulation, provided the lens through which Protestants experienced and understood social and political change in the Age of Revolutions. In particular, they call attention to how Protestants used those changes to continue or accelerate the Protestant imperative of refining their faith toward an improved vision of reformed religion.
 
The editors and contributors define faith broadly: they incorporate individuals as well as specific sects and denominations, and as much of “life experience” as possible, not just life within a given church. In this way, the volume reveals how believers combined the practical demands of secular society with their personal faith and how, in turn, their attempts to reform religion shaped secular society.
 
The wide-ranging essays highlight the exchange of Protestant thinkers, traditions, and ideas across the Atlantic during this period. These perspectives reveal similarities between revolutionary movements across and around the Atlantic. The essays also emphasize the foundational role that religion played in people’s attempts to make sense of their world, and the importance they placed on harmonizing their ideas about religion and politics. These efforts produced novel theories of government, encouraged both revolution and counterrevolution, and refined both personal and collective understandings of faith and its relationship to society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780817393328

Book preview

REVOLUTION AS REFORMATION

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Series Editors

John M. Giggie

Charles A. Israel

Editorial Advisory Board

Catherine A. Brekus

Paul Harvey

Sylvester A. Johnson

Joel W. Martin

Ronald L. Numbers

Beth Schweiger

Grant Wacker

Judith Weisenfeld

REVOLUTION AS REFORMATION

Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832

EDITED BY PETER C. MESSER AND WILLIAM HARRISON TAYLOR

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion Pro

Cover image: Detail from Man Child, Nation of God, Borne on the White Horse, July 4th, 1776 [. . .], ca. 1874, chromolithograph print, 92 × 122 cm; photograph from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LCN 2018756249

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2075-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9332-8

For Judy and Denise

CONTENTS

Introduction

Peter C. Messer and William Harrison Taylor

1. Pierre Bayle’s Revolutionary Script: Protestant Apologetics and the 1688 Revolutions in England and Thailand

Bryan A. Banks

2. Eleutheria (1698): Cotton Mather’s History of the Idea of Liberty That Links the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution

Rick Kennedy

3. Presbyterian Confederal Ideology from the Imperial British Constitution to the New United States

Gideon Mailer

4. Old Light Republicanism: Samuel Williams’s Political Theology of Temptation

Peter C. Messer

5. Conscious of Their Own Idolatry: American Newspapers, the Suppression of the Jesuits, and American Religious Liberty

William Harrison Taylor

6. Rabaut Saint-Étienne and the Huguenot Fight for Religious Freedom

Katrina Jennie-Lou Wheeler

7. Under the Claw of an Inraged Lion: Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Benjamin Hoadly, and the Meaning of the Glorious Revolution

S. Scott Rohrer

8. Redefining Protestant and Catholic Space in Languedoc after the French Revolution

Rebecca K. McCoy

9. Here Is the Reformation That Is So Much Wanting: The Times and Travails of Christopher Marshall, Disowned Quaker

S. Spencer Wells

10. Freedom from Bondage, Freedom from Sin: Transatlantic Black Protestantism in the Age of Revolutions

Anderson R. Rouse

Conclusion

David Bebbington

Notes

Bibliography

About the Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

Peter C. Messer and William Harrison Taylor

This is a study in Protestantism. Specifically, this book explores the influence of Protestant theology and practice on the political revolutions that swept through the Atlantic World between 1688 and 1832. Some of the essays focus on individual Protestants whose experiences of revolution encouraged their efforts to reform religion and themselves in ways that had significant consequences for both their faith and their communities. Others explore how Protestants confronting revolutionary change organized to both promote and protect their vision of the Christian faith in ways that shaped the polities in which they lived. By exploring the various experiences of these revolutionaries—religious and political theorists, reform-minded individuals and congregations, and people making sense of a world in which their lives had been upended—in North America, France, and the Black Loyalist diaspora, Revolution as Reformation places the broad and shifting contours of faith at the center of over a century of social and political change. It reveals how these reimagined forms of Protestantism shaped individual and collective religious practice and, in the process, contributed to evolving ideas both about the role of religion in a polity and society and about the shape and form of the governments that emerged throughout this period. Taken as a whole, the essays illustrate the ways in which ideas about and experiences of religion developed in tandem with ideas about and experiences with politics, highlighting the interdependence, if not harmony, between the secular and sacred in the long eighteenth century.

