“I Am Doing a Great Work, So That I Cannot Come Down”: Civil Liberty and the American Nehemiad of the Early American Republic

James M. Patterson

Introduction: A Wall of Cooperation between Church and State1

For nearly 150 years, the “wall of separation” has served as the central image for

explaining the relationship between church and the American state. As a concept, it has an

excellent pedigree with its origins from the words of a Founder, Thomas Jefferson, in his 1802

correspondence with the Danbury Baptists, and its adoption in judicial decision-making first in

Reynolds v. US (1878) and more famously in Justice Hugo Black’s majority decision in Everson

v. Board of Education (1947). Yet, before Jefferson wrote his now famous letter, an alternative

image served to describe American church and state relations and, indeed, challenged

Jefferson’s—or rather Jefferson wanted to challenge it.2

This image is the other wall in American politics, the wall of Jerusalem that Nehemiah

rebuilt as told in the eponymous biblical book. For American clergy invoking Nehemiah, the

wall did not separate church and state but rather raised the wall of the state around the sacred

center—the temple—to defend it. In return, the sacred temple provided the spiritual resources to

keep the wall strong and well manned. In American scholarship on church and state issues from

the early republic, this wall is the often-overlooked “nehemiad” in favor of other narrative and

rhetorical appeals.3 Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, Puritan leaders, both religious and secular,

looked to Nehemiah as the statesman par excellence, whose combined piety and patriotism

united the returning Jews to rebuild their city, defended against the conspiracies of heathen

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governors, and secured at last the holy city for the orthodox believers returning from exile.4

Jonathan Mitchel looked to Nehemiah when calling on secular authorities to lead the way on

religious orthodoxy.5 Cotton Mather praised Jonathan Winthrop as the “Nehemias Americanus”

in his leadership of the Puritan colonists.6 Even as the Puritan church declined, New England

ministers routinely looked to Nehemiah as an example to emulate, and, in George Washington,

found the successor to Winthrop as the Nehemias Americanus.7 These same New England clergy

embraced John Adams and the Federalist Party against the perceived threat of the impious,

Francophile Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party. While preaching the “nehemiad”

they called for leaders who embraced religious faith as central to the greatness of the new

republic and a prerequisite for anyone who wished to lead the nation as Washington had. It is no

coincidence that Jefferson aligned himself with the political opponents of the established New

England clergy, the Baptists, and neither was it a coincidence that Jefferson’s wall would deny

that clergy their privileged position.

The nehemiad did not disappear with Jefferson’s election, but it certainly changed as the

character of the new nation changed. Until Jefferson, the nehemiad was largely a political

narrative for New England clergy to call for secular authorities to defend Christian orthodoxy as

the clergy understood it. During the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, the

nehemiad shifted away from an explicitly partisan narrative and toward its use as a religious one.

This nehemiad was less concerned with defending against the attacks and conspiracies of

American enemies and much more concerned with the “great work” of evangelizing the nation.

It was also less concentrated among elite New England clergy, finding its way into the rhetoric

of revivalists and missionaries. However, it would be a mistake to treat the more “church-

centered” nehemiad as less political than its forebear. Indeed, the nehemiad of this period always

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had, at its heart, a message demanding that the state actively cooperate with the church even if

the two institutions were formally separate. The reason was simple. The great work of revivals

and missions depended on the strength of civil government. Secular authorities had to man the

walls of secular authority to defend the preachers as they conducted their missions and revivals

within.

To argue this position, this essay has four parts. First, it briefly explains the story of

Nehemiah, the nature of the American nehemiad, and its history prior to the period examined in

this paper. Next, the paper moves through the nehemiad of the early nineteenth century,

explaining the relationship of its church-centered message of evangelization. The three issues

raised by clergy and discussed in this paper are missionary work, Sabbatarianism, and the

defense of religious and civil liberty. While only civil liberty appears to be an explicitly political

issue, the first two actually depend on a concept of the state as the secular walls that protect

sacred activity. As a result, clergy demanded state efforts to police Sabbath observance and

protect missionary efforts, not merely with staying out of the church’s way but by direct legal

intervention and piety among its many officials.

The nehemiad is of central importance to scholars of church and state relations, whether

they be in political science, history, or law. Not only does the nehemiad, with its Puritan origins,

precede the wall of separation, the nehemiad rivals it. In contrast to the wall of separation, the

nehemiad is a narrative defending an alliance of church and state, wherein the church provides

the moral legitimacy and training of its leaders and the state preserves the church role in saving

souls. Clergy have used the nehemiad to defend and mobilize religious peoples in politics for

centuries in direct opposition to the wall of separation. To understand church and state politics,

therefore, requires understanding Jefferson’s wall as only one side in a long, protracted battle

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over the place of religious faith in public discourse. The matter is, furthermore, not merely of

historical interest but of contemporary relevance. Faith communities across the United States

continue to use the nehemiad of the great work to defend everything from partnerships with

municipalities to build low-income housing to church-building missions across the globe.

Nehemiah and the Nehemiad

Nehemiah first appeared in 444 BC as the cupbearer to the Persian emperor Artaxerxes,

whose empire then controlled Palestine. While serving the emperor, Nehemiah learned that

Jerusalem remained in ruins. Despondent, Nehemiah prayed and fasted for guidance. Nehemiah

approached the emperor and lamented the state of his people’s sepulchers and city gates. The

emperor responded by appointing Nehemiah governor of Jerusalem. On arrival, Nehemiah

toured the ruined city alone at night and the next day pronounced to the Jews his intention to

rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Jews rallied to Nehemiah to the city to begin the project, but he

soon faced internal resistance from the Jewish Tekoite nobility, who refused to undertake

Nehemiah’s “great work,” and external resistance and ridicule from neighboring rulers Sanballat,

Tobiah, and Geshem. These three enemies of Nehemiah conspired against him, at first with a

show of military force but eventually by trying to persuade him to stop construction by meeting

with him on the Plain of Ono. All these efforts failed, and the Jews rebuilt the wall.

Once the Jews rebuilt the wall, Nehemiah restored religious orthodoxy by inviting Ezra to

read the law and rededicate the Jewish people to the covenant with God. Nehemiah reinforced

this orthodoxy when, after traveling to Babylon, he discovered that Jerusalem had drifted away

from the law in his absence, and that his enemy Tobiah had leased temple space meant for

storing offerings. Upon returning, Nehemiah removed Tobiah from the temple grounds and

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imposed strict reforms concerning temple worship, Sabbath observation, and a ban on

intermarriage with gentiles or Samaritans.

While the above summary excludes some events and details, it includes those elements

that have formed the core of the American nehemiad. The first element is the link between piety

and patriotism.8 Nehemiah loved his homeland more than the wealth and luxury of his life in the

Persian court. According to the nehemiad, love of country alone was not what sustained

Nehemiah; it was his piety, his love of God. Clergy often note how Nehemiah prayed and offered

his services up to God for judgment over and against the king. The pious patriot knew the proper

ends for the nation because of his piety. In the original account, Nehemiah prayed, fasted, and

subsequently made prudent political decisions that worked toward the general gain of Israel. The

same went for Americans and their leaders, who showed piety in their personal acts as well as in

their public lives.

