Every religion is to be found in juxta-position to a political opinion, which is connected with it by affinity. If the human mind be left to follow its own bent, it will regulate the temporal and spiritual institutions of society upon one uniform principle; and man will endeavor, if I may use the expression, to harmonize the state in which he lives upon earth, with the state he believes to await him in heaven.Footnote 1
—Alexis de Tocqueville
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.Footnote 2
—Carl SchmittThis article argues, against the epigraphs, that connections between religious and political forms were not inherent but historically contingent. Both religious and political forms are polyvalent, and there are divergent understandings of the same concepts at any given moment. This will be illustrated by the ways in which Scottish Presbyterians in the age of the French Revolution engaged with ideas of representative and democratic government.
It is something of a cliché that there was a connection between Presbyterianism and democracy.Footnote 3 In the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century heyday of Scots-Irish filio-pietism in the United States, it was not difficult to find statements such as the following: “The Presbyterian polity of church government was the school in which the Scotch race was trained in the principles of democracy that prepared them for the great part they were to play in the founding of our own republic.”Footnote 4 Similar sentiments were common across the Atlantic. Classicist and Scottish nationalist John Stuart Blackie (1809–1895), explaining the Scottish penchant for Liberalism, found a ready explanation in Presbyterianism: “Our democracy proceeds from our Church, which is as markedly republican or democratic as the English is aristocratic, and the Romish monarchical in its constitution.”Footnote 5
Even non-Presbyterians could voice the same opinion. The French counter-revolutionary theorist Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) argued that “political presbyterianism, or democracy, was born in the bosom of religious presbyterianism.”Footnote 6 Shailer Mathews (1863–1941), a liberal Baptist theologian and dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School (1908–1933), wrote that “the principle of representative government is more completely embodied in them [Presbyterians] than in any of the original Protestant bodies.”Footnote 7
Many of the abovementioned authors treat “democracy,” “republic,” and “representative government” as more or less synonymous. Yet we must note that all of these concepts are equivocal; they have no stable inherent meaning. Rather, the meaning of each concept not only changed through time but was also contested by several different parties even in the same time period.
Recent developments in the historiography of political thought have shed much new light on this polyvalence of political concepts. Joanna Innes and Mark Philp’s “Re-imagining Democracy” project amply shows that the meaning of “democracy” was in flux in the Age of Revolutions.Footnote 8 Political theorists have also probed the almost-axiomatic association between representation and democracy in the modern period. According to Greg Conti, among others, nineteenth-century political discourse in Britain, Europe, and America was often characterized by “tensions between democracy and representation and between democracy and liberalism.”Footnote 9
Building on these works, this paper revisits the connection between Presbyterianism and representative government. I argue that Presbyterians constructed conceptual links between their ecclesiastical polity and representative government in response to the French Revolution. The trope of Presbyterianism as representative government, once invented, could serve a range of purposes: it could be used to stave off the threat of (perceived) French-inspired democratic radicalism or to express sympathy with American republicanism. In short, church government became the lens through which Scottish Presbyterians measured and assessed constitutional change, especially the onset of “democracy.” The point, made by Peter Lake for early modern England, that “debates about religion, and in particular debates about church government,” double as debates on the nature of the polity, is still valid for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American world.Footnote 10
The argument here is not that Presbyterians invented the connection between their church and representation out of thin air. I fully concede that there were plenty of Presbyterian ideas and practices of representation before the late eighteenth century. These precedents would later be used to give credence to the latter-day formulations. Nevertheless, the existence of these inklings did not necessarily translate into conscious theorizing. Nor did the meaning of “representation” remain unchanged between the earlier and later periods. It was the shock from the French Revolution that served as the catalyst to meld variegated precedents into theories of representative church government.Footnote 11
Similar points have been made about post-revolutionary Catholicism. Glauco Schettini argues in his forthcoming book that Catholicism was (re-)invented as a political ideology after the French Revolution. He does not mean, of course, that Catholic ideas did not exist before 1789; he rather means, that modern Catholicism was “the reinvention of preexisting intellectual patterns and their combination with new motifs into an original creation.” And as an ideology, Catholicism not only competed with, but could eclectically appropriate from and associate with, strands of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and nationalism.Footnote 12
Schettini’s observations on Catholicism can be applied, in great measure, to Presbyterianism. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Presbyterianism was also reinvented as an ideology that could diagnose and interpret modern political realities. Furthermore, the new formulation of representative government was retrospectively projected into the past, so that authors could confidently write that Presbyterianism has always been, in essence, a representative government.
In exploring connections between religious and political ideas, I am indebted to a large scholarly literature. Scholars have long explored linkages between theology and political-constitutional theory in medieval and early modern Europe.Footnote 13 Dale Van Kley and others have uncovered how Gallican Catholic ecclesiology shaped the political discourse and praxis of eighteenth-century France and beyond. In a related vein, the burgeoning scholarship on the “religious Enlightenment” and the “counter-Enlightenment” has uncovered how religious figures – traditionalist and conservative as much as liberal and radical – could appropriate “secular” Enlightenment ideas to buttress traditional ecclesiastical and political structures.Footnote 14
Concerning Scotland and Presbyterians in the Age of Revolutions, there is also a rich corpus to build upon. Henry Meikle, Emma Vincent, and Bob Harris’s works on Scottish reactions to, and engagements with, the French Revolution are foundational.Footnote 15 Ian McBride’s careful study of Irish Presbyterian political theology is especially pertinent for the attention it pays to the interaction between “secular” revolutionary thought and Presbyterianism.Footnote 16 Furthermore, while the scope of this paper is much smaller, it has been informed by Valerie Wallace’s exploration of Scottish Presbyterian politics in the British Empire.Footnote 17 More generally, I am greatly indebted to Colin Kidd’s wide-ranging studies on Scottish religio-political thought.Footnote 18
In my study of Presbyterianism, I focus on a genre of sources that have been relatively under-explored: tracts, pamphlets, and treatises on church government. It is easy to see why they have been neglected. They seem to be exhaustingly repetitive, with little change in content over time. The semantic shifts that happen in some late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reprints of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works are subtle enough to easily evade notice. In addition, until relatively recently, Presbyterian historiography itself often repeated the claims of continuity, glossing over elements of change.Footnote 19 Yet, as James Bradley and Dale Van Kley point out, “ecclesiological and political action and reflection” were key areas “where eighteenth-century European Christianity most left its mark.”Footnote 20 As we shall see below, the Presbyterian literature on church government corroborates this observation.
