Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America

By Dana W. Logan

A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual.

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution.
 
Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226818498

Book preview

Cover Page for Awkward Rituals

AWKWARD RITUALS

EDITED BY Kathryn Lofton AND John Lardas Modern

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The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity

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AWKWARD RITUALS

Sensations of Governance in Protestant America

DANA W. LOGAN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81848-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81850-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81849-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226818498.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Logan, Dana Wiggins, author.

Title: Awkward rituals : sensations of governance in Protestant America / Dana W. Logan.

Other titles: Class 200, new studies in religion.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Class 200, new studies in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054314 | ISBN 9780226818481 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226818504 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226818498 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Rites and ceremonies—United States—History—19th century. | Rites and ceremonies—United States—Case studies. | Protestants—United States—Social life and customs—19th century. | WASPs (Persons)—United States—Social life and customs—19th century. | United States—Civilization—1783–1865. | United States—Social life and customs—1783–1865.

Classification: LCC BR525 .L54 2022 | DDC 203/.8—dc23/eng/20211116

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054314

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

1  Uncomfortable Rites in Early Republican Freemasonry

2  Conventional Behavior in the American Bible Society

3  Involuntary Association in the American Seamen’s Friend Society

4  The Head and the Hands in Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity

Epilogue: Awkward Ritual, Once More with Feeling

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

When George Washington dedicated the United States Capitol building in 1793, he did so clad in his masonic apron. He placed a silver plate upon the building’s cornerstone and adorned it with the masonic symbols of corn, oil, and wine.¹ Throughout the early republic, the Freemasons of New-York (as New York City was called) also performed their role as civic leaders by attending parades in full masonic dress and dedicating courthouses, state houses, churches, and forts. During the War of 1812, masons consecrated New-York’s Fort Masonic by processing toward the site of the fort, where De Witt Clinton, the mayor of New-York and the Grand Master of New-York Masons, initiated the building process by calling for the voluntary participation of all citizens in the completion of the works of defense.² The New-York Masons modeled this citizenship by contributing one day of work.³ The consecration of Fort Masonic was representative of ritual governance in the Northeast during the early republic: performed by an organization defined by its religious and civic mission, imbued with choreography that was standardized long before Americans rejected a monarchy, and finally, done with a bit of theatrical flourish. The members of the lodge did not build the fort, after all. It is as if they built the fort.

The early republic of the United States is often illustrated through visible and inclusive rituals that represent the horizontal possibilities of the post-Revolutionary world: revivals, parades, and riots. Unlike accounts of these populist practices, the history of sovereign ritual in the United States necessarily includes performances devoid of charisma, spectacle, or public visibility. While many sovereign rituals in the early United States occurred in public, they often produced their material effects behind closed doors. For example, after Freemasons consecrated buildings in public, they retired to secret meetings in which they performed rituals of initiation closely guarded from public view. Gathered together without an audience, masons ritualized their power in a manner distinct from Clifford Geertz’s foundational theory of sovereign ritual, or what he calls the theater state. Geertz emphasizes that political power is visible, and that through ceremonial spectacle it becomes real.⁴ Sovereign ritual in the United States, however, made political power real through rituals that invited no audience but assured a public that business as usual was happening behind closed doors. The experience of being governed in American life often feels unworthy of attention.

By introducing the category of sovereign ritual to American public life, I am resisting several tendencies in the study of American religious history and in ritual studies more broadly. Sovereign ritual is inherently hierarchical and mimetic. It is how leaders make their power feel real. A king must create an artificial sensation of his presence far beyond his actual body.⁵ Sovereign ritual thus has a quality of sensual trickery: ritual actors communicate their power by artificial techniques of presentation that make them seem larger or more authoritative than they would otherwise appear.

This book will argue that sovereign ritual in the United States is inherently awkward. The trick of behaving as if you are the authority feels incongruous in a country that did away with kings. Embodying authority in the context of democracy is an uncomfortable practice, like wearing a costume that was not quite made for you. As Freemasons, evangelicals, and other northeastern elites inhabited the head of the body politic in the early nineteenth century, they acted out wooden choreography, contorting their bodies into strange positions, forcing themselves to sit for hours at meetings, and speaking in foreign voices to demonstrate their capacity for moral representation. Leadership in the United States is a highly mannered, and thus trying, affect to inhabit.

