Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

By Justine S. Murison

Recent legal history in the United States reveals a hardening tendency to treat religious freedom and sexual and reproductive freedom as competing, even opposing, claims on public life. They are united, though, by the fact that both are rooted in our culture’s understanding of privacy. Faith in Exposure shows how, over the course of the nineteenth century, privacy came to encompass such contradictions—both underpinning the right to sexual and reproductive rights but also undermining them in the name of religious freedom.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of secular studies, Faith in Exposure brings a postsecular orientation to the historical emergence of modern privacy. The book explains this emergence through two interlocking stories. The first examines the legal and cultural connection of religion with the private sphere, showing how privacy became a moral concept that informs how we debate the right to be shielded from state interference, as well as who will be afforded or denied this protection. This conflation of religion with privacy gave rise, the book argues, to a “secular sensibility” that was especially invested in authenticity and the exposure of hypocrisy in others.

The second story examines the development of this “secular sensibility” of privacy through nineteenth-century novels. The preoccupation of the novel form with private life, and especially its dependence on revelations of private desire and sexual secrets, made it the perfect vehicle for suggesting that exposure might be synonymous with morality itself. Each chapter places key authors into wider contexts of popular fiction and periodical press debates. From fears over religious infidelity to controversies over what constituted a modern marriage and conspiracy theories about abolitionists, these were the contests, Justine S. Murison argues, that helped privacy emerge as both a sensibility and a right in modern, secular America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781512823523

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Cover Page for Faith in Exposure

Faith in Exposure

Early American Studies

Series editors:

Kathleen M. Brown, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Emma Hart, and Daniel K. Richter

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Faith in Exposure

Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Justine S. Murison

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Hardcover ISBN 9781512823516

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For my parents

Contents

Introduction. Our Faith in Exposure

Chapter 1. Infidelity

Chapter 2. Matrimony

Chapter 3. Nudity

Chapter 4. Conspiracy

Chapter 5. Hypocrisy

Chapter 6. Secrecy

Epilogue. The Ends of Privacy

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Our Faith in Exposure

Though historical in its orientation, this book begins with a question prompted by contemporary law: How did the idea of a right to privacy become central to arguments both for and against sexual and reproductive freedom? From Roe v. Wade (1973) through several twenty-first-century Supreme Court cases—most prominently the majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) and the dissenting opinions in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)—contemporary legal fights over privacy reveal a strong and hardening tendency to treat religious freedom and sexual and reproductive freedom as competing, even opposing, claims on public life. The Hobby Lobby decision, for example, suggests that the practice of private reproductive choices—in this case the private use of birth control covered under an employee health plan—could be construed as an intrusion on the religious freedom of the corporation, as a privately held entity. Here, we see two significant ways privacy has been wielded in modern legal discourse: the sense that the individual has a right to privacy with regard to both sexual and religious choice; and that the corporation itself could be granted the rights of private individuals, including freedom of religion. And in both cases what is clear—as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have observed so well—is that there is nothing more public than privacy.¹

While these conflicts over privacy, freedom, and rights have been intensifying in the decades following Roe v. Wade, their origins can be traced back to nineteenth-century debates over the disestablishment of state religions, the abolition of slavery, the emergence of modern marriage, and the proliferation of alternative spiritual communities. My aim here is to show how, over the course of the nineteenth century, privacy came to encompass such contradictions—underpinning the right to sexual and reproductive rights but also undermining them in the name of religious freedom; and I do this through a study of the nineteenth-century American novel as a field in which these conflicts played themselves out with a special kind of clarity. As the literary form most closely associated with modern subjectivity and the private lives of individuals, the novel was well attuned to emergent forms of privacy, and it was especially well attuned to the primary mechanism by which this emergent privacy would be constituted as the deepest, most authentic expression of the self: through the gesture of public revelation or exposure.

At the risk of starting with the most obvious literary case of all, consider Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Every time he ascends to the pulpit, Dimmesdale ardently intends to unburden the black secret of his soul, the adultery with Hester Prynne that led to her public shaming after the birth of their daughter. Even so, he never comes closer than generalizations, telling his congregation that he is altogether vile, the worst of sinners, and other abstract confessions to original sin that he knows will cause his parishioners to revere him all the more as a paragon of the moral order:

The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!²

Knowing full well how his seventeenth-century Puritan congregation would receive this kind of public confession, Dimmesdale repeatedly commits only one other sin, the sin of hypocrisy, by grounding his admission in Calvinist theological abstraction rather than in a deeply personal revelation. From the novel’s point of view, Dimmesdale’s moral failing is not that he had an affair with Hester Prynne, nor simply that he lets her take the blame. No, it is that there is an inconsistency between his private and public selves. He hides his shameful secret while publicly preaching moral uprightness. Hawthorne does not present Dimmesdale’s hypocrisy as an uncomplicated moral failing, though; Dimmesdale is subtle at it, and he is remorseful about it. Dimmesdale loves truth and therefore hates himself. As Hawthorne implies, this is the falsest you can be, and it is the deepest truth about Arthur Dimmesdale.

