Book Review

Canada and the United States

This work on the demise of the Congregational Standing Order in Massachusetts is chronologically framed by the state's constitutional decisions of 1780 and 1833. The former maintained established religion in Article three of the state's new constitution; the latter disestablished it. During the intervening half-century, asserts Peter S. Field, a culture war emerged between two Congregational parties in the Boston area: a Harvard-educated "Brahmin" party of rational or liberal Christians (incipient Unitarians) and an almost exclusively Yale-educated, conservative party of orthodox or evangelical Calvinists. Although both parties sought to uphold the Standing Order and to benefit from the Congregational alliance with the state, decades of infighting—culminating in the infamous 1821 "Dedham decision"—eviscerated the Standing Order. The 1833 vote in favor of religious disestablishment proved little more than a formal confirmation of the Standing Order's moribund status.

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In a lively, clear, but not completely satisfying way, Field examines Boston's Congregational clerical elite through the lens of a "social history of intellectuals" (p. 3). Early chapters perceptively trace the emergence of the Boston Brahmins, "America's first coterie of professional intellectuals" (p. 53). Known for their high literary (and correspondingly low theological) tastes, Brahmin ministers cultivated the favor of a nouveau-riche class of merchants whose status as parishioners—not as church communicants—bespoke their indifference toward orthodox Calvinism's demand for conversion. This mercantile elite bankrolled ministerial salaries and supported high culture through patronage of new literary institutions (the Monthly Anthology and the Boston Athenaeum). The crowning achievement of this emerging Boston aristocracy was its takeover of Harvard, symbolized by the controversial election of Henry Ware to the Hollis professorship in 1805 and solidified during the presidency of John Thornton Kirkland (1810–1828).

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