Focusing on American religious bodies’ cultivation of sovereign power, with its consequent contrived affects, challenges the distinction of ritual as instinctual against theatrical practice as artificial. Catherine Bell insists that ritualization is distinct from performance even if it is not defined in reference to the religious or the sacred. By distinguishing some actions as formal and special, ritualization creates ritualized agents, persons who have an instinctive knowledge of these schemes embedded in their bodies.⁶ Bell’s account thus renders ritual into a form of embodiment akin to Bourdieu’s habitus, which feels natural rather than temporary or affected. Similarly, Saba Mahmood’s influential account of piety argues that the techniques of ritual practice remake the actor through the ethical virtues she practices. Thus, even if the ritual doesn’t start out feeling natural, through ritual the actor achieves a lasting embodiment of her ethical tradition.⁷ Both of these accounts assume a collapse (or inherent absence) of the distance between actor and script implicit in the theatrical model of taking on a role. This assumption—that rituals are inhabited without the as if of play—misses essential functions of representation in ritual. Governing rituals allow people to behave as if they were a sovereign, or to take on and then shed a mantle of sacred authority.

Historians of American religion tend to ask how ritual allows individuals to govern themselves rather than how ritual allows an individual to govern others. The field has emphasized religious practice’s disruption, or subtle reworking, of religious orthodoxy. Thus the study of American religious practice does not engage representation in the political or mimetic sense, which is precisely the double power of political ritual in the age of democracy.⁸ This disinterest in governance stems from the field’s commitment to highlighting subjects’ individual agency as well as from an anxious desire to carve out a space for religious practice, and thus religion as a category, against a broad array of practices such as political, artistic, and playful activities. But civic governance and its attendant rituals cannot be neatly divided between secular and religious authority, nor can it be divided between agential and oppressive effects. Governing in the United States is a contradictory affair, a practice that boards of directors, bosses, and college presidents enact dutifully even if they would never verbally endorse the hierarchical principles that their actions perform. Thinking with the category of sovereign ritual thus helps us step out of some well-worn debates about ritual, and in particular rituals in American life, as strategic or coercive. There is docility and agency at play in the rituals we enact as a matter of procedure. To feel awkward in a ritual demonstrates that you might have a bone to pick with the whole apparatus, but not enough to just not do it.

Yet as I hope to illustrate, rituals of governance do exert force on other humans whether or not the ritual actors feel awkward. In this study I turn away from the hyper-focus of civil religion on presidents and charismatic personalities and instead turn to those ordinary people who enacted quotidian demonstrations of power in the context of American civil society. When we think about rituals that govern in American life we can too easily slip into the language of tyranny, imagining the loud despot ordering us about from the dais. I argue that we feel the sensations of ritual governance much more frequently at work, at school, in domestic economies, and in our volunteer work and activist associations. This study provides ways of describing how those key activities of American life—whose ritual qualities are often overlooked because they do not take place at explicitly religious institutions—move our bodies in regular if not awkward choreographies.

Sovereign Ritual’s History

Americans violently and definitively broke with their monarchical past in the American Revolution, but post-Revolutionary Americans still participated in a culture shaped by metaphors of the king’s body. Masonic consecrations and the other governing rituals, between 1790 and 1850, that I will describe in this book share a basic formal structure with medieval conceptions of the social body. Further, in the transition from monarchs to the rise of democracies, corporations played a key role in extending the power of the king far beyond his physical body. Feeling governed in the United States depends on both of these traditions: a sense that political power is divinely endowed, and a belief that we are subject to that power through the intermediary of corporations (a category that includes businesses, nonprofits, clubs, churches, and almost every organization of American social life).

Sovereign ritual developed out of legal traditions in Europe that imagined all political governance deriving from the king’s two bodies. The king’s two bodies, as a cultural and legal concept, cannot be neatly divided between religious and secular lineages. The legal concept’s most famous formulation—The king is dead, long live the king—is a statement of law, theology, and political science. Medieval English law argued that the king’s natural body could die while his body politic remained immortal.⁹ These two bodies, however, came together in one person as the Body Corporate, which allowed the sovereign and the surrogates of his power to work in concert.¹⁰ This medieval conception of sovereignty combined theological and biological metaphors of unity: the Christian church as a single physiological body and the union of man and wife. In this latter case, the groom—Christ—maintains dominance over the church qua bride.¹¹ Together these metaphors formed the basis for the religious dynamic between bishop and flock, pope and church, but also the political dynamic between the king, endowed with divine power, and his people. Subsidiary bodies, such as towns and guilds, became known as corporations and acted as extensions of the sovereign’s transcendent authority.¹²