Hawthorne’s iconic tortured minister encapsulates the interrelated concerns of this study: the public morality attached to putatively private matters of marriage and sexuality; hypocrisy and the tendency in the United States to denounce it as a sin that undermines public trust; and, above all else, the role of the novel form in the emergence and dominance of a secular faith in the power of exposing such sins. My interweaving here of words we associate with religion (sin, faith, morality) with words we consider attached to the conditions of secularity (politics, public, society, and even the novel) is purposeful. One of my primary goals is to consider a widespread moral culture attached to privacy that is the foundation of mainstream secularism in the United States.³

Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of secular studies, Faith in Exposure brings a postsecular orientation to the historical emergence of modern privacy.⁴ As I examine it here, secularism is the ideology invested in the modern progress narrative toward rationality and away from credulity, often referred to as the secularization thesis.⁵ The privatization of religion is the story at the heart of this thesis. One of the ideology’s central myths rests on the importance of relocating to the private sphere religious beliefs and practices that are deemed to be incompatible with modernity and liberation. The Scarlet Letter—with its critique of ministerial hypocrisy, its stark re-creation of seventeenth-century Calvinism, and its providential end that heralds some brighter period in which a new truth would be revealed—enacts just such a progress narrative away from public credulity and toward private belief. We might say that secularism is not so much the absence of religion from the public sphere or the belief that such an absence is a good thing, but is instead a prescriptive orientation to the world that encompasses both potentially contradictory perspectives simultaneously—not only that religion ought to be banished to the private sphere, but also that, in our modern age, it already has been.

Readers will find two interlocking stories about privacy in this book. The first story considers how the legal and cultural shift of religion to the private sphere gave rise to a secular sensibility that was especially invested in the kind of authenticity Dimmesdale fails to honor. My emphasis on sensibility follows from Talal Asad’s insight that representations of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ in modern and modernizing states mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.⁶ It also signals this book’s overarching focus on how privacy constitutes an affect and performance of authenticity as much as a space set aside for the home and religion. The word sensibility also usefully combines this affective quality with the eighteenth-century use of the term to imply moral and aesthetic judgment.⁷ Through the legal and cultural connection of religion with the private sphere, privacy became an overdetermined moral concept, informing how we encounter and debate the right to be shielded from state interference in the domestic sphere and who will be afforded or denied this protection.⁸ By calling attention to the organization of private life as working to produce a certain sensibility that must be apparent beyond the household, the chapters that follow continually return to marriage. During the first half of the nineteenth century, marriage transformed from a publicly recognized duty to a private contract while it was, at the same time, legally denied to enslaved people. The illegality of marriage under slavery fused the moral role of private marriage—and privacy more generally—to the public structures of white supremacy.⁹

The second story is literary and proceeds less from the content of Dimmesdale’s moral failing than from the form in which it is revealed. Faith in Exposure attends closely to the development of privacy as a secular sensibility in and through the novels of the long nineteenth century. The preoccupation of the novel form with private life, and especially its dependence on revelations of private desire and sexual secrets, made it the perfect vehicle for suggesting that exposure might be synonymous with morality itself. Though I expand on genre and methodology later in the introduction, let me forecast those here. A postsecular approach to the literature of the nineteenth century allows me to historicize the prevalence of methods of revelation, unveiling, and exposure in literary study, practices often (though I believe incorrectly) ascribed solely to critique. Here, I argue that the desire to unveil observed in literary scholarship is but one part of a larger cultural mode that dominates public discourse in the United States. I therefore do not reveal secular privacy (or critique, for that matter) to be truly religious after all; rather, I show how the production of such revelations is the quintessential function of secular morality.

