Nursing Fathers in America

A Response to Kevin DeYoung

Over the summer, Kevin DeYoung entered the apparently emerging debate over the congruence of the American revision to the Westminster Confession and its 17^th century predecessor. The article is worth reading in full; much of it does the grunt work of charting out exactly what got changed in Chapter 23 of the Confession (“Of the Civil Magistrate”). Here’s his central point:

“As new debates about the proper relationship between church and state continue to multiply, it’s important to recognize that the two versions of WCF 23:3 represent two different and irreconcilable views of the civil magistrate.”

Meaning, someone who subscribes to the Westminster Confession must choose. The two options on offer are irreconcilable. My own position is that the 1788 version says less than I would like it to in principle—the 1646 is better—but does not represent a rebuke of the fuller, older version. Meaning, not all that was required in 1646 for subscription was required in 1788, but no antithesis was thereby introduced. Accordingly, I can in good conscience subscribe to the 1788 but believe more (i.e., 1646) than is required without contradiction. In other words, the codification of the Adopting Act (1729) which, contra DeYoung, did not render the Confessions doctrine of the civil magistrate “null and void.”  

Looking at the text of the American revisions the radical break insinuated by DeYoung simply does not hold up, and further supplies an approach to subscription not before practiced, at least to my knowledge.  This basic, textual point has already been dealt with ably by Stephen Wolfe.

What can be further investigated, if we are to have a productive debate about all this, is the meaning of key phrases in the text as it stood in 1788 and the context in which it was produced. The former supplies greater understanding of what must be affirmed, demonstrates that the chasm between 1646 and 1788 is not so great as DeYoung says. The latter proposes possible prudential reasons or motivations for the revisions not considered by DeYoung’s account.

DeYong’s story is a winding whiggish one, relying heavily on Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke to tell a tale of trajectory, that certain figures, as time went on were shepherding ideas to their natural and necessary end point through incremental progression. This is a tenuous position, to be sure, when doing intellectual history.

We will not dwell on it, but I should add that in DeYoung’s use of Pufendorf’s Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society he goes astray. Pufendorf does not charge the “sovereign” with only upholding “the basics of natural religion.” Pufendorf explicitly says that it is within the sovereign’s authority not only to uphold natural religion, but also to punish blasphemy, idolatry, and devil worship, anything tending to the subversion of the “Capital Points” of Christianity. He even advises that good order recommends “Uniformity” in “those Ceremonies which have been annexed to Religious Worship.” Johannes Althusius advised the same some 70 years prior. Pufendorf should be read, in context, as fleshing out one of the scenarios given in Politica wherein a diversity of Christian sects is present.

Moreover, DeYoung does not attempt to convince us that this particular text by Pufendorf was influential in 18^th century America. Other of his texts were, to some degree, amongst the well-educated that were also reading Montesquieu and Vattel, but those were predominantly legal works. The same goes for John Locke, the influence of whom on the founding has been wildly over estimated. Reception history is important here if two authors, neither of Presbyterian or American origins are to occupy such a pivotal point in the narrative. But I digress.

To begin in earnest, DeYoung acknowledges the pedigree of the invocation of Isaiah 49:23 as a “designation for kings and other magistrates” with “the general idea” being that civil authorities would support true religion. But DeYoung seems to think that the 1788 WCF has restricted the scope of such a duty by removing the “establishment principle in favor of the voluntary principle of church membership” and further removing the requirement that ministers affirm that magistrates proceed against “erroneous opinions or practices.” The Larger Catechism no longer calls it a sin to tolerate false religion.

More DeYoung:

“If the burden of the historic text is to assert the authority and duty of the civil magistrate to overthrow idolatry among his people and to reform the church, the burden of the revised text is to assert the civil magistrate has no authority to punish his people based on religion (or irreligion) and must not ‘in the least, interfere in matters of faith.’ (WCF 23.3). These are two different conceptions of what the civil magistrate should (and shouldn’t) do, not simply the same idea leaning in two different directions.”

What did “nursing father” mean in 18^th century America? What was the colonial expectation for magistrates vis a vis religion? James Hutson charted the career of the phrase years ago.

Calvin, like the rest of the magisterial reformers, had considered it a Papist error to diminish the civil magistrate to no other role than that of materially providing for ecclesiastical authorities; rather they were to “bravely defend the doctrine of the Word” and protect the “pious worshipers of God.” The same sentiment of Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah was successfully transported overseas but taken on, over time, an emphasis of protection for Protestantism against Roman incursion, as I’ve noted elsewhere.

