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LEARNING FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MASONIC DEBATE

Tony Fels

History Department

University of San Francisco

Presented to the Fraternal Exposition and Symposium

Mill Valley, CA

September 13, 2003

I’d like to begin by thanking Stan Bransgrove and the members of Mill Valley Lodge No. 356 for inviting me to speak at today’s Fraternal Exposition, particularly so because I am not a Mason or a member of any other fraternal body represented here today. My credentials for speaking here are different. I am a historian who teaches United States history at the University of San Francisco – a Jesuit institution, no less! – and I have been studying for many years now the history of Freemasonry, with a special focus on the Masons of nineteenth-century San Francisco.

What I’d like to share with you today is a small piece of my research on what I found to be a fascinating debate that took place inside the Masonic brotherhood of northern California from the 1870s up through the end of the nineteenth century. This debate was centered on the question, "Is Freemasonry a Religion?" And I present it to you today for two reasons. For one, this debate was not just an isolated, local phenomenon. There is evidence that the same debate was occurring not only in northern California but also across many jurisdictions of the fraternity in the United States, and not just during these decades of the late nineteenth century but also from time to time throughout the entire history of the brotherhood, from the 18th century up through our own times. So there is something perennial about this question, "Is Masonry a Religion?" that keeps returning to haunt the fraternity.

And this suggests the second reason for my choosing this subject. If this question is one that in some sense "has always been with Masonry," then maybe it contains some valuable lessons that could point toward some new departures for the Masonic fraternity to take as it approaches its 300th anniversary of the founding of the first Grand Lodge in England, back in 1717. You know, in the early 1800s the Lutherans approached a similar milestone at the approach of the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s historic act in the year 1517 of nailing his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the court church at Wittenberg, Germany, signaling the start of the Protestant Reformation. And the Lutherans’ consciousness of living through a 300th anniversary touched off a great revival of ritual and piety that energized the Lutheran branch of Protestantism for well over the next 100 years – some would say it still resonates among Lutherans today. So maybe Freemasonry and its kindred fraternal bodies are on the verge of such a revival today, inspired by the birth of modern fraternalism nearly 300 years ago. If so, looking back at the lessons of its long and fascinating past history would be an important part of that process of renewal.

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Now, the debate over the religious character of Masonry began in San Francisco with the opening issues in 1869 of the very first newspaper put out by the fraternity in California, the Masonic Mirror. The editor was a man named Amasa W. Bishop, a member of Oriental Lodge No. 144, and Bishop quickly found himself embroiled in a controversy with the newspaper of the Congregationalists in northern California, the Pacific. The Pacific had jumped on the Masonic Mirror’s introductory description of the brotherhood’s principles as proof that Freemasonry was indeed a rival religion and not simply a social and benevolent order as it often claimed. Bishop’s reply is instructive, because it set the tone for this surprising debate, filled with ambiguities, that would unfold over the next thirty years. He began by insisting on the need to distinguish between "religion" and "theology." If this distinction is granted, he argued, he could concede that Masonry "does claim to teach a pure religious sentiment of the heart and feelings..., the true religion of Christianity – not the dogmas of Christianity...[,]" a religion, he went on to say "older than the Christian era, and cherished long before Christianity as a religious faith had an existence...." Yet, Bishop also maintained, the fraternity seeks no encroachment into the legitimate province of any church.1

Well! Let’s look at the competing strains in this formulation: Masonry teaches religion but not a theology; it is true Christianity but it existed before Christianity came into existence; and with it all, Masonry does not desire to take the place of any church. I’d venture to guess that these statements, contradictory as they may sound to an outsider, make perfect sense to those of you inside the fraternity today. And they also show just how constant Freemasonry has been over the past 130 years.

Significantly, this first statement by Amasa Bishop in what soon became an internal controversy within the fraternity had emerged in response to an attack by one of the earliest Protestant bodies to establish itself on the West Coast, the Congregationalists (today known as the United Church of Christ). Beginning at the time of the Gold Rush and extending through the end of the nineteenth century, the Protestant denominations in the West competed with one another for the conversion of souls in what was thought of as a vitally important campaign to civilize the newly settled regions of the country. Within this effort the spiritual destiny of the male population posed a particular challenge to any Protestant church leader, because men were nearly twice as reluctant as women to join a Protestant church. The nationwide religious census taken in 1906 by the United States Bureau of the Census reported that men accounted for only about one-third of total church membership in the nine leading Protestant denominations of California. Thus, it is not surprising that many Protestant churchmen should have regarded Masonry and other fraternal orders with suspicion and alarm, since these groups threatened to siphon off the spiritual energies of their potential male recruits.2 I’m going to return to this context of competition with the Protestant churches toward the end of my presentation, because it’s really the most important context for understanding the significance of this internal Masonic debate over whether the fraternity was a religion or not.