A Religious History of Secularism

The chapters of this book span from the 1790s to the turn of the twentieth century and have as their historical backdrop a significant epoch for religion in the United States: the disestablishment of state churches and the simultaneous proliferation of various religions and spiritualities that included but were not limited to the evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Disestablishment was a process that encompassed the entire nineteenth century. While the legal separation of church establishments from state governance seemed to end officially when Massachusetts disestablished the Congregational Church in 1833, that only heralded the beginning of what the historian Steven K. Green has called the second disestablishment. The century’s legal contests over the meaning and extent of disestablishment and the First Amendment occurred not just over state establishments; rather, as Green has argued, they were part of a larger process that gradually exchanged fealty to the maxim that ‘Christianity is part of the common law’ with a reliance on secular instrumentalist bases for the law.¹⁰ This transformation unfolded through a host of debates about and challenges to laws on profane swearing, church property, nonsectarian public schools, and Sunday law enforcement.¹¹ And this legal and political background was actively on the minds and woven into the works of a wide variety of writers, both women and men.¹²

While the states largely disestablished religion in the early nineteenth century, religiosity (as viewed from any number of angles, including church or revival attendance, splintering of denominations, inventions of new ways of being religious or spiritual, and the persistence of occult beliefs) proliferated in what the philosopher Charles Taylor would term the nova effect of secularity. This proliferation has long been noted by historians of religion under different names: a hothouse of religious experimentation; the democratization of American Christianity; the feminization of religion away from Calvinism and into popular forms of sentimentality; and the commodification of religion in the antebellum marketplace of culture. And it was not only an effect of rising immigration from Catholic countries, or the establishment of the African Methodist and African Baptist Churches, or the splintering of the largely white Protestant denominations over slavery. The century also produced an abundance of spiritual affinities and practices, including Mormonism, Spiritualism, Seventh Day Adventism, Christian Science, and other popular metaphysical religions that flourished especially among the growing white middle classes.¹³

As scholars of American religious and cultural history have shown, the seemingly paradoxical explosion of religiosity as disestablishment unfolded is in fact constitutive and exemplary of secularism in the United States.¹⁴ One significant ideological assumption at the heart of US secularism came out of these legal and cultural shifts: the idea that religious beliefs ought to be private, that they are a matter of individual conscience, free from state interference. This is also, not coincidentally, a Protestant way to be religious. Since the Reformation, Protestants have affirmed that one’s relationship to God is personal and beyond ecclesiastic intervention; they have also affirmed, however, that the state of grace would be evident in the entire range of one’s public speech and conduct. Practice was not so much the substance of religion but a reflection of private belief, and this orientation to the public manifestation of privately achieved conviction continued to be vital to Protestantism in New England and in United States culture more generally.¹⁵

The alignment of religion with the private sphere has caused an ideological conflation of privacy with freedom in ways that have fostered technological and biopolitical influence over the spiritual, sexual, and domestic lives of individuals and groups in the United States.¹⁶ In the language of the First Amendment, the federal government has no right to abridge private conscience and the public expression of it (this was subsequently extended to the states in 1963). The logic of the First Amendment assumes that it is good for democracy to promote a transparent equivalence between citizens’ private beliefs and public selves. But the secular-state’s investment in such transparency had—and still has—a hard limit. The US Supreme Court majority decision in Reynolds v. United States (1878), which upheld the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, targeting Utah and passed supposedly in the interest of maintaining public morality, is one quite visible example. The decision overrode the defendant’s First Amendment prerogative to practice his religious belief in plural marriage. Despite its wording, the First Amendment seemed to protect only an immaterial and private freedom of belief, especially when religious practice challenged mainstream moral convictions about heteronormative marriage.¹⁷ Thus, private religion remained free, while the public practice of it—in the case of plural marriage—was subject to restriction by the state.

One of the origins of the discursive distinction between good and bad religion so pervasive in US secularism lies precisely here. As the religious studies scholar Robert Orsi explains, To ‘believe in’ a religion means that one has deliberated over and then assented to its propositional truths, has chosen this religion over other available options, a personal choice unfettered by authority, tradition, or society. What matters about religion from this perspective are its ideas and not its things, practices, or presences. This is not necessarily how Americans actually are religious, of course, but this account of religion carries real normative force.¹⁸ This normative definition of religion as propositional belief took on legal importance in the disestablishment debates, and it would also undergird the theory of privacy as it developed in the nineteenth century. When Thomas Jefferson, for instance, denounced established churches, he targeted a system that asked citizens to support institutions even when they did not believe in those institutions’ theologies. Conversely, according to the First Amendment, to be truly free consisted in the ability to have your private convictions remain just that—private. For as Jefferson famously quipped in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.¹⁹ Good religion (to borrow Orsi’s term) is private belief, and private belief, if we follow Jefferson, is immaterial. It affects neither your body nor your neighborhood nor the bottom line.