As Benjamin Lewis Price summarized, “From the accession of William III until 1776, American colonists viewed their kings as protectors of their lives, liberties, and property, and preservers of their Protestant faith.” We see this idea, for example, in the appeal of the Suffolk Resolves (1774). The next year, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress complained that those “who should be Nursing Fathers” to the church in the colony had “become its Persecutors.” The passage of the Quebec Act represented a plot to subjugate New England to Papism. Preserving Protestantism was seen as an irrevocable duty of any good sovereign.

Colonial preachers constantly returned to Isaiah 49:23 on appropriate occasions. Isaiah’s prophecy began its fulfillment with the “glorious accomplishment” of Constantine and Theodosius according to Edward Dorr, preaching in 1765. What did it mean to be a nursing father? To protect the church of Christ and its privileges from “malice and insults of all its enemies.” Of course, here the church of Christ did not include Catholics. Further, nursing fathers are to “suppress all immorality and vice, and to encourage the practice of virtue and piety.” What kind of virtue and piety? Christian.

And, apart from professing true religion themselves,

“Civil rulers are to support and maintain religion, and to provide for the publick exercises of it.—Religion can’t be supported and maintained in the world, without some expence… Even the heathen, who had only the dim light of nature, have been sensible, that the public profession and practice of religion, was a benefit to the state, and absolutely necessary, to the safety and security of civil government… All antient history, justifies the truth of this observation. So that ’tis hard to find, among mankind, any nation or people, wherein any regular, civil polity, hath been established, who have not made some kind of provision for the support and maintenance of public worship, in some form or other.”

Hence, Christian nations, including the colonies, had made such provisions for a Gospel ministry and the propagation of Christianity. All this was to be done because rulers receive their power from God and because religion is the best source of public peace. Over and over public sermons, essays, and articles reiterated this basic formula, as did Ezra Stiles in his famous 1783 sermon.

Even John Witherspoon recognized it as a predominant opinion that “the magistrate ought to make public provision for the worship of God.” At bare minimum, magistrates were “obliged to take care for the support of religion, or in other words, of schools and the gospel ministry, in order to their approving themselves nursing fathers.” Elisha Williams in his Seasonable Plea for the Liberty of Conscience (1744) had simply assumed that everyone agreed on this front. The proponents of broadened toleration in New England like Isaac Backus weren’t as ambitious as we tend to remember them. Backus did not deny that magistrates were to be nursing fathers; he only wanted the nursing father to exercise “impartial care” for all of his Christian children. The shift from the 16^th century to the 18^th century was an application, at least in the American context, of the nursing father idea to an ecumenical or non-denominational pan-Protestantism with allowance for regional or state-level diversity.

The First Amendment was not designed to prostrate Christianity before atheism, Buddhism, or Islam, instructed Joseph Story. And neither was the pan-Protestantism just described; it would not even permit the levelling of Protestantism and Catholicism.

As Hutson assessed, the majority of people into the 19^th century “believed that relations between government and religion should be described by the nursing father metaphor.” At a minimum, this described a “warm, paternal feeling for its religious institutions.”

John Mitchell Mason, the Presbyterian thorn in Jefferson’s side, preached that Christians were to “entreat [the magistrate] to fulfill his promise, that kings shall be to his church nursing-fathers, and queens her nursing-mothers. With what conscience can you lift up your hands in such a supplication, when you are exerting yourselves to procure a president who does not fear God… do you think the church of Christ is to be nurtured by the dragon’s milk of infidelity?” Jasper Adams preached similarly, and so on.

Hutson concludes:

“[T]he nursing fathers metaphor expressed the view of the Founding generation toward the relations between government and religion far more accurately than Jefferson’s wall metaphor. In other words, in the early years of the republic, Calvin, whom Jefferson hated with a passion that he reserved for few others, trumped the master of Monticello.”

“Republican Subversives”

So much for the language of “nursing fathers.” What was the political situation for and opinion of Presbyterians in the late 18^th century and early republic period? In short, not overly favorable. The Presbyterian political situation in 1788 is not considered by DeYoung. If the 1788 revisions meant everything DeYoung says they did, then they were rather subversive, flatly contradicting American constitutional practice across the new republic. In other words, playing right into every rumor and conspiracy that had circulated about them for the past decade (at least) and would for decades more.