Corporations became the bedrock of social organization in England, as they would be subsequently in the northeastern United States. All corporations brought individuals together into groups bound by choice rather than kinship, and governed themselves on behalf of the king.¹³ The corporate body thus demonstrated divine powers of cohesion parallel to the extra-human capacity for immortality inherent in the concept of the king’s two bodies. All corporate bodies—from the company to the religious confraternity—also inherited a germ of this immortality insofar as they lived as perpetual bodies despite being composed of mortal individuals.¹⁴ In the early modern period, corporations born from the king’s body, such as the East India Company, governed as a social body of shareholders and thus transcended individual will and responsibility—a quality that in the modern period would shield individuals from personal liability.¹⁵ Churches, businesses, universities, and associations extended from the king’s body, but in the colonial context they also exerted a sovereign power that became total (like an arm disconnected from its former body which nevertheless continues to move), a condition that fundamentally mixed sacred and secular definitions of governance. Even after the American Revolution and the disestablishment of American religion, religious corporate bodies maintained the mixed powers of churchstateness. These ekklesia, as Pamela Klassen, Winnifred Sullivan, and Paul C. Johnson describe them, convened under a transcendent sovereignty and were authorized to act . . . [as] agents with transformative potential.¹⁶ Thus distinctions such as sacred and secular, or authoritarian and egalitarian authority, cannot fully capture the way that Protestant voluntary associations after the American Revolution drew on this legal and social tradition.

Crucially, the legal theory of the king’s two bodies—and the bodies’ superhuman capacities—is also a ritual theory.¹⁷ The legal theory developed alongside royal courts’ ceremonies designed to evoke the king’s body even in his corporeal absence.¹⁸ Courts developed new royal ceremonies as they faced the problem of accounting for the presence of the second, immortal body during the interregnum, the period between the king’s death and the coronation of a new king. When the French king died in 1422, the court began a custom of making a wax effigy of the king to put on top of his coffin.¹⁹ This effigy represented his immortal presence, and in the following centuries it took on a more active role in court life. By the sixteenth century, the French court treated Francis I’s effigy with complete solemnity as a living member of the royal court. The effigy rested on the bed of state in coronation robes and received visitors. Meals were served in his room, where servants, the bread-carrier, the cup bearer and the carver, with the usher marching before them and followed by the officers of the cupboard . . . spread the table with the reverences and samplings that were customarily made. . . . The table was blessed by a Cardinal; the basins of water for washing the hands presented at the chair of the [king], as if he had been living, and seated in it.²⁰ Effigies, as ritual surrogates, acted on behalf of the absent king, evoking him through artful representation. But the two-bodied nature of the king more broadly required rituals that made the king’s immortal body functional in the absence of a mortal body. Thus, whether he was dead or merely far away, sovereign rituals acted out the drama of his presence.

Away from royal courts, the king’s surrogates—including the princes, the guilds, and universities that governed on the king’s behalf—also dramatized sovereign authority. Beginning in the Middle Ages, at every level of political life leaders put on parades, plays, and ceremonies that authorized local power.²¹ The ornate processions, pantomimes, and saints’ days of early modern Europe dramatized governance in the eyes of ordinary folk.²² Sovereign ritual as practiced in European cities invoked both local and distant symbols of authority: carnivalesque and courtly stylistics, and the rhythms of the physical body with its anatomical and physiological universality, as well as Christ’s distinctively divine and human body. Through these rituals of sovereign display, local officials materialized a distant king’s authority by ritually assuming some of his sacred power for themselves.

In the colonial world, where the distance between center and periphery stretched further than court and county, the king’s surrogates also cultivated the vertical and horizontal possibilities of sovereign ritual representation. Colonial corporations acted just like kings on behalf of the king, self-authorizing their rule through processions replete with royal pomp.²³ These processions enacted the corporations’ very material power. Following the English model, in which corporations enjoyed monopolies and the right to tax residents via their charters, colonial companies could police, punish, and create social law for colonial inhabitants.²⁴ But colonial corporations also behaved as horizontal governing bodies, demonstrating the equality inherent in the body-of-Christ metaphor rather than the hierarchical dimension represented by the head’s subjugation of the body. In colonial America, the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company cultivated proto-democratic practices—such as voting on colonial policy—that emphasized the potential for shared governance between white settlers and the original company shareholders. Massachusetts colonists idiosyncratically violated the spirit of corporate law by chartering other corporations, such as towns, through the power of their own charter (a move for which the English government punished them by revoking the charter in 1684).²⁵ Away from the Crown that authorized their power, colonial corporations made visible their authority by acting like a little state made up of equal co-rulers. The collaboration of white settlers and corporate shareholders should not, however, be confused with a government of and by the people.²⁶ American colonial corporations, even those that invited white settlers into their governance, were extensions rather than substitutions for a king.