The second component of the nehemiad is the cooperation of church and state. While

most Americans identify the “wall” as the symbol of the separation of church and state, the

“wall” of the nehemiad is a symbol of their alliance, found in the complementary relationship

between protective walls of the city and the sacred interior centered on the rebuilt temple. In the

biblical account, Nehemiah identified his knowledge of Jewish law as his motivation and warned

that those who transgressed the law would suffer ruin. The wall protected Jerusalem from

external threats, but only because the people observed the laws and customs at the temple within.

In the American nehemiad, leaders must restore and preserve religious faith to preserve the

nation. To that end, the nehemiad looks to the church for evaluating and articulating the proper

ends and means for political decisions. The church preaches good government, and pious

governors listen.

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Finally, the nehemiad contains an element of foreign and domestic opposition to pious

and patriotic government, just as Nehemiah’s efforts provoked Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem to

conspire against him. According to the nehemiad, the American faithful have to reject

compromise, endure ridicule, and remain watchful against conspiracies that the opposition might

bring. Opposition does not merely come from foreign or antireligious elements. It also comes

from within, as it did with Nehemiah when the Tekoite nobility refused to work, the winemakers

treaded and merchants traded on the Sabbath, and most of all when the high priest married his

daughter off to Nehemiah’s Gentile nemesis, Sanballat. Compromise only brings an enemy like

Tobiah not just within the walls but inside the temple itself. The only defense is for the faithful to

close ranks and continue the “great work,” no matter what the opposition promises or threatens.9

These three parts of the nehemiad are mutually reinforcing. If a member of the clergy

successfully exhorts congregations to hold patriotic and pious values, those congregations are

likely to hold their elected representatives to those same standards. To ensure those standards

remain upheld, both the congregant-voters and the representatives they elect will look to form a

closer cooperation between political and religious institutions. Those who do not favor this

cooperation will necessarily fit in the preexisting “opposition” framework. Indeed, the

opposition, especially its call to compromise, affirms the righteousness of the faithful, because

the opposition’s call for compromise is a sign “the great work” (however defined) is succeeding.

Opposition is, thus, a sign of the patriotic and pious purpose of the original congregants and their

representatives, as well as a sign of the necessity to persevere as the opposition increases its

efforts.

The Puritans were the first to develop the American nehemiad. They conceived of an

American Nehemiah as a pious governor who discharged his secular responsibilities in the

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interest of preserving orthodoxy and protecting the faithful. Nehemiah was the civil ruler par

excellence and his example would inspire governors during the errand into the wilderness. As the

Puritan errand came to an end, the nehemiad did not fade from the imagination but, instead, took

on a more national character as the errand itself did. During the Seven Years War, New England

clergy used the nehemiad’s narrative of opposition and keeping the faith to exhort Americans to

defend the colonies from the Catholic French to the north. The French were the Sanballats

attempting to subvert the great work of the Reformation in the New World, and New Englanders

had to ready their swords in one hand and build up the wall with the other. In fact, then Colonel

George Washington invited Presbyterian ministers to preach on Nehemiah 4:14 as British forces

marched to Loyalhannah.10

After England settled its conquest of Canada with the Quebec Act, which allowed for the

continued establishment of the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, the New England clergy then

turned on the Crown. For them, tolerating Roman Catholicism was the very height of betrayal,

since they saw its expulsion from the New World as the very purpose of the war in the first

place. As the tension between the colonies and the Crown escalated, the New England clergy

replaced the French Catholics as Sanballat with the British Crown and called for rebellion. They

elevated George Washington as the American Nehemiah and, after the end of his public life,

replaced him with John Adams and other Federalist Party members. However, with the decline

of the Federalist Party, the explicitly partisan nehemiad faded as well. At the beginning of the

nineteenth century, the nehemiad became more church-centered as clergy other than New

England Congregationalists picked it up as the Second Great Awakening began.

To help explain the transition, one should consider the different chapters and verses

favored. For the Revolutionary and later Federalist of the eighteenth century, the nehemiad relied

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on Nehemiah 4:14, which says, “And I looked, and rose up, and said unto the nobles, and to the

rulers, and to the rest of the people, Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great

and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your

houses.” In this passage, Nehemiah was responding to a show of force put on by Sanballat and

his allies. Nehemiah exhorted the builders to continue building the walls as some take arms to

defend the great work. During the nineteenth century, clergy preferred 6:3, which says, “And I

sent messengers unto [Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem], I am doing a great work, so that I cannot

come down: why should the work cease, whilst I leave it, and come down to you?” In this

passage, Nehemiah rejected an offer from Sanballat to reach a compromise over the issue of

Jerusalem’s walls but only on the condition that Nehemiah would halt construction until the

compromise was reached. Nehemiah rejected the offer five times, arguing that the great work

was more important than anything Sanballat or his allies might have to say.

In the first of the two verses, the great work is the wall itself—the secular walls of the

nation meant to protect the sacred interior, where the temple grounds lay. To defend the walls is

to protect the temple as well. With the War of Independence won, the walls were built, secured,

and well-manned; now the church at the sacred interior could begin its role in evangelizing the

people, as the new temple of Zerubabbel did upon Nehemiah’s completion of the walls and

Ezra’s rededication of Israel to the law. In short, the nehemiad of the nineteenth century began as

the “nehemiad of the great work” in contradistinction to the earlier “nehemiad on the walls.” The

nehemiad of the great work interprets “opposition” not in terms of hostile domestic or

international actors but in terms of sinful, disobedient, or heterodox fellow citizens.

Nevertheless, the pastors preaching the nehemiad of the great work often preached an implicit

politics that become explicit in conflict with bad moral habits, denominational rivalries, and most

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of all the great sins of the nation. Specifically, that implicit politics was one wherein the state

served as a defender of the church so that the church might do its great work.

In the following sections, I account for the major themes of the nehemiads of the early

republic. Some were expressly political, while others assumed an unexpressed politics. In every

case, however, it was clergy who expressed the nehemiad of the great work, one that looked to

the state as a guarantor of religious liberty to protect the sacred work of building up American

churches.

The Great Work: Missions

In an 1823 sermon, Justin Edwards offered a sermon before the Auxiliary Education

Society of the Young Men of Boston (AES), speaking of Nehemiah’s great work and the

opposition he faced in doing it.11 Like Nehemiah, the AES and its missionary work abroad was a

great work, but the AES was even superior to Nehemiah because, “You are raising up

instruments, not indeed for the building of an early city, although the city of God, and the place

of his habitation; but you are raising up instruments for the building of the New Jerusalem...the

Jerusalem built by Nehemiah, was only a shadow.”12 Edwards then interpreted the passion of

Jesus and the history of Protestant evangelization as the persecution that came with conducting

the great work. However, Edwards said little about who might be the persecutors or why they

might act. Instead, he stressed the importance of emulating Nehemiah’s example in continuing

missionary work despite whatever setbacks, “Would our Mahews [sic], and Elliots have gone

from island, to island; and spent the day time in traversing the desert, and the night in translating

the Bible, if they had never heard the preaching of the gospel?”13 The implication was that the

Sanballat of the AES missionary was the very struggle to subsist and preach in the harsh

environments of the far-flung, remote areas in need of the gospel. The “great work” and the

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example of Nehemiah were, for Edwards, an inspiration for enduring the elements while saving

souls.