The loyalist Joseph Galloway was gravely concerned about the mass of “congregationalist presbyterian republicans” moving into Philadelphia. These persons the “original cause of the rebellion.” This was a common opinion, as we will see. It’s complicated, but 18^th century Congregationalists of Connecticut, in particular, often referred to themselves as Presbyterian. Politically, Presbyterianism had become synonymous with republicanism of the anti-monarchical, revolutionary (i.e., non-classical) variety. (For more on this distinction in the context of the English Civil War, see Paul Rahe’s marvelous book, Against Throne and Altar. Not all conceptions of republicanism are the same, and the more exclusivist, populist sort was not the only kind in play in 18^th century America.) That is, political radicalism but with ambition to establishment. Hence, we often see a polemical lumping from loyalists at the time. New Jersey’s Governor, William Franklin, said “Presby[terian]s of N. England [or Congregationalists]” had riled every colony against the Stamp Act. A “Storm of Presbyterian Rage,” as Pennsylvania’s tax collector, John Huges, called it, had singlehandedly instigated the Stamp Act Congress in New York.

Joseph Tiedemann recounts more examples:

“Complaints swelled over time. In 1768, a year of intense hostility between New York’s Presbyterians and Anglicans, ‘Z’ declared that ‘no Protestants have ever given the Government so much Trouble, nor shown such fixed and rooted Enmity to the established Church, as … Presbyterians.’ Although they demanded toleration for themselves in Britain, they behaved in America with a ‘Spirit of Persecution’ and ‘Lust for Power.’ The same year, Alexander Mackrabie warned from New York: ‘The Presbyterians should not be allowed to grow too great. They are all of Republican Principles.’ In 1770, New York’s Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden (an Anglican) reported that New York City’s anti-British rioters ‘consist[ed] chiefly of Dissenters,’ mostly ‘Independents from New England, or Educated there, and of republican Principles.” In 1771, the Anglican Clergy of New York and New Jersey warned Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, that ‘Independency in religion [Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and other Dissenting Protestant groups] will naturally produce republicans in the state; and from their principles, too prevalent already, the greatest evils may justly be apprehended.’”

More examples:

“In 1774, someone opined in the New York Journal that ‘Presbyterians have been the chief … instruments in all these flaming measures, and they always do, and ever will act against government, from that restless and turbulent antimonarchical spirit which has always distinguished them everywhere, whenever they had, or by any means could assume power, however illegally.’ That same year, Thomas Bradbury Chandler blamed the imperial crisis on ‘New England and other Presbyterian Republicans.’ In 1775, a letter in Rivington’s Gazette, allegedly from Boston, declared: ‘The independent Ministers have ever been since the first settling of this colony, the instigators and abettors of every persecution and conspiracy.’ The same year Daniel Varnum, a Delaware Loyalist, affirmed that he would rather live “under a tyrannical King as a tyrannical Commonwealth, especially if the d–d Presbyterians had the rule of it.” In 1776, Rev. Charles Inglis, a New York Anglican apologist, wrote: ‘I do not know one of them [Presbyterian ministers], nor have I been able, after strict inquiry, to hear of any, who did not, by preaching and every effort in their power, promote all the measures of the [Continental] congress.’ A Philadelphia Anglican asserted, ‘A Presbyterian loyalist was a thing unheard of.’ In November 1776, Ambrose Searle, secretary to Adm. Richard Lord Howe, wrote from New York that “the War … is at the Bottom very much a religious War.’ In April 1777, Searle added, “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of this whole Conspiracy, has supplied it with Vigor, and will never rest, till something is decided upon it.’”

As Tiedemann explains, there was good reason for these suspicions. (Here’s a good piece at the Journal of the American Revolution discussing the same subject.)

Note well the equivocation between Presbyterians and Congregationalists or Independents in the loyalist reports. The famous word given to King George III by William Jones in 1776, viz., that “this has been a Presbyterian war from the beginning… and accordingly the first firing against the King’s troops  was from a Massachuset [sic] meeting house,” carried on this equivocation.

Presbyterianism was more often than not a catchall for non-conformist Protestantism of a republican bent, which was taken to be inherent in the ecclesiology anyway. Properly speaking, Presbyterians were not Independents, but the Tories weren’t exactly employing distinctions through the lens of the Westminster Assembly, to be sure.

