Society Stays Christian Longer If It Respects Religious Freedom: New Evidence from Pew

The Pew Research Center has released a very interesting new survey on the current religious landscape of the United States. Commentators will debate for some time what the results mean generally for the future of religion in this country. Will the present stability of America’s Christian identity last? Or will Christian identification resume its previous decline, as the more religious baby boomers die off and their children, many of them millennial “nones,” enter middle age?

Yet Pew’s data reveal patterns that raise other interesting questions. Take, for instance, the rate of Christian self-identification in the Northeastern United States, which I will define as Maryland, Pennsylvania, and all states to their north and east. Which of these states has the highest rate of Christian identification in its population? The answer is Delaware, at 70 percent. Next comes Rhode Island at 63 percent, then Pennsylvania at 62, then New Jersey at 59. Apart from Rhode Island, New England’s states (all those east of New York) are the least Christian: Connecticut’s rate of Christian identification is highest at 57 percent, while the rates of Vermont and New Hampshire are lowest at only 45 percent. The study also distinguishes the religious affiliation of major metropolitan areas. The most Christian metro area in the Northeast is Providence, Rhode Island, at 63 percent, then Philadelphia at 62 percent. Boston is the least Christian, at 47 percent. 

Why pick out these statistics? Because they line up with a cultural division that goes back to colonial times, identified by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed: New England, which was founded by Puritans, versus the Delaware Valley (Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), settled by the Quakers.

The geographical alignment is not exact in the case of the Delaware Valley: Fischer says that central Pennsylvania belongs to the Appalachian culture, southern Delaware to the Chesapeake Bay, and Eastern New Jersey contains a mix of cultures, including an offshoot of New England. Nevertheless, the higher rate of Christian belief in those states, all of them bordering the Delaware River, is striking; and Philadelphia, the center of the Delaware Valley culture, is more Christian than Boston, the heart of New England.

Practicing Puritans—also called Congregationalists—and Quakers have long ceased to have much direct political or cultural influence on America. But each group was the first to settle its respective region; its direct formative influence there lasted for decades; and the ideas and beliefs that inspired each formed the long-term foundations of the cultural habits of their region. Those ideas and habits persisted in laws and social mores that subsequent inhabitants assimilated—both because those newcomers had to adapt to those customs if they wanted to make a living, and because the customs were in many (if not all) respects an effective and attractive way of life. Serious students of cultural development, such as Fischer and Tocqueville, have recognized the persistent power of cultural forms, even if the people who established them recede into the background of history.

I suggest in this essay that the persistent difference in attitudes to Christianity between the Philadelphia region and New England today may not be an accident: it may be a consequence of their original settlers’ differing religious attitudes, and in particular their notions of religious freedom.

More Puritan than the Puritans—Almost

Quakers do not stand out on the stage of history, probably because they were boring and prudish (at least by our standards). As Fischer recounts, their intense sense of duty led them to shun sports, recreation, and other “wastes” of time. They abhorred ostentation and wore plain clothing. They so severely condemned sexual transgressions that they outlawed many of them—in some cases even imposing extreme, excessive punishments, such as life imprisonment and regular whippings. They were wary of sexual intimacy even within marriage: marital relations were to be pursued solely to propagate the human race, and many couples abstained from intimacy for long periods. Quakers were ironically rather “puritanical,” in the popular sense of the term.

The real Puritans of New England, surprisingly, often did not live up to their modern stereotype. They also strove to use time well, but they enjoyed sports (as a means of exercise), like what later became baseball. They dressed with restraint, but their elites would occasionally wear lace, “slashed sleeves,” and other finery. And they were not “puritanical” in matters of sexuality. Although they viewed sexual activity outside marriage as wrong, within marriage they had none of the Quakers’ scruples. The sexually ascetical Quakers had modestly sized families, but the New England Puritans constituted one of the most prolific communities in history: as late as the 1730s, for instance, each family in the town of Waltham, Massachusetts “produced 9.7 children on average” (emphasis added). 

But there was one point about the Quakers that was not “puritanical” in any sense: their strong and consistent commitment to freedom of conscience, especially in matters of religion and religious belief.

On this question, the New England Puritans lived up to their reputation. Both they and the Quakers came to the New World to worship God freely, according to their conscience; but, like other early modern religious authoritarians (of which there were many, across numerous Christian denominations), the Puritans allowed no political freedom to the consciences of non-Puritans: “In their minds,” Fischer says, “religious liberty was thought to be consistent with the persecution of Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, . . . and indeed virtually everyone except those within a very narrow spectrum of Calvinist orthodoxy.” Those who would not conform had to leave their colony in Massachusetts—take for example Roger Williams, the religiously tolerant Calvinist minister who founded Rhode Island.  

The Quakers, however, brought to the Delaware Valley a notion of religious freedom that Williams and many contemporary Americans could recognize as their own. Following William Penn, their “most articulate spokesman” for freedom of conscience, the Quakers believed in a “liberty that God had given not merely to a chosen few, but to all his children,” in religious matters. It extended to people who held beliefs different from Quakers’, even in communities where Quakers were in the majority. Penn wanted to create in the New World a model Christian community—a “colony of heaven”—built around Jesus’s Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Fischer calls this the principle of “reciprocal liberty.”