This collection focuses primarily on the intersection of Protestant religion and republican revolution in a long eighteenth century, and it thus highlights the experiences of Protestants in the broader Anglo-American world and France between 1688 and 1832. Historical comparisons between the American and French Revolutions have a long scholarly tradition, though they have almost always explored the similarities and differences in their understanding of republican ideology and their experience of sudden political change.¹ Protestantism has not featured prominently in the comparisons. The scholarly lacuna is understandable, as in the American case the Protestant churches that dominated religious affiliation in the colonies and the United States took a leading role in advocating for revolutionary change. In France, Protestants approached the Revolution from the perspective of outsiders in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, a status that was reinforced when the Revolution took a decidedly anticlerical turn, culminating in the persecution of both Catholics and Protestants. If the revolutionary settlements in both nations involved a greater level of tolerance, the Protestant experience nonetheless remained distinct. The increased acceptance in the United States underscored the power and influence of various Protestant groups, while in France that sentiment reflected interests of a decidedly still-Catholic French state intent on minimizing social strife.² This collection hopes to complicate that narrative of difference by using the broadly shared Protestant impulse toward religious reformation, both individual and collective, to highlight the shared perspectives that animated Protestant involvement in these revolutions. The prospect of social and political change, for both the Anglo-Americans leading it and the French Huguenots reacting to it, offered an opportunity to reimagine the relationship of the group or individual to society and the polity, with important ramifications for both those who shared their faith and many who did not.

The relationship between religion and revolution has received extensive treatment from historians of both the United States and France. The overwhelming emphasis has fallen on the ways in which religion provided a means to understand abstract political concepts, particularly in the mobilization of people in defense of constitutional principles or in opposition to corrupt or unenlightened governments. Accordingly, in the United States scholars exploring the relationship between religion and revolution have highlighted the ways religion helped explain the foundations of the colonies’ opposition to parliamentary authority, giving resistance the veneer of divine approval and conveying to it a sense of moral necessity. The long struggle between Dissenters and the Church of England, scholars have argued, created a sensitivity to the dangers of political corruption and a vocabulary to translate that experience into a moral crusade capable of mobilizing wide swaths of the population.³ Other historians have pointed to the controversy surrounding attempts to create an Anglican bishop in North America and the Quebec Act’s recognition of Catholicism in the newly acquired French territories as examples of how religiously minded colonists came to understand the dangers inherent in unchecked imperial authority.⁴ Still other scholars have focused on the way in which the political struggles took on new meanings in light of long-standing Calvinist ideas in New England. The gradual conflation of English liberty and the preservation of a Protestant empire; the belief in a covenant or contract between rulers and ruled severed by the manifest corruption of the latter; the visions of an impending apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and evil all provided invaluable tools for explaining the stakes in the secular political struggle and motivating Americans to oppose parliamentary authority and to resist the armies sent to enforce it.⁵ Another school of thought has highlighted the emergence of a Christian/Whig synthesis that conflated resistance to political corruption and the pursuit of civic virtue with the evangelical call for personal and communal reformation and rebirth.⁶ Still another has traced the influence of the evangelical style of preaching as a means of persuasion, the democratizing message implicit in the Great Awakening’s challenge to ministerial authority, and the practical experience gained as congregations mobilized to use political means to defend their religious interests.⁷

Scholars of the role of religion in the French Revolution have approached the subject in a similar manner, highlighting how religious experiences and concerns fit into the story of a largely secular revolution. There has been considerable work done exploring how people of faith, lay Catholics most particularly, contributed to the coming of the Revolution, its subsequent struggles, and the emergence of a nominally secular state in the decades that followed.⁸ As members of the minority religion, Protestants have largely been sidelined in these studies. Scholars have recognized how individual Huguenots, acting in a secular capacity as subjects and citizens, contributed to the Revolution and its settlement, but the lack of a substantial religious infrastructure meant that, in this interpretation, the church and its Protestant theology played no such role.⁹ More recently, scholars have focused on the ways critics of the ancien régime used religious arguments and the Huguenot experience to make the case for political reform and, eventually, pave the way for revolution. They have charted how the presence of a substantial French Huguenot population effectively undermined the myth of a monolithic French state symbolized by the unity of the monarchy and the church. Just as important, the discrimination that Protestant dissenters experienced at the hands of the French state illustrated the abuse of power and the perversion of justices that reformers, both secular and scared, had come to associate with the ancien régime. In France, the Huguenot method of resistance by targeting symbols of authority provided a model for subsequent attacks by Jansenist Catholics and secular philosophes on the absolutist church and state; debates over how to accommodate Huguenots in first a reformed monarchy and then a revolutionary state also prompted a broader reconsideration of the meaning and boundaries of citizenship.¹⁰

