THE DECLARATION of Independence is a little odd. It claims not only that all people are created equal but also that they have a self-evident, God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. If it is indeed self-evident, why did no one even mention it until 1776? God did not guarantee anyone the right to pursue happiness in the sermons of Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford or the great Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, and it is impossible to imagine any of those stern preachers arguing its merits. Just read the gruesome text of Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and you’ll agree. The challenge there is to avoid the everlasting torments of hell; Edwards certainly does not think that you’ll escape them by spending your days on earth chasing after happiness.

Implausible as the declaration is, however, at least in this respect, the members of the Continental Congress accepted and signed it. Then the Continental army fought its way to victory, turning independence from assertion into reality. Now that the Americans were free of Britain, what would be the relationship between this right to pursue happiness and the God who had given it to them? On the whole, it was positive. In the decades after the Revolution, growing numbers of Americans attended revivals, joined churches, founded new denominations and blended godly fervor with the pursuit of their worldly goals.

No one made them go to church; the First Amendment guaranteed religious liberty, forestalling the creation of a national religion. Even states that still had established churches in 1783, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, soon got rid of them. Lyman Beecher, a famous Connecticut preacher, was horrified when his state disestablished the Protestant Congregational Church in 1818, fearing that religion would go into a decline: “It was as dark a day as I ever saw.” Later he completely changed his mind, as the advantages of having religion free from state interference became clear: “They say ministers have lost their influence; the fact is, they have gained.” And why was that? “By voluntary efforts, societies, missions, and revivals, they exert a deeper influence than ever they could by queues, and shoe-buckles, and cocked hats, and gold-headed canes.”

Beecher realized, in other words, that religion was no longer contaminated by being linked to a social elite or to politicians. It could not lean on government and had to pull its own weight, but it no longer risked being compromised by the grimy side of politics. In our own time, the historian R. Laurence Moore made the same point in an elegant book, Selling God (1994), in which he argued that religion quickly became subject to the forces of market competition. Just as in the economy, where each American entrepreneur had to offer a commodity or product that others wanted if he hoped to survive, so in the religious “marketplace” each denomination now had to attract members and persuade them to pay voluntarily for their ministers’ upkeep. There was as much of a free market in religion as there was in grain, cotton or shoes.

The system worked incredibly well, but it did lead to a shift in power from “producers” to “consumers.” Ministers knew that their livelihoods depended on their ability to offer what their congregations wanted. It is striking to see how, under these conditions, their theology began to change, becoming steadily less menacing and more comforting with the passing decades. The God they offered really did seem to be more interested in the pursuit of happiness than in fire and brimstone.

This theological change, to be sure, did not come overnight. Lyman Beecher himself, for all his understanding of how the Church might benefit from disestablishment, remained an uncompromising Calvinist. When his daughter Catharine’s fiancé, Alexander Fisher, drowned in a shipwreck in 1823, he wrote her a letter saying that not only was the young man dead, but that his soul was condemned to everlasting torment. By our standards, it is just about as heartless and insensitive a letter as a parent could possibly send to his bereaved child. But within a single generation, the harshest elements of Calvinism started to disappear. Catharine, her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe and their brother Henry Ward Beecher dropped the nasty doctrine and preached a far-more-comforting, sentimental, domestic brand of Christianity. Catharine went on to become a pioneer in education. Harriet’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was among the nineteenth century’s most popular and influential works, while Henry, with a well-endowed pulpit in Brooklyn, became the most famous preacher of his day. Each of them had more to say about love and charity than about the threat of damnation.

The decline of hell and of Calvinist predestination were accompanied by a new interest in Jesus. Before 1800, Jesus had been important mainly as the second person of the Trinity, whose sacrificial death and resurrection atoned for the sins of mankind. After about 1830, Americans began to write biographies of Jesus and to depict the events of his life as equally important as those of his death and resurrection. These biographies, moreover, showed him to be a friendly, comforting, domestic sort of fellow, a working carpenter with his bag of tools and a kind word for every neighbor. Right on schedule, in 1855, the poet Joseph Scriven wrote the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Authors like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps also began publishing fiction about heaven (her book The Gates Ajar was a best seller in 1868) that made paradise sound just like middle-class Victorian life but with all the bad parts left out. Everyone was happy there, and she gave no indication that anyone might be sent to The Other Place.

