In Puritan New England where the institutions of church and state were intertwined, politics and theology were comingled. I doubt if the Puritan divines kept their political philosophy and their theology in separate mental boxes.

Thus, I have to reject Morgan’s analysis, that the H.C. was an “attempt to rescue the concept of a church of visible saints from the tangle of problems created in time by human reproduction.” Human reproduction may have been the proximate cause, but predicating citizenship upon church membership was the ultimate cause. So it was the Puritan’s political philosophy that precipitated the controversy.

I am not so sure about whether the H.C. was evidence of spiritual decline. But I am much more confident about arguing that the H.C. contributed to spiritual decline. The end result of the H.C. was to graft dead fruit into the Church. The covenant community was no longer limited to people who professed the covenant between man and God. Should we then be surprised when the body of Christ begins to whither?

Perhaps we should do a post on whether religion can be quantified…

About the Halfway Covenant. Though it’s a commonplace to take the Halfway Covenant as a sign of declension, I’m not sure the case for that interpretation can be made unambiguously. I see the Halfway Covenant as the resolution of two tensions within the very specific dilemmas of Puritanism that was (1) congregational and (2) in early New England. The first dilemma was the problem of visible sainthood. The Anglican tradition out of which congregational Puritanism came held that everyone who was a part of the state was also a member of the national church. The purpose of the church was to bring salvation to the people who were under its care. Puritans, on the other hand, were moving to the idea that the church should be a body only of those who were “visible saints,” and especially that the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (but not baptism) should be given only to visible saints. At the same time, Puritans retained the idea that everyone should be members, and so they baptized infants. The dilemma came when children who were provisional members never came to the point of visible sainthood. Should they be offered the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper? Should their children be baptized? The Halfway Covenant said no to the first question, but yes to the second. It was a compromise on the dilemma of visible sainthood. Halfway members (those who were baptized but not admitted to communion) would be permitted to have their children baptized, so that the children would not be cut off from the redemptive work of the church. But halfway members were not permitted to take communion, in order to preserve the idea of visible sainthood. Thus, the Halfway Covenant was not so much a “grassroots pragmatic concession” as an attempt to preserve the distinctive ecclesiology of Congregational Puritanism.

The second dilemma, which can be summarized more briefly, is that the franchise was tied to church membership. With declining numbers of full church members, the state was in danger, and the Halfway Covenant was an attempt to maintain the tie between church membership and political membership in a more workable way.

I’m indebted here, even for the use of the word dilemma, to Edmund Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Let me quote from him:

New England piety may have been declining, but the halfway covenant was not a symptom of decline. Rather it was an attempt to answer questions which neither English Puritans nor Separatists had had to face, questions which were created by New England’s rigorous new conception of church membership . . . . The halfway covenant, I would maintain then, was neither a sign of decline in piety nor a betrayal of the standards of the founding fathers, but an honest attempt to rescue the concept of a church of visible saints from the tangle of problems created in time by human reproduction.

My point is not just that the facts don’t fit Kurth’s model. My point is that we don’t need Kurth’s model to interpret the facts.

Thanks for the correction about the relationship between evangelicals and “In God We Trust.” I had no idea that mainline Protestants in the 1950s were more responsible for that legislation than evangelicals. Since I’m doing some work in that period this semester, that will help my conception of post–World War II religion.

You are right, of course, that I was too simplistic in suggesting that rising church membership refutes a declension model. I merely offer that piece of evidence as one of the very few quantifiable indicators of religion. No matter what indicator you look at—political influence of religion, pervasiveness of religious ideas—I think you’ll find that it belies a simple declension model like Kurth’s.

You said above that “further historical background will reveal different conclusions.” If it’s true that Joseph Smith married more than two dozen women while he publicly and repeatedly claimed that he was not practicing polygamy, what different conclusions about that statement might be reached by investigating the historical background?

I said nothing about whether specific data points were verifiable or not. My original argument applied only to CONCLUSIONS drawn from decontextualized data points. Sure it’s reasonable for people to conclude that Joseph had at least a certain number of wives. And yes there are documented statements of denial. I wasn’t talking about that to begin with. I was talking about where people then take those isolated data points.

For example, is the audience supposed to take those two data points and say “wow, what a sneaky, philandering, law-breaking scumbag”?

Or are they supposed to reach some other conclusion. The way you selected the data points seems to imply that you’d like a negative conclusion about Joseph Smith. And for an American audience lacking any historical context within which to place these data points, that may indeed be the rather ignorant conclusion reached. But a further historical background will reveal different conclusions.

So it’s not so much particular data points and whether they are valid or not that my comment was aimed at. It is how opportunistic people take those isolated data points, and use the general ignorance of the audience to imply conclusions that are controversial at best.

My point was that a little humility about how much of a bead we’ve got on historical characters is in order. I think my example of Cornelius Ryan illustrates that point. And this is doubly true of polarizing characters – where inevitably, the sources we do have will be highly agenda-driven. There is plenty of room to say we don’t know in such instances.