“Salvation” or “Damnation”? The Survival of Hell in the Early Republic

“No doctrine has ever been advanced under colour of a christian name, that more directly strikes at the root of all virtue and religion,” warned the Presbyterian minister John Murray in 1783. The “doctrine” Murray so feared was the prospect of universal salvation, preached most vigorously in the early republic by another minister named John Murray and his celebrated wife, Judith Sargent Murray. To distinguish the two Johns, followers dubbed the former “Damnation” and the latter “Salvation.”

By focusing on the lives and stories of the three Murrays, this paper asks why the place of hell survived the Enlightenment in America. By the late-eighteenth century, women and men across the Atlantic and in the Americas began to suggest that human nature was fundamentally innocent and perfectible rather than inherently depraved and deserving of hell. They challenged the prevailing Calvinist view that heaven and hell existed for and by God’s pleasure and that He could put whomever He pleased in either place.

Despite the revolutionary hopes of Enlightenment thinkers and the apparent “decline of hell” in contemporaneous Europe and New Spain, though, the devil’s dominion did not just survive in the American early republic—it throve, saturating private and public discourse. Yet Americans are renowned as forward-thinking millennial optimists. How and why did hell survive the onslaughts that diminished its power elsewhere?

This paper shows how hell’s defenders met the universalist challenge by arguing that the concept of ultimate justice was necessary to a new republic dependent on the virtue of its citizens. The American case suggests that hell and belief in a radical end for radical evil were not just archaic concepts destined to disappear once people became educated and “enlightened.” To the three Murrays and the perspectives they represented, debates over hell were essential to the nation’s very survival.