Without disputing those arguments this collection of essays offers a different perspective, one that highlights the contribution of religious, and particularly Protestant, thought to the creation and evolution of secular revolution. Such an approach seems fruitful in light of several recent scholarly trends exploring the opportunities revolution offered religious groups and the changes it invited in both theology and practice. Historians of American religion, for example, have called our attention to how political change fostered, among different groups, a reason-based ecumenical Christianity and an invigorated commitment to evangelical Protestantism.¹¹ Others have pointed to how, variously, individuals understood the Enlightenment’s revolutionary implications through the lens of religion; the Revolution prompted ministers to merge religious and political arguments to promote moral reform and fiscal responsibility; and cultural conservatives crafted popular literature to lampoon the secularization and heretical religious beliefs they feared the Revolution had introduced.¹² In light of these works highlighting the important synergistic relationship between political change and religion, Revolution as Reformation highlights how the ideas and experiences of self-identified Protestants, acting in accordance with distinctly Protestant principles, contributed to the largely secular revolutionary settlements between 1688 and 1832. Michael Walzer offered a blueprint for this idea in his exploration of the ways in which Calvinist theology posited a difference between saints and the unregenerate population, a difference that required a secular government capable of imposing order on both groups.¹³ This collection builds on this theory by exploring three additional dimensions of Protestant thought: its emphasis on the individual person’s right and responsibility to interpret the Bible, its emphasis on the ability to revise and revisit central assumptions about the faith, and the consequent willingness to adapt in response to particular contexts.

The first of these principles was the Protestant assumption that the project of reforming religion was never complete. As Alister E. McGrath notes, At its heart, Protestantism represents a constant return to the Bible to revalidate and where necessary restate its beliefs and values, refusing to allow any one generation or individual to determine what is definitive for Protestantism as a whole.¹⁴ This quest for improvement reflected the idea of post tenebras lux (light after darkness), or the belief that individual or collective spiritual journey toward a more reformed religion would reflect the political, social, and economic conditions in which a person or people lived.¹⁵ That process of reformation, emerging out of the struggles of contemporary times, both reinforced and was reinforced by the power that Protestantism granted individuals to define their own faith through individual interpretation of Scripture—often without any particular regard for orthodoxy. As the seventeenth-century theologian William Chillingworth noted, the foundation of the faith did not lie in "the Doctrine of Luther, or Calvin, or Melanchthon; nor the Confession of Augusta, or Geneva, nor the Catechism of Heidelberg, nor the Articles of the Church of England, no nor the Harmony of Protestant Confessions," but was found sola scriptura, in the individual interaction with the Bible in the pursuit of an improved faith.¹⁶ This sense of empowerment, of course, lay behind Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers, which not only conveyed the ability of individuals to pursue the broader project of reform, but also compelled them to hold their ecclesiastical leaders to account if they threatened or ignored the true understanding of the faith. These principles and motivations were behind the Protestant contributions to the Age of Revolutions and form the common thread that connects the essays in this collection.

While the collection highlights how Protestantism reflected a syncretic interaction with the secular world, it does not presume that the influence operated in a single way or direction. The essays by Rick Kennedy and Bryan A. Banks, for example, illustrate how the power that Protestantism placed in the hands of individuals to shape their faith and to advance the cause of reformed religion could produce very different views on the relationship between politics and religion. Kennedy’s essay, "Eleutheria (1698): Cotton Mather’s History of the Idea of Liberty That Links the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, explores the libertarian political theology that Mather crafted in response to England’s Glorious Revolution, when the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange and his English wife, Mary, at the invitation of powerful English Protestants, replaced James II on the English throne. As Kennedy explains, Mather used the biblically based concepts of the Eleutherians and Idumæans to make a case for the new English monarch, William III, as well as to champion the cause of political and religious liberty in the service of Protestantism against its religious and political foes. On the other hand, Banks’s essay, Pierre Bayle’s Revolutionary Script: Protestant Apologetics and the 1688 Revolutions in England and Thailand," highlights how in response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (a revocation that ended the French state’s loose toleration of Protestantism), Pierre Bayle crafted a secular political ideology devoid of theology that transformed French Huguenots from potential subversives into loyal subjects. To illustrate his argument, in contrast to Mather, Bayle argued that the Glorious Revolution was an example of dramatic political change that had its origins primarily in secular political disputes and therefore should not be viewed, by either side, as vindication of a particular theology. In each case—Mather and Bayle—the individual confronted political change through the lens of a Protestant worldview. This worldview endowed the individual with the ability to derive meaning from Scripture, informed and directed by the individual’s experiences in the wider world and the realities they imposed, or the opportunities they offered, for the sake of the faith. For Mather that represented an opportunity to tie the monarchy even more closely to a Calvinist scriptural heritage, while for Bayle it represented an acknowledgment that in order for French Protestantism to prosper it needed to divorce itself from the state.