Well, in reply to criticisms of the sort raised by the Congregationalists, most official spokesmen for the fraternity hastened to reassure the churches and synagogues that Freemasonry represented no challenge to their function. Masonry "does not array itself against any religion or proclaim itself a substitute therefor," asserted Grand Master George C. Perkins in 1875. A year later, Grand Orator John H. C. Bonte stated the same viewpoint with equal forcefulness. Some say that the brotherhood is a rival to the church, acknowledged Bonte, and that it detains men from church attendance. "But the Masonic Order carefully abstains from entrenchment upon times and seasons claimed by the Church," he countered, "and offers nothing as substitute for sacraments, ordinances, or doctrines." Nor does the fraternity deprive the church of money, Bonte added, for there are few Masons who do not also contribute to the sustenance of their church.3

One of the most common phrases used by the fraternity's officers to emphasize its position of deference toward the churches was that which called Masonry "religion’s handmaid (or handmaiden)." "[R]eligion shall find in us one of her most useful auxiliaries," declared Grand Orator Thomas Guard in 1878, "one of her most fair and generous handmaidens...." Ten years later, Grand Master Hiram Newton Rucker elaborated on this same theme:

It has been asserted, times without number, that Masonry never designed to take the place of religion....[T]he chief purposes and objects of each are greatly at variance....[The] direct aim [of the church] is to impart knowledge of GOD and faith in His revealed will... [while Masonry] inculcates the practice of virtue but it supplies no scheme of redemption from sin. ...[A]s the hand-maid of religion, it may, and often does, act as the vestibule that introduces its votaries into the temple of divine truth.

And again in 1897 Grand Orator Francis Ellsworth Baker drew a firm line between religion, a "system of faith and worship, which treats primarily of man’s relation to his Creator," and Masonry, "a Code of Moral Philosophy, which treats primarily of the mutual obligations which exist among men....It is not wise," counseled the grand orator, "for a Masonic Brother to say that a practical application of Masonic principles constitutes a religion good enough for him...."4

Yet as this last warning by Grand Orator Baker implied, some members of the brotherhood apparently did regard Masonry as their own brand of religion – or else why would such a warning be necessary? In fact both literary and statistical evidence suggest that the amicable notion of Freemasonry as "handmaiden" to the churches – which was certainly the fraternity’s official position, as I’ve shown – did not reflect the sentiments and actions of the majority of the membership.

Many fraternal spokesmen, for example, often referred to Masonry and Christianity as equals, as if the two were fully equivalent competitors from an organizational standpoint. "If in your walks you meet a man whose intemperate habits is a reproach," wrote the Masonic Mirror in the early 1870s in the context of defending the fraternity against a charge of corruption, " – do not point to him and say, ‘There is a representative of Masonry, or of Christianity, or of Odd Fellowship!’" Later in the 1870s a grand orator reasoned that if human nature were perfect, there might be no need for Masonry since all would live according to the church; but equally then, he added, there would be no need for the church, since all would live according to Masonic principles. As human nature is not perfect, he concluded, there is ample room for both organizations. The Masonic Record, a short-lived Masonic newspaper coming out of San Francisco in the mid-1880s, showed a similar tendency to regard the fraternity on an equal footing with the churches of the day. In an article recalling the antimasonic crusade touched off by the William Morgan incident of the 1820s, the Record’s editor argued that even if there had been some Masonic foul play connected with this event, this would only prove that there were some bad men in the order, "a fact that can be alleged against every church in the land." All three of these examples took for granted the idea that the lodge was equivalent to the church, not subordinate to it.5

And similarly, there is the fact that the brotherhood insisted that for a Masonic burial to occur, the lodge and not the deceased member’s church had to have firm control over the service. In 1891 the Jurisprudence Committee of the California Grand Lodge explained the meaning of this rule:

We do not understand this to mean that no service except the Masonic burial service can be performed at the burial of one who has requested Masonic burial, but only that the Lodge must, in the procession, occupy the place of honor, and must have charge of and conclude the service.