This article focuses on two Presbyterian clergymen, John Brown and Alexander McLeod. In Scotland, responding to the perceived democratic radicalism of Congregationalism, Brown developed a vision of representative government that was anti-democratic. In doing so, he engaged, not only with early modern sources but also with contemporary conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke. In the United States, however, McLeod developed a theory of representative government that was much more open to democracy and was rather opposed to the aristocracy and oligarchy of Britain. There are resonances with Thomas Paine as well as James Madison in these arguments. Finally, I close with a summary and pointing forward to further developments in the Age of Reform.
I. Representation against Democracy: John Brown and the Church of Scotland
On December 28, 1797, a group met in Edinburgh to form the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home (SPGH). A key mover in the Society, Robert Haldane (1764–1842), was initially sympathetic toward the French Revolution but eventually became convinced that human progress was only possible through the spread of evangelical religion. Reflecting Haldane’s vision, the SPGH aimed to sponsor itinerant preachers and Sunday schools throughout Scotland. The Society soon gained the enthusiastic support of young clergymen of the Church of Scotland (a.k.a. “the Kirk”) such as Greville Ewing (1767–1841) and William Innes (1770–1855).Footnote 21
Haldane, Ewing, and Innes were in good company. As historians have noted, the years between 1789 and 1815 saw a remarkable growth in the numerical and cultural power of evangelical Protestantism. Inspired in equal parts by millenarianism and democratic hopes unleashed by the French Revolution, evangelicals enlisted numerous men and women to itinerate and preach the gospel of salvation to all, without respect of rank.Footnote 22 The movement for the conversion of souls led to the founding of a number of missionary societies, foreign and domestic. Between 1793 and 1801, at least six foreign missionary societies were founded in Britain, most of them on an interdenominational basis: the Baptist Missionary Society (1793), London Missionary Society (1795), Glasgow Missionary Society (1798), Church Missionary Society (1799), Scottish Missionary Society (1801). Over the same period, Ireland saw the emergence of a number of missionary societies: the Evangelical Society of Ulster (1798), Hibernian Bible Society (1808), Hibernian Sunday School Society (1809), Irish Evangelical Society (1814), among others.Footnote 23
While there was much enthusiasm for the new evangelicalism, many others recoiled from what seemed like the religious counterpart of democratic radicalism. Frightened by the violent turn of the French Revolution, churchmen scrambled to distance themselves from anything that even remotely smacked of radicalism. In 1796, indeed, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland slammed foreign missionary societies for their alleged resemblance to radical political associations. Likewise in 1799, the General Assembly accused the SPGH of being a subversive force filled with “persons notoriously disaffected to the civil constitution of the country.” Disillusioned by this reaction, Haldane, Ewing, and Innes, along with many sympathizers, left the Kirk between 1798 and 1799.Footnote 24
These were not, of course, the first people to leave the Church of Scotland. Objecting to different aspects of the Church-State connection, at least three groups had broken off since the Glorious Revolution: Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) in 1690, Associate Presbyterians (Seceders) in 1733, and the Relief in 1761. Despite their differences, however, these were all Presbyterians: they all held to the same form of church government, whereby individual ministers and congregations were subject to an ascending hierarchy of church courts – Presbytery, Synod, and General Assembly. Their gripe with the Kirk was not that it was Presbyterian, but rather that, in their eyes, it was insufficiently loyal to Presbyterian ideals, particularly on church-state issues. As Callum Brown puts it succinctly, “[d]issent arose because of perceived laxity in Established Church adherence to the expected standards and because of differences over the extent of the church-state relationship.”Footnote 25
The new dissenters, however, abandoned Presbyterianism altogether. Having had their initiatives for itinerant preaching squashed by church courts, Haldane and his collaborators began to question the soundness of this ecclesiastical structure, favoring instead a system that would leave individual ministers and congregations free to pursue any “plan for mutual edification and comfort, about which they might be agreed.” In short, these men became Congregationalists. The upstart sect grew rapidly. Between 1799 and 1807, the number of Congregational churches in Scotland grew from one to eighty-five.Footnote 26 The explosive growth of Congregationalists in Scotland was part of a broader trend: evangelical Dissenters, such as Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists, grew by leaps and bounds over the same period, threatening the social, cultural (and eventually) political hegemony exercised by the established churches.Footnote 27
On the one hand, many of these new Dissenters, including Congregationalists, attacked the connection between church and state. In response, as Stewart J. Brown notes, the established churches sought to revive and extend parish structures, to reach and serve more people.Footnote 28 But the challenge could go further: some Dissenters argued that, even setting aside the church-state connection, the very structures of the established churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland were fundamentally flawed. Perhaps channeling democratic hopes aroused by the French Revolution, these men repudiated church government by bishops and even by presbyters, embracing instead direct participation by the congregation in governance – or, in other words, Congregationalism.
This was not, of course, the first time that Congregationalists attacked Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism. That happened during the 1640s and 1650s, during the Civil Wars that rocked England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was perhaps natural, then, that some observers felt a déjà vu. Footnote 29 As one Presbyterian author complained: “[a]rguments often refuted are again brought forward, with a degree of confidence as if they were unanswerable, and little or no account is made of what has been said in refutation of them.”Footnote 30 Owing to this perception, many works of sectarian polemic from the mid-17th-century were republished in the 1790s and early 1800s, including a 1799 Paisley edition of the Presbyterian classic Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici (1646).Footnote 31
Despite superficial parallels, there had been subtle changes in the intervening century and a half. In the 1640s, Presbyterians were identified primarily with aristocracy, Episcopalians with monarchy and Congregationalists with democracy.Footnote 32 The authors of Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici (1646) classified Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism as “Monarchical government,” Congregationalism as “Democraticall Government,” and Presbyterianism as a “pure Aristocraticall Government.”Footnote 33 A Scottish Presbyterian writing in the 1690s followed suit, contrasting Papal monarchy and Congregational “Democracie” with “Presbyterial Aristocracie.”Footnote 34
In the 1790s and 1800s, however, Presbyterianism was identified primarily as a “representative government,” both by its defenders and opponents. This is most evident in the 1799 Paisley edition of the above-mentioned Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici (see Table 1). The new edition, besides omitting Latin quotations and replacing difficult words, also made subtle changes to the terminology. In contrast to the previous edition, the new edition classified Presbyterianism, not as a “pure Aristocraticall Government,” but as a “pure representative government.”Footnote 35
Table 1. Comparison between the 1647 and 1799 editions of Divine Right of Church Government
Perhaps “aristocracy” smacked too much of inherited privilege to be adequately defended. After all, Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1791–1792) had characterized aristocracy as a form of “government by hereditary succession,” and denounced it as a “corrupt system.” By contrast, “representative government” was easier terrain to defend from radical attacks, as it was praised effusively by Paine himself.Footnote 36
This semantic shift was not without precedent in the Presbyterian tradition. In the early modern period, the General Assembly, comprising commissioners “chosen and delegate for that effect,” was called the “kirk representative” of Scotland. Samuel Rutherford, a leading seventeenth-century Presbyterian theologian, discussed the different ways in which church courts might be considered as representative of the church as a whole.Footnote 37
Yet the change in terms did not automatically prove advantageou. Writing in 1804, the Rev. William Innes of Stirling (1770–1855), a Presbyterian-turned-Congregationalist, attacked the Kirk’s “system of representation” itself. In each congregation, only the kirk session – comprising ministers and elders – handled issues of church governance, excluding the “general body of the church” from the decision-making process. Furthermore, the “representatives of so many neighbouring churches” formed a Presbytery that reviewed the decisions of individual congregations. Innes argued, from experience, that the reform measures of any congregation could be reviewed and censured by the Presbytery or Synod. For these reasons, in Congregationalist churches, “nothing is decided by representation.” Whatever was done by ministers and elders was “carried on in the presence of the general body, and with their consent.”Footnote 38 In short, Innes alleged that the Presbyterian system of representation excluded ordinary church-goers from the decision-making process, while Congregationalism did not.