A similar vision of the role of Protestantism as the source of revolutionary change appears in the essays by Gideon Mailer, Peter C. Messer, William Harrison Taylor, and Katrina Jennie-Lou Wheeler, though with variations according to conditions, time, and place. Mailer’s essay, Presbyterian Confederal Ideology from the Imperial British Constitution to the New United States, explains how the confederal structure of Scottish Presbyterianism emerged out of a theological imperative to provide congregations the freedom to pursue and encourage their spiritual development and to ensure the spread of the gospel. Consequently, when the British government began violating the secular confederal relationship between the colonies and the empire, Scottish Presbyterians in the colonies understood the crisis in theological terms. Guided by their experience in the patronage controversy between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, they saw that the erosion of confederal political boundaries could easily bleed into the erosion of confederal sectarian boundaries to their detriment, justifying and necessitating resistance. Similarly, after independence, the need to preserve those boundaries inspired Scottish Presbyterians to embrace the confederal state governments as a bulwark to preserve their sectarian identity. Messer’s essay, Old Light Republicanism: Samuel Williams’s Political Theology of Temptation, highlights how a theological controversy between New Light and Old Light Calvinists over the origin of sin and its role in the world led Samuel Williams, an Old Light minister, to craft his own variation of Calvinist theology. Arguing in favor of human perfectibility, Williams replaced sin with temptation as the primary obstacle to individual and collective salvation. Williams used the same logic behind his theological innovation—that the principle task of religion lay in preparing people to overcome temptation—to outline a path for the success of the United States’ republican political experiment. In the same way that well-prepared Christians would not succumb to sin, Williams argued, well-prepared republican citizens would not succumb to political corruption.

Taylor and Wheeler offer interpretations more in keeping with the relationship between Protestantism and revolution outlined by Bayle. Taylor’s essay, ‘Conscious of Their Own Idolatry’: American Newspapers, the Suppression of the Jesuits, and American Religious Liberty, explores how Protestant attempts to fashion a more unified body of believers out of the myriad of Christian sects that had emerged since the Reformation led eighteenth-century Americans to reconsider their traditional hostility toward Catholic France. This theological realignment had its origin in the suppression of the Jesuits—whom American colonists had long viewed as the primary agents of what they saw as Catholicism’s spiritual oppression—by Portugal, Spain, France, and even the Vatican. Interpreting this development as a sign that the Catholic Church was open to reformation, ideally along Protestant lines, Americans became more tolerant of Catholicism and found themselves willing to embrace a political alliance with France against Great Britain, who many American Protestants believed had succumbed to the corrupting influence of the Jesuits. Wheeler’s essay, Rabaut Saint-Étienne and the Huguenot Fight for Religious Freedom, explaining Saint-Étienne’s efforts to secure first toleration and then freedom of worship for Huguenots, reflects the logical extension of Bayle’s refiguring of the relationship between religion and the state. Saint-Étienne made the case for toleration by emphasizing that religious differences did not preclude Protestants from being valuable members of the French kingdom, and then insisting that an open acceptance of Protestant religious practices was the only way to ensure that religion did not threaten the good order of the state. The end result was not simply an acceptance of Protestants, but an acceptance of the sense of community and public affirmation of faith that, in Saint-Étienne’s mind, stood at the core of the Huguenot faith. The long-term consequences of Bayle’s effort to divorce theology from politics became, eventually, a way for French Protestants not only to enter the state but also to pursue, for a brief period, their faith on their own terms.

S. Scott Rohrer’s essay, ‘Under the Claw of an Inraged Lion’: Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Benjamin Hoadly, and the Meaning of the Glorious Revolution, offers an ironic counterpoint to the efforts of Bayle and Saint-Étienne to separate religion and politics. Chandler, in many ways, wrote from a similar position as Bayle and Saint-Étienne. As an Anglican in a Congregationalist-dominated part of New Jersey, he was the voice of a religious minority, whose theological beliefs were assumed to be an extension of politically dangerous ideas. As with the French authors, Chandler used the theological freedom Protestantism offered to individuals to make the case that his religious views—in this case his desire to establish an Anglican bishop in North America—had no bearing on local or imperial politics; Chandler also stressed that his political views, particularly his suspicion of American resistance to parliamentary taxation, did not reflect his religious sentiments. Unfortunately, his efforts were complicated by another important quality of Protestantism, the need to confront and correct error. In Bayle’s case this impulse had led him to challenge the prevailing Calvinist belief that the Glorious Revolution represented an act of divine retribution against Catholicism and prompted him to argue for a secular vision of revolution. Chandler, however, could never successfully divorce himself from his profound belief, reflected in his commentary on the theological debates surrounding the Glorious Revolution, in the importance of a powerful state church headed by bishops and a monarch to check the dangers of theological and political democracy. Consequently, Chandler failed in both his theological efforts to secure a bishop and his political effort to persuade Americans to reconcile with Great Britain.