Another sermon confirmed this interpretation. Later that year, in a very similar message,

Yale College president Jeremiah Day preached to the American Board of Commissioners for

Foreign Missions about how “in the spirit of Nehemiah, We are engaged in a GREAT

WORK,—and it must NOT BE SUSPENDED.”14 Day described the greatness both in object and

scale of missionary work but created tension in the audience when speaking of the opposition to

the great work. Sanballat was not a person or a type of person but rather the “prevalent systems

of philosophy, in the pagan world” which “were so blended with the common business of life.”15

Worse was “the long established forms of idolatry. The idolatry of the heart is to be overcome.

The worship of stocks and stones has come down from generation to generation, because it has

ever found so welcome a reception in the human heart.”16 Day insisted that missionaries had to

use scripture to enlighten pagan darkness, but this effort was not enough. To succeed, the great

work could not only begin; it also “must not be suspended” because of financial hardship. Day

referred to the great fundraising success the board of commissioners had during the War of 1812,

and his reason was that the “burden of supporting missionaries will be trifling, if it be distributed

in due proportion among all who are able to bear part of it.”17 Yet, those capable of contributions

had to understand their responsibility to the missions. Day exhorted his audience at the end,

alluding to another kind of Sanballat: worldly temptations, “We are doing a great work. Why

should we leave it, and come down, at the call of the men of the world? Are we to be so dazzled,

with the splendors of opulence…? Shall the bustle of commerce delay our purpose to send the

tidings of peace?”18

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Edwards and Day do not directly address politics during their sermons, which raises the

question of how political these nehemiads really were. The answer is not to keep digging into

these sermons but to dig into different ones, those that depict the political stakes for the great

work of religion. The next section shows how these apparently apolitical nehemiads rested on

strongly political assumptions about the necessity of state cooperation. The Sabbatarian

nehemiads illustrate how clergy believed the state had a role in structuring daily life to facilitate

public piety.

The Great Work: Sabbatarianism

In 1813, Pastor Seth Williston gave several sermons in Durham, New York, on the

importance of the Sabbath.19 Residents had only recently returned to the young town, as the

Revolutionary War had required them to flee until its end. Upon their return, as the population of

the area increased, Williston grew alarmed at the “growing immoralities of the day” and

answered the request of newly formed “Moral Societies” to preach in a way that would “stem the

torrent of profligacy about to deluge our land.”20 Williston decided to preach for keeping the

Sabbath because he “hoped, while the feelings of the Divine Being, as expressed in his word,

were summarily brought into view, that they who had not entirely renounced his word as their

guide, and gone over to infidelity, would place their practice by the side of this standard;

discover their deviations from it, and reform their abuses of his holy day.”21 In other words,

Williston had to discipline the Moral Societies into keeping the Sabbath before they themselves

could have any hope of stopping the torrent of profligacy.

To call the area to repent and resume keeping the Sabbath, Williston appealed to

Nehemiah, who vigorously enforced the Jewish prohibition of working or conducting business

on the Sabbath. Williston believed that keeping the Christian Sabbath was equally vital, since the

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Sabbath was a day that belonged to God. He found in Nehemiah that the Jews were too often

caught up in a desire for doing business or making social calls to give their time to God on his

day, but “with that command before them they were doing all manner of work. It is likely

however, that they invented some excuse for it all.”22 No different were, for Williston, those who

ignore the Sabbath in “the city of New-York, and in other cities, and sea-port towns” where “it is

not allowed to bring in flesh, vegetables and fruits, on the Sabbath-day; but in these places even

on the morning of the holy day, you may hear the horns blow, to call you to the fish market.”23

Why did so many people disobey city and biblical prohibitions against doing business on the

Sabbath? Williston suspected he knew the reason—wealthy people thought they were above the

Sabbath, and their bad behavior influenced everyone else. He pointed to Nehemiah’s

condemnation of the Tekoite nobility for conducting business on the Sabbath, since the nobility

first, “either make the laws of the nation, or administer justice”; second, “will often conduct as if

they themselves were above the law” thus having a “bad example [and] a most pernicious effect

on the community; and third, “their contempt of the command of God, peculiarly exposes the

nation to judgments.”24 Williston referred to 13:15–22, then summarized its message to America:

It is God who sends the evil; but it is we who procure it: yet ye bring more wrath upon Israel by profaning the Sabbath. Let the profaners of the Sabbath, throughout this American Republic, know, that they are bringing more wrath on this nation by their contemptuous disregard of holy time! The nation are [sic] already groaning under the rod of Heaven; and will ye bring more wrath upon this people by profaning the Sabbath?25

What was to be done? Nehemiah set the better example. “This pious governor of Judah, whose

heart was greatly set upon a thorough reformation” closed the city gates when the Sabbath began

at sundown and did not open them until the Sabbath ended.26 When merchants lingered outside

the gates, he threatened them with violence. Williston spoke highly of Nehemiah’s force of will,

“This best of governors met with opposition: but it did not discourage him…. He did not bear the

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sword in vain. He was a terror to evil doers.”27 It was Nehemiah’s piety that made him best

among governors. He subjected himself and others equally and without mercy to God’s law.

According to Williston, for there to be moral reform in Durham and in America, Americans had

to keep the Sabbath, and the state had to enforce it when the citizens failed to do so. This is the

nehemiad of the great work, wherein the secular walls protect the reforming task of the sacred

center, in this case, on the frontier of upstate New York. In return, Williston and his church could

continue the great work and thereby spread the blessings of God rather than incur his wrath.

While the hardscrabble Presbyterian minister Williston and his nehemiad railed against

the immoralities of the frontier, the more refined Congregationalist minister Ebenezer Porter

delivered a similar sermon in 1816, though with a more learned style, to Andover Theological

Seminary about how Nehemiah “built up” his great work.28 Porter began by praising the

character of Nehemiah, finding him a man of piety in his prayerful devotion to God, integrity in

his conduct around the Persian monarch, firmness in his enforcement of Jewish law, and

patriotism in his love for the Jewish people as they experienced the hardships of returning from

exile.29 Porter outlined these traits to explain why Nehemiah was such an effective governor; he

faced precisely the sins that had originally delivered Israel over to their enemies, namely “that

the rich, by extortion and usury, had reduced the poor to such straits, that they were compelled to

sell their houses and lands, and even their children, to get bread,” “that the Levites had been

compelled to forsake the temple and the sacred office; and to seek subsistence in other business,”

and worst of all “that the Sabbath was dreadfully profaned.”30 To end one required ending all

three, and Porter stressed the need to keep the Sabbath as the most important, saying, “The

Sabbath alone, with its system of moral restraints, is more efficacious to prevent crimes, and to

promote personal and public security, than the best code of penal statues, that can be framed.”31

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Porter preached the example of the great Protestant ministers and what they could teach

his audience about the state of the nation. First, Porter exhorted his audience to emulate

Nehemiah as other great reformers, who had set free “emperors and empires trembling before the

Roman Pontiff, and enchained for ages, in the darkness of moral midnight: till one man stood

forth alone, and braved the thunders of the Vatican, and broke the fetters of the world.”32 More

controversially for the time, Porter held William Wilberforce up to Nehemiah’s example, calling

his audience to “see the wretched inhabitants of Africa, torn from their homes, transported to

distant climates, and subjected to all the horrors of slavery; till one man raised his voice against

his monstrous iniquity, poured a stream of light through the darkness” and “though often baffled,

triumphed at last, over the combined influence of prejudice and avarice, the strength of custom,

and the policy of princes; and procured the abolition of this atrocious traffic in immortal

beings.”33 Porter believed America was equally capable of a reformation to end slavery but only

if it restored the place of the Sabbath in the daily lives of its citizens.

