Religion and the Revolution at 250, with Nikki Stewart and Dr. Kyle B Roberts (episode 346)

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Jake:
[0:03] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.

Introduction to Religion and Revolution

Jake:
[0:13] This is episode 346, Religion and the American Revolution, at 250. Hi, I’m Jake. Longtime Hub History listeners will remember co-host Emerita Nikki as a regular presence in our first few years. And, of course, anybody who’s been listening lately has gotten reintroduced to Nikki because she’s been filling in from time to time as host while I’m working on other projects. In this episode, I’m bringing Nikki back as a guest in her role as Executive Director of Old North Illuminated. This week, I’m going to play a conversation that I recently had with Nikki and Dr. Kyle B. Roberts, Executive Director of the Congregational Library and Archives here in Boston. We talked about how each of them and their organizations are approaching the 250th anniversary of our American Revolution, with Nikki interpreting history in one of Boston’s most historic churches, and Kyle interpreting religion at one of Boston’s most important archives. But before we talk about interpreting religion during the 250th anniversary of independence, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to the listener supporters who make this show possible.

Jake:
[1:25] 2026 is not only a big year for America, it’s also going to be a big year for this show. This fall will mark a decade of hub history, and we’re going to hit episode 350 along the way. I know it’s probably a cliche to keep saying this, but I really never imagined that we’d make it this far. When we started, each episode’s main story was about two or three minutes long, and then we padded out the episode with historical anniversaries.

Jake:
[1:56] After a year or so, we switched from historical anniversaries to a local historic site of the week, and then later on from a historic site to our Boston book club. It took years until I was confident enough in my own writing to allow the main story of each episode to stand on its own. I finally think we’ve gotten pretty decent at this, and it’s only because the support of our listeners has allowed me to keep making episodes until I figured out what I was doing. The generous listeners who commit to giving $2, $5, or even $20 or more per month on Patreon, plus the folks who send in one-time contributions with PayPal, make it possible for me to make Hub History. And to keep making it until it got kind of good. So to everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory, or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Meet the Guests

Jake:
[3:02] I’m joined now by Nikki Stewart and Dr. Kyle B. Roberts. Nikki is the Executive Director of Old North Illuminated, and Kyle is the Executive Director of the Congregational Library and Archives. I’m going to have each of them tell you a little bit more about their own organizations in just a few minutes. So, without further ado or introduction, I just want to welcome Kyle Roberts and Nikki Stewart to the show today. And I want to start off by just having you each introduce yourselves and your organizations a little bit in terms of where you stand in sort of the Boston historic landscape. Nikki, you’ll be a familiar voice to regular listeners, at least, having hosted a good bit recently. But I don’t know that we’ve actually had you talk about your role at Old North and sort of the role of Old North Illuminated as compared to Old North Church itself. Can we start there, maybe?

Nikki:
[3:59] My name is Nikki Stewart, and I’m the Executive Director at Old North Illuminated. And Old North Illuminated is the non-profit organization that manages education, interpretation, and preservation at Old North Church Historic Site. And Old North Church is also an active Episcopal congregation. So, I guess one way to think about that is that Old North Illuminated operates a historic site or a museum within a church, and Old North Church is also, you know, holding services and operating a house of worship within a museum and a historic site.

Jake:
[4:40] And Kyle, is the formal name of your organization the Congregational Library and Archives? Or is it just a library? Where is it that you work?

Kyle:
[4:51] That’s a great question. My name is Kyle Roberts, and I’m the executive director at the Congregational Library and Archives. We are located at 14 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill, kind of kitty corner to the statehouse and next to our much more better known neighbor, the Boston Athenaeum. We have been on the second floor of Congregational House, which is the historic structure we’re in, since 1898. But our roots go back not as far back as Old North, but to 1853, when Congregationalists, one of the kind of most important and least known Protestant denominations in the nation, got together and decided they needed basically a library and a historical society. You know, our mission is to foster a deeper understanding of the congregational story and its ongoing relevance to contemporary society. And I think that’s probably a real through line that Nikki and I both have about the importance of the past in the service of the present and the future. We live on our mission in two ways. In one way is by collecting and preserving and sharing primary source materials. And we do that through about 225,000 books and manuscripts. The fastest growing part of our collection, of course, are digital files, and we have 130,000 of those on our digital archive.