Taken together these essays underscore the ways in which Protestantism did not simply overlap with the political currents surrounding eighteenth-century revolutions, but rather contributed their own distinct influences on those currents. Kennedy’s recreation of Cotton Mather’s libertarian strain of Calvinism makes the case that what we have interpreted as largely a defense of rights and liberties defined through secular literature, in fact, had an alternative religious origin. Calvinism did not simply reflect republican concerns with corruption but gave a sacred responsibility to governors to protect the liberties of the governed as a precondition for promoting Christian salvation. Mailer illustrates how the confederal system distributing power among state, federal, and local authorities was shaped by Presbyterian ideas of the vision of healthy and viable churches. Messer, similarly, outlines how the reconfiguration of republican ideology in the United States to divorce virtue from the state drew from Calvinist theology as well as the influences of the Scottish Enlightenment and classical republicanism. Although Banks’s argument points to a different conclusion—the removal of religion from revolution and from the state—it nonetheless emerges from a similarly religious starting point, Pierre Bayle’s education as a Huguenot and his experience as both a Protestant and a loyal French subject.¹⁷

Intertwined with these broader links between religion and secular political innovation lies the connection between Protestantism and religious toleration. The role of eighteenth-century revolutions in prompting an acceptance of religious toleration in the United States is familiar to historians. Scholars have focused on two related causes for the new nation’s embrace of religious toleration. Either the intense competition between churches ultimately revealed the futility and danger of an established church, prompting theists and deists alike to separate the church and the state, or the necessities of revolutionary mobilization prompted a pragmatic reconsideration of religious establishments.¹⁸ This collection, however, highlights the ways in which the same Protestant principles that inspired broader political change also contributed to the new republic’s embrace of religious toleration. Messer highlights how Williams’s faith in human perfectibility led him to embrace toleration on the principle that theological errors would be gradually uncovered and corrected as people learned to overcome temptation. Rohrer notes how Chandler’s efforts to craft a compromise between his Congregationalist neighbors and the Church of England led him to embrace Benjamin Hoadly’s doctrine of adiaphora, or the possibility that a polity could accommodate different religious practices provided they shared broad theological principles. More directly, Taylor points out how the Protestant reimagining of Catholics, at the expense of the Jesuits, prompted Americans not only to offer further tolerance to Catholics, but also to override concerns about any particular group and unite across sectarian divides. Mailer makes the case that toleration was an essential component of the Scottish confederal vision of church organization and that it played an important role in defining the boundaries between church and state in the new republic. Quite simply, if Scottish Presbyterians were to see their vision of a redeemed people realized they would have to rest assured that no state would interfere with their practices.

Religious toleration emerged in a slightly different form in France than in the United States, as an acknowledgment that state involvement in the religious realm tended to promote unwanted and unneeded dissention among the people. When exploring Protestantism’s role in this process most scholars have focused on how Huguenots, and their allies, made the case for toleration by contending that their participation in the state would only contribute to its strength and stability. Like-minded authors also noted that exclusion of law-abiding Protestants from the state highlighted the excesses of monarchical authority.¹⁹ Banks’s analysis of Bayle’s vision of secular revolution, however, reveals the role that his Calvinist education played in shaping his commitment to the freedom of conscience and, by extension, toleration for religious dissenters. Similarly, Wheeler illustrates how Saint-Étienne made the case for religious toleration based on two tenets central to his Protestant faith: that a careful reading of Scripture made the case for public worship, and that this type of worship was essential to preventing religious extremism. Religious extremism, he argued, was a threat not only to good theology but also to the good order of the state.

