Eric Schlereth | A Tale of Two Deists: John Fitch, Elihu Palmer, and the Boundary of Tolerable Religious Expression in Early National Philadelphia | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1

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Eric Schlereth | A Tale of Two Deists: John Fitch, Elihu Palmer, and the Boundary of Tolerable Religious Expression in Early National Philadelphia | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1 | The History Cooperative

A Tale of Two Deists: John Fitch, Elihu Palmer, and the Boundary of Tolerable Religious Expression in Early National Philadelphia

For a few weeks in early 1792, heady disputes over the truth of Christianity moved into Philadelphia's streets and press. When deist pamphleteer and orator Elihu Palmer placed a notice in the National Gazette for a speech "against the divinity of Jesus Christ" that he intended to deliver in Philadelphia on a Sunday morning, he incited both a print war and local mob action against him. Philadelphian John Fitch anticipated this reaction to Palmer, recording in the pages of his autobiography that he believed Palmer's actions were "very imprudent."¹ Fitch knew of what he spoke; he was also a deist and an active member in the Universal Society, a small deist debate club he helped establish in 1790. During the society's two-year existence it had never aroused popular opposition on the streets or in the press. Unlike Palmer, Fitch and the members of the Universal Society understood where and how to express provocative religious opinions without attracting community ire.	1
The different reactions to Palmer and Fitch elucidate an informal boundary between acceptable and unacceptable religious expression in early national Philadelphia. This line was not a legal but rather a cultural construct that reflected local religious sensibilities and was maintained through local strategies for policing public order. Although the boundary of acceptability was fluid, it influenced where and how dissenters expressed controversial religious opinions. It was discernable in the geography of the city and in the content of the local print culture.² Members of the Universal Society expressed their deism in the semiprivate realm of a debate club, where radical ideas and conversation would only be heard by and shared with people who willingly joined. As a result, Fitch's society was accommodated spatially in the city, and its presence was tolerated within civil society. On the contrary, Palmer's proposed oration was controversial because he announced it in a local newspaper, publicizing deism in a way that the Universal Society never did. Philadelphians therefore challenged his presence in the city and in the local public sphere by deploying social and political mechanisms that ordered urban life in the 1790s.	2
The 1792 Palmer controversy reveals the daily exchanges that solidified and enforced Philadelphia's boundary of acceptable religious expression. The polemicists and rioters in 1792 all subscribed to a resonant political fiction that American civil society and political culture had only a finite capacity for dealing with conflicting religious opinions. The Palmer controversy indicates that early national Philadelphians defined the religious standards of their community, and attempted to limit religious difference within their community, by using newspaper debate and crowd action as opposed to legal pronouncements or abstract philosophical treatises. In doing so, all controversy participants, including Palmer and his opponents, demonstrated their commitment to ideas and practices that promoted religious toleration—an approach that emphasized a balance between the common good and religious freedom at the expense of the latter if necessary.	3
Philadelphians were committed to a narrow understanding of religious toleration premised on locally enforced boundaries between private belief and public expression over freedom of conscience—an idea that had yet to embed itself in American culture. Although adoption of the federal Constitution advanced an intellectual shift toward an understanding of religion as a matter of opinion and a legal shift toward freedom of conscience, this was a process that moved only haltingly. Reaction to Palmer's announcement reveals that early national Americans adhered to the practices of religious toleration even as the ideals of their Revolution and the guarantees of the new Bill of Rights and federal Constitution encouraged them to accept more expansive ideas of religious freedom. This conflict between political ideals and local practices was central to how early national Philadelphians grappled with epistemological questions regarding religious truth and their political implications. Specifically, Philadelphians contested the extent of permissible religious toleration in a political and cultural domain between private religious belief and the formal realms of constitutional deliberation.	. . .

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