Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian controversy in Boston, 1804-1833 - Massachusetts

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Mary Kupiec Cayton

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Unitarianism surely was the religion of a more privileged social class, and Congregationalism that of an also propertied but somewhat less well-off class, many of whom had recently migrated to the city. Although the latter were marginalized enough from the ways of the urban elite to distrust their leadership and resist deference to them, they were not so disadvantaged that they were unable to organize, both politically and socially. The higher income levels for (some) Unitarians suggest also a fundamentally different social experience - and not just in terms of consumption and socioeconomic power. Second Church's adherents were far more heavily represented proportionally as members of professions where abstract and rule-bound economic transactions, often national or international in character, were common. They were more highly educated, and they were also more involved in partnerships that required cooperation and the pooling of resources in order to deal with others who might not be likeminded. Evangelicals, on the other hand, seem for the most part to have been equally enmeshed in the market, but far less likely in the course of day-to-day affairs to have to deal directly with worlds outside the local arena. If, in fact, many of them were migrants to Boston from rural areas of New England, their prior experience in their formative years also would suggest less cosmopolitan contact. In short, Unitarians both by background and by profession - were far more likely to have had cosmopolitan types of experiences, and abstract and rulebound understandings of experience, than their Congregational counterparts.

Table 5

Individuals Listed in 1829 Tax List for Boston

                                Salem Street         Second Church

Individuals                 16 (7.24% of Men)     41 (16.33% of Men)
Avg. real                      $ 3,575.00             $ 7,334.15
Avg. Pers                      $ 2,118.75             $ 2,965.85

Avg. Total                     $ 5,693.75             $10,300.00

Partnerships                 5 (2.26% of Men)     25 (9.96% of Men)
Avg. Real                      $ 4,320.00             $ 2,092.00
Avg. Pers                      $ 5,700.00             $10,440.00

Avg. Total                     $10,020.00             $12,532.00

The Congregationalists, for their part, were far more likely to be members of a socioeconomic stratum where the ethos of what some historians have called a "small producer tradition" may still have been at work. Such a tradition valued overall social equality, the acquisition of a skill, the practice of a trade, and local knowledge where intimate ties of custom and clientage held people together. Human relations were based on a community knowledge and an ethos in which the individual good was subordinated to that of the collective well-being of the whole, but individual responsibility was expected. Evangelical religion appealed to people with such a tradition and such experiences who craved collective commitment within a new urban, pluralistic environment where older forms of corporate integration had become so attenuated as to be almost unrecognizable.(53)

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Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian controversy in Boston, 1804-1833 - Massachusetts

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Mary Kupiec Cayton

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