Kyle:
[6:10] And then we also engage faith communities and students and scholars in learning about this history and the contributions to the American story. And so that’s the research center part of us that matches the traditional library and archive apparatus that we’ve had for almost 175 years.

Jake:
[6:31] Both of your organizations have this through line of religion and history, and both have living congregations, either actually worshiping within the four walls at Old North or relying on the church’s archives in the case of Kyle. Kyle, as America’s starting to celebrate our 250th anniversaries, how do your organizations serve both those missions of both history and religion?

Nikki:
[7:03] Well, I think for Old North, in some ways, it’s a simple answer. And then, of course, in some ways, it’s complicated. You know, and I think the simple answer is that we have dual and complementary organizations, right? We have Old North Illuminated managing Old North as a historic site. And then we have Christ Church in the city of Boston, which is the formal name of Old North Church, you know, as a continually operating house of worship, right? Right. Old North is the oldest standing church building in the city today and one of the oldest congregations. And, you know, history is important to the congregation as well. And so, you know, we’re both leaning into it in different ways. And the nation is getting ready for its 250th anniversary in July of 2026. But here in Boston, we’ve had a lot of our 250s already. And so for Old North, our big 250 was just this past April.

Nikki:
[8:09] And so Old North Illuminated prepared for that anniversary with a wide range of research and new public programming, a new exhibit, a new audio guide. We held an event the week of the anniversary with Ken Burns as our honoree. But, of course, Old North Church as a congregation had their own event with Heather Cox Richardson.

Approaching the 250th Anniversary

Nikki:
[8:31] And so, I think we found really complementary ways to share our connection with the church’s history.

Kyle:
[8:38] The Congregational Library inhabits kind of a similar space. We are not the official library or archive of any of the three congregational denominations today. So this is, for those of you who love American religious history trivia, in the 1950s, what had been one church kind of broke into three. And as a result of that, we’ve been largely an independent research library. We have strategic partnerships with these denominations, and we work very closely with them. But it’s important because we’re not an arm of the church. It’s not our role to uphold orthodoxy, for example, which you might find at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston or the Presbyterian Historical Society. And I think what becomes exciting then is that we can tell a story, we can offer an interpretation of the past that comes out of these shared primary sources that can be used by any of these different groups. And so a lot of the work we do happens online because our followers are national and even international.

Kyle:
[9:50] We focus a lot on helping individuals who might never know what to do with a library or an archive. And, you know, it’s a little hard for me as somebody who got my doctorate in history, you know, to kind of reorient myself and realize that, you know, my neighbor doesn’t usually think that going to a library and archive is something that she should be doing. Whereas I think everybody should be in library and archives. So we can kind of play a role within these denominations, letting people know why it’s important to connect with these original primary sources and why the stories within them. And I think the stories that we tell today in 2025 and 2026 are very different than the ones we would have told 50 years ago. Why those stories matter both historically, but also spiritually. You know, I think maybe that’s part of why I find this job particularly gratifying. I grew up in a congregational church. I can inhabit both a role as a historian and also as a person of faith. And so I can go out and talk to people and say, all right, well, let’s look at this example. Let’s understand both the context in which this person was making decisions about fighting the revolution and also understand the worldview they existed in. And maybe there are some connections to the way that people view their world today.

Jake:
[11:12] I don’t remember the exact word you used when you were introducing yourself, whether it was that the congregationalism is overlooked or little known. But if we rewind 250 years to that era, things look very different. Can you talk a little bit about what the religious landscape in Boston or in New England more broadly would have looked like sort of on the brink of revolution?

Kyle:
[11:34] Yeah, absolutely. I’m kind of thinking here that if Nicky and I have a friendly rivalry today about who gets more visitors, clearly, Nicky, you win hands down. Everybody knows Old North, and not nearly enough people know the Congregational Library. But of course, in the 1760s and 1770s, the Congregational faith was the established church in Massachusetts. It was also the established church in Connecticut and New Hampshire, and the dominant faith in the other New England states. So when we put together the in-person exhibition that we have up right now, which is called Sacred Rebellion, Congregationalists and Revolutionary of Massachusetts, we start just by orienting people to understanding that in many New England towns, there was only one church. And that church was a congregational church. And it had been that church for 100, 150 years by the time of the outbreak of the revolution.