Twelve years earlier, the Grand Lodge had also ruled that a lodge should refuse to pay the funeral expenses for a member if his widow chose a church service over the Masonic burial service. For the fraternity to view a member’s lodge and church to be in such potential competition over so important a ceremony as the time when a man is laid to rest, there had to be the prior assumption of spiritual equivalence between the two organizations.6

There were even those in the order who implied that Masonry, as a religion, was superior to the churches. The Jurisprudence Committee’s explanation of the rule on funerals did so, in effect, by reserving for the brotherhood the right to lead the burial procession and conduct the grave side service, the central observances according to Masonic custom. The committee conceded little to other religious bodies when it offered to assist them in any prior rites, since these other religious ceremonies did not challenge the fraternity’s practice in any significant way and could even be thought of as being subsumed in this way under the universalistic umbrella of Freemasonry. Some of the very spokesmen who defended the Masonic record of non-encroachment upon the domain of the churches could not help adding a note of competitive boastfulness to their comments. In the same 1888 address in which he set forth the official "handmaiden" formula, Grand Master Rucker nevertheless added that there was no reason to think that if a man were denied membership in the lodge, he would necessarily then embrace the church. "It is not strange," Rucker went so far as to say, "that many who are adverse to creeds express a preference for this great Institution [i.e. Masonry], whose only aim is to promote the peace and happiness of man." And in the process of eulogizing a brother at a lodge of sorrow held by the Scottish Rite, Edwin A. Sherman of Mission Lodge No. 169, the man who wrote the two-volume history of the nineteenth-century California fraternity, Fifty Years of Masonry in California (1898) and an important local Masonic figure all through these years, expressed an attitude of wounded pride that, again, could only have been predicated on a view of the fraternity as fully equal, if not superior, to any church. "There were no Masons at the funeral of Brother Ainsworth," noted Sherman regretfully. "Some of us attended in our private capacity, and listened to the [minister’s] statement that jarred our heart strings, ‘that it was censurable because he [i.e. the deceased] did not belong to any church!’" Clearly, to Sherman, it was not censurable that Brother Ainsworth had not belonged to a church. Years earlier Sherman, together with Amasa Bishop, had proudly proclaimed of Masonry, "We believe in a bright, glorious happy religion, that looks upon God as our Father, and this bright and joyous world as the work of His hands...." The optimism of their pronouncement did not fully match the fraternity’s actual spiritual outlook, which I believe has always been more realistic and subdued about man’s destiny, but the assumption that their Masonic faith constituted a "religion" carried far more truth than the organization’s officers typically cared to acknowledge.7

Cyrus Moody Plummer, editor of the single most important of all the nineteenth-century Masonic journals coming out of San Francisco, the Trestle Board, took an even more forthright stand on the question of Masonry as a religion. To begin with, he regularly and directly addressed the question, and was not shy in attacking those in the fraternity who would relegate the brotherhood’s spiritual role to one of religion’s mere "handmaiden." In 1891 he identified himself wholeheartedly with "‘that class of Freemasons’" whom a recent grand master of New York had assailed as those "‘ – thank God we have few – who state that the lodge is good enough Church for them, and that to be a good Mason is to be a good Church member.’" In rebuttal Plummer quoted a Methodist preacher who had recently defended membership in the fraternity as equally acceptable to that in a church. The following year Plummer added more substance to his views, defending the idea that Masonry taught the "pure and undefiled" religion advanced in the New Testament book of James. "[T]he teachings and precepts of Masonry are the highest type of Religion," he asserted, and "[they] should not be prostituted to be the handmaid of any system of creed or dogmatic theology." Plummer had learned through Masonry to respect the principles "taught not alone by our teacher [i.e., Jesus Christ], but by all the great founders of the many systems of religion, which are contracted [i.e., reduced in value], because they cannot embrace men of all creeds and races as can Masonry, when not prevented by prejudice." Plummer found support for his perspective in the views of the nationally-known Scottish Rite ritualist Albert Pike, whose words he reprinted for the Trestle Board’s readership:

It has been said that Masonry is not a religion. If it be said that it is not Christianity, or Hebraism, or Mohammedanism, or Parseeism, this is true; but there was religion in the world before any of these were; and if the faith of the enlightened thinkers of Greece, Rome, of Egypt and India, who believed that there was one Divine Creator and Preserver of the Universe, its Lord or Ruler, loving and adoring him as beneficent and wise, and that the intelligent soul of man did not cease to be, at the death of the body; if this was religion, surely Freemasonry, having the same belief and trustful reverence, is likewise a religion.8