And in any case, the Congregationalists of New England and the Presbyterians of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York (“republican sectaries,” Galloway called them) were aligned in the war. Politically, the distinctions were eroded. And even if the “Black Robe Regiment” is more legend than fact, the dissenting clergy were indispensable in colonial secession. For our purposes, Congregationalist and Presbyterian clergy were fervently preaching the traditional “nursing father” requirements, those evidently abandoned by their English sovereign, up through the 18^th century.

John Adams recalled that at the time of the Revolution, the Society in London for Propagating the Gospel in foreign parts had told its members, many of whom were in Delaware, that if the states declared independents, not only would their salaries be cut off, but that the entire affair “was a plan of the Presbyterians to get their Religion established.”

The suspicion that Presbyterians had instigated the American Revolution and, thereafter, were plotting a national establishment was widespread. The American Revolution was a replay of the Glorious one that preceded it; it was just a question of which role was being played by a faction. For Tory’s Presbyterians were doing what they had always done, tyrannicide. For colonists, at least up to 1776, whether Congregationalist or Presbyterian, they were then filling the Cavalier role against an errant parliament.

“The Most Intolerant of All Sects”

After the war, Presbyterian as a label still stood in some circles for both subversion and domination. Even worse, it became synonymous with the threat of a national establishment.  

Tiedemann again: “After the Revolution, Thomas Jones, an embittered loyalist exile, identified the culprits he deemed responsible for the rebellion in New York: the Whig ‘triumvirate’ of Presbyterians–William Livingston, William Smith, and John Morin Scott.” In the middle colonies, the rapid rise of Presbyterians in numbers and influence was a problem.

Thomas Jefferson considered Presbyterians “the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious.” Their clergy were

“ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere, the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. they pant to reestablish by law that holy inquisition, which they can now only infuse into public opinion. we have most unwisely committed to the hierophants of our particular superstition, the direction of public opinion, that lord of the Universe. we have given them stated and privileged days to collect and catechise us, opportunities of delivering their oracles to the people in mass, and of moulding their minds as wax in the hollow of their hands. but, in despite of their fulminations against endeavors to enlighten the general mind, to improve the reason of the people, and encorage them in the use of it, the liberality of this state will support this institution, and give fair play to the cultivation of reason.”

He said the same thing almost verbatim to another friend—Jefferson really couldn’t stop writing about the conniving Presbyterians the sole aim of which was “ascendancy” and “exclusive” establishment. The “breeze advancing from the North,” viz., Unitarianism, was the last best hope of Virginia, otherwise its fate was a Presbyterian establishment.

Thomas Cooper had reported to Jefferson that New York Presbyterians were attempting to “establish a system of Tythes.”

“Equally decided and persevering, is the attempt of the same sect to acquire the command over every Seminary of education; and finally to attempt in favour of the Presbyterians, a Church establishment. Of these designs on the part of that sect, I am as fully persuaded, as I am of my own existence; and what is worse, I greatly fear they will succeed.”

Jefferson could only respond with choice words for the “blasphemy and absurdity of the five points of Calvin,” and report in kind that whilst ecumenism was blossoming in mixed areas, by contrast “in the districts where presbyterianism prevails undividedly. their ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power.”

The second president brought up the same issue in another letter, blaming “a Philadelphia publication the ‘Reformer’” for getting Presbyterian clergy in Virginia to support similar policies, not to mention conspiring to boot Jefferson himself from the university he founded. In response to Jefferson’s correspondence, William Short admitted that he had once conceived of Presbyterians as the “Jansenists of Protestantism” but now saw them for what they truly were, the “Jesuits” of Protestantism.

Machiavellian operators in the shadows, that was the general opinion amongst Jefferson and his friends. Thomas Watkins discerned a “strong Presbyterian interest silently but actively in operation for Mr. Adams [i.e., John Quincy Adams].” John Quincy, of course, was a notorious Calvinist, to the chagrin of his father. The political fortunes of the elder Adams had been seriously threatened in the election of 1800 when the rumor circulated that he was involved in the Presbyterian plot for national establishment. Such an establishment, would have introduced a radical contradiction within the federalist polity and the original understanding of the First Amendment. Had the Presbyterians merely aspired to a state level establishment it would have been ambitious, especially in the middle colonies, but not so threatening.

Let me propose, then, that the impetus for the American revisions to the Confession dealing with the Christian magistrate were not insulated from this crisis of public opinion for Presbyterians, and further that said revisions were generally in step with the constitutional settlement then emerging. True subscription to the revised Confession should appreciate this fact that it is not pure and inevitable theological progression that drove the revisions.