Alexander Carson (1776–1844), another Presbyterian-turned-Congregationalist (and later Baptist), advanced many similar arguments. He alleged that “there is not the shadow of any such representation in the word of God.”Footnote 39 Examining the Greek word ekklesia, which meant “assembly” and later came to mean “church,” Carson argues that the whole of the churches of any given region or country could not be called ekklesia, “because they are never assembled.” As long as the people at large are shut out from the decision-making process, the objection that churches could be assembled via representatives rang hollow. “None are members of an assembly, but those actually possessing a right to sit in that assembly.” National and provincial church assemblies, as held by Presbyterians, consisted of “church rulers alone, or rather a selection of church rulers.” They could not, therefore, be called ekklesia, but sunklesia, an “assembly of nobles or senators.”Footnote 40 Instead of the Presbyterian sunklesia, Carson advocated the Congregationalist ekklesia.
Many of the points raised by Innes and Carson were not new. Some of them were aired in the mid-seventeenth century by Congregationalists who attacked what they saw as the aristocratic and exclusionary character of Presbyterian representation.Footnote 41 Closer in time, they were anticipated in the 1730s by the Rev. John Glas (1695–1773), who was deposed from the Church of Scotland’s ministry for preaching such ideas.Footnote 42 In his view, representative government meant the exclusion of popular consent. “Representatives,” in the form of elders, were almost like an entirely different class who could act independently from, and even ignore, the will of the populace. Glas argued that the “people” had a right to be “personally present, and to consent or dissent.”Footnote 43 As a result, he repudiated Presbyterianism, whereby the “church-representative,” or assemblies of elders, governed the church. He rather embraced Congregationalism, in which “the body of the people” could directly participate in church governance.Footnote 44
That the same anti-Presbyterian arguments predated the 1790s by half a century did not mean that they were any less potent. In fact, they were potentially even more powerful, given the volatile political climate of the French Revolutionary period. The attacks on the hierarchical nature of Presbyterian “representative government” could very well resonate with the democratic aspirations aroused by events across the Channel. This partially accounts for the fact that the Haldane movement grew more explosively than the Glasite: at its height, the latter barely reached forty congregations and a thousand members.Footnote 45
The kind of arguments raised by the likes of Innes and Carson against Presbyterianism was perhaps emblematic of wider trends in evangelical Protestantism. The stress on “heart religion” and the conversion experience could lead to a downplaying of denominational forms and traditions. While many Scottish Presbyterians welcomed the “revival of Religion,” they also lamented the general lack of interest in forms of church government, or “the external order of the Gospel-Church.”Footnote 46
Rising to meet the Congregationalist challenge was one Rev. John Brown (1778–1848).Footnote 47 He was born in Glasgow and educated for the ministry in one of the dissenting Presbyterian denominations, but instead became a minister of the Church of Scotland, first of Gartmore (near Stirling) and later of Langton (Berwickshire).Footnote 48 This background as a dissenter-turned-churchman perhaps equipped Brown to be a better apologist for Presbyterian church government than many of his colleagues. As Colin Kidd notes, by the late eighteenth century, discussions about forms of church government had become a “sectarian idiom,” carried on primarily by Presbyterians who dissented from the established church.Footnote 49
In 1805, Brown published a Vindication of the Presbyterian Form of Church-Government (1805). A central argument of this work was that Congregationalism “resembles and equals the lowest form of political democracy.”Footnote 50 The choice of this line of attack was shrewd indeed. First of all, there were plenty of precedents within the Presbyterian tradition. Canonical writers such as Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) and Robert Baillie (1602–1662) had attacked Congregationalism as a spiritual democracy for allowing every member of the congregation to participate in church government.Footnote 51 While tapping into centuries-long tropes, this line of attack also touched on contemporary developments. As Joanna Innes and Mark Philp note, “‘democracy’ was substantially discredited by the unfolding of the French Revolution,” especially for conservatives, but even for many moderates. One need only think of Edmund Burke’s vehement attacks against the “swinish multitude.”Footnote 52 In this context, equating a rival denomination with “political democracy” was calculated to conjure up nightmares about the violent radicalism in France.
Brown wasted no time in applying stock anti-democratic arguments against Congregationalism: “if the church contain the collective wisdom, it contains also the collective ignorance of the brethren.”Footnote 53 He asked rhetorically:
Are there not many to be found among them [congregants], to whom, though men of the most amiable characters, you could not commit even the lowest offices in the government of the state, or the guardianship simply of your external interests, where no extraordinary knowledge or wisdom was required?