Kyle:
[12:29] Now, Boston, of course, is a seaport. It’s one of the bigger concentrated settlements in British North America. So it has a greater diversity of religious faiths. But out of maybe the dozen to 15 churches that stood in Boston at that time, the vast majority were congregational. That meant that they shared a kind of similar way of doing things. But on a theological spectrum, they were actually quite diverse, running the gamut from kind of what we might consider very conservative evangelical to very liberal kind of Unitarian leading at the time.

Kyle:
[13:04] So everybody in Boston knew these churches. I think there’s really interesting stories about why people chose the churches that they did, which we could get into. But there are also, I think we need to remember, cheek by jowl, right? Boston is not a lot of land in the 1760s. So these are the largest structures in town. They have some of the most famous people preaching in them each week. And even if you don’t want to go to one, and that’s an option, right, in a seaport. you still are very aware of what’s happening within their walls.

Nikki:
[13:40] Kyle, that comment reminds me of the print of the landing of the troops, where we see all the steeples in the landscape, you know, taller than they need to be, but really making the point, like, this is a God-fearing city.

Jake:
[13:55] And Nikki, along with King’s Chapel at the time, another big, probably a leading Anglican church in Boston, And that was also the faith of Old North before independence was the Anglican Church. And what did Anglicanism mean, or the Church of England mean in Boston compared to the Congregational Church or the other churches that somebody could be a part of?

Nikki:
[14:19] So, Old North is founded as a Church of England congregation, and it’s essentially spillover from King’s Chapel. King’s Chapel’s congregation has become too large for the building that it is, right? And there’s this demand to have a Church of England congregation on the other end of town. And it is very much founded for a wealthy congregation. That’s important to keep in mind is that the congregation that’s worshiping at Old North beginning in 1723 isn’t, you know, fully reflective of, the racial or the economic diversity of the town at that time. And I think our visitors…

Nikki:
[15:03] You know, if we fast forward right to 1775, almost 50, a little over 50 years later, you know, our visitors are very surprised to learn that Old North Church wasn’t a patriot church. We always say that everyone was a loyalist until they weren’t, right? That was the status quo. And for many people, eventually a change comes. And I think what’s all the more challenging for congregants at Old North or Christ Church, as it was then, is that, you know, loyalty to the king is very foundational to their religious faith. And so by the time of the revolution, we say that Old North is about a third remaining loyalists, a third that have become patriot, and a third that really don’t want to talk about politics at Thanksgiving. I think a ratio that maybe holds true broadly today as well. And then the other piece that I think surprises our visitors related to this is that the rector.

Nikki:
[16:12] Mather Biles Jr., actually had resigned his post hours before the lantern signal was hung in the steeple. A move that we believe was a long time coming, and the timing of that really is quite coincidental. But then the congregation, the church, I suppose I would say, the church is closed for several years through the revolution. And so without a new minister appointed.

Nikki:
[16:40] You know, the church is closed and the congregation has to move through this incredibly challenging time without their community and without their spiritual home. And so I think the… When you look at Old North’s history, it’s really impossible to separate the politics and the religion. They are both really equal drivers of what happens at Old North.

Jake:
[17:07] That sort of rule of thirds maps pretty neatly onto some of the things that John Adams said about America more broadly. Outside of the context of Old North, did denominations or religious sects map neatly onto the political affiliations during the Revolutionary Era, or was it more up for grabs within each church that had the similar divisions to Old North?

Religious Landscape Pre-Revolution

Kyle:
[17:30] Yeah, if I can jump in. I mean, what I love about what you’ve just said, Nikki, is that Congregationalists are going to start from the opposite assumption, right? Which is that they’re patriot until proven otherwise. I love that Peter Oliver’s 1781 History of the American Rebellion, right? The first history written of the American Revolution, before the Treaty of Paris even is signed, right? While the war is still going, he vehemently blames the Black Brigade of congregational ministers for stoking this fire. And what’s important, you know, and I think it’s something we have to kind of wrestle with is that that legacy of being on the winning side has been something that congregationalists have baked into their identity.

