ABSTRACT
In arguing for “continued public support of religion,” Timothy Dwight, President of Yale and leader of the Second Great Awakening, declared: “Morality, as every sober man who knows anything of the subject discerns with a glance, is merely a branch of Religion; and where there is no religion, there is no morality . . . [W]here God is not worshiped . . . justice, kindness, and truth, the great hinges on which free Society hangs, will be unpracticed, because there are no motives to the practice, or sufficient forces to resist the passions of men.”1 Dwight’s opinion was widely held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continues to be expressed by significant portions of the American public. The view has not lacked dissenters, however. Responding to Cleanthes’s claim that, because it “is so strong and necessary a security to morals,” “religion, however corrupted, is . . . better than no religion at all,” Philo replies that if religion were “so salutary to society,” then history would not abound “so much with accounts of its pernicious consequences on public affairs. Factions, civil wars, persecutions, . . . oppression . . . ; these are the dismal consequences which always attend its prevalency over the minds of men. If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it.”2
