What did the Presbyterians who met in 1788 intend regarding political theology? If the amended Confession did fundamentally change the church’s ostensible relationship to the state, did even a conception of the federal (or national) government that was explicitly secular nonetheless leave room underneath-in municipalities, states, and in other socio-cultural institutions for a diversity of approaches to political theology? My proposition is to answer yes, and to propose what I hope is a useful taxonomy to understand the development of the political theology within the United States in the 19th century.

            Between the federal Constitution’s promulgation and Massachusetts’s disestablishment of its state church in 1833, Reformed Protestant communities could be organized into three relatively distinct theopolitical tribes:

1. New England’s waning pseudo-theocracy, complete with establishmentarian constitutions, legally sanctioned tithes, and state supported churches and clerics.
2. The Middle State’s Whiggish cultural establishmentarianism, that presumed a Christian social and political order and the state’s rhetorical—but not politically establishmentarian—affirmation of that order.
3. An aggressively Aristotelian South per William Goetzmann, where the lack of churches and a history of Anglican establishmentarianism bred forceful anticlericalism and a reliance on natural law and natural rights over Biblical political prescriptions. Bertram Wyatt-Brown described the South as an almost primeval and pagan political society that was nonetheless informed by Biblical folk-culture.

            Two recent examples from Presbyterian ministers—James Baird’s King of Kings and Alan Strange’s Empowered Witness—provide examples of good faith engagements with 19th century political theology that nonetheless miss the mark on the theopolitical imagination of the Early Republic and Civil War Era. Baird’s King of Kings lays out a compelling case for what he sees is the necessity of government support for the Christian religion rendered from the Westminster Confession and American Presbyterian history. Baird is certainly right that Presbyterians in the Middle States presumed that the government would rhetorically affirm Christianity. But he carries this too far and seems to make it a case for government politically ensuring Christianity through by state action, a notion that was widely and ferociously rejected in the Early Republic by every major Protestant group except for Unitarian-influenced New England. His assertion that the Founding generation continued to see government as nursing father of religion in continuity with previous generations of Protestant thinker is problematic, precisely because the magistrate’s participation in the ecclesiastical order was what the Revolutionary generation wanted to curtail; the fact that they were not aggressive secularists did not mean they accepted the magistrate’s role in ecclesiastical governance or even survival.

Alan Strange’s Empowered Witness makes a case for the spirituality of the church by proposing that Charles Hodge’s moderate version of the spirituality of the church was superior to James Henley Thornwell’s aggressive and (and by inference pro-slavery) spirituality of the church. Strange therefore positions Hodge as the right or true representative of the spirituality of the church over the obviously more distasteful slaveholding Thornwell. The problem is that Hodge’s Princeton was far more political than Strange concedes. More likely, Hodge was fundamentally not as committed to the spirituality of the church doctrine as Strange wants him to be, precisely because Strange understandably does not want to cede the doctrine to southern Presbyterians associated with slavery. Strange admits quite openly that he is the first scholar to associate Hodge with the spirituality of the church doctrine.[1] But Hodge was far more political with his churchmanship than Thornwell was with his, and with good reason no other scholars see the Hodge as a devotee of the spirituality of the church as it was articulated in the 19^th century and as it is articulated by its most aggressive partisans in the 21^st century. Paul Gutjarh notes in his biography of Hodge that the Princetonian had “little patience” with fellow Presbyterians who “believed the church should play no role in political discussions.” Foremost among the Presbyterians who preached a truly spiritual Gospel that annoyed Hodge was none other than James Henley Thornwell. Strange’s analysis is well intended, but his argument seems to be little more than an assertion that distasteful historical theologians could not possible be true practitioners of a doctrine because they were distasteful. 

No figure in American church history has been more associated with the doctrine of the spirituality of the church than James Henley Thornwell, and for good reason. Southern Presbyterians worked as state-supported intellectuals—Thornwell served as President of South Carolina College—who articulated the most aggressively disestablishmentarian articulation of Calvinist political theology in 19th century North America. During the American Revolution Virginia Presbyterians announced that “the Religion of Jesus Christ may and ought to be committed to the Protection, Guidance & Blessing of its Divine Author and needs not the Interposition of any Human Power for its Establishment & Support.” Their definition of human power undoubtedly included the state. Southern Presbyterians were not, at least in their understanding of establishments, theocrats. And yet the disestablishmentarian order certainty allowed southern Presbyterians to exercise outsized cultural, social, and political power in ways unthinkable in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England in the same era. The southern paradox was that disestablishment in a geography the size of Western Europe with little federal or state institutional presence meant that the church as an institution filled non-state civil, cultural, educational, and other social functions it otherwise would not have. Southern Presbyterian churches were socio-political hearts of communities where children were educated and where enthusiastic political meetings were held. Disestablishment by the middle of the 19th century led to an ecclesiocentric order in the South, where practical secularism had been the norm during the Enlightenment-influenced 18th century. In the 19^th century South, secular politics created the conditions for a disestablished dominion of unparalleled ecclesiastical socio-political influence.

[1] Strange, Empowered Witness, 22.