Kyle:
[18:15] Yet it’s not true in all cases. You know, I think there’s the one-third, one-third. I mean, we might even push it to one-tenth or fervent patriot, one-tenth or fervent loyalist, and the rest are just depending on what’s going on in the neighborhood that week.

Kyle:
[18:30] Their political loyalties wax and wane, depending on how the war is going. What we’ve been able to uncover is there are more loyalist congregational ministers than have gotten the time of day or gotten attention from the scholars. And more often, they’re in the hinterlands than they are in the cities. You know, in many ways, thinking about patriot preachers as congregational ministers is not wrong, because a disproportionate number of them were. And honestly, if you’re in a Boston pulpit, you have a political seat, right? That’s also a religious seat, which is also a cultural seat. In some ways, the first object in this exhibition that we have up right now is a sermon from 1750, right? Long before anybody’s actually plotting an overthrow in Massachusetts Bay. But Jonathan Mayhew at that very early point is already planting the seeds. And I think the very important and very, very simple distinction between the C of E folks at Christ Church and the Congregationalists is Jesus Christ is the head of the church, not the king. And so, these are very autonomous, self-governing congregations by their very designation. So, in many ways, it shouldn’t be surprising that any threats to self-government are immediately going to set off alarms that are both spiritual and political.

Jake:
[19:59] I have maybe one more question about religion in 1775 or 1776, and then we’ll bring it back to the present day and talk more about how you’re interpreting those times today. Starting in the spring of 1775, you had a lot of outsiders come rushing into the Boston area. You had officers like George Washington coming from Virginia. You had riflemen from Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia and all these folks who weren’t used to New England showing up in Roxbury and Cambridge to man the Patriot lines. Do we have any sense of what the impressions from outside New England were of the religious landscape here?

Kyle:
[20:47] I think it’s important for listeners to remember that Boston is a little anomalous. Boston is not like New York or Philadelphia or Charleston, right? They all had a much more balanced mix of Atlantic world faiths within them. Dominance of congregationalists in Boston was unmatched, maybe except in New Haven. So that makes for a different – makes for a slightly odd environment. I’m trying to think about if there’s a contemporary city we would go to today in the United States where you would see maybe Catholic Chicago or Mormon Salt Lake City, right, LDS Salt Lake City.

Jake:
[21:27] So let’s come back to the year 2026, although we are recording this just a few days before 2026 begins. What’s going to happen in 2026 as we celebrate this momentous 250-year anniversary together? How are you bringing those stories into the discussion for 2026?

Nikki:
[21:51] You know, for Old North, our planning for 2025 and 2026 really began at the start of 2021. When we were going through a strategic planning process that was really meant to help us rebuild from the losses of the pandemic and to bring us, you know, into these anniversary years ready to celebrate. And we spent a lot of time thinking about why do we tell history, right? What is the point of these stories? What is the point of celebrating these historic milestones like the 250th anniversary of the lantern signal or the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And.

Nikki:
[22:39] We aligned on an understanding that we study the past so that we can understand how we came to the present.

Nikki:
[22:48] And furthermore, so that we can understand then how we might shape the future. And so, you know, we’re, we’re living now in a time as we approach these anniversaries, when there’s so much, you know, controversy around how and why history is presented. And so I feel like I do have to go on the record and say, you know, we are trying to present as complex and robust of a narrative as we possibly can, because that’s what helps us understand how we got to today. And so we started preparing for the anniversaries with a research fellowship in 2022 into 2023 that would help uncover the identities and experiences of Black and Indigenous congregants at Old North. We were very intentional about bringing those voices and their stories into, you know, a full interpretation of what the community of Old North looked like in the buildup to the revolution and why events at Old North unfolded as they did. While these things are already in place, we do have a relatively new exhibit called Sparking Revolutions. We have an accompanying audio guide that particularly digs into that research.

Nikki:
[24:11] And then one thing that we are doing that will be fresh for 2026 is an accompanying children’s audio guide so that we can present Boston at the time of the Revolution, Old North at the time of the Revolution, through the stories and experiences of children. Because I think children are also, in many ways, kind of marginalized and left out of the historic record.