Rebecca K. McCoy’s essay, Redefining Protestant and Catholic Space in Languedoc after the French Revolution, builds on these ideas by illustrating how the failures of state-sponsored toleration under Napoléon Bonaparte produced the White Terror in 1815 and, as a consequence, secured a distinctly Protestant vision of religious toleration in France. As McCoy explains, in the Concordat of 1801 and the Organic Articles of 1802 Napoléon sought to enforce religious toleration as a means of ending sectarian conflict and division within France. Unfortunately, while the laws could create de jure toleration, de facto toleration lay beyond reach as the laws did not address the day-to-day reality of conflict between Catholics and Huguenots—a conflict that, as McCoy notes, was made manifest in increasingly violent confrontations over spaces each group viewed as essential to its faith. The solution lay in the gradual acceptance of a decidedly Protestant vision of sacred space (tied to the presence of the faithful), faith (an inherently private matter), and national community (defined by the inclusion of several groups rather than the embodiment of one). Of course, as McCoy stresses, the realization of this vision ultimately depended on the state’s willingness to fund the creation of spaces around which the national community of diverse privately held faiths could cohere.

The remaining two essays in the volume offer a different vision of the relationship between reformation and revolution, highlighting the way in which secular developments shaped religious belief and practice. As Mark A. Noll has argued, a defining feature of American religion lay in the ways in which theology emerged out of the collision of broad theological principles and the social, political, and economic facts on the ground.²⁰ Highlighting one dimension of this synergistic evolution, Taylor’s exploration of eighteenth-century American Protestants’ retreat from anti-Catholicism reveals how elements of received religious wisdom evolved when faced with new circumstances. S. Spencer Wells’s and Anderson R. Rouse’s essays offer personal illustrations of Noll’s thesis. Wells’s essay, ‘Here Is the Reformation That Is So Much Wanting’: The Times and Travails of Christopher Marshall, Disowned Quaker, chronicles how the rapid economic, political, and social change surrounding the American Revolution reinforced Christopher Marshall’s suspicion of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s growing emphasis on disciplining its members for violating what it believed were Quakerism’s fundamental principles. Rouse’s essay, Freedom from Bondage, Freedom from Sin: Transatlantic Black Protestantism in the Age of Revolutions, highlights how five African American ministers crafted their personal visions of Christianity to reflect the realities they faced as Black men in a world controlled by white people. None of the individuals explored in these two essays remade Christianity, but their efforts highlight how Noll’s vision of the evolution of religion as it confronted, embraced, and resisted various intellectual currents and physical realities played out on a personal as well as a societal level.

The evolutions charted in these two chapters not only reflect the circumstances in which each man found himself; they also reveal broader themes in the revolutionary era. Marshall—much like John Jea and George White, two of the ministers Rouse examines—found himself at odds with orthodoxy but empowered by revolutionary conditions to continue his resistance. The American Revolution confirmed in Marshall’s mind the hypocrisy of the Quaker elders, whose attachment to worldly goods and the power they wielded over fellow members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had led them to abandon what he believed were Quakerism’s founding principles. Similar disownments, prompted by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s opposition to American independence, created a community of like-minded disowned Quakers who formed the Society of Free Quakers. While Marshall’s membership in this new society was ultimately short lived, he emerged more committed than ever to his distinct vision of Quaker Universalism. George White found within his Methodist communion both opposition and support. His unlettered and enthusiastic vision of Black Christianity generated opposition, whereas his ministry to his fellow African Americans garnered support. John Jea found in the revolutionary era support for his distinctive religious voice championing soul liberty as the key to personal salvation and what he believed was true freedom. His beliefs, as with Marshall’s, led him into a new community, a transatlantic alliance of Baptists whose support he enlisted in an effort to combat slavery and spread the gospel.

The same transatlantic community that empowered Jea, however, also underscored the limits of what the combination of religious commitment and revolutionary change could produce. George Liele, David George, and Boston King, like Jea and White, took advantage of the political turmoil surrounding the American Revolution to free themselves and promote a Christian faith that they believed would liberate former and current slaves. George and King quickly found themselves dependent on a network of white English evangelicals to support their efforts to proselytize among the former slaves relocated to Sierra Leone and the natives who already lived there. As a result, these men found their religious autonomy limited and their influence redirected to support the goals of their patrons. Liele’s spiritual freedom was similarly compromised. Freed during the Revolution, he relocated to Jamaica, where he established a successful mission among the island’s slaves and free Black people; white planter hostility, however, ensured that Liele never offered his congregation anything other than spiritual freedom, as he himself embraced the island’s slave-owning ethos. The revolutionary limits on Marshall’s reformed Quakerism were more self-imposed, a luxury the African American ministers did not enjoy. Marshall pointed to the Quaker establishment’s condemnation of slavery as another example of how the faith’s leaders had transgressed their appropriate boundaries.²¹