Brown added that such men could not be trusted with even more important powers, those relating to life eternal.Footnote 54 Congregationalism, as ecclesiastical democracy, subverted the “natural” order of things by “constituting those who should be ruled, the rulers, while the decisions of those who are dignified with that name [rulers] are entirely subject to their [congregation’s] determination.”Footnote 55
Even taking Congregationalism on its own terms, it fell short. While it avowed ecclesiastical democracy, it was by no means true that all church members could participate equally. In practice, “it is only a few of the leading and most active of the members who determine every business.” The promises of Congregationalism were therefore deceptive. Here Brown comes remarkably close to Burke, who predicted that the apparently “pure democracy” of the French Revolution would soon become a “mischievous and ignoble oligarchy.”Footnote 56 Furthermore, and like Burke, Brown highlighted the tyrannical potential in democracy. In Congregationalism, “there is certainly more room, as in other democracies, for the display of tyranny than in a mixed and moderated government, such as that of Presbytery.”Footnote 57
Democracy’s degeneration into tyranny was not merely a possibility for Brown. He discusses a recent case in which a Congregationalist minister unilaterally and summarily excommunicated several members of his congregation, without first consulting the congregation as a whole. To drive the point home, Brown asks his readers: “Could conduct so tyrannical and imperious as this, however merited the sentence, be tolerated in any civil courts in Europe, except those of the military despot of France?”Footnote 58 The “military despot” was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become First Consul in 1799 and Emperor in 1804 – and who had planned invasions into Britain in 1797 and more recently between 1803 and 1805. For many contemporaries, Napoleon’s career was a prime illustration of the progress of democracy into autocracy. Given that the British government had mobilized its people to an extraordinary degree to prepare against French invasion, the comparison of Congregationalist ministers to the French Emperor was not meant to be flattering.Footnote 59
While Congregationalism was based on direct democracy, Presbyterianism was based on a “system of representation.” In the latter, church government was administered exclusively by ministers and elders, who acted as representatives of the people.Footnote 60 Brown drew analogies between Presbyterian ecclesiastical polity and the British constitution circa 1805. The ordinary populace was “not permitted to vote, and adopt or reject the decisions of the rulers” on most issues. Yet, Britain was nevertheless considered to be the most liberal country in Europe. It was therefore not “inconsistent with civil liberty, to commit to the rulers the government of the state.” By analogy, it was not a violation of religious liberty to commit the government of the church to ministers and elders. To the contrary, Brown argued that it would be “preposterous” if, “before any decision be made by the magistrates of a city, or county, or kingdom, the people should be convened, and their votes collected.”Footnote 61
The analogy between the Scottish church and the British state could go further. Brown posited a direct connection between Congregational democracy on the one hand, and French-inspired political radicalism on the other. Congregationalist apologetics “agree in substance with the arguments adduced by the well known Thomas Paine, and other levelling demagogues, for the rights of the people in political democracy.”Footnote 62 Of course, Paine was the author of the Rights of Man (1791–1792), which defended the French Revolution from Burke’s attacks. As if it were not clear enough, he warns the reader:
the power which is given by Independency to the people in the church is similar to what is granted to them by democracy in the state, and how ready they may be to transfer this spirit from the one to the other, is it not obvious that if any form of ecclesiastical government be formidable to the state, it must be that of Independency.Footnote 63
Brown argued, then, that attacks against Presbyterian church government were likely to be transposed onto attacks against the British government. In other words, the spiritual democracy of Congregationalism was subversive of the British constitution in church and state. Brown was not alone in making this allegation. In a Pastoral Letter dated Edinburgh, 3 June 1799, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland stated that, “Much reason there is to suspect, that those who openly profess their enmity to our Ecclesiastical Establishment, are no friends to our Civil Constitution and that the name of Liberty is abused by them, as it has been by others, into a cover to secret Democracy and Anarchy.”Footnote 64 Brown was, then, making an argument shared widely by his clerical colleagues in the Church of Scotland.
It is notable that Brown’s defense of representation excludes popular election. He writes that “the majority of the people are totally unfit” to judge the qualifications of ministerial candidates. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise, given that few ministers or elders of the Kirk were elected. Instead, he focuses on, first, the superior virtue of the representative-cum-ruler, and next, the identity of interests between rulers and the ruled. For example, he writes that elders were “to be chosen from the wisest and most pious among the people,” from those who were “known to be zealously attached” to the interests of the faithful at large.Footnote 65 Here, again, Brown’s formulation had roots in the early modern tradition as well as contemporary parallels. On the one hand, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Presbyterians argued for church government by elders, as those “who are chiefe in the congregation in godlines and vertewe.”Footnote 66 On the other hand, Edmund Burke argued for “an aristocracy of virtue and wisdom governing for the good of the entire nation.”Footnote 67
There is an irony here. As noted above, Brown originally came from dissenting Presbyterian circles, which placed great emphasis on the congregation’s right to elect their pastor and elders.Footnote 68 By contrast, the established Church of Scotland, which Brown had eventually joined, had a system of lay patronage, whereby powerful landowners could nominate candidates to fill vacant parishes. This perhaps explains why Brown declares at the outset that he will defend “the principles only, and not the practices of Presbyterians” – which presumably implies that he will avoid areas where practices between different Presbyterian denominations diverge. Indeed, discussions of not only election but also patronage are absent from Brown’s work. Congregationalists saw this as a weak stance, challenging him “not only to defend Presbytery in the abstract, but the church of Scotland with all its corruptions.”Footnote 69
The neglect of election left Brown vulnerable to criticism: namely, that the system of representation then current in the Presbyterian church was not truly representative. A Congregationalist asked rhetorically: “can they be justly called deputies who hold their deputation for life, take no instructions from, nor regard the mind of their constituents”?Footnote 70 Another took aim at Brown’s hierarchical view of representation as internally contradictory: “Rulers do not represent the ruled.” Ministers and elders could not truly represent their flock, as long as they acted on the authority of Jesus Christ (top-down) rather than on that of the people (bottom-up).Footnote 71
For the time being, however, Brown succeeded in holding the line against the Congregationalist offensive. This is evident from the bitter complaints of Robert Little, an English Congregationalist preacher then working in Perth.Footnote 72 According to Little, Brown’s analogizing Congregationalism in the church to democracy in the state cast “political odium” upon Congregationalists by invoking the dreaded threat of mob rule. Furthermore, it also led some to “seek connection with Independent churches upon mistaken principles.” These newcomers thought, apparently, that to be a Congregationalist meant engaging in “unrestrained disputation” and “determining every thing by popular debate.” Little went on to reject, in no uncertain terms, the idea that Congregationalism was a spiritual democracy, “nor are the people all rulers.”Footnote 73
Soon, the Scottish Congregationalist movement split in two, with the Haldane brothers and a significant number of their followers becoming Baptists. Those who remained Congregationalists looked askance at Baptist practices, calling it a “levelling system” of “promiscuous teaching” (lay preaching) and “setting aside the pastoral office” (diminution of pastoral authority). In short, according to Congregationalists, the Baptist model of church government “savour[ed] of democratic legislation,” with issues of church discipline “being subjected to long discussion of all the members, and being decided by a majority of votes.”Footnote 74 Ironically, Baptists were too “democratic” for Congregationalists, who were themselves too “democratic” for Presbyterians. Thus split, the Haldane movement ceased to be an immediate and present threat to Scottish Presbyterianism.
