Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 64:2 (Jun 2021)
Article: From Puritans To Patriots: The Republicanization Of American Theology, 1750–1835
Author: Obbie Tyler Todd

JETS 64:2 (June 2021) p. 341

From Puritans To Patriots: The Republicanization Of American Theology, 1750–1835

Obbie Tyler Todd*

^* Obbie Tyler Todd is Pastor of Third Baptist Church of Marion, Illinois, 1102 E. Boulevard St. 62959. He is also adjunct professor of theology at Luther Rice College and Seminary, 3038 Evans Mill Road Stonecrest, Georgia, 30038. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: While scholars and American religious historians have mainly addressed the effects of republicanism on church and state in the early United States, very few have examined how this ideology shaped theology proper. This article therefore presents the republican doctrine of God in America between 1750 and 1835. In the years between the First Great Awakening and the end of the Second, American Christians conceived of God as a reasonable, honorable, disinterested governor of a very public universe rather than an arbitrary, self-loving autocrat unaccountable to his subjects. During this time, God was essentially cast in the mold of the virtuous public servant, and this republicanization of theology both mirrored and reinforced the republicanization of America.

Key words: republican, republicanization, democratization, America, Puritan, patriot, disinterested, government, honor, virtue

When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831, he was originally tasked with studying its prisons. But after just nine months in the adolescent nation, the Frenchman had also gathered a sense of the American mind. Despite containing a number of generalizations about Americans and not a few of his own prejudices, Tocqueville’s subsequent Democracy in America (1835) captured what historian Gordon Wood has called “the ideology of the Enlightenment”: republicanism.1 For Tocqueville, American religion was both a puritanical and a republican religion. In fact, one “corresponded in many points with” the other. He keenly observed, “It may be asserted that in the United States no religious doctrine displays the slightest hostility to democratic and republican institutions. The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language, their opinions are consonant to the laws, and the human intellect flows onwards in one sole current.” In turn, Americans believed their faith “to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.”2 Throughout America, and especially in New England, the sons of Puritanism had become sons of liberty.3

JETS 64:2 (June 2021) p. 342

However, republicanism was not so m...