1. Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 4–5.Google Scholar

2. The legend accompanying this object identifies it as a “communion ostensorium” and suggests that it was “used at Catholic communion services to display the consecrated Host” (exhibit 38). The ostensorium or monstrance was not used during the Mass but was reserved for exposition of the Host during benediction and in processions. It shared origins with medieval reliquaries.Google Scholar

3. In his preface to the exhibit's companion volume, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington notes that “the exhibition focuses on the relation of religion to government during the founding period and does not cover other significant subjects in the broader field of early American religion, such as the religious practices of Native Americans or religion in Spanish and French North America. In planning the exhibition, it became apparent that justice could not be done to these and a number of other rich subjects in the context of a show focusing on church-state relations in the early republic.” See Hutson, James H., Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1998), xi–xii.Google Scholar

4. James Hutson recounts the story of Benedict Arnold's officers entering the Newburyport, Massachusetts, church crypt where Whitefield had been buried in 1770.Google ScholarThe officers opened the coffin, removed Whitefield's collar and wristbands, cut them in pieces and handed them out to the troops as protection against the looming terrors of the 1775 invasion of Quebec (Hutson, 35).Google Scholar Further evidence of eighteenth-century Protestant relic-making is available at the Methodist Archives at Drew University. Whitefield's thumb is preserved there, along with Francis Asbury's spectacles and pieces from John Wesley's coat. See McDannell, Colleen, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 46–47;Google Scholarand Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 188. Glimpses of material and popular religion presented in this exhibit suggest the possibilities of a more extended exploration of the role of “people's religion” in sustaining the new political practices of the republic.Google Scholar

5. Crane, Elaine Forman, “Religion and Rebellion: Women of Faith in the American War for Independence,” in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Hoffman, Ronald and Albert, Peter J. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1994), 52–86.Google Scholar

6. See, for example, Hutson, James H., Pennsylvania Politics, 1746–1770: The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972);Google Scholar idem, John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980);Google Scholar and Hutson, James H. and Kurtz, Stephen G., eds., Essays on the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1973).Google Scholar

7. See Bonomi, Patricia, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On the controverted issue of church membership and religious “gatherings,” Hutson also uses Bonomi's conclusions.Google Scholar See Bonomi, Patricia and Eisenstadt, Peter, “Church Adherence in the Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31 (1982).Google Scholar

8. Bonomi, , Under the Cope of Heaven, 6.Google Scholar

9. Bonomi, , Under the Cope of Heaven, 216. Another scholar whom Hutson cites with some frequency is Jon Butler. Hutson's relationship to Butler's work, however, is notably more adversarial than his relationship to Bonomi's. See, for example, his dismissal of Butler's reading of the Great Awakening (24–25). For the source of this disagreement,Google Scholar see Butler, Jon, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305–325. Butler also questions the current scholarly emphasis on the importance of “dissenting evangelicalism” and urges a renewed effort to assess colonial patterns of authority and religious coercion in the context of both popular religion and the religion of the Enlightenment.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 196;Google Scholar and idem, “Coercion, Miracle, Reason: Rethinking the American Religious Experience in the Revolutionary Age,” in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Hoffman, Ronald and Albert, Peter J. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1994), 1–30. For a fuller sense of the debate, readers will want to also examine Patricia Bonomi's extended discussion of “Religious Dissent and the Case for American Exceptionalism” in the same volume.Google Scholar

10. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 81.Google Scholar

11. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 62.Google Scholar

12. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 75–76.Google Scholar

13. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 77–78.Google Scholar

14. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 84.Google Scholar The theological nuance here, of course, is that Jefferson's cut-and-paste Gospel masked the radicalism of the “real” Jesus. For a thorough review of the religious resources and positions of both Jefferson and Madison, see Wills, Garry, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 339–81.Google Scholar

15. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 91.Google Scholar

16. For evidence of Jefferson's cryptic Christianity, see “The Lord's Prayer, in Thomas Jefferson's hand” (exhibit 161).Google Scholar

17. Thomas Jefferson to Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, and Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the state of Connecticut, 1 Jan. 1802 (marginal note). Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, exhibits 163a, 163b.Google Scholar

18. Hutson, , Religion and the Founding, 93–94.Google Scholar See also Hutson, , “ ‘A Wall of Separation’: FBIHelps Restore Jefferson's Obliterated Draft,” LC Information Bulletin, 06 1998, at http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danbury.html. For an extended analysis of the Danbury episode,Google Scholar see Dreisbach, Daniel L., “ ‘Sowing Useful Truths and Principles’: The Danbury Baptists, Thomas Jefferson, and the ‘Wall of Separation,’ ” Journal of Church and State 39 (1997): 455–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Dreisbach, , “Another Meaning of the Metaphor: Is the ‘Wall of Separation’ Really What We Think It Is?” Liberty Magazine, 05–06 1998, at http://www.libertymagazine.org/html/metaphor.html. For contemporary reaction to Hutson's reading of the Danbury letter, see “The Library of Congress Misinterprets Thomas Jefferson: A Letter of Concern from Scholars,” at http://www.au.org/alley.htm. Constitutional historian Robert S. Alley and the twenty-four cosigners of this letter “strongly disagree with the conclusions reached by the Library of Congress and urge Library staff to refrain from presenting those conclusions as settled fact.”Google Scholar

19. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), edited with an introduction by Blight, David W. (Boston: Bedford, 1993), 105.Google Scholar