Vox Populi, Vox Dei
Vox Populi, Vox Dei
Bentley had led the Democratic‐Republican Party to victory, but not all of Salem's Republicans followed along for the reasons he offered. Many, perhaps most, of Salem's Republicans were evangelicals, not rationalists. They supported the party not because of its advocacy of disestablishment—at least that was not an important part of the public rhetoric—but rather because they too were economic republicans, even if of a different sort than Bentley. They brought to the party a social ideology derived from Jonathan Edwards rather than from Rousseau. Even so, both Bentley and the evangelicals—Baptists and Methodists and New Light Congregationalists—stood on the essential common ground of Christian republicanism, and if it was an awkward fit for both factions, such was the nature of oppositionalism in New England's First Party System.
Keywords: Democratic‐Republican Party, evangelical, disestablishment, Rousseau, Jonathan Edwards, Baptists, Methodists, New Light, Christian republicanism
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