The Power of Truth in Itself

The question of which view of religious freedom—the Puritans’ or the Quakers’—was the more Christian one is a debate for theology; it seems plain to me at least that the Quaker view is more that of contemporary Christianity, especially as articulated in the Catholic Church’s Dignitatis Humanae. What the social science behind the Pew Religious Landscape Survey can suggest is that, at least in the long run, Quakers’ respect for freedom of conscience might be more effective than Puritans’ integration of church and state in maintaining a Christian society. Although the differences in Christian identification between New England and the Delaware Valley today are not so large in the case of certain states, the Delaware Valley still comes out on top; and its metropolis, Philadelphia, easily outdoes New England’s preeminent city, Boston. Moreover, the one outlier state in New England that does better than much of the Delaware Valley in Christian religiosity—Rhode Island—was precisely founded on the principle of religious freedom, in protest of Puritan rigidity. 

How might New England’s and the Delaware Valley’s different religious attitudes have accounted for their long-term religiosity? Although many New England Puritans were surely sincere, their harsh public policing of orthodoxy led many other Christians (like Roger Williams) to leave New England. Many who stayed perhaps conformed outwardly without interior sincerity. Some came to see Christianity cynically—as a tool of hypocritical political rulers who only wanted to control others—and they made little effort to pass on belief to their children. Others conformed out of fear and came to see Christianity as rules by which to live in order to survive, not a truth that sets one free; such religiosity was probably not very attractive to potential converts. Many later New Englanders, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw the society of their Puritan ancestors this way—as shown in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Speculations aside, both historical data and scholarship (such as Kevin Vallier’s book All the Kingdoms of the World) show how religiously authoritarian regimes tend to harm both religious and political culture in the long run.

In the Delaware Valley, on the other hand, religion and politics were clearly distinguished: people were given the freedom to open themselves genuinely to religious truth, without fear of political reprisal. Thus, as Dignitatis Humanae says, truth was allowed to enter their minds “by virtue of its own truth, . . . quietly,” and therefore permanently, “with power.” If religious truth is to take possession of a person, he has to make it his own, in love, until he says with the poet in the Song of Songs: “I have got him, and I will not let him go.”

The power of religious freedom to strengthen Christianity was demonstrated by the outstanding political impact that Delaware Valley Christians had in the history of human rights. Abolitionism, the movement that eventually ended chattel slavery in the United States—and the whole world—was strong in New England; Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), was born and raised in Connecticut by a prominent Congregationalist (i.e., Puritan) minister. But the movement began not in New England but in the Quaker meetinghouses of Philadelphia. Its political power, Fischer says, emanated from the Quakers’ fidelity to the Golden Rule: “if they did not wish to be slaves themselves,” they thought, “they had no right to enslave others.” Little less could explain why many early Quaker colonists who owned slaves eventually gave them up, despite the economic sacrifices that manumission often entailed. As one scholar (whom Fischer quotes) points out, Quaker “antislavery reformers never contended that slavery was economically unsound”; indeed, slave-based labor was profitable in the Delaware Valley’s economy. Quakers rejected slavery simply because it was a moral evil that was incompatible with the Gospel.

To Promote America’s Religious Tradition, Promote Religious Freedom

These points are important for conservative Christians to consider today, when the future of American Christianity remains in doubt. Many of them seem to want a political union of church and state, as in the Puritan colonies. But the data suggest that, whatever gains such close church–state alliances might win for religion in the short term, those achievements would probably fade away in the long run, just as Christianity is now fading from old Puritan New England.

Nor should Christians worry that the only alternatives to such regimes are moral libertarianism or the wholesale exclusion of religion from public life. There is another way: religious freedom like that of the Delaware Valley, embodied in the ideas of William Penn. Perhaps alluding to John Rawls (still alive and teaching when Albion’s Seed was written), Fischer emphasizes that Penn’s idea of reciprocal liberty “has been appropriated by those who believe that the republic . . . should not associate itself with any creed other than that of secular liberty.” Yet “[t]his idea of ethical neutrality is profoundly different from the purposes of the Quakers.” Penn’s religious freedom was emphatically not that of the Enlightenment, or of secular liberalism, but of the Gospel. “He despised the material and secular impulses that were gaining strength around him,” Fischer shows, nor did he consider freedom an end in itself (hence Quakers’ aforementioned tendency to err toward too much force when punishing moral lapses). His intent—however imperfectly he achieved it—was to foster a community bound by truth and Christian charity.

The legacy of the Quaker experience suggests that the best way to associate religion with politics is not to give Christianity special privileges from the state (such as money and recourse to civil power), but to give it freedom. Such a political framework is not only very fitting for the diffusion of God’s love into the hearts of men, it also has gotten impressive political results: it brought about the liberation of millions of enslaved people, and it enabled Christian society to last longer in the Delaware Valley than elsewhere. If Christian conservatives want to secure a more Christian future for their country, perhaps they should take as their model not the religiously authoritarian states of early modern Europe and America’s Puritan colonies, but the American Quakers’ society of authentic Christian freedom.

Image by Craig Zerbe and licensed via Adobe Stock.