Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

By the first decades of the eighteenth century, religion, though still established,
had lost its commanding power in society and its practitioners their
old dogmatic zeal. The Puritan theocracy gradually but steadily dissolved
during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Some of the reasons why
Puritan zeal flagged were the debilitating effects of the growth of culture
and worldly cosmopolitanism on it, plus the liberal trends emerging from
within the Puritan church to become powerful in Harvard College, the
very training ground of Massachusetts Puritanism. The liberal Puritans, incidentally,
used the Salem witch-hunt effectively as an object lesson of the
consequences of unchecked religious superstition and frenzy. In the Southern
colonies, the Anglican establishment was largely a formal shell behind
which religion per se had very little impact on the people. The Virginia
squire, for example, was naturally and habitually a churchgoer and vestryman;
but far more for institutional and social than for deeply religious
reasons. The Anglican ministry had little influence in the Southern colonies,
even though the vestry in the state church was the basic unit of local government.
In fact, there is generally a clearly discernible correlation between
the governmental perquisite of an establishment and the dwindling of
religious zeal in the society. Even in dedicated Pennsylvania, as we have
seen, recently intense Quaker zeal faded rather rapidly and a more worldly
and less-principled Quaker generation replaced the old "holy experiment."
Moreover, in Pennsylvania, the Quakers were by midcentury far outnumbered
by other creeds. As for the Ulster Scot frontiersmen, they were almost
devoid of ministers during much of this period. Hence religious activity
slackened greatly in that numerous group.
The growing liberalization of the churches was also a function of the
new spirit abroad in Europe: the great rationalist movement we know now
as the Enlightenment. The intellectual emphasis in England was shifting
from a Calvinist preoccupation with pure faith, divine revelation, and the
depravity of man, to an Enlightenment belief in the supremacy of man's
reason and in the possibility of his goodness and his progress. The Enlightenment
emphasis was on individual liberty, including the sphere of religion.
Isaac Newton's great achievement in the late seventeenth century gave a
powerful impetus—despite the great physicist's own personal inclination—to
the growth of rationalism. Here was a mighty achievement of man using
his reason to uncover the hitherto hidden and mysterious laws of nature.
For the eighteenth century, Newton's achievement had an enormously liberating
impact. As the great poet Alexander Pope celebrated:
Nature and nature's law lay hidden in night,
God said: "Let Newton be," and all was light
And in America, William Livingston, future governor of New Jersey, hailed
the "immortal Newton: whose illustrious name will shine on records of
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