Item Detail
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21921
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0
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0
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English
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The American Moral Establishment : Religion and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century
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Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Ph.D. diss.
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"The relationship of religion to political governance is one of the most vexed questions in the modern world, but it is a central tenet of the American myth that the United States has solved the problem with the advent of modern religious liberty. In fact the United States maintained an established or state-supported religion through much of its history. The moral establishment moved through the proxy of laws designed, in the explanation of its proponents, to uphold public morals and good order. But the moral establishment often upheld a religiously derived morality, so although the establishment was not forthrightly a religious establishment, religious ideals still possessed the coercive power of law. Law in the nineteenth century became a way of advancing a regulatory regime that held a relative view of individual rights, rigidly subordinated to what courts thought was the good of the whole, and it was the moral establishment that prescribed the duties that citizens owed to one another and to the state. Part of that prescribed moral obligation entailed the limitation, the situational qualification, or even the flat denial of individual rights to women, Afro-Americans, and religious minorities including Catholics, Mormons, and free thinkers. Yet the paradox of the moral establishment was that as it increased its reach and attained a more-fully elaborated symbolic repertory and a finer-grained articulation of the limits of moral behavior, its proponents felt increasingly uneasy. Its growing intermediate range, neither forthrightly supporting Christianity nor effecting a complete separation of religion and government, left some proponents worried that it was a house built on sand, whose uncertain stability resulted from a lack of clear connection to what they took to be the rock bed of Christianity. Historians have typically taken religious rhetoric on face value, assuming that the decline in religious power was real, but ultimately the religious rhetoric of decline served to further consolidate the establishment's support. By the end of the nineteenth century the moral establishment was more firmly entrenched than it had been at the beginning, and religious hold on the levers of public life was tighter than ever." [Author's abstract]