Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[S019]

Now, I could point out to you that the North held on to Established Churches for longer than the South did

It doesn't make any sense to me how there could be an "established" state Congregational church in the North, when the whole point of Congregationalism is that local congregations control their own affairs. Case in point: when the Independents came to power in Britain, they abolished the Church of England and granted freedom of religion to Protestant dissenters.

Okay, but there was. The Congregationalist Church remained the state church of Connecticut until 1818, when it was finally disestablished by a coalition of Republicans and moderate Federalists who ran under the banner of the "Toleration party"; New Hampshire had disestablished its state Congregationalist Church only the previous year, while neighboring Massachusetts kept its established church for another decade and a half, only formally disestablishing the Church in 1833. I should think this should not be too surprising to anyone familiar with the history of Puritanism in New England.

I just don't understand it on a conceptual level. How can a denomination that definitionally gives congregations local control have a state church?

I wonder what you imagine a state church to be, and how it is incompatible with Congregationalism? In New England, the established Congregational Church had the support of the state, meaning it was able to collect tithes and enforce church attendance. As I say, this continued well into the nineteenth century, long after the rest of the country disestablished their state churches in the late eighteenth century.

I'd imagine a state church to have bishops (or presbyters), for starters. "No bishop, no king", as King James said. I would also think state churches are used to enforce a standardized doctrine and book of common prayer, if you will. That was certainly a responsibility of both the Anglican Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. But the thing about the Independents is that they didn't have a standardized doctrine and held no book of common prayer. They were "sectaries", men and women of varying shades of Protestantism whose local congregations made up their own rules. Each of them interpreted the Bible in his or her own way without a bishop to instruct them. Accordingly, they didn't believe in a state church, and when Cromwell took over he abolished the Church of England and gave dissenters the freedom to worship as they chose. This is in contrast to episcopacy and presbytery, both of which sought to enforce religious uniformity. As far as I know "Congregationalism" is just the American term for Independency, so I assumed that their view on state churches was the same due to their internal religious diversity. Then again, I know the Massachusetts Puritans were not at all fond of religious diversity when it came to the Antimonians, so there's probably something I'm missing here. It almost seems like American Congregationalists weren't true small-c "congregationalists".

However, I think it is a mistake to give too much credit to the Enlightenment, or to discount the role of the Second Great Awakening in producing and sustaining the abolitionist movement. If Enlightenment liberalism were enough to abolish slavery, it would have happened in 1790; Evangelical Protestantism absolutely played a crucial role in furthering abolitionism, and its place within the larger tapestry of reform movements in the middle nineteenth century cannot be ignored.

Oh, I did not mean to discount the role of Evangelical Protestantism; far from it. My point was that Evangelicalism on its own was not the primary motivator behind the anti-slavery movement, but rather Enlightenment ideas that often (though not always) mixed well with Protestant liberalism. God knows how many times I have lauded and praised Puritans in this thread as the originators of this form of Protestant liberalism, so do not think for one second I am minimizing the role of their enlightened Yankee descendants in ending the pox of slavery. It is simply to say both parts were necessary: say what you want about 1790, but if Protestant religiosity were enough abolition would have happened in 1690. Instead, we got the Salem Witch Trials.

This seems to be a misunderstanding of the Second Great Awakening. Yes, it was a religious revival, but the much more important and consequential part of it was that it encouraged people to be the most moral that they could be and instilled a sense of urgency in people to force change, which would give rise to reform movements such as temperance and abolition. The Puritans are kind of irrelevant in this case, honestly, and connecting the Puritans to the Second Great Awakening is bad history.