Note: This was my final paper for EN 841B: Transcendentalism, a seminar I took in the Fall of 2005 with Laura Dassow Walls, now of Notre Dame. It was a fascinating class with an excellent professor and a great text. I enjoyed writing this paper and in the process learned a lot about a topic that was of great personal interest at the time–America’s ideological history. The Fall of 2005 was a crazy semester in which I bit off far more than I could chew, so I took an Incomplete on this course and didn’t finish this paper till a year later in the Fall of 2006.

In recent years the ongoing revolution in American cultural life has become increasingly apparent. Best-selling books like Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior (and the controversy surrounding them) have underscored the increasing secularization and liberalization of a culture that was once decidedly Judeo-Christian in moral tone and worldview. And while this revolution has dramatically increased in rapidity and scope in recent decades, any student of American letters knows that cultural controversy and change is not a new phenomenon in America. Indeed, between the 1631 ruling of the general court of the Massachusetts Bay colony “that no man [should] be admitted to the freedom of [the] body politic, but such as [were] members of some of the churches within the limits of the same” and the 2003 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court “that barring an individual from . . . marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution,” one can trace an almost regular series of controversial moments that have become landmarks in the history of America’s cultural revolution: the Half Way covenant of 1662, the print debates between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncy in 1743 and the accompanying schism in Congregationalism, the 1805 appointment of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Emerson’s 1838 address at the Harvard Divinity School, Charles Briggs’ 1891 inaugural address at Union Theological Seminary and his subsequent heresy trials, the 1925 Scopes trial, and the Supreme Court rulings on the Bible and prayer in the public schools in 1962-3. It is no coincidence that almost all of these controversies have been wholly religious in nature; before cultural practice can change, ideology must change. Change in belief paves the way for change in behavior. Neither is it a coincidence that the conservative faction in most of these crisis moments has espoused an ideology virtually identical to that of the Puritan divines of 1631 Massachusetts. For in a real sense, the history of America’s cultural revolution is the story of how the conservative Christian orthodoxy[1] of Massachusetts Bay (with its concomitant rules of behavior) has been gradually moved from the halls of power to the margins of society, challenged in each new generation by new foes in new spheres until finally those who will and can claim their ideological inheritance from the original Puritan divines are a fringe few, increasingly seen as narrow and extreme even in Christian circles.