That Religion in Which All Men Agree. David G. Hackett

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      The emergence of liberal Protestantism expanded the boundaries of Christianity to include the ideology of colonial Freemasonry. The latitudinarian movement in the Church of England, in particular, employed Newtonian science to stake out an understanding of religion between the extremes of Catholicism and atheism or religious indifference. Reason and science rather than faith and revelation lay at the foundation of latitudinarian belief and practice. This Anglican view was widely adopted by colonial American Masons, including clergy.

      In the early nineteenth century, Protestant ministers and other members of a variety of denominations joined Freemasonry, with the great majority of its new leaders coming from the Unitarian, Episcopalian, and Congregational Churches. The brotherhood met this attraction with efforts to link itself more overtly with Christian faith. Standing to the left of sectarian Calvinists and their evangelical heirs yet to the right of Enlightenment rationalists, Christian Freemasonry appeared to respond to a widely shared desire to reimagine the character of American society as it emerged from the revolution.

      The Unitarians James Thompson and William Bentley were characteristic of the Protestant ministers who joined the fraternity following the war. When he was ordained in 1804, the Harvard-educated Thompson stood, “like many of the New England clergy, on that indistinct and wavering line between Calvinism and Unitarianism, sometimes called moderate Calvinism.” In that same year, the Barre, Massachusetts, native was present when the appointment of a liberal to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity marked the end of orthodoxy at his college. “Following discussions attendant on the inauguration of Dr. Ware as Hollis Professor,” Thompson was said to have become “completely emancipated from Calvinistic . . . theology.” He joined his local lodge shortly thereafter and later served as the grand chaplain of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge.⁷⁹ Bentley had a similar story. In his youth in prewar Salem, Massachusetts, and at Harvard during the war, he was described as a “decided and earnest Calvinist.” Following his ordination and permanent settlement in Salem’s Second Congregational Church in 1783, he “renounced Calvinism” and soon became an “avowed Unitarian.” Two years afterward, Bentley joined his local lodge, later serving as state grand chaplain.⁸⁰

      The twenty-four ministers who served as Massachusetts Grand Lodge chaplains between 1797 and 1825 followed similar courses. Twenty were raised in the strict-to-moderate Calvinism of the Congregational Church and later helped form its liberal wing (five) and the liberal Unitarian (twelve) and Universalist (three) Churches. The majority of these grand chaplains, including two of the four Episcopalians, attended Harvard College. Nearly all were ordained within a few years of finishing college and joined their local lodge around the same time.⁸¹

      These clergymen were benevolent and educated, concerned more with the moral and mental improvement of society than with the dogmatic sectarianism of Calvinist churches. Believing in the universal benevolence of God and universal salvation, these liberal ministers avoided theological controversies and supported the formation of interdenominational societies to advance social morality and education. These were men such as the Unitarian John Pipon, whose sermons were always “sound” but “never doctrinal” and who avoided “the topics of dispute which divided the religious community” while offering to all a “general benevolence” which “lost none of its strength by diffusion.”⁸² Or the Concord Unitarian Ezra Ripley, whom one congregant, the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, described as “adopting heartily, though in its mildest forms, the creed and catechism of the fathers” and who worked ardently for the temperance cause.⁸³ Some went so far as the Reverend Joseph Richardson, who declared “all religious creeds or formulas [to be] of human device” and thereby “unfit to be regarded as substitutes for the Christian life.”⁸⁴ Well-educated themselves, they sat on school committees, helped form the American Education Society, and joined the Massachusetts Historical Society. With the ministers and other members of other denominations, they helped create local and national Bible societies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and numerous benevolent and charitable institutions intended to serve the community as a whole.

      

      For these leading liberal ministers, their local Masonic brotherhood complemented and supported the larger purposes of Christianity. There they found men like themselves, from their community, from their church, who were similarly interested in mental and moral improvement. The brothers, in turn, often placed these clergymen in positions of authority. In addition to serving as grand chaplains of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge, several were deputy district grand masters; the Universalist Paul Dean became the grand master of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge, while Thompson had a lodge named after him.⁸⁵

      In their Masonic discourses, these ministers repeatedly placed the temporal work of the lodge within the greater spiritual purpose of Christianity. The Congregational minister Ezekiel L. Bascom argued that while Freemasonry was committed to improving social morality, it, like other “religious and moral societies,” “rises or falls” to the degree that “piety to God” is “the reigning principle of our hearts.”⁸⁶ The necessity of personal and social “regeneration for the enjoyment of the blessing of holy union,” the Congregational minister and brother Clark Brown concluded, “render[ed] Masonry important, as well as Christianity necessary.”⁸⁷ For these Christian Masonic clergymen, the lodge was, in an often-repeated phrase, “the handmaid” of Christianity, working toward its temporal ends while not usurping Christianity’s larger spiritual objective. As Bentley bluntly declared in an address to his local Salem lodge, “the object of Christianity and Masonry never can be the same.” Christianity’s aim is “the advancement of personal virtue always above the state of society in common life. It proposes its highest rewards in a future existence, and directs all its associations to this end.” In contrast, “our institution provides immediately for the friendship of life and manners through the world.”⁸⁸

      Although the majority of early nineteenth-century Masonic clergy appear to have been Unitarian, Episcopal, or Congregational, the fraternity had some evangelical Baptist and Methodist leaders. The Baptist revivalist Joshua Bradley, known for his Accounts of Religious Revivals in Many Parts of the United States from 1815 to 1816, was also the author of Some of the Beauties of Freemasonry.⁸⁹ The Methodist Solomon Sias was the publisher of his denomination’s newspaper Zion’s Herald in the 1820s and the prelate of an advanced degree, the Encampment of Knights Templar. In 1820, he brought his evangelical convictions into the lodge, reminding his fellow Masons that “the rude and sinful state of man . . . is early impressed on the mason’s mind; and the necessity of change of heart and life” is “clearly pointed out.”⁹⁰ Men such as Bradley and Sias believed in human depravity and the need for an experience of conversion yet were also, like their Baptist brother John Gano, “of a liberal mind, and esteemed pious men of every denomination.”⁹¹

      Baptist missionaries and itinerant Methodists, tied to a system that relocated them every few years, may have joined the ubiquitous fraternity to help them accommodate to their constant movement. The Masonic membership of the fiery populist “Crazy” Lorenzo Dow, perhaps the most well-known and well-traveled Methodist itinerant, is further evidence of the attraction of the brotherhood to evangelical preachers. Unkempt in appearance, rough in manner, and guided by inner lights and vision, Dow had a passionate preaching style, often accompanied by hysterics and falling on the ground, that would seem the antithesis of the studied decorum of the gentleman Mason. Yet in 1830 he was introduced to a Maryland lodge meeting as a “visiting Brother.” Addressing the lodge, “Brother Dow” exhorted his fellows “to show that Masons can be good men as well as good Christians.”⁹²