4.10- Federalist and Anti-Federalist Views on the U.S. Constitution

“The transformation of American theology in the first quarter of the

nineteenth century released the very forces of romantic perfectionism that

conservatives most feared. . . . As it spread, perfectionism swept across

denominational barriers and penetrated even secular thought. . . .

5

As the sum of individual sins, social wrong would disappear when enough

people had been converted and rededicated to right conduct. Deep and

lasting reform, therefore, meant an educational crusade based on the

assumption that when a sufficient number of individual Americans had

seen the light, they would automatically solve the country’s social problems.

10

Thus formulated, perfectionist reform offered a program of mass conversion

achieved through educational rather than political means. In the opinion

of the romantic reformers the regeneration of American society began, not

in legislative enactments or political manipulation, but in [an] . . . appeal to

the American urge for individual self-improvement.”

“In the United States, the public sphere formed itself in a void, growing lush

from the fertilization of religious and political controversies as its signature

forms spread rapidly from city to town and town to village. In the ensuing

decades, the public realm became an arena of initiatives and experiments,

5

religiously-inspired reform movements and heated political contests. . . .

In creating vast pools of proselytizers . . . and designating the entire society

a missionary field, the evangelical Protestants, particularly in the North,

encouraged social activism. . . .

The society as a whole had to be redeemed . . . . Once converted, men

10

and women found ways to express their new-found spiritual awakening by

getting government policy, public morals, and private lives to conform to

biblical prescriptions.”