To be clear, as Orsi stresses, it is not that lived religious experience was somehow reduced down to an immaterial private belief. To begin, this was a largely white Protestant way of defining religion, in which embodied practice and communal rites were considered secondary to private conviction. It was also explicitly set against Catholic theological emphases on sacraments, icons, and rituals. Yet as secularism laid claim, in John Modern’s words, to that which was most natural, that which was certainly true, and that which was excessively real, the ability to code private religion as both self-evidently good and something that had been subtracted from the public square became a way for secular institutions to retain their Protestant structures while simultaneously disavowing them.²⁰ Tracy Fessenden has demonstrated how this version of religion became, in her words, unmarked as religion, to the extent that Philadelphia and Cincinnati, among other major cities, could pass laws to endorse the teaching of the King James Bible in public schools not as theological instruction, but rather for its simple lessons in universal morals.²¹ This is also why, just as Protestant Bibles could stand for universal morality in the nineteenth century, Emerson’s secular vision of nonconformity could build on this Protestant framework and stretch it nearly to its breaking point. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature, he declares in Self-Reliance, Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.²² While Emerson imagines an interlocutor objecting that these impulses may be from below, his version of the private self as a moral guide is a logical extension of the grounding of morality in the self’s assent to beliefs.

The consolidation of belief as a basis for the modern legal notion of religion did not mean that theological disputes dissipated across the nineteenth century. Far from it. Even among and between white Protestant denominations, controversies and schisms abounded, and the popularity of evangelicalism, especially through the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, led to crises and shifts in denominational affiliations and theological emphases. Theological journals were rife with just such controversies. For literary scholars, the most famous is likely Emerson’s 1838 delivery of his Divinity School Address, which called for a true Christianity represented by a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man over and against what he termed Historical Christianity, a formal approach to Christianity that had led to a decaying church and a wasting unbelief.²³ It inspired thirty-six responses (not counting reprints), including one from Andrews Norton, retired Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard and staunchly conservative Unitarian, who called Emerson’s address an incoherent rhapsody and an insult to religion.²⁴

Despite the evident theological disagreement, what we see in these debates is a consolidation of the role of belief as the primary and foundational component of religiosity among mainstream white Protestants; and that consolidation came to define religion for the secular state and secular public sphere—as it still largely does today.²⁵ In this consolidation we see an increased emphasis on true conviction, and the mental and emotional—that is, internal—processes that achieve it. The Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, for example, charted in a series of lectures in the 1830s the effects of what he called an epidemic of infidelity unleashed by the French Revolution and gnawing away at religion in the United States ever since (a specter of unbelief on Emerson’s mind too, as is evident in The Divinity School Address).²⁶ Beecher’s answer to such an epidemic was to more carefully protect and shepherd the mental processes that produce belief. Various dangers, both internal and external, threatened to derail this conversion process. While theories and philosophies—the stuff of theological controversy—could cloud the truth of the Gospels, a wayward heart might form opinions through the power of passion, prejudice, interest, and aversion. Believing strongly in the learned ministry, he stresses the importance of first principles, competent instruction, and study for the religious seeker who wishes to avoid skepticism and unbelief.²⁷

Beecher would be aghast to hear that he was aligned in any argument with radical abolitionists and ministers who challenged theological orthodoxy, like Emerson or the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, but all partook of this assumption that belief is the preceding term to which practice points, and that these are, on a fundamental level, internal processes. The difference is that, unlike Beecher, Emerson and Parker epitomized the Romantic trust in the inner self, as when Parker asserted in 1841 that while true religion is always the same thing, the Christianity of the Pulpit . . . has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands, except only in name.²⁸ Publicly preached, institutionally supported, the Christianity of the Pulpit represents, according to Parker, the transient element that occludes the true religion that is in each century and every land, in each man that feels it.²⁹ True religion is felt and universal, but most significantly, it is private; it is in each person, arising from, or more accurately constructing a sense of the private self. In secularism we thus see not the relegation of something called religion to the private sphere so much as the invention of religion as, first, synonymous with belief (and only secondarily practice), and, second, as a category of difference that is private, immaterial, and unlikely to disrupt the flows of the emerging capitalist system.³⁰