Now, before we stop to evaluate all this data and try to say what it all means, we need to add one final piece of evidence to our discussion about this late nineteenth-century debate over whether Freemasonry was a religion. This evidence is of a statistical nature. We need to know just how many Masons maintained additional allegiances to religious bodies outside the brotherhood. Many of the fraternity’s grand officers, as we have seen, stated or implied that the average Mason also belonged to the church of his choice. As Grand Orator John Bonte had put it, there were few in the order who did not contribute to the sustenance of their church. Such a picture was surely in keeping with the notion of the fraternity as an auxiliary arm of the churches, a "handmaiden to religion." Yet in truth an overwhelming majority of Masons did not belong to any Protestant church or Jewish synagogue. Church and synagogue membership appealed to the men of the fraternity just slightly more than it did to the overall adult, white, non-Catholic, male population of San Francisco – which is to say, not very strongly at all. In fact, just about 17% of the roughly 8,000 Freemasons in San Francisco during the 1870-1900 period belonged to another house of worship, nowhere near the proportion necessary to support the "handmaiden" formula. From the picture drawn by many of the brotherhood’s leaders, one would have expected at least a majority of Masons to have regularly attended a church or synagogue. But this was not the case.9

So why, then, if the great majority of nineteenth-century Freemasons belonged to no outside religious institution, did the fraternity maintain as its official position that Masonry served as the "handmaid" to the churches, or even as the "handmaid" to religion? The answer is certainly not that the fraternity drew back from meeting the religious needs of its members. With its moral teachings, its strong charitable practices (this was the era when the Masonic Home for Widows and Orphans in Decoto was founded), its creation of fellowship among its members, and its rituals that taught so clearly a reverence for God and, through the story of King Solomon’s Chief Architect, a fervent hope for an afterlife of peace and contentment, Freemasonry fulfilled all of the central functions that any Protestant or Jewish denomination did in the United States. And all across the country throughout the nineteenth century, from the towns of Connecticut following the American Revolution to the first communities of the new Louisiana Purchase lands to the Sierra mining camps at the time of the Gold Rush, plenty of ordinary Masons spoke and acted as if their lodges were their churches, just as later Californians like Amasa Bishop, Edwin Sherman and C. Moody Plummer did.10

Why, then, the reluctance on the part of most grand officers to openly proclaim the fraternity as the religion that it most obviously was? There were two broad reasons for this, I think. The first one had to do with fraternity members’ conflicting definitions of religion itself. Masons so often identified the very concept of religion with theological dogmatism or intolerant enthusiasm that many were uncomfortable with the notion that they themselves belonged to a religious organization, complete with its own principles and practices. Masonry had suffered at the hands of two significant religious forces during its long history – the Roman Catholic church and the evangelical Protestant movement. Having seen religious bodies act intolerantly toward themselves, many Masons may have believed that to be religious meant to hold to a rigid dogma and to compel others to subscribe to that dogma as well.

Yet these difficulties with the definition of religion do not tell the whole story. There was another reason, even more important, and that had to do with the unstated rivalry between the fraternal orders and the churches. C. Moody Plummer recognized this angle of the question in an 1895 editorial, when he wrote that the doctrine of Masonry as "handmaid" to religion served only to protect the professional prestige of the Protestant ministers. And indeed it did, plus more. The grand officers who held to the "handmaid" formulation were men whose official positions made them especially sensitive to how the fraternity was regarded by important laymen and ministers in the surrounding Protestant community. The denial that Masonry was a religion paid superficial deference to the Protestant churches, thus helping to ward off any return of antimasonry. It also enabled ministers and other denominational Christians to join the fraternity without feeling they had to choose between the lodge and the church. And it maintained good personal relationships across denominational boundaries for fraternal leaders who might value such alliances in their civic or political pursuits. All in all, the denial that Masonry was a religion was a highly effective rhetorical stance for the top officials of the fraternity to take. And they backed up this stance with forceful actions. When in 1879 a Sacramento lodge began to conduct its initiation rituals on Sunday, the Grand Lodge came down hard on the lodge to stop its practice. And when in the early 1890s C. Moody Plummer proposed to a meeting of the Past Masters Association of San Francisco that the brotherhood hold an observance on Sundays for Masons "to listen to opinions of religious maxims inculcated in Masonry" and to impart moral instruction, the association loudly rejected the idea.11

