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Religion and Politics in the Constitutional Era
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17299 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
7,132 Words |
| Author
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William R. Garrett
William R. Garrett is professor of sociology at Saint
Michael's College, Colchester, Vermont. He is former president
of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. His latest
book is titled The Social Consequences of Religious Belief. |
From the framing of the Puritan "holy experiment" in New England through the Constitutional-Republican eras, American society was tormented by a succession of inner tensions that centered around differing religious, class, political, and economic interests. These diverse orientations provided the empirical bases upon which subsequent political parities could emerge as the new nation moved beyond its infancy. Although Washington warned in his Farewell Address against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally," the days of Federalist Party hegemony with its virtual monopoly over national power were already numbered by the end of his administration.
Democratic-Republicans - led by Jefferson and Madison - were gradually consolidating their forces around a political ideology and a set of economic concerns that were dramatically different from those which animated the Federalists. Recent analyses of these dynamics of party formulation - and especially the thesis developed by Jackson Turner Main - have utilized local cosmopolitan distinctions to conceptualize the center of gravity obtaining for each orientation during this formative era of American political life. The overriding purpose of this essay is to utilize these concepts to reinterpret the political stances developed during the Constitutional era.
While the locals/Republicans articulated a point of view representing the class interests of those of lower status than the cosmopolitans/Federalists, the localists also embraced a human right perspective that was actually more extensive than their upper-status opponents. Inadvertently, then, the localists pioneered a form of argumentation that ultimately bequeathed to American society a highly original political stance, for a great deal of the genius of the American democratic experiment has turned on the ability of the national government to guarantee certain inalienable rights redounding to individuals qua individuals.
To establish this thesis, it will be necessary to trace the emergent political divisions in our early national experience back to their roots in Puritan society. Put simply, the argument developed below will claim that an incipient party division manifested itself first in the early Puritan experience, resurfaced in the wake of the First Great Awakening, congealed during the Revolutionary-Constitutional era into formidable power blocs, and then attained formal institutional expression when the Republicans finally split with the Federalists around the start of Washington's second term.
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