And, if all that were not worrisome enough, the law contained ominous hints at the expansion of Anglican power in the colonies, perhaps even the long-feared appointment of an American Bishop. As some colonists interpreted it, the Act not only unfairly taxed them to profit England, but it also contained provisions infringing on their right to a common law trial and expanding the power of admiralty courts. In early spring of 1765, the American colonists learned of the Stamp Act, Parliament's latest attempt to raise revenue from the colonies in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. As colonists participated in unmasking supposed Catholic and Parliamentary conspiracies against them, they created a community united around scared liberty. In the case of the Stamp Act Crisis, conspiracism, anti-Catholicism, and satanic symbolism sparked an affectively charged moment characterized by fear, disgust, and anger. Through such analysis, we can begin to understand how religious communities formed through affective connections to the sacred, what that sacred felt like, and how bodily and emotional experience shaped reactions to violations of the sacred. Attention to affective cues, particularly in religious texts, sheds light on the phenomenology of historical religion. In making this claim, this article aims to demonstrate how scholars of religion might incorporate affect into the historical study of religion. Unmasking conspiratorial plots against colonial liberties was a religious experience in the colonies, simultaneously imbuing liberty with a felt sense of sacredness and forging an emotional separation between the colonies and England. I argue that this is a serious oversight in understanding religion in the Revolutionary era. Once a common subject in the study of Revolutionary America, conspiracism has disappeared from the historiography in recent decades. This article explores affective and emotional components of conspiracism in the 1765 Boston Stamp Act Crisis.
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