Kyle:
[24:37] I think our preparation for 2025, 2026, in some ways, is kind of the opposite of what Nikki and her team were doing, because we are a research library that really does have a national and international set of stakeholders. So we really went in more thinking about what are the digital resources we could make available. And we have a signature digital project called New England’s Hidden Histories. It’s been going for 20 years this year, which is a pretty important milestone for a digital humanities project. You know, I was thinking about some of those, and I kind of came up through the academy doing that kind of work. And it’s hard to sustain a project like that for so long. But we really thought that would be the base, you know, that in this, you know, if you go to congregationallibrary.org forward slash NEHH, you’ll see that it’s a digital archive with 130,000 pages of church records and sermons and letters and diaries. So we really thought that would be what people would see. And it would be less about kind of coming to Boston physically to see it and more experiencing it at their kitchen table or with their families. And Trisha Peone, who is our curator for our Religion of Revolution exhibit, which is drawn from the materials in NEHH, but also drawn from our collections.

Kyle:
[26:00] Really just had the opportunity to kind of dig in and start to see what she could find. It’s funny how in Massachusetts, it wasn’t really ever sure that there was going to be funding available for.

Kyle:
[26:14] Things that would bring people in in person. And it was the Office of Travel

Preparing for 2026

Kyle:
[26:19] and Tourism that offered a grant scheme in July of 2024 that 170 plus institutions applied for. And we were fortunate to be one of 37 that were awarded. And that gave us a $50,000 grant that allowed us basically to turn the online exhibition into a brick and mortar physical exhibit, which we had not done, at least in kind of institutional memory. We’re known as a research library. We’re not known as a gallery. I think really the opportunity to pull that together really maybe kind of shifted our way of thinking and moved us from just being able to see things online to allowing people to kind of come in. So that will be kind of our in-person contribution. I will say that I’m probably a pretty quintessential base stater in that we had that exhibition open to the public from two weeks before the 250th anniversary of Concord and Lexington through the end of June.

Kyle:
[27:23] And then a board member said, you do know that the rest of the country is not going to remember this anniversary until 2026, right? Like, oh, yeah. So we left this exhibition up and it will be available for those who saw the Ken Burns documentary who are now making their travel plans. It was maybe a good reminder to us that, all right, maybe the great waves of tourists are coming in the spring-summer of 2026.

Jake:
[27:49] I was lucky enough to hear a talk about New England’s hidden histories. I guess it was for the 10th anniversary of the project in 2015. But for somebody who hasn’t had that exposure, can you just talk a little bit more about what sorts of insights or discoveries or context do you get from congregational church records in the larger digitization project? And then what can people see when they come to visit in 2026?

Kyle:
[28:19] New England Hidden Histories launched in 2005 under the less auspicious name Colonial Era Church Record Digitization Project. And it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue in the same way. And got renamed in 2012 as New England’s Hidden Histories. And, you know, really, I think, comes out of that moment of wanting to discover things hidden. And, you know, we’ve seen in many ways other postdocs and other institutions kind of following that to great effect. What was hidden? Well, initially, just the availability of these sources. You know, one scholar calls this the most important archive of early New England records that you haven’t used. Because these are materials that have been in church basements and attics. They’ve been in small local historical societies where they’re not well cataloged or known to scholars and users.

Jake:
[29:14] And you described in many towns around New England, there being just one church for basically centuries. And that one church may be the only repository of public records for a lot of that time. So, it really becomes like the only written record of some of these towns, it sounds like.

Kyle:
[29:30] Absolutely. And, you know, it’s fascinating talking to somebody who, you know, is just visiting the library, seeing the exhibition and saying, you know, for many New Englanders, the only written trace that we might have of them is their entry in a church record.

The Hidden Histories Project

Kyle:
[29:46] You know, that there weren’t a lot of other places where they were being recorded unless they were acting inappropriately and ended up in the court records. I think what’s important, though, and it’s something that we want to dig into, and I think Old North has done such fantastic work, is that Hidden has also, especially over the last decade, come to being the finding of people who’ve been written out of the story.

Kyle:
[30:12] In the 19th century, abolitionists, white, congregationalists were ashamed of the slaveholding that was rampant in their communities, especially by their ministers. And they actively wrote that story out of the histories that they were telling. Sometimes when they were transcribing the records, they might remove the racial designations that are there in the original records, right?

