Reviews of Books

Errand into the Republic

Reviewed by David W. Kling, University of Miami

Informed by the typological categories proposed by H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic work Christ and Culture (New York, 1951), Jonathan Sassi argues that between 1783 and 1833 the New England Congregational clergy moved from a "Christ above culture" model to a "Christ the transformer of culture" model. Amid social, political, and religious upheavals, the clergy abandoned the centuries-old model of Christendom, with its church-state establishment, for a new model of voluntary action. A new conception of the relationship between church and state emerged: the church rather than the state became the primary source of societal renewal. The clergy remained convinced of God's direct rule throughout these "rather remarkable . . . creative adaptations" (p. 143), but as they witnessed an outpouring of revivals, they adapted their social vision to reflect current realities.

1

Sassi is less interested in how these developments worked themselves out at a practical level than in their theoretical underpinnings—in what he calls the Congregationalist ministers' "public Christianity." This public side expressed the clergy's social vision of the good (or godly) society. Communicated through such occasional discourses as election- and fast-day sermons, century sermons, orations, and polemical treatises, a "vibrant and upbeat" (p. 20) public Christianity later "became the engine of reform and missions in the antebellum period" (p. 18). His argument falls between two historiographical traditions. One contends that the clergy were little more than rabid Federalists bent on maintaining their privileged status through the force of a state establishment. The other minimizes the clergy's direct political involvement and emphasizes their primary calling as ambassadors of the Gospel. Falling between these extremes, New England's Congregational clergy were neither indifferent to the politics of the day (they "entered the political controversies of the first party period with a vengeance" [p. 88]) nor ruled by self-interest. Rather than abandoning the social order when threatened by the defeat of the establishment, they creatively responded to their circumstances and by around 1810—"the pivotal years" (p. 131)—espoused "a distinctively New England variant of public Christianity" (p. 11).

. . .