Newsom discusses the varieties of religious belief during the seventeenth century, ranging from Laud's High Church Anglicanism (Arminian Church of England), to Presbyterianism (Calvinist Church of England), to Separatist/Independent Calvinist, noting that through the century the Presbyterians lost the most ground, while High Church Anglicanism held on weakly until its nineteenth century Tractarian revival. He doesn't highlight low or broad church Anglicanism, but those forms of the Church of England also survived, while Separatist/Independent Calvinism was the more dominant view of English Protestantism, the one whose adherents brought to British America.
As he notes, the Stuart monarchs constantly fought the House of Commons on religious matters in domestic and foreign policy, and the Commons was the equal if not the master of the Stuart kings. He focuses on two Stuart era Religious Settlements: in 1662 after the Restoration and in 1688 after the Glorious Revolution. During the Interregnum comments that there was no established religion in England--it was neither Presbyterian nor Episcopalian.
Newsom does credit both Charles II and James II with giving "us a foretaste of a broad and liberal toleration" (p. 235) with their Declarations of Indulgence in 1672 and 1687--both of which were thwarted by Parliament opposition.
But it is Newsom's review and judgment of the 1689 Act of Toleration (and John Locke's empirical views of religious Toleration) that I found most interesting. He notes that William of Orange wanted to "restore [religious] unity without threatening the Anglican hegemony" (p. 235). Therefore, Dissenters received some freedom of religious practice and worship with Anglicans having the control of Parliament since Charles II's Corporation and Test Acts still dominated English Protestantism. Catholics, non-Trinitarian Protestants, and Atheists were not included in the Act of Toleration.
Newsom opines that the Act of Toleration fails on the three grounds he identifies as sources for the idea of religious tolerance: prudence (inadequate), rationality (irrational), and morality (too narrow), concluding that it is an obstacle and not an opportunity for the establishment of religious tolerance as a governing principle that may be acted upon in a community.
If the abiding rule is that the "tolerant must be intolerant of the intolerant" (p. 238), Newsom places the burden on the tolerant to prove that they've prudently, rationally, and morally identified the intolerant. Were Catholics, Unitarians, and Atheists intolerant? any more intolerant than Dissenters? than some Anglicans? Newsom thinks that William and Parliament could not prove they weren't and thus concludes that the Anglicans and Dissenters who designed the Act of Toleration "flunked the test." (p. 239)
Nevertheless he says that they institutionalized the ideas of "restraint and attrition" in government's view of religion. (Anglicans hoped that Dissenters would eventually become weaker while they remained in power.) And because the Act of Toleration maintained the Penal Laws and Test Act in the name of maintaining Anglican power but wouldn't exercise them against Dissenters who swear designated oaths, Newsom believes it "compels a discourse distinguishing toleration and rights". (p. 239) He concludes that the Act of Toleration fostered the pan-Protestant diversity present in English religion since the Tudor era and that it "confirms the moral strengths and weaknesses of the Anglo-American Reformation" (p. 240) without identifying either the strengths or the weaknesses!
So then Newsom leaves England for British America, defining the predominant, normative form of American Protestantism as revivalistic and evangelical with a pietist strain, demonstrating lack of respect for institutional mediation (the Church of England/Episcopal Church), and certainly Calvinistic.
Anti-Catholicism and the fear of individual Catholics was also part of the colonial belief system. As for social reform in the colonial era, Newsom points out that Chattel slavery was a pan-Protestant project and institution. He could have also noted, as Martin E. Marty does in the first chapter of his Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America, the genocidal pan-Protestant attitude toward the Native Americans.
Citing Jon Butler's "Coercion, Miracle, Reason: Rethinking the American Religious Experience in the Revolutionary Age", Newsom outlines how the American Protestant Empire practiced "Suasion and Coercion", adapting English methods to the colonial setting: 1) the colonial religious establishments (colonial churches); 2) the establishment of colonial religious institutions (colleges, etc), exerting "coercive power" over their members; and 3) the "wholesale destruction of the African religious systems" brought by African slaves (which would also apply to the Native American religious systems). (pp. 244-245)
Examining the Founding of the United States of America via the Constitution, Newsom opines, "Neither originalist nor theoretical forms of inquiry can yield up a constitutional principle of religious freedom. However, historical inquiry can" and notes that the principle of religious freedom developed by the Founders is based upon "an ideology of anti-Roman Catholicism, pan-Protestant toleration, the destruction of African Religion and a 'persistent insensitivity' to Native American Religion."
Thus again "confirm[ing] the moral strengths and weaknesses of the Anglo-American Reformation"?
Newsom notes that the delegates to the Constitutional convention were predominantly Protestant, mostly Congregationalist and Anglicans, and predominantly Zwinglians, opposed to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
Regarding the constitutional principle of religious freedom that was finally written into the U.S. Constitution, Newsom states: "The Constitution does not declare that America is a Protestant Empire. It imposes no religious test for national office, but the Founders did not overthrow the entire political and religious world in which they had grown up." The Constitution does not declare the newly founded country a Protestant Empire because of the Federalist model of governance the Founders established; colonial Protestant diversity; and "the opposition of some delegates to organized religions" (the Deists at the Convention).
Therefore, Newsom argues that the Founders established "The Tentative Principle" for the establishment of an American Protestant Empire:
allocate much of the work of the Anglo-American Reformation to the states and other institutions and not the federal government (p. 250 and 251).
I am not saying that I agree with everything that Newsom is saying; it is different view of religious freedom in the Founding and in the Constitution than I have read before, for example in The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War over Religion in America by Kevin Seamus Hasson or The God of Liberty by Thomas S. Kidd.
And how fascinating that that this historical view of religious freedom was published in a law journal! I have not explored what kind of reaction Newsom received in the Washburn Law Journal or other publications.
After Holy Week, I'll conclude my notes from this article, as Newsom discusses Prohibition, Public Schools, and what he call "The Incorporation" of pan-Protestantism in the 1940's.
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