Brown’s anti-Congregationalist, anti-democratic theory of Presbyterian representative government proved to be enduring, even after the French Revolutionary threat had passed. A second edition of his Vindication appeared in 1812, and its author received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1815.Footnote 75 It inspired another author who, echoing Brown, wrote of the “purely representative form of church-government” of Presbyterianism which pooled together the “the collective wisdom and information” of the church, in contrast to the “pure democracy plan” of Congregationalists that gave free rein to “the collective ignorance, incapacities, and corruptions of the church at large.”Footnote 76
II. Representative and Democratic: Alexander McLeod and the Reformed Presbyterians
Brown’s was not the only theory of church government available to Scottish Presbyterians. Presbyterians who dissented from the established Church of Scotland usually stressed the importance of popular consent as expressed through elections (as Brown himself might have, had he not joined the Kirk). Archibald Hall (1736–1778), Scottish Presbyterian minister in London, wrote in a book published in 1769 (republished 1795) that “Election is essential, in ordinary officers, to a regular call to the office of a gospel-ministry.”Footnote 77 Likewise, another dissenting Presbyterian, George Whytock (1750–1805) of Dalkeith,Footnote 78 readily admitted that members of the congregation “have a right of choice, or consent, as to those who are constituted office-bearers among them.”Footnote 79 Interestingly, neither Hall nor Whytock did not once mention “representation” as a central organizing concept, which suggests that they did not see an inherent conceptual link between election and representation.
Yet another option was to incorporate popular election as a component of representation. A case in point is the 1799 Paisley edition of the above-mentioned Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici (see Table 1). Whereas the 1646 edition speaks of a “pure Aristocraticall Government […] without the people,” the 1799 edition instead speaks of a “pure representative government […] chosen by the people.” Whereas the original was more consonant with Brown’s anti-democratic focus, the later edition incorporated popular election as a component of representation.
Despite such different attitudes, Scottish Presbyterians were generally united in writing against democracy. Hall, who extolled the right of the faithful to elect their pastors, wrote in the same breath that democracy was “in all ages, an insufficient means of liberty” which often led to “Anarchy and wild disorder.” Whytock, for his part, argued that popular election did not make Presbyterianism a democracy. This was because, even after popular consent, the pastor- or elder-to-be had to receive ordination from the presbytery, from already-ordained pastors and elders. And the Divine Right of Church Government repeated the seventeenth-century strictures against “Democratical government,” whether “mere” or “mixt.”Footnote 80
Thus, anti-democratic attitudes were broadly shared among Scottish Presbyterians, whether of the established church or dissenting from it. Yet the former and latter groups differed in one crucial aspect: willingness to critique Episcopalianism as embodied in the Church of England. As Stewart J. Brown notes, “[d]uring the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Church of England and Church of Scotland, linked through their common connection with the State, had, for probably the large majority of their adherents, been ‘sister establishments’.”Footnote 81 As such, the mainstream of each established church avoided polemics against one another. This probably explains why the Rev. John Brown, a minister of the Church of Scotland, did not at any point mention Episcopalianism.
Dissenting Presbyterians were not governed by the same imperative. To the contrary, they often extolled the mid-seventeenth-century Presbyterian revolutionaries, who were extremely hostile to Episcopalianism. It went without question, then, that they would continue to attack it. In the same breadth as condemning the “wild disorder” of democratic Congregationalism, Hall slammed the “lordly dominion” and the “pride and ambition” of bishops in Episcopalianism.Footnote 82 In language reminiscent of Montesquieu, then, this dissenting author presented Presbyterianism as a commonwealth or republic that could safeguard liberty, and Episcopalianism as a despotism. This language had roots going back to the sixteenth century, when authors such as Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright criticized Anglican Episcopacy for concentrating power in one man (the bishop), and called instead for input from the eldership and the congregation in church government. For this reason, Anglican polemicists attacked Presbyterians for advancing a “popular” or even “democratical” politics.Footnote 83
This anti-despotic or anti-tyrannical strand of Presbyterian thought could very well be combined with ideas about representative government.Footnote 84 The full implications of this combination were realized, not in Scotland, but in the United States, at the hands of the Rev. Alexander McLeod (1774–1833), the Scottish-American leader of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America. Born in St. Kilda, an archipelago west of the Scottish Highlands, he was a scion of a minor clerical dynasty. His father, the Rev. Neil McLeod, who met Samuel Johnson during the latter’s tour of the Hebrides,Footnote 85 and maternal grandfather, the Rev. Archibald McLean, were both ministers of the Church of Scotland at St. Kilda.Footnote 86 Neither contemporaries nor later scholars have uncovered much about his early life, except that he received a classical education in preparation for ministry in the Church of Scotland.Footnote 87
Yet it seems that he had (at least for the time being) stopped pursuing the ministry and emigrated to the United States in 1792. Not much is known about his motives for moving. According to a posthumous account by his son, the Rev. J. N. McLeod (1806–1874), Alexander McLeod had two or three job offers, none of which were satisfactory, and one was even connected to the slave trade, which was “repulsive to all his feelings.”Footnote 88 While it is possible that J. N. was privy to information that does not otherwise survive, it might also be possible that he read his father’s later antislavery stance into his earlier life.Footnote 89
While most Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterian immigrants joined the mainstream Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) (John Witherspoon’s church), Alexander McLeod did not. He instead joined the ultra-orthodox Reformed Presbyterian Church, also known as Covenanters.Footnote 90 Reformed Presbyterians professed fidelity to the National Covenant (1638) and Solemn League and Covenant (1643), the latter of which pledged signatories to the “extirpation” of hierarchical church government, especially as embodied in “Popery” and “Prelacy” throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Footnote 91 Covenanters refused allegiance to the post-1688 regime in church and state because it did not upheld the Covenants, but rather tolerated religious pluralism (even if only to a limited extent). For this reason, Reformed Presbyterians did not vote or serve in juries or partake in activities that might require recognizing the legitimacy of the British state. Naturally, their membership was never large, and they could go for long stretches of time without an ordained minister. From their origins in Scotland, they spread first to Ulster and then to British colonies in North America. In keeping with their origins, they remained critical of the governments of their new homelands.