Kyle:
[30:38] I think we can understand on some level the kind of shame that they felt about what their own kind of quest for social justice looked like in the 19th century and the reality of what their ancestors had been guilty of. But you have to go back to the original records to restore those stories, to find those listings. And Richard Bowles, a great historian of early American religion, and Trisha Peone, the current project director, have been working very actively with each new record they digitized to create a finding aid that identifies those Black and Indigenous free and enslaved individuals who are listed. So out of 155 churches, there are several dozen churches now where we’ve identified that these people are recorded. And I think that part of the hidden histories is really so important now. It’s also a little politically charged, as we see right now. But honestly, I think that’s where people are most hungry for knowing new stories, for understanding this past more. And so, you know, I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of exhibits about the American Revolution or storytelling about the American Revolution that doesn’t highlight the experience of unfree black and indigenous peoples alongside the traditional narrative of white colonists.

Jake:
[32:08] And Nikki, I know that your research fellow really focused on uncovering some of the stories of free and enslaved congregants of color over centuries who only existed as an entry in a baptismal record and what you could read into that sort of documentary history. But also we live in a time when diversity has been made a dirty word and a lot

Navigating Controversial Narratives

Jake:
[32:34] of pressure politically is coming down to not tell some of those more inclusive stories. How are you each trying to navigate wanting to get those stories out and the appetite that you see from visitors or readers for those stories and some of the political currents that are running against that sort of inclusive storytelling right now.

Nikki:
[32:55] I’ve been really surprised, especially over the last year, at how much of an appetite our visitors really do have for those stories. Which isn’t to say that there’s never any pushback, right? Sometimes there is. But I think that, We have done a good job, I will give our staff a pat on the back, we’ve done a good job of incorporating Dr. Crumley’s research into the bigger story of Old North, because the story of Paul Revere and the lantern signals is important. That is also the reason that most of our visitors are coming to see us. And so we still tell that story, right? And we have full confidence that our visitors have the capacity to learn more than one story. And I think I’ve tried to always be very intentional in explaining that, you know, Old North has very deep ties to enslavement and colonialism, and it’s not unique. So saying that doesn’t besmirch the church.

Nikki:
[34:06] And you know we’re just blessed with records and and now you know blessed with a year-long research fellowship and a highly skilled researcher to help us find more information but every church or institution or historic site or even wealthy family in new england that can trace its roots to the 18th century is going to have very similar connections and so we we i guess I would say we or I, you know, fail to see what the harm is in telling those stories. And we just try to tell them in a way that is factual and honest and, you know, lets people make of them what they will.

Jake:
[34:52] And that’s not the only contentious waters that you’re both waiting in right now. I feel like we’re also in an era where religion itself can be pretty polarizing between on the one side. I’ve heard that none of the above is basically the fastest growing religion in America today, where also we have big growth in non-Christian religious faiths in the U.S. At the same time. as this resurgent or maybe surgent growth of militant Christian nationalism among some Americans who feel like only a pretty narrow definition of faith counts as American today. So, it drops you right in the middle of some of that contention. Has that been a challenge to navigate or do you see people coming in the door with different different appetites for that discussion or different approaches to the religion that each of your organizations represent?

Kyle:
[35:53] I think there’s kind of two things that kind of come to mind. One, right, is just what is our primary mission? On the one hand, it’s our mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to the primary sources of American history. And those are available and accessible to anyone. And if anything, we are trying to, to make them as accessible as possible through digitization through free access you know there are no firewall there are no paywalls that you have to go through to access any of the materials that we hold and and i think that people just want to see these materials they want to be able to see for themselves as they’re weighing the arguments that they’re seeing in culture around them is it true that this was founded as a christian nation where where is that written And can I look at these original sources and think about what the actual people that we are lauding as proto-evangelicals or whatever are actually saying? I think the other part, though, is that we both represent organizations that are vibrant and evolving. If we were to jump into a time travel machine and go back to a church service in 1775, it’s going to look really different.