Privacy in Public

This modern, secular meaning of religion as internal assent to propositional beliefs had the effect of weighting privacy with an intensified moral role. As Saba Mahmood explains, While religious morality has always been concerned with sexuality . . . their delineation as quintessential elements of private life under secular modernity has created an explosive symbiosis between them that is historically unique.³¹ The wide-ranging and urgent debates over marriage (its form, legal status, and role in maintaining white supremacy) were the most visible manifestation of this explosive symbiosis between private religion and secular modernity in the nineteenth-century United States. Legal marriage constituted a flashpoint, to borrow Mahmood’s words, in a number of struggles over what it means to be religious or secular in the world.³² These struggles ultimately generated not only what are generally taken to be a priori elements of social organization—public, private, political, religious—but suffuse[d] them with content, giving them a natural quality for those living within them. Mahmood’s argument that secularism is generative of the structures of modern life—the very categories of public and private, religious and secular—is crucial to this study. But equally so is her insistence that some of the most important work secularism produces is affective; it makes the divisions of secular/religious and public/private feel both natural and right.

Given the importance of this affective dimension, it is worth clarifying the distinct words we use for private life because such terms as private, privacy, and private sphere may overlap but they are not synonymous, with some evoking more material spaces and structures and others pointing to the more abstract and affective aspects of what I have been calling a secular sensibility. Etymologically, private comes from the classical Latin privatus, and was most often used, in its earliest invocations in English, for demarcating private persons (those not holding public office), private property, and close, intimate friends.³³ In the nineteenth century, it came to name both the domestic sphere (or even more private spaces within a home, like closets) and the nongovernmental capitalist marketplace. While these competing definitions can cause interdisciplinary confusion (especially when comparing the private sphere of separate spheres, where the capitalist marketplace is ostensibly excluded, with the naming of that marketplace as private rather than public) they are also interrelated. Through the historical confluence of disestablishment and the market revolution, the private sphere became the location that housed private lives, feelings, and all kinds of beliefs (religious or otherwise), and, as with the private market, it was supposedly a space meant to be shielded from government control.

In literary history, the private sphere has been most fully explored in feminist studies of the ideology of separate spheres, especially in relation to women’s writing. Arguably, no concept has had more of an influence on gender analysis of the nineteenth-century United States.³⁴ Put briefly, it is one of the foundational structuring ideologies of liberalism and capitalism: that society is separated into private and public spheres, and that those spheres are gendered. The private sphere was meant to be a refuge of morality, hospitality, and maternal care for men buffeted by the public sphere of business, law, and government. This ideology also naturalized the private sphere as that which preceded the public and granted it legitimacy; it constituted, to quote Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, a fabulous origin rather than the temporal starting point of the narrative of liberal subjectivity.³⁵ As many scholars of African American literature and culture have shown, the ideology of separate spheres was also thoroughly imbued with assumptions about race and class.³⁶ Part of its fantasy was universalizing the experiences of the white middle and upper classes—those who had a private space that could form a refuge, with legally recognized family structures, and who had the financial stability and autonomy to keep women out of a workforce, free or enslaved.

Both colloquially and in scholarship, the word privacy tends to name an affective orientation to the self and the world, one notoriously difficult to measure. It emerged in modern English to describe the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right.³⁷ Many readers may equate privacy with solitude and perhaps cite Emerson’s famous line, I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.³⁸ But as this book explores at length, privacy stands for more than the act of wandering in nature without company or the desire to be left alone. It encapsulates the feelings, beliefs, affects, and passions that constitute an authentic self, where that self best flourishes, and in which domestic structures it will be allowed to do so. But privacy is also, ironically enough, a performance of that authenticity; it becomes a sensibility through that mediation, by performing one’s moral and aesthetic orientations.³⁹ It is this version of privacy that led to the twentieth-century cases Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade, which established it as a Constitutional right. For this reason, a central point of my argument is that privacy is not precisely synonymous with either solitude (being left alone) or secrecy (that which it would be a shame to reveal) because privacy depends on revelation—or at least the performance of it—as part of its moral work and its eventual legal claims. That privacy relies on a mechanism for public accountability—what Stacey Margolis calls its public effects—has been established by scholarship on nineteenth-century privacy and interiority.⁴⁰ Privacy and publicity were and are dialectically intertwined in liberalism, and that dialectic gave rise to the inner lives of liberal subjects.⁴¹ Building on these insights, I consider in what ways secularism and religion underpinned and informed that dialectic.