The Ulster branch of this denomination was particularly influential upon McLeod. While Presbyterians were hegemonic in Scotland, they were not so in Ireland; to the contrary, they chafed under Anglican dominance. As a result, regardless of theological leanings – whether liberal or conservative – Irish Presbyterians were generally more (politically) liberal and radical than their Scottish counterparts.Footnote 92 The French Revolution thus found a more receptive audience in Ulster than in Scotland: many Irish Presbyterians wanted to topple what they saw as an oppressive regime, just as the French had toppled theirs.Footnote 93
Under such circumstances, the political theology of the Covenanters could become even more radical. They saw the French Revolution as the final battle prophesised of in the Books of Daniel and Revelation. The corrupt anciens régimes of Europe, taken together, was the Final Beast and Empire; the French were God’s battering-ram against it.Footnote 94 Given this background, it is unsurprising that the Irish Covenanters were disproportionately involved in the United Irishmen, despite being tiny in numbers (by 1792 there were only 6 ministers and 12 congregations). According to historian Ian McBride, the Irish Covenanters, despite (or, ironically, because of) their ultra-orthodoxy, “became deeply infected with Paineite ideas.”Footnote 95 Evidently, the Covenanter critique of the British state could have an elective affinity with other radical political ideas.
McLeod encountered this strand of political theology through the mentorship of the Rev. James McKinney (1759–1802), a Reformed Presbyterian minister from Ulster. In keeping with the overall trends within his church, McKinney was, “from his early youth, an enthusiastic admirer of republican institutions, as exclusively congenial to the universal rights of man.” His preaching in the wake of the French Revolution was considered seditious by the government, and he was forced to leave the country for the United States in 1793.Footnote 96
Once he reached New York, McKinney lost no time in resuming his clerical duties, preaching for several consecutive Sundays at Princetown in upstate New York. In the audience one Sunday was a youthful McLeod. Captivated by McKinney’s fiery preaching, McLeod decided to become a Reformed Presbyterian himself. After finishing his undergraduate studies at Union College (Schenectady, New York), McLeod went on to study theology under McKinney’s tutelage.Footnote 97 McLeod soon became one of the leading ministers of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America, gaining respect from many clergymen from other denominations in New York City.
McKinney imparted to McLeod two key interests, among others. The first was a millenarian reading of contemporary events. In a sermon published in 1797,Footnote 98 McKinney observed that “visible things are at present in a state of unusual commotion” because the centuries-long oppression of religious and political despotism had reached a breaking-point.Footnote 99 This cumulative oppression created an opening for demagogues, “a set of the vilest of our race,” who “goad[] the outraged victims of their despotism, to madness” – an indirect reference to the violence of the French Revolution.Footnote 100 Yet this Irish exile saw the hand of God in the turn of events: this was “[t]he long expected time of judgment for unnumbered wrongs.”Footnote 101 Similarly, McLeod saw the eschatological significance of “the commotions of the French Revolution” and believed that Napoleon was “the principal agent of Providence hitherto employed in this work of judgment.”Footnote 102
The second, and more important, was the concept of representation. In the same 1797 sermon, McKinney, discussing the Fall, writes that “[a]ll men were represented in Adam, by a righteous constitution of God.” This statement, taken on its own, is nothing remarkable; the doctrine of “federal representation,” that Adam and Christ represented humanity for the sake of covenants with God, was a mainstay of early modern Reformed theology.Footnote 103 What is more interesting is that McKinney grafts onto this idea more modern notions about political representation. He sounds almost like Paine when he writes that “the idea of representation has been judged, in all free countries, perfectly to accord with justice, and the rights of man: nay, it is judged the only guardian of men’s most precious rights.” McKinney further argues that, if all of humanity were gathered in a convention, they would have unanimously chosen to be represented by Adam.Footnote 104 McLeod develops these ideas further into a full-fledged theory of representation that looked quite different from his compatriot and contemporary, John Brown.
In 1806, just a year after John Brown’s Vindication appeared, McLeod published an Ecclesiastical Catechism, containing a succinct summary not of “doctrine,” but of “the order and government of the [Presbyterian] Church.”Footnote 105 This work was a great success and quickly went through multiple editions in both America and Britain, selling at least 40,000 copies.Footnote 106 In this work, McLeod highlighted the principle of representation – the “radical principle” of Presbyterianism which also “pervades all the social concerns of men.”Footnote 107 In fact, according to his reading, representation ran through the entirety of history, from Genesis down to his own time. God dealt with Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac as representatives of mankind. Moses spoke to all of Israel through its elders. In later times, the synagogue was ruled by elders, its representatives; and the Sanhedrin represented the entire Jewish nation. These principles were carried over to the Christian church – by which it is implied that the apostolic church was organized along Presbyterian lines.Footnote 108 McLeod was emphatic about the merits of Presbyterianism:
In this system of divine appointment, representation is so managed, as effectually to secure the liberty of the subject, and the energy of the government. No system can preserve order in any society, civil or ecclesiastic, except so far as it proceeds upon the principles of presbyterianism.Footnote 109
Compared to Presbyterian ecclesiastical polity, which was based on representation and therefore divinely ordained, the Episcopalian and Congregational models were defective, given the “usurpations” of the former and the “irregularities” of the latter (McLeod does not elaborate much further).Footnote 110 Likewise, he claimed that the Presbyterian church offices of pastor and elder were jure divino, i.e. held authority by divine right.Footnote 111
Consistently with this general outlook, McLeod argued that representation was as central to civil, as much as for ecclesiastical, authority – to the state as much to the church. In a sermon preached in 1815, he posited that church government provided the model for civil government.
In the government divinely provided for the church of God, we have the best evidence of the manner in which [God] will have his rational creatures to act, in the formation of all their social institutions. The church is by divine right a Republic: such a system of government is of course the wisest and the best.
The reasoning was simple: because God ordained the form of church government, it was the best exemplar for civil polity. Furthermore, according to McLeod, Presbyterianism, the divinely ordained form of ecclesiastical polity, was based on representation. Ergo, civil government should be representative. Going further, McLeod “la[id] it down as an axiom in political morality, that TRUE REPRESENTATION IS ESSENTIAL TO LAWFUL POWER.”Footnote 112 (Frustratingly, McLeod defines neither “true representation” nor “lawful power.”)