Kyle:
[37:12] Than what we are, what we experience today. And that’s just sort of natural. I mean, that’s just the way that religion historically has moved and changed as a result of the time that it exists in. And so, in some ways, I think that it’s a caution to those who kind of claim direct dissent from certain ideas. And it’s a way that maybe puts everybody on a similar footing to say, hey, no, actually, we need to think a little bit about what was it that they meant when they said that? Or what are the assumptions that we’re bringing to this? And let’s maybe check our assumptions. It maybe might not surprise your listeners that I am a recovering classroom teacher. So I love getting people together and asking them questions. You know, I’m much more interested in an open sharing of thoughts. And that’s maybe the bigger challenge we have right now is putting people at ease, allowing them to share the thoughts that they have without feeling like Like somebody’s going to jump down their throat for saying something that is not correct in some sort of way. And that’s, I think, the great, great strength of museums and libraries and archives today. There’s a reason we’re one of the most trusted institutions in our culture. And it’s because we can foster those sites of dialogue. And I think that, for me at least, is the antidote to these kind of heightened sensibilities.

Jake:
[38:33] And I feel like you have a natural connection. Constituency from people who come from within one of the congregational faiths. And I can see a natural outreach to researchers and historians who want to immerse themselves in the primary sources. What’s the hook for, say, a casual history fan who might listen to a podcast once a week about Boston history? What’s the hook to get somebody like that in the door to the Congregational Library that seems on its face to be more facing toward the religious audience?

Kyle:
[39:11] Like the past was just weird, man. It’s just a weird place. It was a foreign country, right? And that there are all sorts of really fascinating things and circumstances that people that our ancestors had to wrestle with. And we need to take seriously that religion was an important motivating force for them. But also, a lot of the kind of principles of congregationalism, which are focused on the importance of the individual congregation, that congregationalists choose their own minister. They voluntarily accept members into the church. They covenant to be part of a community. A lot of these principles are actually the ones that we seem to lament the most as being lost in our society, right? That as we think about the alienation and isolation that have come out of the pandemic, You don’t have to be a Congregationalist to appreciate how did a small town or how did a city church come together to address a problem like the fact that the revolution was raging and their minister owned a slave and refused to let her free.

Jake:
[40:28] Nikki, your site also has a built-in constituency of the millions of people who walk the freedom. Maybe not millions. Maybe it is millions.

Nikki:
[40:37] Oh, no, it’s millions.

Jake:
[40:37] Millions of people who walk the Freedom Trail every year. But I feel like you equally have to confront the visitor who walks in the door and didn’t realize that Old North is still an active Episcopal church. And also, somebody who walks in the door who knew it was an active church, but whose own faith or church looks very different and, you know, somebody who has some disagreements with the way church history is presented there because their church looks so different. How do you engage with folks where you find them? Yeah.

Nikki:
[41:12] Old North is really blessed in that of all the visitors who come to us over the course of the year, we see folks from all the way across the political spectrum, from across the religious spectrum, from around the country, from around the globe. And so, on any given day, there’s an incredibly diverse group of people coming through our doors. And I think it allows us to have really interesting and really meaningful conversations.

Nikki:
[41:43] And, you know, most of our visitors come to us not realizing that Old North is still an active Episcopal congregation today. Although we do want them to know that when they leave. and many of them, you know, who are here on the weekend, especially in the summer, will come to Old North to worship. And so, I think both as a historic site and as a place of worship, we find ourselves needing to strike a balance in which.

Nikki:
[42:12] You know, generally everyone is going to feel welcome and engaged. And I think that, you know, because we have new research, because we have reliable records, we’re able to lean into the facts, you know, and like Kyle said with the Congregational Library, we of course lean into our mission. Our mission is to inspire active citizenship and courageous, compassionate leadership through the interpretation of Old North Church. So that’s, you know, that’s not about religion. That’s not about politics. But after our mission, we lean into our facts, because we know our history better than anyone, and we know why our history matters better than anyone. And so I think it’s important for our educators, you know, whether they’re having a friendly conversation and exchange, or whether they’re getting a little pushback because somebody feels like there’s too much about slavery in the church. It’s like, well, this is our house. We know our story. We are telling it in the way that we know how to do best.

Nikki:
[43:24] And by and large, we have positive interactions with our visitors and, you know, they come curious. I think we have seen, especially in the last year, that an appetite for conversation and for dialogue is growing. And I think we’re starting to see you know what what happens when censorship is upon us right like people react with questions right like if you put a book on a banned book list more people are going to read it than ever and so I think a lot of our visitors are coming to us thinking what is this stuff right like what what is the controversy like why am I not supposed to learn Why are we not supposed to be seeing this in a historic site, in a national park site? And, you know, I regret all of the reasons that that has become our reality, but… But maybe it is a little bit of a silver lining.