Porter invoked Nehemiah as a paragon of good governance and his standards as the only

kind that can produce a reformed nation. He appealed to the line from Proverbs 14:34, namely

that righteousness exalteth a nation but that sin is a disgrace to any people.34 As a result, Porter

feared for the fate of the nation since, in addition to slavery, it so poorly kept the Sabbath. Like

the Tekoite nobility, “the recent measures of our public authorities, respecting this sacred day,

cannot fail to awaken emotions of grief and alarm, in the hearts of many” since he had “seen the

Lord’s day habitually profaned, by the authorized agents of one department, in our national

government” and “the transmission and opening of the mail on this day, becoming extensively, a

pretext for worldly amusements and employments” despite “a flood of petitions, once and again,

presented to Congress, expressing the earnest and simultaneous wishes of thousands, in different

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parts of the land, that the authority of this honourable body, should interpose, to produce a

reformation.”35 Concluding his sermon, Porter alluded to an earlier passage in Nehemiah 2:3, in

which Nehemiah confessed to Artaxerxes that his sad countenance was the result of knowing

“the place of my father’s sepulchers, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire.”

Porter called out, “The crumbling monuments, that bear the names of these worthies; and the

grass, that waves in the breeze over their dust, testify against us. Who, that fears God, or loves

his country, if he could go today, and find the grave of Robinson, or Winthrop, or Cotton, could

not stand there, and pour out his grief over this subject?”36 Porter’s nehemiad remained firmly

church-centered but nonetheless argued that piety is a necessary political virtue for good

government and that the secular authority had a compelling interest in enforcing piety. The

sacred center within the wall, for Porter, provided the instruction necessary to reform the morals

of individual citizens, exalt a nation, and give God his due.

An important common feature between the sermons of Williston and Porter is the

absence of Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. The broader context for their nehemiad of the great

work is one of general peace, with the War of 1812 concluded. The foreign threats of the British

Crown or Revolutionary France were less relevant than the persistent threats from within.

However, Porter offered an extensive note speculating that the French Revolution might have

started the decline of Sabbath observance. What accounts for Porter’s distinguishing between the

infidelity of the Tekoite nobility and the outright hostility of Sanballat? The Tekoites were also

Jews. Their refusal to work amounted to a betrayal of their own people, since they endangered

everyone—not just themselves—with their refusal to work. The choice was between siding with

the great work or siding with the enemy Sanballat and his promise of compromise. Porter

insisted on constant vigilance against compromise on the Sabbath, equating it to siding with the

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nobility who had no interest in the wall: “But no compromise, which involves the relinquishment

of important principles or objects, can prosper…. The temple and wall of Jerusalem, never would

have been built up by the help of men, whose hearts were hostile to the work.”37 To build his

work, Nehemiah gave no comfort to those who wavered; neither would Porter, nor, in his view,

should any American. Even so, the opportunity remained for the unfaithful to spurn the example

of the Tekoite nobility and resume the great work alongside the faithful.

The nehemiad of the great work places much greater emphasis on the role of the church

in protecting religious practices at home and spreading them abroad. To succeed, as Williston’s

sermon illustrated, requires state cooperation with church standards, but the nature of that

cooperation is problematic. Does the state not cross the line in supporting churches, infringing on

the individual civil liberty to be freed from state coercion on religious practice? Williston

obviously showed little concern or sympathy for this position, preferring instead to appeal to

Nehemiah’s coercive role as governor as the solution, not the problem. However, not all clergy

were indifferent. The next section shows how clergy understood civil liberty to be the

consequence of religious liberty and not the other way around, as the wall of separation would

have it.

The Great Work: Religious and Civil Liberty

Since its installation in 1780, the “standing order” that established the Congregational

Church as the official church of Massachusetts was subject to opposition from among dissenting

Baptists, Unitarians, and other denominations. For fifty years, the Congregationalist clergy had

used their social standing, control of Harvard University, and influence among its elite alumni to

preserve its place.38 The Massachusetts government finally ended the standing order in 1833, but

in 1832 one member of clergy, Frederick Freeman, used the nehemiad to condemn vigorously

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any charges that the Congregationalist church opposed religious liberty. Freeman used the

nehemiad to argue that the Congregationalist church was directly responsible for civil liberty in

America because it introduced religious liberty, from which civil liberty derived its origins,

during its efforts to reform Christianity.39 Freeman was also not so shy about using Sanballat

(rather than the Tekoite nobility) to describe his enemies. For Freeman, anyone who charged that

the Congregationalist church was opposed to religious liberty behaved like Sanballat, Tobiah,

and Geshem (or “Gashmu”) and were guilty of the false charges of treason against the Persian

monarchy they made against Nehemiah. Specifically, Freeman focused on the authority

Sanballat used to dress up the charges, saying, “‘It is reported among the heathen, AND

GASHMU SAITH IT.’”40 Interpreting the verse for his audience, Freeman declared that, though

America had no inquisition that prohibited religious liberty, it nonetheless had populations who

used ridicule as a way of preventing the great work of religion. He said:

And the means which are most effectual, and therefore oftenest employed, are referred to in our text: “GASHMU SAITH IT.” In other words, the means most frequently and effectually employed are MISREPRESENTATIONS, associate with sneers, scoffs, ridicule, appeals to the selfish and unhallowed passions, and a determine to put down (whether in business, in civil life, or in the enjoyment of those kind and amiable feelings that should ever distinguish a civilized and enlightened community) whoever has the mental independence that dares to think for itself.41

Enemies of religious liberty, according to Freeman, used lies and ridicule to suppress the value

and exercise of religious liberty. Freeman believed that lies and ridicule shut down open

religious enquiry by creating a hostile environment for people of faith. To explain this position,

he defined religious liberty and demonstrated how the appeal to Sanballat’s “GASHMU SAITH

IT” undermined each practice.

Freeman defined religious liberty as having five components. They were the right to free

enquiry after matters divine, the freedom to choose religious practices based on that enquiry, the

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free expression of those views and practices, the freedom to follow the religious authorities to

which one subscribes (conscience, church, and clergy), and the right to use speech to defend

one’s beliefs and persuade others of them. As he discussed each component of religious liberty,

Freeman introduced a Sanballat who tried to undermine it. For example, concerning the spirit of

enquiry, he described an “individual [who] would fain be thought a very knowing man. And so

he was—very passable in matters of worldly concern, and well-read in all the novels of the

day.”42 Yet, the man knew very little of the Bible or the array of Christian ideas, but this did not

stop him from ridiculing both. Freeman did not mince words, saying “As ignorant in these

matters as a child of yesterday, and yet welling most complacently at the thought of his own

superior light, and, like the mole, still burrowing in the earth, blind, blind, perhaps perfectly,

blind he held himself in the most disgraceful mental bondage!”43 Such a man, for Freeman,

poisoned religious liberty by preventing a free and intelligent enquiry after religious things,

preferring instead to laugh and deride the very notion, though having no understanding of

religious matters himself.

