Prayers of our fathers.

• Author: Allitt, Patrick

The Declaration of Independence is a little odd. It claims not only that all people are created equal but also that they have a self-evident, God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. If it is indeed self-evident, why did no one even mention it until 1776? God did not guarantee anyone the right to pursue happiness in the sermons of Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford or the great Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, and it is impossible to imagine any of those stern preachers arguing its merits. Just read the gruesome text of Edwards's sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and you'll agree. The challenge there is to avoid the everlasting torments of hell; Edwards certainly does not think that you'll escape them by spending your days on earth chasing after happiness.

Implausible as the declaration is, however, at least in this respect, the members of the Continental Congress accepted and signed it. Then the Continental army fought its way to victory, turning independence from assertion into reality. Now that the Americans were free of Britain, what would be the relationship between this right to pursue happiness and the God who had given it to them? On the whole, it was positive. In the decades after the Revolution, growing numbers of Americans attended revivals, joined churches, founded new denominations and blended godly fervor with the pursuit of their worldly goals.

No one made them go to church; the First Amendment guaranteed religious liberty, forestalling the creation of a national religion. Even states that still had established churches in 1783, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, soon got rid of them. Lyman Beecher, a famous Connecticut preacher, was horrified when his state disestablished the Protestant Congregational Church in 1818, fearing that religion would go into a decline: "It was as dark a day as I ever saw." Later he completely changed his mind, as the advantages of having religion free from state interference became clear: "They say ministers have lost their influence; the fact is, they have gained." And why was that? "By voluntary efforts, societies, missions, and revivals, they exert a deeper influence than ever they could by queues, and shoe-buckles, and cocked hats, and gold-headed canes."

Beecher realized, in other words, that religion was no longer contaminated by being linked to a social elite or to politicians. It could not lean on government and had to pull its own weight, but it no longer risked being compromised by the grimy side of politics. In our own time, the historian R. Laurence Moore made the same point in an elegant book, Selling God (1994), in which he argued that religion quickly became subject to the forces of market competition. Just as in the economy, where each American entrepreneur had to offer a commodity or product that others wanted if he hoped to survive, so in the religious "marketplace" each denomination now had to attract members and persuade them to pay voluntarily for their ministers' upkeep. There was as much of a free market in religion as there was in grain, cotton or shoes.

The system worked incredibly well, but it did lead to a shift in power from "producers" to "consumers." Ministers knew that their livelihoods depended on their ability to offer what their congregations wanted. It is striking to see how, under these conditions, their theology began to change, becoming steadily less menacing and more comforting with the passing decades. The God they offered really did seem to be more interested in the pursuit of happiness than in fire and brimstone.

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This theological change, to be sure, did not come overnight. Lyman Beecher himself, for all his understanding of how the Church might benefit from disestablishment, remained an uncompromising Calvinist. When his daughter Catharine's fiance, Alexander Fisher, drowned in a shipwreck in 1823, he wrote her a letter saying that not only was the young man dead, but that his soul was condemned to everlasting torment. By our standards, it is just about as heartless and insensitive a letter as a parent could possibly send to his bereaved child. But within a single generation, the harshest elements of Calvinism started to disappear. Catharine, her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe and their brother Henry Ward Beecher dropped the nasty doctrine and preached a far-more-comforting, sentimental, domestic brand of Christianity. Catharine went on to become a pioneer in education. Harriet's book Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was among the nineteenth century's most popular and influential works, while Henry, with a well-endowed pulpit in Brooklyn, became the most famous preacher of his day. Each of them had more to say about love and charity than about the threat of damnation.

The decline of hell and of Calvinist predestination were accompanied by a new interest in Jesus. Before 1800, Jesus had been important mainly as the second person of the Trinity, whose sacrificial death and resurrection atoned for the sins of mankind. After about 1830, Americans began to...