Note, here, that McLeod uses the term “Republic” to describe Presbyterian polity, whereas in the previous work he used “representative government.” In this we can see influence from Anglo-American republicanism. James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, had defined a “republic” as “a government in which the scheme of representation takes place”.Footnote 113 In the Rights of Man (1791–1792) Thomas Paine had argued that while a republic “is not necessarily connected with any particular form [of government],” it still “most naturally associates with the representative form,” or a “government by election and representation.”Footnote 114 By the time that McLeod wrote, then, it seems “republic” and “representative government” were often used interchangeably, without needing elaboration.
For McLeod, representative government went together with democracy. In the same sermon preached in 1815, he went so far as to declare that “a REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS THE ORDINANCE OF GOD.” By “representative democracy,” McLeod meant government by popularly elected representatives, for, he writes that, in all cases where God did not directly appoint rulers, “the choice of a representative belongs to the members of the community.”Footnote 115
The use of the term “representative democracy” is curious and needs some explanation. As Mark Philp notes, this phrase was rarely used in Britain of the 1790s and 1800s. The more popular phrase was “representative government,” which was not usually associated with “democracy,” By contrast, some Americans, such as John Adams, frequently used “representative democracy.”Footnote 116 This difference maps on to the two major figures we have examined so far. Indeed, we saw in the previous section that John Brown, in Scotland, always used “representative government” in opposition to “democracy.” Alexander McLeod, in the United States, espoused “representative democracy.”
For McLeod, the principle of representation became a tool to measure the merits of existing governments. Given the context of the Anglo-American War, McLeod focused his firepower on the country of his birth: “The British government, in the present practice of the constitution, is not a fair representation of the people over whom its power is exercised.” The British Crown was unaccountable to the people, having “assumed all that power in his dominions “over all persons and all causes, whether civil or ecclesiastic,” which the Pope claimed. The House of Lords were likewise unrepresentative. Even the Commons was “far from being a true representation of the people.”Footnote 117 McLeod elaborated:
The population of the united kingdoms amounts, according to the latest accounts, to about fifteen millions. Very few of these are represented in parliament. The whole of the members returned to that great court of the empire, have received, probably, less than three hundred thousand votes. These suffrages are commonly bought and sold as any other article in the market. The ministry can always secure a large majority. The parliament is a representation of a few powerful and opulent families; and these only serve to give the appearance of popularity to the paramount influence of the monarchy, as employed by the immediate servants of the crown.Footnote 118
In short, the unreformed electoral system of the United Kingdom meant that the Parliament was unrepresentative of the people. This criticism was, of course, not McLeod’s alone. His fellow Scotsman James Mackintosh had also argued in 1791 that “No branch of the Legislature represents the people.” This was the polar opposite of Burke, who had argued that the king, lords, and even judges all represent the people.Footnote 119 Neither McLeod nor Mackintosh has any truck with the idea of virtual representation; for them, representation was either “real,” or not at all.
Judged by the yardstick of representation, the United States was superior to Britain, for it had a “definite Constitution upon the representative system.”Footnote 120 Yet even the U.S. Constitution was internally contradictory, because it “violate[d] the principles of representation, by bestowing upon the domestic tyrant who holds hundreds of his fellow creatures in bondage, an influence in making laws for freemen proportioned to the number of his own slaves.”Footnote 121 This was a reference to Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which gave slave states more representatives in Congress. For McLeod, the idea that slaveholders could possibly represent the enslaved could not be anything but a travesty. In the hands of someone like McLeod, then, the trope of Presbyterianism as representative government became a weapon of reform.
It must be noted, however, that the “democracy” envisioned by McLeod was never “pure,” but always “representative.” He stressed the role of legitimate authority and the duty of people to obey it: “There are in the church authorized rulers, distinct from the ruled. The rulers, and not the ruled, must ultimately determine controversies.” It was the duty of “the ruled” to “submit with cheerfulness to the yoke of discipline.”Footnote 122 For all intents and purposes, McLeod limited “democracy” to the laity participating in the election ministers and elders, and voters in that of MPs or Congressmen.
Thus, although Brown castigated democracy and McLeod embraced it, the end result appears to be remarkably similar. Both Presbyterian authors upheld a hierarchical view of ecclesiastical authority. Both put limits on popular sovereignty, and both excluded “the people” from direct participation in decision-making, which was to be left to the representatives alone. Where the two differed was on the popular election of representatives, and on the concept “democracy.”
McLeod’s stress on representation as the key principle of Presbyterianism was highly influential beyond his immediate denomination, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America. It was quickly adopted by the much larger denomination, the PCUSA. In a sermon delivered in 1809, the Rev. Samuel Miller (1769–1850), a PCUSA minister in New York City, acknowledges his debt to “a manuscript of his learned and excellent friend, the Rev. Dr. McLeod, Pastor of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in this city.”Footnote 123 The material is essentially a paraphrase of McLeod’s interpretation of biblical history:
the representative principle is a most important one in the constitution of the Christian church. It is essential to the system of grace. It was known to the Old Testament church; and it is clearly exhibited in the New Testament Scriptures. The Elders of Israel are repeatedly called the whole congregation of Israel, because they represented it. And an ecclesiastical judicatory is called, upon the same principle, “the church,” because it is the whole body by representation.Footnote 124
Miller soon became professor of Church Government at Princeton Theological Seminary, from which position he further developed and taught his ideas about representative church government to generations of Presbyterian clergymen.Footnote 125
III. Conclusion
John Brown and Alexander McLeod represent two different possible Presbyterian responses to the French Revolution. Both Scots formulated theories of representative government, but to different ends. Brown, echoing Edmund Burke, argued for a representative government that was hierarchical and anti-democratic – remarkably similar to the unreformed British Parliament of his day. By contrast, McLeod, channeling Thomas Paine, posited popular election and democratic choice as the key to representative government. In McLeod’s hands, then, the ideal of representative democracy became a cudgel to beat the ancien régime with. It also translated to a strong sympathy for, if not full endorsement of, the American republic.
While Brown and McLeod were thus conversant with contemporary political theories, they also drew upon early modern precedents. One can draw a direct line from seventeenth-century anti-Congregationalist polemics to Brown and another line from sixteenth-century anti-Episcopalian critiques to McLeod. Thus, the divergence between Brown and McLeod can be attributed not only to differing political positions vis-à-vis the French Revolution, but to the polyvalence of early modern Presbyterianism itself. As recent research reminds us, even during the brief mid-seventeenth-century Presbyterian ascendancy over Britain (1638–1651), tensions between top-down and bottom-up theories of authority within Presbyterian ecclesiology were left unresolved.Footnote 126 The intense political pressures generated by the French Revolution could, then, pull apart these divergent strands within the Presbyterian tradition.