The Morality of Hypocrisy

If privacy is publicly oriented, then its opposite is not publicity but sinful secrecy, like Dimmesdale’s in The Scarlet Letter. Privacy, therefore, enfolds a moral contradiction: to be a legally protected and culturally affirmed right, private life cannot be secret life. This is one reason hypocrites abound in the novels of the nineteenth century. Needless to say, the nineteenth century did not invent a concern with hypocrisy; its centrality to Christianity can certainly be traced to Jesus’s admonition, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.⁴² What is building through the legal and cultural fusion of religion with the private sphere, though, is an increasingly pervasive secular discourse of such accusations. We can see the roots of these in the defenses of disestablishment in the late eighteenth century. As Jefferson asserted in Notes, an established church may make someone worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man.⁴³ The project of what, in the eighteenth century, was often called private conscience was cast as freeing people from such moral hypocrisies—particularly the hypocrisy of having to publicly support a religious institution while failing to truly believe in its doctrines.

Though hypocrisy is the focus of Chapter 5, it is also a keyword, like privacy, for the entire study due to its ongoing salience for our public and scholarly discourses. Canonical authors are often called to account for various so-called hypocrisies (Thoreau’s mother did his laundry, as many an undergraduate will tell you); ironically enough, British and American narrative fiction of the nineteenth century made such accusations feel like moral work. Novels like The Scarlet Letter, which probe the seductions and moral pitfalls of hypocrisy, build characters by parsing distinctions between public and private selves. Moreover, to imagine oneself as having distinct public and private dimensions—a keynote of psychological realism—is presented in these novels as a self-evident psychological truth and at the same time a grave moral problem. In effect, the most profound irony about modern privacy is that it encourages both the condemnation of hypocrisy and the unavoidable feeling that one is always a hypocrite—and this irony is a key feature of the literary and political writing of the nineteenth century.

Hypocrisy is a moral concept with a long history. From Sophocles to Machiavelli, the uses and abuses of hypocrisy have animated theology, political intrigue, philosophical debate, and theatrical and antitheatrical theory. However, political theorists including Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar discern a shift with regard to hypocrisy in the late eighteenth century.⁴⁴ This is the era that invested in sincerity as a political and cultural value, and it became inextricable from the rise of liberalism and the liberal nation-state. Sincerity was promoted in philosophical and literary texts of the late eighteenth century from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) to William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and it was especially important to writers of the early republic, including both Royall Tyler and Charles Brockden Brown.

In her subtle analysis of hypocrisy, Shklar expands on sincerity as a moral code deeply embedded in liberal societies. It is liberalism’s Achilles’ heel and the most potent weapon used to disarm opponents. Shklar cites Benjamin Franklin as a prominent example of the way hypocrisy operated on the precipice of this political shift. As he recounts in The Autobiography (1791), Franklin obscures his deist inclinations since it upsets others; he plays down his own role in starting big public projects in order to achieve consensus on them; he pays dues to all the Philadelphia churches; and he attends, above all, to the appearance of his virtue, from his early years (when he "took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the contrary) to his later accounting books for virtuous living (where, tongue-in-cheek, he notes that he added Humility to his list but that he could not boast of much Success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue though he had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it").⁴⁵ Franklin exemplifies a moral order much more oriented to a public self, including the relation of that self to the state-supported religious institutions meant to foster a moral society. Yet we might actually be more precise about Franklin’s relation to the emerging moral investment in sincerity. While his narrative shows a delight in the affordances of hypocrisy, its form—the memoir, as the first edition explicitly named it—is exactly invested in the types of sincerity emerging in the revolutionary era. We see the moral value accorded to sincerity when he confesses his well-meaning deceptions (and a few that were not so well-meaning). When a culture values sincerity, this value is not shorn of the idea of performance. In fact, the very valuation of it depends on a public performance of one’s adherence to an even more private self. Sincerity, in other words, points inward but is not a raw experience of that interiority. It is, instead, a performance of that deeper self.

With this distinction in mind, we can see how nineteenth-century American culture embraced a further investment—not just in sincerity but in authenticity. These are not opposite qualities; rather they are degrees. A thoroughly Romantic quality still highly valued in American culture today, authenticity imagines a public self that is not performing, that is as sincere as one can be to an inner truth. Valuing authenticity means despising even the roles and poses of sincerity. Its moral value rose instead from publicly displaying a strong sense of one’s authentic selfhood, which increasingly came to be synonymous with rough edges and natural emotions. Both sentimentalism and antisentimentalism valued such authenticity and taught one to read for it in others. What the historian Karen Halttunen describes as the sentimental typology of conduct, marked by "the belief that every aspect of social