 

AS RELIGION partnered with happiness in America, enfranchising the vast majority of the population and losing many of its sharp edges, something quite different was happening in Britain. From decade to decade, attendance at Anglican services was shrinking. Growing numbers of Britons, especially in the new industrial cities, lost interest in religion altogether. Periodic revivals checked and temporarily reversed the decline, but they could not alter the long-term trend.

Historians have speculated about this Anglo-American contrast, which persisted throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Most of them agree that the disestablishment of churches in America promoted religious health, whereas the continuation of an established church in Britain contributed to religious anemia. Anyone who became dissatisfied with the government was likely to fall out with the Church of England as well, it being a branch of the state. Where Americans dissatisfied with the political status quo could often draw strength from their religious communities, Britons were more likely to see government and church as, jointly, the source of their troubles. British clergy, exempted from the market environment that challenged their American counterparts to preach brightly and energetically, dozed and mumbled their way through the Book of Common Prayer.

The religious novels of Anthony Trollope, beginning with The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857), offer an evocative and entertaining portrait of Anglican life in the middle years of the nineteenth century. They depict a clergy deeply preoccupied with politics, with property, and with the scramble for advancement and rich benefices. Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly, a central figure in the series, always has one eye on the composition of the government. He fights like a tiger, not to spread the Gospel, but to protect church property and privileges. His father-in-law, Septimus Harding, is less venal and much more lovable, but also depends on a corrupt and decadent system for his livelihood. Harding would not last a moment in the competitive world of American ministers and evangelists. These novels describe magnificently the Church’s simultaneous complacency, beauty and vulnerability to attack.

Certainly it was still powerful. It exacted tithes from everyone, whether they were Anglicans or not, and levied “recusancy” fines on people who stayed away from church. It could still inaugurate prosecutions for blasphemy and heresy into the mid-nineteenth century. The bishops sat in the House of Lords and were politically influential figures, while the Church itself was immensely wealthy, one of the nation’s biggest landowners. Until 1829 only Anglicans could attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, only Anglicans could be judges and magistrates, and only Anglicans could sit in Parliament.

In other respects, however, the Church of England was weak. For one thing, it had long permitted “occasional conformity,” allowing Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists and other non-Anglican Protestants to be regarded as Anglicans if they were willing to attend Holy Communion in an Anglican church just once each year. The Tory party had tried to put a stop to the practice in 1711 with the Occasional Conformity Act, but the Whigs found clever nonconformists too useful to do without and repealed the act when they were back in power a few years later. Moreover, a state church has an obvious incentive to keep as many people inside as possible, whatever their views.

Even on doctrine the Church of England had no strong and clear stance. Its version of a written constitution, the Thirty-Nine Articles, was deliberately vague on the most controversial issues of the Reformation: the real presence of Christ’s body and blood at Holy Communion; apostolic succession (the passing down of divine authority since St. Peter); the number and nature of sacraments; the invocation of saints; and the relationship between faith and good works in obtaining God’s favor. It could not even agree on whether it was really a Protestant church. Anglicans each week continued to declare in the creed that they belonged to “one holy, catholic and apostolic church.” A prominent Church of England priest, John Henry Newman, created a scandal in 1841 by arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles could be read in such a way as to establish the essential compatibility of Anglicanism and Catholicism.

Thus, while American Christianity was growing by leaps and bounds, under the galvanizing ministry of Charles Grandison Finney and dozens of lesser revivalists, the C of E was becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack and fragmentation.

 

AMONG THE greatest religious contrasts between the two nations was that an aggressive secularist movement was gathering force in Britain. While Americans found religion and the pursuit of happiness entirely compatible, a growing chorus of voices on the other side of the Atlantic was arguing that the way to happiness was to get rid of religion once and for all. The Church, said secularists, exercised a malign economic, political and psychological power. It tyrannized minds and consciences. The way to happiness and human liberation, they believed, lay in its destruction.