Jake:
[44:25] Bringing the conversation back around to where we started, or at least closer to where we started, talking about religion and the revolution, why –,

The Role of Religion in the Revolution

Jake:
[44:35] Does religion matter in the context of the American Revolution? Why does it matter for people today to understand how religion fits into the American Revolution or the story we tell ourselves about the American Revolution?

Nikki:
[44:47] Well, you know, I answer this question through the lens of public history, not as a member of the clergy, you know, right, not as a scholar of religion. But when I look at Old North’s story, which is, you know, deeply connected, as we said, to religion and revolution, I see religion as community, as how a group of people comes together, makes decisions together, has to balance, you know, what is good for the individual versus what is good for the whole. And, you know, as we said, at the time of the revolution, Old North was such a divided community. And so in that history, we can also see how a community, how this group of people moves through a period of just great division and strife and turmoil and endures. And, you know, 302 years after its founding is still here. And so I think whether you’re a person of faith or not, there’s a lot to learn when you look at it through that lens.

Kyle:
[46:03] That’s really well said. As a scholar of American religion, you realize that we approach the past in many different ways, right? So we can think about religion in sort of maybe a kind of a functional way, right? What religion does to society? And there’s a fascinating story there. How is it that these colonies of people who, at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, were the proudest they had ever been to be British—, within 12 years are at concord and lexington and religion played a really important role in that it was their meetings in their sunday worship it was in the connections that the churches had with each other that were sharing uh correspondences back and forth it was the chaplains voted by the massachusetts convention of congregational ministers in may of 1775, that were present in all of these regiments, right? Like, religion played a really kind of instrumental role.

Kyle:
[47:06] But we also, as scholars, think about religion in a kind of substantive way, and just this kind of larger, more universal question. What does religion mean? Why is it that we believe in supernatural forces, superhuman forces that inspire us to do things that we might not otherwise do? And there, you know, I said earlier that the 18th century was a weird time. Going back to a world where God’s act of providence was at play, right? That you might go out into your field and a storm might come up quickly and a tree limb fall on you and you could just be dead, right? And that when you’re looking for an explanation for that, it all goes back to God’s plan.

Kyle:
[47:52] So to think about how these congregationalists, especially in Massachusetts, believed that the revolution was actually their sacred responsibility, that it was a sacred rebellion, right? That God foreordained that they were going to do that. And then to take this war, which went on for far too long, right, drags on and on, to see them having these crises of confidence, what if they misinterpreted God? What if that’s not what they thought, what he or she thought was in store for them? And then to come out the other side and to see to persevere, there’s a great sermon from 1782 that basically claims that we see in this God’s frown is on the British people for the role they played in persecuting this war against us. You know, for me, I think that religion matters both in what it did to make this revolution happen. It mattered in why people were motivated to fight.

Kyle:
[48:56] And maybe the most important part is it undergirded the working out of the legacy that we’ve had for the last 250 years. Are we as americans going to live up to these lofty ideals and we can be pretty honest there it’s a it’s a it’s not a home run right it’s a pretty shepherd experience and so i think that’s you know that that final component of understanding 250 years later liberty for who.

Conclusion and Thanks

Jake:
[49:31] Well, that is a big question to leave things on, but I will wrap it there and say a big thank you to Kyle and Nikki for joining us today. I really appreciate the time you’ve given us tonight and engaging in some of these big questions of 1776 and today. To learn more about Old North Illuminated and the Congregational Library and Archives, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 346. I’ll have links to the websites for both organizations, where you can learn more about the important work they’re doing to share our country’s essential history this anniversary year. Make sure to visit Old North to see all the new interpretive material they’ve added over the past couple of years, and make an appointment to stop by the Congregational Library to take in their exhibit, Sacred Rebellion, about how Congregationalists debated the meaning of the Revolution, even as they supported and fought in it. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I maintain profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and on Mastodon as at hubhistory at better.boston. If you want to actually interact with me on social media, the only place where I maintain an active profile and post probably too much, or at least more than I should, you’ll want to look for me over on Blue Sky. And you can just search for hubhistory.com.

Jake:
[51:00] If you’re on a social media diet these days, and I can’t blame you, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.