In these ways and for all of these reasons, the denial that Masonry was a religion carried the day as the official position of the fraternity. And so long as men flooded into the fraternity, as they did during the later years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, it seemed to be a winning formula. But what was lost in the process? Well, mainly, something of the truth about Freemasonry. And in an ironic way, a position that was meant to deflect any return of antimasonry, may unintentionally have helped keep a certain current of antimasonic sentiment alive. For there would continue to be men of sincere religious convictions – from the editors of the Congregationalists’ California newspaper in 1869 all the way up through certain men and groups today – who couldn’t help but notice the religious character of the brotherhood and therefore perceive a certain hypocrisy in the fraternity’s denial that it stood on a similar footing to the various denominations of Christianity and Judaism.

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And that brings our discussion back to the present. There seems to be much talk within the Masonic order (and no doubt in other fraternal organizations too) about what it might take to spark a revival of interest, especially among younger people, in the principles and practice of fraternalism. Certainly the ongoing tendency among many grand lodges and local lodges to become more visible in their local communities through sponsoring scholarship funds, clean-up campaigns, and other benevolent activities will help bring the Masonic brotherhood to the attention of people who may wish to join in the fellowship of the lodge. But I can’t help but think that a reluctance among Masons to present their organization as a religious body deprives the fraternity of the chance to accentuate its greatest strength and the true source of its benevolent energies. The religious message of Masonry is both unique and compelling: a universalistic form of monotheistic devotion that does not require exclusive allegiance by its members. For Freemasons to go out into the world of modern America with its central mission largely hidden from view would seem to be like a fighter going out in the ring with one hand tied behind his back.

Notes

1. Masonic Mirror, November, 1869, pp. 80-81.

2. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1906. Special Reports of the Bureau of the Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), pp. 162-165. On the Protestant mission to northern California during the 1849-1869 period, see Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

3. Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of California [hereafter, Proceedings] (1875), p. 15; ibid. (1876), p. 506.

4. Proceedings (1878), p. 593; ibid. (1888), pp. 452-453; ibid. (1897), pp. 205-206.

5. Masonic Mirror, March 11, 1871, p. 8; Proceedings (1879), p. 163; Masonic Record, July, 1885, p. 4.

6. Proceedings (1891), p. 215; Proceedings (1879), pp. 20, 154.

7. Proceedings (1888), p. 452; Trestle Board, January, 1895, p. 39 (for Sherman's remarks at the lodge of sorrow); Masonic Mirror, July 1, 1871, p. 8 (for the optimistic pronouncement).

8. Trestle Board, August, 1891, pp. 366-367; ibid., April, 1892, p. 172; ibid., April, 1893, pp. 182-183; ibid., July, 1892, pp. 326-327; ibid., September, 1888, p. 259 (for the quotation from Pike).

9. The statistics in this table are based on a random sample of 371 members belonging to the San Francisco fraternity in 1890, whose names were checked against surviving church and synagogue records. For details of the steps taken in this analysis, see Anthony D. Fels, "The Square and Compass: San Francisco's Freemasons and American Religion, 1870-1900" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1987), Table 9.1 and Appendix on Quantitative Procedures.

10. For evidence from Connecticut, see Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1785-1835 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 8, 125. On Masons in the Louisiana Territory, see Ray V. Denslow, Territorial Masonry: The Story of Freemasonry and the Louisiana Purchase (Kila, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1995 [1925]), p. 5. On the role of Masonry in the Gold Rush, see the remarks by Grand Master George C. Perkins in Proceedings (1875), p. 15.

11. Trestle Board, May, 1895, pp. 227-228 (see also Ibid., September, 1894, p. 422). On the Sacramento lodge incident, see Proceedings (1879), pp. 2, 184-185, and Ibid. (1882), pp. 442-445, 676. On Plummer's proposal, see Trestle Board, January, 1894, p. 41; ibid., February, 1894, pp. 88-89; ibid., January, 1896, p. 40; and ibid., September, 1897, p. 427. For more on the rivalry between the lodges and the Protestant churches in other locales, see Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, pp. 116-117, 120; and Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 48-52, 62-69 (for a discussion of the "handmaiden" formulation).