Who were these secularists? Among the most famous, equally in Britain and America, was Tom Paine, the radical ex–customs officer who came to America just before the Revolution and helped inspire the Declaration of Independence with his pamphlet Common Sense (1776). Paine was a popular figure in America so long as he confined himself to political agitation, but when, later in life, he attacked organized religion with his book The Age of Reason (1794), he enraged large and influential parts of the public. He spent his last years in New York and died there, poor, neglected and resented, in 1809. Angry clergymen made sure that the remains of this infidel were not permitted burial in sacred ground.

Secularism in Britain, by contrast, honored Paine. It then gained intellectual weight from the utilitarians, philosophers whose criterion of the good society was explicitly this worldly: the greatest happiness of the greatest number. John Stuart Mill was their most influential writer. He was also a pillar of Victorian moral rectitude and argued that religion should be rejected because it promoted not just unhappiness but also immorality. The God of the Old Testament was vengeful; to worship him would be to endorse his unscrupulousness. In his Autobiography (1873) he explained that he had inherited this view from his father, the Scottish economist and philosopher James Mill:

My father’s rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. . . . He looked upon [religion] as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up fictitious excellencies,—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind,—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

Mill also noticed that happiness itself, though central to the utilitarians’ project, was not something people could aim at directly. “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. . . . Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Younger English writers picked up the theme where Mill left off. Critic and poet Edmund Gosse had a very different kind of childhood, being the son of a well-meaning but zealously religious man, what we would call a fundamentalist. Philip Gosse, the father, a marine biologist, refused to accept Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) because it contradicted the Genesis account of creation. He was gradually marginalized in the scientific community for his unconvincing attempts to refute the theory of natural selection. He agonized over his son’s developing skepticism, believing that it would lead to eternal damnation, and this division poisoned their relationship. Edmund, writing fifty years later in his classic account Father and Son (1907), sighs: “What a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend, my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.”

Gosse, like Mill, treated religion as a source of unhappiness:

It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation. . . . There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.

A long succession of British secularists journeyed to the United States in the nineteenth century, hoping to persuade the Americans to throw off the shackles of religion. At home they enjoyed a growing measure of success; abroad they failed almost completely. The voluntaristic religious situation in America simply prevented most citizens from feeling that they were being oppressed. In 1829, for example, the British utopian socialist Robert Owen debated the spellbinding American Protestant preacher (and a founder of the Disciples of Christ) Alexander Campbell in Cincinnati in front of an immense audience. After eight days of claims and counterclaims, Campbell challenged members of the audience to stand up if they believed in Christianity and wanted it to dominate the world. More than a thousand people instantly stood; just three people remained seated!

 

AMERICA HAD its secularists too, certainly, but most were isolated figures, rarely enjoying a widespread following. English secularism, on the other hand, gained confidence, recruits and popularity with each passing year. Activist Charles Bradlaugh founded the National Secular Society in 1866, made bravura speeches against Christianity and campaigned successfully for a seat in Parliament in 1880. As an atheist, he refused to take the oath of office, at that time a requirement for MPs. As a result, Parliament refused to seat him—Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, led the anti-Bradlaugh faction. A by-election was held. Bradlaugh’s indignant constituents reelected him. Then they did it again and again until finally, after a prolonged standoff, he gained his point. George Bernard Shaw, William Gladstone and many other leading figures in British intellectual life supported his stand on antireligious principle.

Bertrand Russell carried the secular tradition into the twentieth century. He too understood religion and happiness to be polar opposites. Adopting utilitarian principles early in life, he was also a pioneering advocate of contraception, and he denounced Christians who opposed it. In a 1927 speech, “Why I am Not a Christian,” Russell linked these themes:

There are a great many ways in which . . . the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct that have nothing to do with human happiness.

Not surprisingly, Russell’s advocacy of free love and contraception, along with his irreligion, led to a brouhaha when he was invited to teach at the City College of New York in 1940. The Episcopal bishop of New York led a protest movement against his appointment, while the mother of a college student who feared for her daughter’s moral safety prosecuted him. The judge, an Irish-American Catholic, found in favor of the anxious mother, and the school was compelled to terminate Russell’s contract.