A Militant Whitefield?

Expansion of religious tolerance was a necessity in the new republic given its diversity of Christian sects and denominations; diversity is always a political problem whether we recognize it today or not. Unity and stability are difficult achievements.

There was a question of national security as well. John Adams took it as fact that foreign governments, including England, were “employing [underhanded] means to propagate their sectarian Systems in these States.” At the same time, he foresaw a future where “Presbyterians and Methodists” could unite into one faction and thereby take over the country. ‘[L]et a George Whitefield arise, with a military cast, like Mahomet, or Loyola, and what will become of all the other Sects who can never unite?”

On the one hand, sectarianism diminished the likelihood of the latter, but also introduced chaos and disunity. Jefferson’s solution, as I’ve highlighted before, was for the government to shun sectarian disputes entirely to diminish their public significance—death by neglect.

But disestablishment, as James Bryce understood, especially in places like Virginia, was instigated by an anti-Anglican (i.e., anti-Tory) animus. Tories were initially viewed with the same suspicion that would later attach to Roman Catholics, viz., the threat of foreign loyalties and disproportionate influence. For Anglicans it was their control of education and the public purse, for Catholics it was their unassimilable masses flooding into port cities. The Germans (Lutherans) presented a similar assimilation problem but weren’t so numerous.

All that to say, the trend toward expanded toleration and disestablishment, begun in Virginia, was owed to facts on the ground, public sentiments, and political dynamics less than pure principle. Moral arguments were, of course, asserted and in the mx, but were not a singular driver. If John Coffey is right, that “Lockean ideas of religious liberty” were “increasingly attractive to Presbyterians who feared Anglican hegemony or saw little prospect of becoming the dominant majority,” then we must add two things. First, at least some of them thought they could take power anyway, or at least that was the perception. Second, Coffey’s conclusion speaks to the motivations of the time: the limit of Anglican power and the limit of Locke’s conception of “religious liberty.” The first was practical and political. The second was not at all maximally inclusive. Catholics and atheists needn’t apply to the bounds of Protestant charity. On what basis then are the American revisions expanded beyond that point? Only in a world quite detached from their original meaning can they be thought to baptize current religious liberty dogma. Liberality and charity are possible within Christian homogeneity, and the early republic established what is probably the ceiling on toleration, on what can be plausibly conceived of as adiaphora.

DeYoung says Presbyterians must choose between London of 1646 and Philadelphia of 1788. Surely, we must now choose between Philadelphia of 1788 and that of 2024. And if we choose the former, then, basically what we are going to need is a George Whitefield “with a military cast.” For even a Lockean Confessionalism can’t comprehend our present misfortunes. A Lockean Presbyterian is a Christian Nationalist. A Lockean Presbyterian magistrate would have an understanding of what “maintenance” of morality and “protection” of the “church of our common Lord” means in the American revisions, one that would reflect the common law and constitutional practices of the late 18^th century at minimum. The Prophet’s idea of a “nursing father” still carried weight back then, as the everyone still knew but we seem to have forgotten.

Conclusion

To invoke Bryce again, “Few things are more difficult than to use aright arguments founded on the political experience of other countries… Direct inferences from the success or failure of a particular constitutional arrangement or political usage in another country are rarely sound, because the conditions differ in so many respects.” And the country we are investigating here is, indeed, a foreign one to us now.

Determining what is needed today, according to “Christian prudence,” both for America and for confessional subscription in our churches is difficult. But, as I said at the beginning, if we are going to have a debate over the relationship between the 1646 and 1788 standards, we might as well try to do it right. The “Presbyterians” might have been Whigs, but that is no reason for us to be whiggish today in our interpretation of historical artifacts and the events that produced them. Semper reformanda is a fickle and untrustworthy guide. Charting “trajectories” or “progress” is a species of this enthusiasm.

Examining developments apart from context, however, immediately returns one to an a la carte of abstractions. Protestants need to be better in their doctrine of development, to be sure. But the distinction between what is desirable in principle and possible or necessary according to prudence must be maintained before we standards of confessional fidelity are issued according to a given development. Moreover, the weight of the whole tradition must be accounted for. If the lion’s share of our theologians prior to the mid-18^th century were wrong in principle, then it must be demonstrated that they were wrong without sentimentality or winding theories of progress.

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