The constitution of 1723 elaborated the new vision of the fraternity and remained, throughout the eighteenth century, the document to which all official lodges subscribed. Written by the Scots Presbyterian clergyman James Anderson, it “digested” the older charges in what he called a “new and better method.”53 Complaining of “gross Errors” in the legendary histories, Anderson updated the list of former grand masters to include not only the kings of England, thereby linking its political history with the development of Freemasonry, but also Augustus Caesar.54 The kings included the first Stuart king of England, James I, who imported the Augustan style of architecture from Renaissance Italy. Instead of the medieval architecture celebrated in the old constitutions, which brought to mind the now unfashionable pursuit of occult wisdom, the 1723 history heralds Augustan aesthetics, which suggested the order and symmetry of the Newtonian universe and the new Enlightenment social theory.55
Similarly, the new constitution transformed the guild’s instructions on religion and politics. Previous constitutions began by invoking the Trinity and contained the injunction that masons shall be obedient to God and the Holy Church. Anderson instead makes no specifically Christian belief obligatory. “A Mason is oblig’d, by his Tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist nor an irreligious Libertine.”56 Taking the latitudinarian view shared by moderate Anglican priests and Protestant dissenters, Anderson pledged the fraternity to a position midway between a parochial High Church Anglicanism and an unbelieving natural religion.57 In doing so, he stepped away from his Presbyterian convictions and his recent sermons decrying both Deists and Unitarians.58 No longer obligated by their fraternity to submit to the religion of the nation, Masons were told to keep “their particular Opinions to themselves” while affirming a common belief in the transcendent.59 By encouraging its members to step outside their religious convictions, the new fraternity proclaimed a religious harmony among all men while prescribing very little. Although the constitutions’ call for men of “whatever Denominations or Persuasions” to join the fraternity suggests that this “religious harmony” was intended to encompass no more than doctrinal differences among Christians, as early as 1731, Masonry’s formerly obedient servants of “the Church” had admitted Jews into their fellowship.60
Political involvement was similarly open. Previous constitutions commanded all masons to “bee true men to the Kinge without any treason or falsehood.”61 Now, aside from an agreement to be “a peaceable Subject to the Civil Powers,” no political position was required.62 At the same time, Whig party leaders were among the early members of the modern fraternity, and Anderson’s history reflected their advocacy of a strong constitution and court-centered government.63 Similarly, he, Desaguliers, and their brothers established a Grand Lodge governed by rules and statutes requiring all lodge members to submit to the authority of their elected officers and all lodges to pledge their loyalty to the Grand Lodge.64 Neither wholly subordinate subjects of a king nor dangerously radical liberals, the members of the new fraternity submitted to its constitutional government, which embraced social stability while celebrating the brotherhood as a model for a well-ordered, cooperative society.
Presenting itself as a harbinger of the new social vision, the fraternity allowed its members considerable latitude in their political and religious convictions. As Shaftesbury argued, the genius of the private club was that it kept a playful distance from the solemn orthodoxies of state and church.65 Meeting in the King’s Arms, the Apple Tree, and other upscale London taverns, lodge members enjoyed long evenings of ritual toasts, “sumptuous” feasts, “innocent mirth,” entertaining orations, and the business of welcoming “noblemen and gentlemen of the first rank” into their order.66 At the same time, by creating a constitutional society that its members could alter through majority vote, the modern fraternity experimented with the reformation of civil society. It further enhanced its progressive image by embracing the new, liberal spirit of religious toleration. Although popular Newtonianism, with its frequent references to God as the Universal Architect, came to dominate Masonic rhetoric, amid the secrecy of the lodge, members were free to entertain a variety of spiritual perspectives. Like the antiquarian William Stukeley, who said that he entered the fraternity in search of “the remains of the mysterys of the antients,” a wide array of Druids, Deists, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics were members of the English fraternity. On the whole, however, as participants in the liberalizing mainstream of early eighteenth-century English society, the gentlemen and nobles of Freemasonry reinforced the progressive ideals of constitutional monarchy and religious toleration.
COLONIAL AMERICAN FREEMASONRY
The Freemasonry that came to America in the 1730s brought this extensive collection of cultural baggage, which the encounter with local culture reworked and transformed. Between the 1730s and the 1760s, Masonic lodges were one of a variety of “polite” societies that formed in America’s coastal cities. These private clubs included Saint Andrew’s, Saint George’s, and other British immigrant societies; the Beefsteak Society, the Calve’s Head Club, and other eating clubs; various literary, theatrical, and philosophical societies; and predominantly female salons and tea tables. Dedicated to the pleasures of amiable conversation, the arts, and good eating, these societies promoted the common interests of relative strangers in the new public meeting spaces of taverns, coffeehouses, and well-appointed homes. At a time when urban social relations were moving beyond the traditional ties of family, ethnicity, church, and local community, Freemasonry was among the new social forms that anticipated the rise of the American middle class.67
Since 1990, several colonial historians have adopted and refined Jürgen Habermas’s theoretical framework of the public sphere to explain these social developments in America while not paying particular attention to religious life. Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic (1990) makes the case for the significance of an emerging print media in the establishment of a secular eighteenth-century public sphere. He holds that through a burgeoning array of newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, print was both a carrier and an expression of a new republican ideology. David Conroy’s study of taverns in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, In Public Houses (1995), investigates their role in the creation of secular public space. In Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997), David S. Shields argues that colonial polite societies were vehicles for producing horizontal relationships among the elite.68 Taken together, these books suggest that a new language of secular discourse was taking hold through print and the new societies. I argue—in contrast to the secular focus of these studies, a tendency characteristic of Habermas’s European public sphere—that debates over religious ideas suffused the public sphere that emerged in America by the 1740s.69 The late colonial period saw an intermingling of secular and religious discourse.
Although Habermas held that the totalizing worldview of premodern religion stood in an inverse relationship with rational criticism, whereby religion must decline if enlightenment were to progress, his theoretical framework of an exclusively rational public sphere does not sufficiently acknowledge the pervasive presence of religion in the colonial world. There, unlike in England, the metaphysical authority of the monarchy was an ocean away.70 Instead, Reformed Protestant and Anglican establishments held varying degrees of religious authority across the colonies. A flexible Calvinism that was capable of including both the orthodox and the revivalist sides of the Great Awakening informed most eighteenth-century Christianity.71 At one of its extremes was a small minority of Catholics, and at the other the various advocates of Enlightenment religion, while all stood apart from Native American religions and the African gods of eighteenth-century slaves.72 Within this broad religious culture, moreover, magical beliefs and practices,