Indeed, it is easy to make lists of famous twentieth-century British secularists but difficult to make lists of famous twentieth-century British Christians. There is really only one whose name approaches widespread familiarity—C. S. Lewis—and even he is more famous for his children’s stories than for his religious apologetics. He too, as he grew up, seemed to be treading the familiar British path to atheism but then something got in the way, an experience he described in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955).

At unexpected moments throughout his childhood, Lewis was beset by feelings of overwhelming happiness. He loved them, but they tantalized him; no sooner had they come upon him than they were gone, and in vain he sought to induce them to return:

It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me. . . . It was a sensation, of course, of desire. . . . and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.

Despite its conventional religious trappings, his education was leading him steadily away from the Church. But then, at the age of eighteen, while reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), the feeling recurred and this time it stayed. “I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on [this book]. I do now. It was Holiness. . . . It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side.” From that moment on, Lewis began to recover his faith, and the experience became the emotional foundation for his lifetime of Christian assurance. Lewis is clearly the odd one out in twentieth-century British history—one of very few figures of literary eminence to assert the compatibility of happiness and faith and to write about it at length.

In our own time, the British secularist tradition has found new champions, none more outspoken than Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, both of whom might reasonably be described as antireligious fanatics. Hitchens became an American citizen a few years ago, but the tone and mood of his God is Not Great (2007) indicate his continuing debts to his British upbringing. Where most Americans in public life make a sharp distinction between Islam as one of the “religions of peace” on the one hand and radical Islamism on the other, for example, Hitchens declines to do so. Instead, he declares about Islam, as about all other faiths: “Religion poisons everything.” Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), as its title suggests, regards religious people simply as lunatics. Both authors agree: religion is a source of misery, folly and untruth; happiness comes from getting rid of it.

 

IT WOULD be an overstatement to claim that happiness and faith are synonyms in America and antitheses in Britain, but the striking divergence of the two nations’ experiences makes it at least a powerful tendency. The political results of this contrast are profound.

Many burning issues in American politics, including school prayer, abortion, gay marriage, religious tax exemption and government aid to religious schools, seem baffling to British observers, where the necessary religiously motivated constituency is absent. Tiny handfuls of British Catholics and evangelicals do feel strongly, especially on the abortion issue, but their voices can scarcely be detected in a political culture that is overwhelmingly, and explicitly, secular. Where American candidates make a point of being seen and photographed going to church, British candidates and officeholders do it furtively if they do it at all. Tony Blair only went public about his conversion to Catholicism after leaving office in 2007; he knew it would have caused trouble during his premiership.

More striking still is the intensification of religion in American politics since the late 1970s. Evangelicals had largely withdrawn from politics after the fiasco of the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, when a high school teacher was found guilty of violating state law by teaching evolution. The state and its fundamentalist supporters endured ridicule from H. L. Mencken and the American mainstream media. Evangelical political activism reappeared with the creation of the Moral Majority during the Carter years. The theologian Francis Schaeffer regarded feminism, abortion, gay rights, evolutionary teaching and the breakdown of conventional family roles as threats to America’s Christian foundations. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other ministers tried to bring Schaeffer’s insights to bear in political life. Nonevangelicals like the Catholic convert Richard John Neuhaus joined in during the 1980s with warnings about the dangers of a “naked public square” swept clean of religious influences. Since then, the Christian Coalition and other groups of religious activists have vitally affected election outcomes, and given warning to candidates that they must show an increased respect for Judeo-Christian faith communities. If the “mosque at ground zero” doesn’t get built, it will be due largely to their influence.

Meanwhile, the puzzle of happiness remains unresolved. Mill was surely right in saying that happiness is impossible to measure and that it is impossible to aim for directly; happiness comes rather from other accomplishments and has to be attained indirectly. For each person it has its own character, meaning and significance. Despite all the polemics, it is as impossible now as it was in Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine’s day to say whether religion does or does not lead to happiness, just as it is impossible to know whether God regards our pursuit of it as an inalienable right.

 

Patrick Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University.

 

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