Religion: Saints & Democrats

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For 150 years the New England meetinghouse was as much a center of American civilization as the Gothic cathedral had been in Europe. Its hard-hewed timbers formed the foundations of a way of life that began with religious dissent and ended, after a long and interesting journey, in political democracy. To show how this process worked, Ola Elizabeth Winslow, a Pulitzer prizewinner in 1941 for her biography of Jonathan Edwards, has written Meetinghouse Hill: 1630-1783 (Macmillan; $4), published this week.

The Puritans thought of themselves as "covenanted saints," but saints only so long as they lived "in a church order." Their government and social life, as well as their religion, centered in the meetinghouse, and their learned nonconformist ministers were the intellectual as well as the spiritual leaders of the colony.

The clergy's sermons "took the place of the newspaper, the magazine, the radio, the lending library, the lecture platform, the school and college education" for the struggling settlers. As such, they had to be understandable to all sizes of intellects. Wrote Cotton Mather of the Rev. John Eliot, an early New England divine: "The very lambs might wade into those discourses—wherein elephants might swim."

Yet it was the congregation, not the ministers, which had the governing power in the meetinghouse. "Every self-gathered church . . . elected officers from among themselves, practiced consent of the governed, and in all their doings proceeded on the assumption that all power needful for the functioning of the society was vested in the membership alone."

Wine & Strong Waters. In early practice, "consent of the governed" meant the domination of a conforming majority. "The brotherly watch of fellow members" soon degenerated into a terrifying apparatus of secret accusations and public confessions, where people's neighbors passed judgment on their real or fancied sins.

The extreme penalty—excommunication from the local church—often amounted to political exile. In 1640, Sister Temperance Sweet was cast out of the First Church of Boston for giving "entertainment to disorderly Company & ministering unto ym wine & strong waters even unto Drunkenesse & yt not wth out some iniquity both in ye measure & pryce thereof." In 1681, however, Sister Cleaves of Roxbury got off with a public admonition, although she had "corrupted Mr. Lamb's neger" so that "in a discontent" he had set two houses afire.

As the population of the colonies increased, it became impossible for the old guard to continue enforcing their own ideas. The practice of church government grew nearer its democratic theory, and pious colonists began taking their new views on the "consent of the governed" into politics. After several generations of sermons on the subject, the New Englander of the 1750s displayed a rooted religious belief that "liberty was his just and inalienable heritage," a statement which Europeans knew only as a sophisticated political theory.