While it is not the intention of Revolution as Reformation to offer an exhaustive examination of the interplay between republican revolution and Protestantism during the long eighteenth century, the following chapters do reveal the significance of the faith in what are often seen, exclusively, as secular affairs. They call attention to the insight recently offered by James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley that for both better and worse religion and religious controversy acted as the chrysalis as well as a casualty of the modern political world, and that if ideology and ideological conflicts gradually preempted religion’s place in a politicized ‘public sphere’ largely of its own making, they did not cease in one way or another to bear the marks of various Christian origins.²² Each essay sheds light on how Protestants in revolutionary circumstances across the Atlantic established secular political theory, shaped religious thought and practice, and reimagined religion’s role in the state and society. While there was no singular approach taken by Protestants with regard to revolution, the chapters that follow, taken as a whole, show that the dynamic Protestant influence on republican revolution largely resulted from the common emphasis on the individual’s right and responsibility to interpret the Bible for themselves, the ability to revise and revisit central assumptions about the faith, and the consequent willingness to adapt in response to particular contexts. By highlighting the importance of the ideal of reformation to or within the Protestant experience of revolution, these chapters offer insight and elaboration into these varied processes, in the end further revealing the intimate relationship between sacred and secular in the Age of Revolutions.

1

PIERRE BAYLE’S REVOLUTIONARY SCRIPT

Protestant Apologetics and the 1688 Revolutions in England and Thailand

Bryan A. Banks

An orthodox Calvinist.¹ A Catholic-Calvinist.² A covert Socinian.³ An early deist.⁴ Indifferent to theology altogether.⁵ A crypto-atheist hostile to theological, dogmatic thought.⁶ There is much debate over the true religious conviction of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). He grew up in a small French Calvinist community just beneath the Pyrenees Mountains at a time of religious and political tumult. Like many in seventeenth-century France, Bayle was persecuted for his Reformed faith, and he fled the region. He converted to Catholicism in 1668 while attending the Jesuit college of Toulouse, only to abjure and return to the Calvinist fold in 1670 at Mazères. He studied theology in Geneva and worked as a private teacher until he, however briefly, found solace in the Protestant Academy of Sedan. In 1681, Louis XIV issued an arrêt (decree), closing the school and turning its property over to the Jesuits. Bayle fled again, this time from France into the Huguenot diaspora, landing in a position at the newly created École illustre in Rotterdam, the Dutch Republic. In Rotterdam, Bayle worked and wrote some of his most important tomes—those texts others took as evidence of his errant, apathetic, or hostile attitude toward organized religion.⁷ Bayle’s writings, most notably his Nouvelles de la république des lettres (1684–87) and Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), proved canonical for eighteenth-century secular rationalists as well as those few overt atheists.⁸

The religion of the so-called Philosopher of Rotterdam is difficult to ascertain, or at the very least to describe in terms conventional to his life. Those who bypass the problem often refer to Bayle as a Protestant philosopher or a Huguenot exile, defined by his Reformed heritage more than any explicit religious conviction. Owing greatly to the Calvinist intellectual tradition, as he did, does not necessarily make him a devout Orthodox, just as challenging Calvinist doctrine and communal performance does not incontrovertibly make him a prototypical atheist. Bayle’s true religious beliefs may be undiscoverable, but what we can say for certain is that Bayle’s intellectual work, his tireless erudition, and his devotion to skeptical thought denuded the mysteries of more established faiths, moderate or fanatical, and undoubtedly fashioned his own thought. As Richard Popkin correctly noted, Bayle’s devotion to study and the systematic exposition of his thought allowed him to maintain an unemotional religion of the heart.⁹ Pierre Jurieu, Bayle’s once friend and later fierce critic, leveled charges of religious indifferentism at him in 1687.¹⁰

How did Bayle come to develop such an unemotional, skeptical approach to religion? Elisabeth Larousse and the contextualists of the Cambridge school would answer this question by pointing to the traumatic role of the late seventeenth-century confessionalization; the vitriolic, theological debate between Catholics and Protestants (known as the Controverse); Bayle’s expulsion from France; the deaths of family members; and his subsequent intellectual community of the Huguenot diaspora. French state-sponsored religious oppression led Bayle toward a kind of religious indifferentism or an unemotional religion of the heart, but his philosophy was also the byproduct of a volatile period of war and revolution—revolution that for many remained best explained in confessional terms.¹¹ In 1688, the Dutch stadtholder and Protestant William of Orange overthrew the English, Catholic king James II. Many interpreted the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) to be the result of the same religious divisions that drove the French Wars of Religion (1562–98).

