Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical
religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a
widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and
tradition--and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and
reactionary aspects.
In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard
interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes
the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that
emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s,
religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture
shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and
fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic
instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant
ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about
American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and
manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as
to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for
immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical
authority as the foundation of the new American national identity.
As the fledgling nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively,
exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent
hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out
this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth
in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for
democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of
influence and ideals in the young republic.
