Early Reflections on a Book About America’s First Federal Morality Police

How 19th-century Christian nationalists tried to turn America into a Christian nation

I’ve started reading Gaines M. Foster’s Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920. The book begins by describing the rise of a Christian lobby after the Civil War that pressed Congress to regulate personal behavior on a national scale.

This coalition pushed for sweeping changes. Some lobbied for a constitutional amendment that would acknowledge God, Christ, and the Bible in the nation’s founding document. Others pressed Congress for laws against alcohol, gambling, divorce, prostitution, polygamy, obscenity, and abortion. Anthony Comstock became the public face of campaigns against vice. Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union drove efforts for Prohibition. Wilbur J. Crafts even opened a permanent lobbying office on Capitol Hill in 1895, calling himself a “Christian lobbyist.”

Nathaniel Currier, “The Drunkard’s Progress.” 1846. Wikimedia.

Foster sums up their guiding premise: “The legislation of personal morality remained the primary goal of the reformers who made up the Christian lobby.” Most believed that the federal government not only had the authority but also the duty to enforce virtue. They often pointed to emancipation as precedent: “If the federal government could abolish the sin of slavery, they claimed, it could also outlaw other forms of immorality.”

The background is crucial. This movement emerged in a society shattered by war. The victory had come at enormous cost, and the country lacked a unified vision of its future. Old coalitions had collapsed. Assumptions about what government should do had been upended. New inventions and ways of living—railroads, telegraphs, a growing commercial culture, new forms of mass communication—were altering everyday life. People did not automatically celebrate these changes. Many reacted with alarm, seeing disruption rather than progress. This is why Mark Twain dubbed the period the “Gilded Age,” and why people today talk about a “second Gilded Age.” The label captured the sense that surface glitter concealed deep anxiety and dislocation. (When I mention AI today, I don’t mean it is equivalent to the railroads. What I mean is that people talk about AI as if it were transformative, and often with the same unease that marked reactions to new technologies then.)

The same goes for the Covid parallel. I am not equating a pandemic with a civil war. What I am pointing to is the shared phenomenon: a crisis that upended expectations, shattered daily life, and scrambled political alignments. After the Civil War, as after Covid, people felt that the way things were supposed to work no longer did. That disorientation opened the space for new movements and ideas to take hold.

The late 19th century also saw the arrival of socialism and communism in America. Reformers and politicians feared their spread, especially among workers and immigrant groups. At the same time, many Christian moralists were not defenders of capitalism either. They were skeptical of big business, and especially of the freedom big business exercised. They opposed concentrated corporate power, yet also opposed socialism. They stood against both sides: the radical grassroots and academic currents of socialism, and the unchecked liberties of large corporations. That double suspicion—anti-left and anti-big business—echoes in today’s nationalist populism, including in the Christian nationalist movement that has gained influence in American politics.

This history raises enduring questions. Can people be made honest by punishing them, or do they have to choose honesty for themselves? If you outlaw drinking, gambling, or prostitution, does that build a better society, or does it just drive behavior underground? What happens when a government claims the authority to enforce virtue? And what kind of progress results when morality is defined not by persuasion and choice, but by federal coercion?

What questions stand out to you here? Does hearing about this raise further issues I should track as I keep reading?