As subjects of the English crown, even if they were unruly subjects, it is unsurprising that colonial American leaders utilized sovereign rituals premised on monarchical presence and absence. What is surprising is how northeastern Americans continued to use the corporate form and its attendant rituals after the break with the Crown. Counter to histories of the United States that emphasize a radical break with monarchy, a history of sovereign ritual demonstrates the persistence of this hierarchical performative tradition throughout the early republic and antebellum period.²⁷

Unlike studies of American life that assume a transition from the sovereignty of the king to the sovereignty of the people, this study participates in a growing body of scholarship that examines the persistence of an intermediary form of sovereignty in American life: namely, the assumed social and political authority of post-Revolutionary corporations.²⁸ Banks, churches, tract societies, charities, fraternal organizations, municipal corporations, colleges, and other bodies continued the tradition of corporate sovereignty in the northeastern United States, despite the form’s association with British law.²⁹ Unlike the state (in its federal form), these sources of governance played an immanent role in northeastern Americans’ lives in the early nineteenth century.³⁰ In particular, religious organizations blossomed in the early republic and constituted the majority of the first corporate charters.³¹ Despite the very real repercussions of disestablishment, religious organizations’ dominance in civil society ensured that religion would play a central role in both early republican law and social custom.³² This book will describe organizations and individuals that played a key role in developing the ritual repertoire of northeastern civil society.³³ The specificity of this location is important because it was in the Northeast, and not the South, of the United States that Americans doubled down on the pre-Revolutionary legal structure of incorporation, and in particular religious associations’ management of society via the structure of civil society.³⁴

This book argues that northeastern white civil society defined itself against the riots, mutual aid societies, and use of incorporation by free Blacks and working-class men in the early republic. We should not confuse the proliferation of charters for new white churches and benevolence societies in the new republic with Black northeasterners’ strategic use and remaking of social structures during this era.³⁵ One of the key arguments of this book is that, against the alternative forms of social organizing that bubbled up in the new republic, white northeastern civil society made the white elite body constitutive of a properly executed ritualization of social authority. Equal access to the legal structure of the corporation was not the same as equal access to a civil body.³⁶

By recognizing how northeastern elites’ governing rituals were evocative of a pre-democratic sovereignty, I am not rejecting the legal and discursive breaks with the king’s body through the American Revolution.³⁷ Rather, I am showing how ritual is a location from which we see how people talk and walk in different tones and rhythms, performing multiple ideological positions at the same time. My book is a provocation to see the ways we find ourselves enacting practices we would never discursively endorse.

Rituals in American Protestant Civil Society

This book is concerned with the rituals that religious folk performed outside the confines of what we traditionally think of as sacred space. Between 1790 and 1850, American ritual in the Northeast took place in institutions that blended the categories of public and private, religious and secular. Variously called civil society or voluntary associations, these institutions were the medium through which religion secured an operative relationship to the state and the public sphere in the wake of disestablishment. Civil society was, of course, not the only place religious folk acted; churches and private piety were a vital aspect of early nineteenth-century religiosity, but the religious activity within civil society played a distinctive role in the operation of religion within American society. Associations such as the American Bible Society were spaces where elite northeastern Protestants presumed to act not as sectarians but as religious citizens, and in these spaces white Protestant men and women both symbolically and materially ordered the social body beyond their own congregations.³⁸

I use the term ritual to show that religious folk governed beyond the confines of churches when they dominated seemingly secular spaces (corporations, associations, welfare organizations) in the northeastern early republic. As Kathryn Lofton points out, ritual, unlike its sibling piety, does not evoke the Christian or, specifically, Wesleyan tradition of individual prayer or self-discipline. Ritual, with its connotations of non-Christian religious activity, evokes a lack of intentionality between thought and action. Lofton argues that these connotations are precisely why scholars of American religion have embraced practice as an alternative term. Rather than the cold etic stare of ritual, practice seemed to these scholars to offer an emic embrace, a loving individual care.³⁹ The people I describe in this book certainly had intentions, but I use ritual as a term to communicate the unselfconscious enactment of tradition and its repetitive quality.⁴⁰ I also use