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Disciplining Conscience: Judging Ecclesiastical Courts in the Early American Republic
Wells, S. Spencer
Wells, S. Spencer
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Abstract
American Protestants during the Second Great Awakening participated in one of the largest experiments in lay judging the nation has ever seen. It was not initiated among the countless (initially property-owning) white men sitting on local juries—but amidst those determining the social and spiritual fate of fellow church members accused of wrongdoing within local congregations. In a republic lurching towards official disestablishment of church and state, questions concerning the rights of lay members to judge others’—and their own—potential relationships with the church continually bubbled to the surface. Did lay members retain authority to visit possible offenders within the home, in an effort to reclaim them before initiating a church trial which might possibly endanger their membership? Were witnesses of such trials duty-bound to speak on behalf of those brought up on charges? When confronted with the dread sentence of excommunication, who held the final power to judge the state of one’s relationship to the church, or even to God? The body as a whole, or those threatened with discipline? Such internal struggles often revolved around questions of biblical procedure and due-process, defined as a legitimate form of law in the eyes of ministers and members alike. In a world where believers espoused the “right of private judgment” as their Protestant birthright over and against the church, controversy inevitably arose in the conflicts that followed.