This article thus complicates any straightforward connection between religious traditions and politics in the Age of Revolutions. Dale Van Kley famously posited a connection between neo-Augustinian or Reformed theology and “Patriot” politics of revolution and reform in the late eighteenth century.Footnote 127 From a different perspective, James Bradley connects Dissenters in Britain and Ireland to radical politics.Footnote 128 The examples of Brown and McLeod complicate these arguments. Both Brown and McLeod shared Reformed theology, and both came from dissenting backgrounds (there is no evidence that Brown abandoned his dissenting sensibilities upon joining the Church of Scotland), yet they had differing political outlooks in the face of the French Revolution. One harshly criticized democracy, while the other embraced it; one defended the British status quo, while the other castigated it. Perhaps one way of making sense of these fault-lines is by highlighting again the role of contingency in political-theological alignment. The unfolding of events during the French Revolution could fracture reformist coalitions: as Van Kley himself acknowledges, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy pit Jansenist against Jansenist.Footnote 129 It is easy to imagine something similar happening for Presbyterians. Yet another explanation might involve location: outside of Scotland, where Presbyterianism was hegemonic, the dissenting and radical edges could become sharper – as we saw in McLeod’s example.Footnote 130
Yet the two strands did not remain separate for long. Eventually, Brown and McLeod both became canonical in the transatlantic Presbyterian world. The former’s anti-democratic and the latter’s anti-despotic bent could be synthesized, partially because Brown and McLeod agreed on a deeper level: decision-making in the church was for ministers and elders in exclusion of the people. The resulting synthesis made Presbyterian representation the happy middle, the golden mean, the via media that avoided both extremes.
The first work to make use of both Scots’ works came out of Ulster, in the Rev. Andrew George Malcolm (1782–1823)’s 1816 work on Presbyterian church government.Footnote 131 Malcolm was not a country parson; he would later receive a Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1820, and in the same year elected moderator of the General Synod of Ulster. Although Malcolm was Arian (denying that Jesus Christ was fully God) while Brown and McLeod were Trinitarians, this proved no barrier for borrowing of church-governmental ideas. At one point Malcolm writes:
The radical principles of presbyterianism are essential to society. In this system of divine appointment, representation is so managed, as effectually to secure the liberty of the subject, and the energy of the government. No system can preserve order in any society, civil or ecclesiastical, except in so far as it proceeds upon the principles of presbyterianism. The reason is obvious. These are the principles which the author of nature has rendered essential to human society. No monarch can govern without assistance; no community can govern itself but by representatives.Footnote 132
This passage was lifted verbatim from McLeod’s Ecclesiastical Catechism (1806) without attribution.Footnote 133 A few pages later, Malcolm uses passages from Brown (again without attribution) to compare Congregationalism and the “lowest form of political democracy.”Footnote 134
The cumulative effect of using Brown and McLeod together was the construction of Presbyterianism as the golden mean between Episcopalianism and Congregationalism. “By the method of representation, Presbyterians guard against the tumult, disorder or passionate judgments of popular assemblies on the one hand, and the encroachments of arbitrary power on the other.”Footnote 135 In so many ways, this was a restatement of the seventeenth-century formula: of Presbyterian aristocracy between Episcopalian monarchy and Congregational democracy. But instead of aristocracy, now Presbyterianism was equated with representative government.
In the next few decades, this formulation was adopted by a broad swathe of Presbyterians across the north Atlantic, despite their very different national contexts. It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully explore when, how and why Presbyterians in each locale made this choice.Footnote 136 Suffice it here to say that the model of representative government as the via media between oligarchy and democracy captured the political aspirations of many Presbyterians, who were middle-class and fell on the liberal reformist side of the political spectrum. They supported moderate reforms to the status quo ante, but were wary of further expansions to the franchise that might lead to mass democracy. There was a sense that a full democracy would inevitably lead back to despotism and erase the fruits of reforms. Increasing Irish Catholic migration, combined with O’Connellite mass mobilization, undoubtedly heightened the anxieties that Presbyterians had of “democracy.”Footnote 137 The Presbyterian discourse of church government thus mirrored broader trends in contemporary political thought, which often pit liberalism and representative government against democracy as much as against the ancien régime. Footnote 138 Only when, after the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, “democracy” had been fully tamed, were the panegyrics about the “representative democracy” or “democracy” of Presbyterianism possible.
Presbyterians were by far from the only religious group who had to grapple with the challenge of democracy. American historian Nathan O. Hatch has spoken of a “democratization of American Christianity,” focusing on the popular religious movements such as Methodists, Baptists, the “Christian movement,” black churches and Mormons.Footnote 139 Yet the story does not end with the emergence of new denominations. For one thing, many of these newcomers themselves eventually faced internal divisions over questions of church governance, showing that even ostensibly populist and democratic religious groups could have difficulty grappling with “democracy.”Footnote 140
Yet the emergence and growth of these upstarts did not mean that the older, more established, denominations could ignore the question of “democracy.” To the contrary: no group could avoid engaging it. As is evident from the slew of papal encyclicals on the subject, as well as the writings of Felicité de Lamennais (1782–1854) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), even Roman Catholics – with their supposed conservatism – fiercely debated the merits of “democracy.”Footnote 141 Jews and Protestants were no exception.Footnote 142
In sum, the process of “re-imagining democracy” was as much a religious as a political one – if it is even feasible to draw a strict line between them. On the one hand, religious ideas and practices were transformed in response to “democracy.” Thus transformed, religion might have lent credence to, or imbued legitimacy to, “democracy” and movements to further it.Footnote 143 Much more research is needed to tease out how different religious traditions engaged with, and were transformed by, the encounter with democracy and possible alternatives, such as representative government.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Linda Colley, Dirk Hartog, David Cannadine, Greg Conti, Leslie Gerwin, Sally Gordon, Tony Grafton, and Will Storrar for their close reading and helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank participants in the Princeton Center for Culture, Society, and Religion’s Religion and Culture Fellowship for reading and commenting on an early draft. This version of this article benefited greatly from suggestions by Joanna Innes and Darrin McMahon, as well as by the editors and anonymous reviewers of Church History. Thanks are also due to Michael Gioia, Haidun Liu, and Chase Mendoza for their reading and feedback on the final draft. Any remaining faults are mine alone. Finally, I am grateful to the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, Princeton University History Department, University Center for Human Values, and the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion for supporting research for this article, and to the Special Collections librarians of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary for help with sources.
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