Freeman did not merely complain about ignorant conversationalists. He reserved his

greatest animus for those who charged him and his church of wanting the “Union of Church and

State.” Freeman raised the issue of how professing a public creed somehow inhibited the free

enquiry of others, to which he responds, “What child does not see that the result of free enquiry

(which is something believed) is itself a creed, necessarily, whether written on paper, or written

on the fleshy tables of the heart?”44 Because all persons believed something about religious

matters, all persons necessarily followed a creed, even if it was one that rejects religious creeds.

Therefore, those who claimed not to have a creed were liars, and those who, on the basis of that

lie, tried to end religious enquiry with ridicule should be given no quarter. Freeman thundered, “I

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say, this putting down, or the attempt to put down perfect liberty—whether the attempts be made

by menaces, by the withdrawing of business, by sneers, by derision, by misrepresentation, or by

any discourteous treatment whatever, is the veriest TYRANNY! tyranny over a man’s

conscience! tyranny over his religious rights!! tyranny over his soul’s eternal interests!!!”45

Freeman was not simply getting carried away; he argued that religious liberty paved the

way for civil liberty. He told of his version of the Reformation and its struggle to end papal

domination of the state. He recounted, “And in this struggle and its triumphs, how followed the

increase of knowledge, the invigoration of intellect, the extension of sound moral principle, the

development of character, ‘energy of action, unyielding endurance, untiring perseverance,’ until

civil liberty succeeded as a consequence.”46 Freeman continued the narrative, telling of how

Puritans settled colonies in America to establish free government because they themselves

desired religious liberty and how, at present, they continued to defend both. Those who charge

that his “sentiments having the remotest tendency to an infringement on our liberties by a union

of Church and State” were the real villains of religious liberty, charging Freeman “as was

Nehemiah, ‘It is reported among the heathen, that thou and the Jews think to rebel; and

GASHMU SAITH IT.’”47 To ridicule religious enquiry or settling a creed was to ridicule the very

foundations of the Reformation and, specifically, the foundations of the Congregationalist church

in Massachusetts. Because the church was the foundation of civil liberty, an attack on it was an

attack on the republic. Hence, Freeman concluded his sermon that the man who ridiculed

religious liberty:

…is a TYRANT. I repeat it, that man is a TYRANT. And if our Fathers’ blood was with propriety represented as crying from the ground to their descendants “MY SONS, SCORN TO BE SLAVES!” when we were politically oppressed; how much more does the practice of those who have gone before… call upon us in such a case to resist the yoke of spiritual bondage, and assert the liberty of freemen.48

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For the great work to succeed required the proper understanding of religious liberty and vigilance

against the liars and conspirators against it. After all, without the sacred center of the

Congregationalist church, what purpose did the secular walls of the state serve?

In 1835, Steven H. Tyng published the sermons of the Episcopalian priest Gregory

Townsend Bedell.49 Bedell had been a successful circuit preacher, a somewhat unusual

accomplishment for his denomination, spending the better part of the year after his ordination,

1814 to 1815, touring the South to revive their churches. After settling into an upstate New York

church on the Hudson River, he still visited his hometown of New York City with an interest in

returning. During his time there, he supported the formation of the interdenominational

American Bible Society, which placed him at odds with his bishop, John J. Hobart, who was

hostile to the group.50 Hobart, evidently, blocked Bedell’s placement at Trinity Church in New

York City and, instead, handed him over to the southern frontier city of Fayetteville, North

Carolina, until Bedell grew ill. Bedell spent the rest of his career in a newly built St. Andrews

Church in Philadelphia, where he held more evangelical services than those of his fellow priests

and, not coincidentally, had tremendous church growth. When in good health, he traveled across

the nation to preach and drew great crowds.

Over half of the book contains Bedell’s magnum opus, “The Great Work of Religion.”51

In eleven sermons, Bedell analogized that “the great work which Nehemiah was performing,”

namely, “the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem,” was the “work of [Christian] religion in which

it is the duty and the interest of every one before me to be most seriously and actively engaged

in.”52 The greatest threat to this work was worldliness, or preferring one’s material interests over

spiritual salvation. Bedell had his own account of Sanballat and Tobiah; he preferred to focus on

how Nehemiah’s enemies feigned friendship in entreating him to cease building the walls until

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they had met together to reach a compromise. Bedell referred to the dangers of “the worldliness

of professed friends” since “a traitor is almost infinitely more dangerous than an open enemy.

You can guard against the one, when you do not even know the designs of the other.”53 Indeed,

anything that would distract a person from the great work of religion was suspect, including

“pursuits of wealth most generally, the untiring efforts of worldly business, the aspirations after

mans’ applause, and the infinitely more foolish, and sometimes debasing occupations of

pleasure.”54 Bedell warned especially against attributing the blessings of religion to the fruits of

human labor alone. The faithful received “the dispensations of God” to “furnish aid in the great

work of religion.”55 The result was “the movements of the grand machinery of God in relation to

the civil and political affairs of men; the movements of the same great machinery in another of

its departments, the moral improvement of the world; the various individual, social, civil,

religious advantages which he may enjoy.”56 Worldliness, according to Bedell, tempted people to

believe that they are responsible for their own and the world’s improvement, what he describes

as “the miscalled march of intellect,” miscalled by the “the political economist” who might “read

the gradual amelioration of the condition of the species going on in his estimate to the perfection

of our nation.”57 If the people believed they were the causes of God’s blessings, then they would

see no reason to continue the great work and would go down to Ono.

Bedell comforted his audience, however, with the provision of religious liberty in

America. Like Freeman, he observed that there “are here no fires of persecution raging, and there

is no martyrdom in prospect for your profession of the faith of Jesus Christ.”58 What a Christian

in American confronted, instead, was ridicule. Unlike Freeman, Bedell was untroubled by

ridicule, saying, “Tell me, ye who are engaged in this great work of religion, who is there in this

land of liberty that dares to harm you, or who can make you afraid? I grant you… you may be

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sneered at, and laughed at, and talked at; but who can harm you? who can infringe upon your

liberty?”59 While Freeman saw ridicule as the source for religious oppression and political

tyranny, Bedell was more optimistic, provided that the faithful keep after the great work. He

said, “What need I fear, though the work is arduous, and the difficulties great? God has

surrounded me by circumstances of favour which place me beyond pressure of external

opposition, and if I will but exercise the liberty which God has made me free, none can molest,

none need make me afraid.”60 Where Bedell and Freeman implicitly agreed was the essential role

civil liberty played in continuing the great work of the Christian religion in America.

