‘I am Slave to no Sect’: Brownson’s Defense of Intellectual Freedom and Doubt

Cortés, Ángel

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51877-0_4

Ángel Cortés³

Part of the book series: Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000 ((HISASE))

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Abstract

Chapter 4 begins with Brownson’s brief foray into socialist circles and is followed by a description of his attachment to Unitarianism, where he served as a minister beginning in 1831. Cortés shows how the prevalence of ‘the theology of the people’ in this era combines with the proliferation of religious publications to create a culture that is extremely attuned to religious change and demands that religious peripatetics like Brownson define their religious identity. Defending his right to religious change, Brownson proceeds to register respect for skepticism and religious doubt. The chapter concludes with Brownson’s continued concern over the clash of confessions.

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Notes

1.
Orestes Brownson, The Convert, Or Leaves from My Experience (New York: Edward Dunigan & Bros., 1857), 5.
2.
Orestes Brownson, ‘To the Editors of the Free Enquirer,’ in Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, Vol. 1: The Universalist Years, 1826–1829 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), 395. For other Victorians, free enquiry functioned as a permanent secular conversion from religion. See Eric R. Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 171–201.
3.
Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944), 214.
4.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Prospectus of the Genesee Republican and Herald of Reform,’ in Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, Vol. 2: The Free Thought and Unitarian Years, 1830–1835 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001), 42.
5.
Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1930), 537.
6.
Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (New York: Macmillan Co., 1943), 35. Also, see Lori D. Ginzberg, ‘“The Hearts of Your Readers will Shudder”: Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,’ American Quarterly 46 (1994): 195–226.
7.
Quoted in Maynard, Orestes Brownson, 32.
8.
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 206.
9.
Patrick Carey has shown that Brownson’s encounter with Channing’s work led to his conversion. See note 22 in the introduction to Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 8.
10.
Orestes Brownson, ‘A Sermon on Righteousness,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 165.
11.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Church and State,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 83.
12.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Letters to Rev. William Wisner,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 85. Brownson had been aware of Wisner’s sentiments regarding Universalism before this exchange in the Philanthropist. See, e.g., Orestes Brownson to William Wisner, February 1828, in Daniel R. Barnes, ‘An Edition of the Early Writings of Orestes Brownson,’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1970), 58–67.
13.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Letters to Rev. William Wisner,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 85.
14.
Ibid., 89.
15.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Essay on Reform,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 125.
16.
See Nathan O. Hatch, ‘The Christian Movement and the Demand for a Theology of the People,’ Journal of American History 67 (1980): 545–567.
17.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98.
18.
Ibid., 163.
19.
Quoted in David M. Ludlum, Social Ferment in Vermont, 1791–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 36.
20.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Protracted Meetings,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 152.
21.
Ibid. For a useful discussion on the challenge presented by revivalism to families and their patriarchal authority, see Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 67ff.
22.
Quoted in Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004; originally 1978), 108.
23.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Protracted Meetings,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol.2, 152. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that ‘religious insanity is very common in the United States.’ (134) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993; originally 1835–1840).
24.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Protracted Meetings,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol.2, 152.
25.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Protracted Meetings,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol.2, 152–153.
26.
Ronald L. Numbers and Janet S. Numbers, ‘Millerism and Madness: A Study of “Religious Insanity” in Nineteenth-Century America,’ in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Knoxville: Univeristy of Tennessee Press, 1993), 95. According to the Numberses, Millerites were especially prone to suffer from religiously induced madness.
27.
See Julius H. Rubin, Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 125–155. Also revealing and relevant is Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 28–76. For a primary source discussing religious melancholia, see Calvin Colton, ‘A Plea for Pastoral Prerogative,’ in James D. Bratt, ed., Antirevivalism in Antebellum America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 104ff. The extent of the psychological problems connected to camp meetings comes into full view when you consider that ‘by 1820 the camp meetings held throughout the country had reached the astonishing number of at least one thousand.’ (150) See William Warren Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765–1840 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).
28.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Protracted Meetings,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 151. Of course, evangelical morphology need not end in dejection. But this has been the experience of more than a few, isolated, individuals.
29.
Given the fact that Brownson’s critique of revivals was very much linked to his own personal experience among Methodists, it makes sense to also see his account of the decline of religious feeling as reflective of his own past experience.
30.
Quoted in Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 7.