As such, the English example became a testing ground to imagine politics free from religious fervor and to reflect on the trauma of the Wars of Religion for many, including Bayle. He rebuked the religious narrative of 1688, disconnecting any kind of religious mentality from political action. While many Huguenots had supported William of Orange, Bayle found a way to cast their actions as purely political. Bayle took this approach most thoroughly in his Avis important aux réfugiés (1690). Published anonymously but thoroughly proven to have been written by Bayle, the Avis set off a controversy that encouraged Huguenots to distance themselves from the Glorious Revolution if they ever hoped to return to France.¹² Bayle represented the Huguenot population as essentially loyal to the French Crown. One way he did this was through exploring the political origins of the English revolution in 1688 as well as the so-called Siamese Revolution of 1688.¹³ Bayle used this comparative approach to disentangle religion from revolutionary action altogether, especially since the Southeast Asian revolution occurred without the influence of Protestants at all.¹⁴

While Bayle employed a discussion of revolutions in order to ameliorate the Calvinist political self-image, he also began to imagine a new form of political action, the secular revolution. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, in their coedited Scripting Revolution, advance a narratological understanding of modern revolutions.¹⁵ Comparative frameworks of revolution often hinge on cultural and contextual differences, making it difficult to draw useful parallels, but in 1789, Baker and Edelstein argue, a script of revolutionary change emerged that would be reused in subsequent revolutions. Revolutionaries, they state, have always been extremely self-conscious of (and often highly knowledgeable about) how previous revolutions unfolded. These revolutionary scripts offer frameworks for political action.¹⁶ This script is replete with acts and actors—old regimes and new social orders, learned elites mobilizing the masses in the name of high-minded, universal ideals—that, in turn, legitimize acts of violence. This internecine conflict simultaneously seeks to level social inequalities but seems heinously unequal to those who previously occupied socially privileged positions. And this script is not cast in stone but instead can be reordered, the details slightly rewritten, though the basic arc of this revolutionary narrative legitimizes their actions. For Baker and Edelstein, this script was largely developed in the 1789 revolutionary crucible. But the secular element of the modern narrative of revolutions commenced generations earlier, during the Controverse, when discourses surrounding revolutionary action were only just starting to take the stage.

This secularity had religious origins. Bayle’s philosophical position on revolution reflected a much deeper appreciation for freedom of conscience, an intellectual position he owed to his Calvinist theological upbringing. This attachment to freedom of conscience led Bayle to divorce religious conviction from revolutionary politics, but the same tradition of freedom of conscience led other Protestants at the time, like the Calvinist theologian Pierre Jurieu, toward revolutionary millenarianism. The evolution of a secular revolutionary script cannot be divorced from the religious contexts of its creation. Alexis de Tocqueville distinguished the French Revolution of 1789 from all preceding political revolutions; instead, he noted, the French Revolution shared more in common with the religious revolutions of the sixteenth century.¹⁷ Tocqueville stops at the level of analogy, but historians Carl Becker and Dale K. Van Kley have teased out the primacy of Christian theology, community, and controversy in their studies of early modern France.¹⁸ Their work challenges the ascendant rise of secular modernity and, by extension, those revolutions said to be the crucibles of the modern world, by retraining our attention to the realm of theological debate. Bayle’s theology, as difficult as it is to categorize and characterize, owed much to Calvinist freedom of conscience. By guarding that freedom of conscience, he advanced a secular interpretation of revolutionary politics that could then make room for freedom of religion.

Born in the Controverse: Between the Calvinist Scylla and the Catholic Charybdis

From his childhood, Pierre Bayle was torn between Calvinism and the Catholic Church. He was born in the small French village known then as Carla, since changed to Carla-Bayle to celebrate the hamlet’s philosopher. Near the Spanish frontier and in the sight of the Pyrenees Mountains, a Calvinist enclave developed during the sixteenth century. Bayle’s father was a Calvinist pastor and as such sent Pierre to a Calvinist school. Later, Bayle moved to the Jesuit college at Toulouse. Engrossed in controversial literature, Bayle soon converted to Catholicism. Not long passed before Bayle became a rélaps, an individual who returned to heresy following conversion. Such oscillations at such an early age set Bayle down a dangerous road both in the eyes of the French legal system (which did not look kindly on Calvinist conversion) and in the theological landscape of the Controverse, which demanded polarization in the years leading up to the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This revocation made Protestantism illegal in France and ended the period of religious toleration that had been heralded by the 1598 edict. Bayle weathered the rising storm in Geneva, studying philosophy and theology. In 1674, Bayle returned to France, holding positions as a tutor in Paris and Rouen. In 1675, he took up a professorship at the Protestant Academy of Sedan. He taught at the