The Great Work: Preserving a Free People

The revivalist Charles Finney embraced the same nehemiad of the great work. While

Freeman attacked other denominations and Bedell self-satisfaction and worldliness, Finney

attacked his own church leadership as the Sanballats trying to stop the great work. In his classic

text on staging revivals, Finney denounced old Presbyterian fathers in a stinging chapter titled

“Hindrances to Revivals.”61 Unlike his “Old Light” opposition, Finney clearly believed that

individuals had a greater role in their individual salvation. As a member of the “New Light,”

with its emphasis on individual repentance, Finney encountered significant opposition among the

Old Light (especially his nemesis at Princeton University, Albert Baldwin Dod) with their

traditional Reformed belief in salvation strictly through God’s grace. In his defense, Finney

compared himself to Nehemiah, calling his “Revival of Religion…a great work. It is a great

work, because in it are [sic] great interest involved” specifically “the glory of God, so far as it

respects the government of this world, and the salvation of men.”62 Finney condemned the Old

Light for their “letters in the newspapers, against revivals or revival men” and urged the New

Light not to “write letters back against, against them, in an angry contentious, bitter spirit.”63

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Finney, however, was not seeking compromise, since compromise occurred away from

the great work, down with Sanballat on the plains of Ono. On the contrary, he advised the New

Light, “LET THEM KEEP ABOUT THEIR WORK, and not talk about the opposition, nor

preach, nor print about it.”64 The great work of the church could not cease because of the lies and

conspiracies of Old Light opposition that resembled the deceit of Sanballat who “by artifice and

fraud [sought] to draw [Nehemiah] off from the vigorous prosecution of his work.”65 Finney told

a story about a Presbyterian revivalist preacher opposed by “certain ministers” who “formed a

combination against the pastor of the church, and a plan was set on foot to ruin him.”66 The

opposition managed to bring him before the local Presbytery for a six-week trial, but “another

minister…labored among the people, and the members did not even go to the trial, generally, but

kept praying and laboring for souls, and the revival rode out the storm.”67 It is an imperfect

analogy, since Nehemiah rebuffed his charges but this minister defended them (perhaps he had

no choice), but Finney used it as an example for how New Light revivalists had to conduct

themselves when challenged by Old Light authorities. His language was quite direct, “whenever

those who are actively engaged in promoting a revival get excited at the unreasonableness and

pertinacity of the opposition… and feel they must answer their cavils and refute their slanders,

then they get down into the plains of Ono, and the works must cease.”68 The result, for Finney,

was unacceptable. Revivals were a great work; to argue with the Old Lights was to let the work

cease in favor of the plains of Ono.

For Finney, the revivals were necessary for introducing the virtue necessary for a

republican self-government, and that virtue made plain the concrete conditions that endangered

the republic: the twin evils of intemperance and slavery. To those revivalists who did not preach

temperance, Finney cried that their “hands are RED WITH BLOOD.”69 Finney also narrated how

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the church has learned of the nature of slavery, saying, “Facts are exhibited, and principles

established, and light thrown in upon the minds of men, and this monster is dragged from his

horrid den, and exhibited before the church, and it is demanded of them, ‘IS THIS SIN?’”70

Finney concluded that it “is a question for the church and for the nation to decide, and God will

push it to a decision.”71 Finney did not want the readers to misunderstand. He did not “preach a

political sermon” or wish “to have you join and get up a Christian party in politics.”72 What he

wanted was for Christians to “vote for honest men, and take consistent ground in politics, or the

Lord will curse them.”73 Christians needed to “let the world see that the church will uphold no

man in office, who is known to be a knave, or an adulterer, or a Sabbath-breaker, or a gambler.”74

Finney believed that there is more at stake than simply dishonest, self-serving public policy. The

threat was existential, saying, “God cannot sustain this free and blessed country, which we love

and pray for, unless the church will take the right ground…. Christians seem to act as if they

thought God did not see what they do in politics. But I tell you, he does see it, and he will bless

or curse this nation, according to the course they take.”75 Finney then argued for how revivalist

churches must either persuade their slave-holding and intemperate members to give up their sin

or, alluding to Nehemiah’s response to intermarried Jews and gentiles, purge them. The advice

was harsh, but Finney reminded his reader, “What is the condition of this nation? No doubt, God

is holding the rod of WAR over the heads of this nation. He is waiting fore he lets loose his

judgments to see whether the church will do right…. And now suppose war should come, where

would be our revivals?”76 If these were the stakes for revivalists, then who “should leave such a

work, and go to writing letters, and go down to the plain of Ono… and let the work cease.”77 For

Finney, New Light revivalists had to ignore the lies and conspiracies that might draw them from

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their great work; otherwise, not only will ongoing revivals end but likely any future revivals,

since God would exact his punishment on an unfaithful nation.

In 1846, Joseph Alden explicitly linked the nehemiad with the life and career of George

Washington in his book The Jewish Washington.78 The Jewish Washington was, naturally,

Nehemiah himself. In Alden’s view, Washington had been so great an American leader that he

supplanted Nehemiah as the perfect union of piety and patriotism within a single statesman.

While I have discussed the material elsewhere, one issue still needing attention is Alden’s

rationale for telling his nehemiad and its relationship with the United States. Alden described

God as the governor of nations, which were “bound to acknowledge his authority—to obey it” or

else “he will inflict judgments upon them.”79 The place of American governors was subservient

to the nation’s piety. He explained, “We need not therefore ask the experienced statesman what

will be the fate our country in future days. If the people serve God, they will enjoy liberty and

happiness.”80 Governors could not take credit for political and social prosperity; only God

delivered it as a blessing from heaven.

What, then, was the purpose of a governor? Alden answered, “to reward those who obey

the laws, and punish those who disobey them.” According to Alden, American governors came

to know the law and its proper execution from reading the Constitution, since it was “the highest

expression of the will of the state” and therefore “when a measure is proposed that is contrary to

the Constitution… it should not be passed.”81 However, governors could only come to know the

justice of the Constitution through revelation, meaning the Bible “ought therefore to be the

textbook of every legislator and officer of government as well as the Minister of the Gospel.”82

The Bible revealed “the will of God, the author of the State, the governor of the nation.”83 Alden

concluded that a governor knows just enforcement of the Constitution from knowing God’s will

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expressed in the Bible, and when the Constitution conflicted with the Bible, the governor must

heed the divine authority before the human. After all, asked Alden “Why should not the member

of Congress, when a measure is proposed which is contrary to God’s… not be rejected?”84

Yet Alden insisted that he did not want to “teach that the government should be

connected with the church; or in other words, that there should be a union of Church and State.”85

They were, he maintained, “two distinct institutions; they exist for different ends” the pursuit of

which were “hindered when the attempt is made to unite” them.86 Church and state were

complementary, as both Washington and Nehemiah revealed in their examples. According to

Alden, Washington understood that he could not “make men religious by law” and had “no right

to interfere with the relations which man sustains to his Maker.”87 However, Washington showed

personal devotion to God “as the ruler of nations, and supplicated his favor for the nation,”

“attended the public worship of God himself,” and, when leading the army, “sought to employ

good men for chaplains that the soldiers might have the gospel.”88 Nehemiah’s example, for

Alden, confirmed the wisdom of Washington’s, since Nehemiah also understood “how important

was the well-ordered support of the worship of God to the prosperity of a State, and hence knew

it was worth more than it cost,”89 as illustrated in Nehemiah’s restoration of taxes that paid for

Levite religious services. Likewise, Alden believed Americans should be generous in their

support of churches. A pious society was well-ordered, peaceful, and prosperous, but, Alden

warned, that this “is not the reason why we should contribute to it.” The blessings were a happy

reward, but the “great object of the Bible is to teach us how to obtain eternal life in heaven.”90

After all, Alden did not want to make an instrumental argument for piety. He wanted to save

souls, and he wanted the state to help. The balance he wanted to strike was in educating and

electing pious leaders like Washington, so that they could use their moral judgment to follow