31.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Notebook of Reflections,’ Orestes Brownson Papers, Archives of the University of Notre Dame. Like Brownson, Theodore Erastus Clark reported feeling ‘absolutely like a lump of ice’ (75) after attending a Finney revival in 1830. Quoted in Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The identification of being far from God with being ‘cold’ suggests that proximity to God was associated with warmth, which is consistent with the physical exuberance that revivalism generated.
32.
William J. Gilmore, ‘Orestes Brownson and New England Religious Culture, 1803–1827 (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1971), 171. Gilmore’s judgment is corroborated by Lynn Gordon Hughes, ‘The Making and Unmaking of an American Universalist: The Life of Orestes A. Brownson, 1803–1829’ (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2007). According to Hughes, ‘the picture that emerges…[of the early Brownson] is of an intellectually gifted but deeply troubled man.’ (12)
33.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Revivals,’ Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator 6 (May 10, 1828): 157–159.
34.
Ibid., 158.
35.
Quoted in Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 380.
36.
Wesley Norton, Religious Newspapers in the Old Northwest to 1861 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), 61–62.
37.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Revivals,’ 151.
38.
Ibid. One of the most suggestive sermons Brownson ever delivered regarding the ‘ravings of fanaticism’ was in Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator 6 (April 12, 1828): 113–117.
39.
Brownson’s judgment is corroborated by Orville Dewey, ‘Letters of an English Traveler, 1828,’ in James D. Bratt, ed., Antirevivalism in Antebellum America: A Collection of Religious Voices (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 90. A number of scholars have supported Brownson and Dewey’s characterization of revivalists. For example, see William G. McLoughlin, Jr., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press, 1959), 67; John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1805 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 65–66.
40.
Sydney Jackson, ed., A Diary in America, with Remarks on its Institutions, by Frederick Marryat (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1962; originally 1839), 294.
41.
Frank L. Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941), 167.
42.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol.1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993; originally 1835–1840), 186.
43.
Nathan O. Hatch, ‘Elias Smith and the Rise of Religious Journalism in the Early Republic,’ in William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench, eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 270.
44.
Ibid., 250–251.
45.
John Nerone, The Culture of the Press in the Early Republic: Cincinnati, 1793–1848 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 187.
46.
Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., ‘The Fortunes of a Religious Newspaper: The “Christian Repository” and the ‘Circular,’ 1821–1825,’ Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1960): 97.
47.
David T. Arthur, ‘The Millerites: A Shadow Portrait,’ in Numbers and Butler, The Disappointed, 46.
48.
Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992), 227.
49.
Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 35.
50.
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 455.
51.
Mott, American Journalism, 167.
52.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol.1, 187.
53.
Jackson, A Diary in America, 412.
54.
Hatch, ‘Elias Smith,’ 277; Hatch, Democratization, 126; Wesley Norton, Religious Newspapers in the Old Northwest to 1861 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), 46.
55.
‘O.A. Brownson,’ Trumpet and Universalist Magazine 12 (March 26, 1831): 154.
56.
Quoted in Hughes, ‘Making and Unmaking,’ 5.
57.
Orestes Brownson, ‘A Sermon on Righteousness,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 167.
58.
Ibid., 166.
59.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Treatment of Unbelievers,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 205.
60.
See Orestes Brownson, ‘Reverend Abner Kneeland,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 1, 290–291. In fact, Kneeland identified himself as a pantheist. See ‘Abner Kneeland’s Code of Morals, Philosophical Creed, and Declaration of Character’ (Hebron, New Hampshire, 1833).
61.
Brownson was not unique in this regard. According to Walter Houghton, doubt was a defining characteristic of the age for many Victorian intellectuals. See Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), passim.
62.
Orestes Brownson, Charles Elwood: Or, the Infidel Converted (Boston: C.C. Little & Brown, 1840), n.p.
63.
Ibid., vi.
64.
Ibid., 95.
65.
See ibid., 41–46.
66.
Ibid., 28–29.
67.
Ibid., 56–57.
68.
See ibid., 91–92.
69.
Ibid., 96.
70.
For a profitable source discussing the ongoing effects of doubt on religious believers, see Christopher Grasso, ‘Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of the Early Republic 22 (2002): 465–508.
71.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Sunday Memorial,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol.1, 274.
72.
Support for this interpretation can be found in the introduction to Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 19.
73.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Treatment of Unbelievers,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 212.
74.
Ibid., 213.
75.
Quoted in Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), 15. Other scholars have found Stout’s repugnance toward ‘warring sects’ to be a general condition among early Mormons. See Leonard J. Arrington and David Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 39ff.
76.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Treatment of Unbelievers,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 213.

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Department of History, Holy Cross College, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
Ángel Cortés

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Cortés, Á. (2017). ‘I am Slave to no Sect’: Brownson’s Defense of Intellectual Freedom and Doubt. In: Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace. Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51877-0_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51877-0_4
Published: 16 May 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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