On Under the Cope of Heaven

Bonomi’s book is a revisionist (at the time) history of religion in colonial North America and has since been taken up by so many historians as to now be the dominant narrative. Pushing back against religious and church histories published before 1986, which generally argued that the population of eighteenth-century British subjects who were active churchgoers was between 5-20%, Bonomi finds that North American religious life was vibrant and played an active role in colonial society and politics.

In the early eighteenth century, it appeared that church-going was in decline, especially after the establishment of Massachusetts as a royal colony and the increase of new denominations throughout the continent. To many observers, this appeared to be fundamentally disruptive and representative of a major shift in colonial American religious thinking—ultimately, they believed, churchgoing was declining and the territories that would become the United States would break from religious practices. However, Bonomi finds that British subjects on the continent—regardless of ethnic background—were broadly “latitudinarian” (accepting of other denominations so long as they were Protestant), allowing a diversity of spiritual viewpoints to take hold in the United States.

Because of North American latitudinarianism, many British subjects preferred to attend services at churches closer to home rather than demand religious purity. Many others were willing to try other Protestant denominations so long as they agreed on the basics of the faith. As a result, churches essentially created a marketplace where each denomination offered a variety of social services in order to appeal to more people. Unlike in Europe where the church mainly focused on religious matters—although they did engage in charitable actions and educational missions—North American churches became centers of social and political life. In fact, when the Revolution arrived in 1773-74, churches were a mobilizing institution for revolutionary change, and it is a testament to the strength of American Protestantism that anticlericalism was not common during the Revolution, as it was in virtually every other revolution that comes to mind (the French, Mexican, and Russian Revolutions are the first that I think of).

Bonomi revises the statistics of American churchgoing to around 60% of the white North American population at its height during the First Great Awakening. By no means does this mean that all white British subjects were churchgoing, but it is a strikingly different number from what earlier historians had suggested.

The major absences here are on African American religion (which Bonomi mentions in the preface to the revised edition as having experienced a dynamic explosion in scholarship) and Native American faith, which still appears to be absent. Moreover, there is little to be said about Catholicism here. It’s clear that while British subjects in North America were latitudinarian toward other Protestants, they did not hold the same attitudes toward Catholics. Yet, I do wonder about religious conflict in those terms. There are some great accounts of anti-Popish rituals in New England (especially the annual commemorations of Guy Fawkes Day on the Boston Commons) in other works, but they don’t really find a place here.

After reading this, I’m really curious about what other more recent historians have contributed to the conversation. Bonomi handles her subject matter really well, but the text is limited by the time in which it was published. Should she have published this in, say, 2010, I’m certain that it would be a very different book.