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and, when necessary, improve the Constitution with lessons from the Bible. The church would

not be directly involved, since it was concerned with spiritual ends, but would be indirectly

involved in its ministry to public leaders. The outcome was not quite a union of church and state,

but it was hardly the kind of separation Jefferson or later jurists had in mind.91

The nehemiad of the great work depended on a government composed of pious officials

and cooperation with church efforts to improve the moral state of the nation. The state could

assist with moral improvement by providing, first and foremost, the religious liberty for clergy to

minister to the citizenry. While Freeman demanded the liberty afforded to the Congregationalists

over all others (as they were historically due, in his mind), Bedell and Finney were more

sanguine about is broader application. Unsurprisingly, both were subsequently in trouble with

more orthodox leadership, Bedell for supporting the nondenominational American Bible Society

and Finney for his attenuation of Reformed doctrines believed to be essential to the Presbyterian

faith. For Bedell and Finney, if dogma stood in the way of saving souls and preserving the

nation’s liberty, then the dogma was the problem. Hence both men needed to articulate their

vision of how the great work of religion operated differently from how the Church of England or

the Old Light had originally thought. Though Bedell’s was more optimistic and Finney’s

pessimistic, they both articulated nehemiads that incorporated the place of the nation and the

existential threats it experienced in worldliness, drunkenness, and bartering in human lives. With

God sitting in judgment, the stakes were simply too high to tolerate sin. The whole nation must

find salvation, since righteousness exalteth any nation, and the only path to a saved nation is to

save national leaders themselves and their enforcement of rules facilitating salvation. The result

is a religious liberty that is free to choose within the moral and spiritual constraints of Protestant

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theology, which excludes worldly pursuits as Nehemiah had when enforcing the Sabbath and

when threatening the gentile merchants camped outside the Jerusalem gates on the Sabbath.

Conclusion

New England ministers and evangelical revivalists of the Second Great Awakening of the

American antebellum period preached a church-centered nehemiad that addressed political issues

necessary for the church to continue its great work. These included religious liberty, Sabbath

breaking, impious leadership, and immoral public policies like intemperance or slavery.

Individual clergy differed somewhat on what those issues were, but all agreed about their central

role in preserving the great work at the sacred center. Those discussed above are by no means the

only nehemiads; they serve to show how the nehemiad continued as a long-standing alternative

conception of church-state relationship that eventually made its way out of the old Puritan

strongholds and into frontier, evangelical preachers. As the Puritan errand became, for New

England preachers, a national one, so did the nehemiad itself become national, extending beyond

its local origins into tents that burned over New York. The evolution of the nehemiad

nevertheless did not alter its fundamental tenet that church and state must be separate yet

intimately linked in a spirit of cooperation both to preserve church efforts at human salvation and

to protect the nation from God’s wrath.

As the Second Great Awakening grew tired and the sectional tensions between slave and

free states worsened, the nehemiad of the great work slowly returned to the nehemiad on the wall

between both sides. The Civil War introduced nehemiads with both sides accusing each other of

being Sanballat to their Nehemiah, the most intriguing perhaps being one given by a defiant

Confederate rabbi in Richmond, Virginia.92 These also deserve their own treatment, but I raise

them in the conclusion to point out how events have dictated which kind of nehemiad

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predominated. When America was at war, the nehemiad shifted to one on the wall. For the

patriotic English Americans of the Seven Years War, the Revolutionaries in the War of

Independence, and during the tension of the Quasi-War of the Adams administration, the

nehemiad on the wall prevailed. During periods of peace, churches could focus on growth and

the means for preserving it, namely religious liberty and state cooperation; hence, clergy

appealed to the nehemiad of the great work. Moreover, during the nineteenth century both

nehemiads made their way out of New England and into Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and

evidently even Jewish congregations in the South. Piety, as a virtue, became increasingly

ecumenical and, with it, so did the nehemiad and the possibility of patriotic, devout citizens.

The nehemiad, with its secular wall and sacred temple, has long rivaled the wall of

separation of church and state. For that matter, it has mostly defied Jefferson’s alternative. The

nineteenth century was a period of state cooperation with Protestant denominations to defend

America from Roman Catholics, Mormons, and other non-Protestant denominations. With the

rise of Jefferson’s wall of separation in federal jurisprudence, it is no wonder that the clergy used

the nehemiad on the wall as they heated up the rhetoric opposing what they saw as a secular

attack on the religious liberty responsible for all other civil liberty, as well as the faith necessary

to stay God’s wrath. Jerry Falwell used this nehemiad on the wall during the 1970s and 1980s,

characterizing the hostile press as the Sanballats of his day:

Notice verse 10, [Nehemiah] arrived at the city and as soon as he arrived, opposition, there was Sanballat, Tobiah, they don’t mention him here, but they mention him later, Geshem. Opposition. Why was the opposition upset? Because somebody had come to help the children. To seek the welfare of the children. To stop the abortions. That’s why the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] is upset. Our Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshems today are the ACLU, People for the American Way, Norman Lear, the National Education Accusation, NARAL [an acronym at the time for the National Abortion Rights Action League], NOW, the National Organization of Women, the World Council of Churches, Planned Parenthood, the Abortionists, the pornographers, the liberal politicians. Those are the persons who are against what we’re doing and the liberal

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clergymen cursing us for doing it. Why? Because somebody has now come to seek the welfare of the children. That isn’t legislating morality, that is responsible and sincere recovery of a nation. Revival.93

Among many pastors, David Barton is the most prominent exponent of the nehemiad on the wall

today. He places the wall of Jerusalem directly in the title of his organization of conservative

pastors, “Wallbuilders.” The nehemiad is not merely the province of conservative pastors. There

are “Nehemiah Projects” and “Nehemiah Centers” among the nation’s largest cities meant to

rebuild minority neighborhoods with the cooperation of state officials, first among them being

the South Bronx Nehemiah Project.94 Indeed, while Falwell and Barton invoke the nehemiad on

the wall, these local church efforts favor the nehemiad of the great work, one that regards its own

communities as missionary work. Rather than demanding cities change laws to make citizens

moral, they ask for material assistance that restores the livelihoods of community members, as

the church restores their souls. The nehemiad of the great work, in fact, appears to be the more

typical American nehemiad since the Revolutionary War. Most American cities have at least one

Nehemiah-themed faith program organized around the idea of rebuilding individual lives,

churches, and even entire communities.

In both cases, the wall of separation recedes in favor of Nehemiah’s rebuilt wall of

Jerusalem. The sacred center makes members of government moral, and those on the walls—

elected officials—protect the sacred center by bearing witness to the gospel in the legislation

they pass and enforce. Such a rationale subverts formal disestablishment by treating elected

officials as bearers of religious responsibilities found in only apparently secular legislation. More

importantly, the nehemiad legitimates church influence on politics and, therefore, the influence

of the clergy themselves.

Notes

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1 I would like to thank Peter Haworth and Joshua Bowman in addition to the anonymous reviewers for their patience and their advice on how to improve this manuscript. I also would like to thank Glenn Moots for inviting me to present my research on a panel he organized for the 2013 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. Finally, I would like to thank the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University for providing me with the time and resources to work on improving and extending the research that went into this manuscript. 2 Robert M. Healey, “Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Wall’: Absolute or Serpentine?” Journal of Church and State 30 (1988): 441–62; Derek H. Davis, “Thomas Jefferson and the ‘Wall of Separation’ Metaphor,” Journal of Church and State 45 (2003): 5–14; Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Donald L. Drakeman, Church, State, and Original Intent (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3 An incomplete list would include: James H. Hutson, ed., Religion and the New Republic (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); James H. Hutson, Forgotten Themes of the Founding: The Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early American Republic (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003); James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 4 James M. Patterson, “The American Nehemiad, or the Tale of Two Walls,” Journal of Church and State 57 (2015): 450–68. 5 Jonathan Mitchel, “Nehemiah on the Wall in Troublesom [sic] Times,” 1667; repr. in American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Michael Warner (New York: Library of America, 1999), 119–50. 6 Cotton Mather, “Nehemias Americanus: The Life of John Winthrop, Esq. Governour of the Massachuset [sic] Colony,” Magnalia Christi Americana or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698, (first American ed. 1702; repr., Hartford: Roberts and Burr, 1829), 111. Sacvan Bercovitch, “‘Nehemias Americanus’: Cotton Mather and the Concept of the Representative American,” Early American Literature 8 (1974): 220–38. 7 Samuel Webster, The Misery and Duty of an Oppress’d and Enslav’d People (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1774); Joseph Perry, A Sermon Preached before the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, CT: Ebenezer Watson, 1775); David Jones, Defensive War in a Just Cause Sinless: A Sermon Preached on the Day of the Continental Fast (Philadelphia: Henry Miller, 1775); Enoch Huntington, A Sermon Delivered at Middletown (Hartford, CT: Ebenezer Watson, 1775); Allyn Mather, The Character of a Well Accomplished Ruler Describ’d (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1776); John Murray, Nehemiah, or the Struggle for Liberty Never in Vain, When Managed with Virtue and Perseverance (1779; repr., Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2013); Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor: A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Jonathan Trumbull, Esq L.L.D. Governor and Commander in Chief (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1783); Joseph Buckminster, A Sermon, Preached before His Excellency the President (Portsmouth, NH: Robert Gerrish, 1787); John Cosens Ogden, A Sermon Delivered before His Excellency the President (Concord,

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NH: George Hough, 1790); John Marsh, A Sermon Preached before His Honor Oliver Wolcott (Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin, 1796); Nathanial Emmons, A Discourse, Delivered May 9, 1798, on the Day of Fasting and Prayer Through the United States (Wrenthem, MA: Nathaniel and Benjamin Heaton, 1798); Eliphalet Porter, A Discourse Delivered at Brookline, in the Morning, and at the First Parish in Roxbury (Boston: John Russell, 1798); Daniel Dana, “Sermon II,” Two Sermons, Delivered April 25, 1799: the Day Recommended by the President of the United States for National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer (Newburyport, MA: Angier March, 1799); Heman Ball, A Sermon Delivered at Rutland Before a Numerous Audience Assembled to Publicly Mourn the Death of General George Washington (Rutland, VT: S. Williams, 1800). 8 The broader idea of patriotism and piety is explored by Jonathan J. Den Hartog in Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 9 Michael Walzer has used these accounts to describe Nehemiah as a theocratic tyrant. See In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 195. 10 Andrew Bey, Diary quoted in Lewis Clark Walkinshaw, Annals of Southwestern Pennsylvania, vol. 1., (orig. pub. 1939; Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg, 1999), 224, http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/t/text/text-idx?c=pitttext;view=toc;idno=01aee7995m. 11 Justin Edwards, A sermon delivered at the fourth anniversary, of the Auxiliary Education Society, of the Young Men of Boston (Andover, MA: Flagg and Gould, 1823). 12 Ibid., 6. 13 Ibid., 13. The two names mentioned here are in reference to two early New England missionaries to Native Americans. The “Mahews” here mentioned refer to the Mayhew clan of Martha’s Vineyard, who evangelized Native Americans. The elder Thomas Mayhew (1593–1682) began the effort by coming to Martha’s Vineyard, but his son, Thomas Mayhew (1621–57), began the missionary work in earnest. After the younger Mayhew was lost at sea, the older resumed his son’s role until he died. The “Elliot” here mentioned is John Elliot (1604–90), who learned the Algonquin language and in 1663 provided Algonquin translations of the Bible for Native Americans in New England. 14 Jeremiah Day, A sermon delivered in Boston, September 17, 1823, before the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at their fourteenth annual meeting (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1823). 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 20. 18 Ibid., 22. 19 Seth Williston, Five Discourses on the Sabbath (Albany: E. and E. Hosford, 1813). 20 Ibid., iii, iv. 21 Ibid., iv. 22 Ibid., 33. 23 Ibid., 34. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 35. 26 Ibid., 37.

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27 Ibid., 40. 28 Ebenezer Porter, The character of Nehemiah, or, Jerusalem built up: a sermon, preached on the public fast, April 4, 1816, in the chapel of the Theological Seminary at Andover (Andover, MA: Flagg and Gould, 1816). 29 Ibid., 5–10. 30 Ibid., 11. 31 Ibid., 20. 32 Ibid., 16. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 19. 35 Ibid., 20–21. 36 Ibid., 22. 37 Ibid., 18. 38 Peter S. Field, Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 39 Frederick Freeman, Religious liberty. A discourse delivered in the Congregational church at Hanson, on the Fourth of July, 1832 (Plymouth, MA: B. Drew, Jr., 1832). 40 Ibid., 5. 41 Ibid., 6. 42 Ibid., 11. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 14. 45 Ibid., 21. 46 Ibid., 25. 47 Ibid., 26. 48 Ibid., 30. 49 Gregory T. Bedell, Sermons with a biographical sketch of the author, vol. 1., ed. Stephen H. Tyng (Philadelphia: W. Stavely and J.C. Pechin, 1835). 50 Ibid., xxxviii. 51 Ibid., 129–92. 52 Ibid., 129, 135. 53 Ibid., 206. 54 Ibid., 223. 55 Ibid., 248. 56 Ibid., 249. 57 Ibid., 250. 58 Ibid., 252. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 253. 61 Charles G. Finney, “Hindrances to Revivals,” Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Crocket and Brewster, 1835), 256–84. 62 Ibid., 257. 63 Ibid., 263. 64 Ibid., 264. 65 Ibid., 256.

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66 Ibid., 264. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 265. 70 Ibid., 266. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 274. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 283. 77 Ibid., 284. 78 Joseph Alden, The Jewish Washington; or, Lessons of patriotism and piety suggested by the history of Nehemiah (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1846). 79 Ibid., 8. 80 Ibid., 9. 81 Ibid., 9, 10. 82 Ibid., 9. 83 Ibid., 10. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 12. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 70, 71. 88 Ibid., 71. 89 Ibid., 76. 90 Ibid., 1. 91 Alden makes no mention or appears not to know about the heterodox approach to Christianity Washington demonstrated. 92 M. J. Michelbacher, A Sermon delivered on the Day of Prayer, Recommended by the President of the C. S. of A., the 27th of March, 1863, at the German Hebrew Synagogue, “Bayth Ahabah” (Richmond: MacFarlane and Ferguston, 1863). 93 “A Biblical Perspective on Church/State Relations,” Old-Time Gospel Hour 627, RG 3-4-9, Liberty University Archives. 94 Alexander Von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 69–73.