Joseph McKeen

Joseph McKeen (1735–1807) was an influential American Congregationalist minister and educator who served as the founding principal of Bowdoin College, where he shaped early American theological education through his emphasis on rational piety and moral philosophy. His Election Sermon exemplifies the genre's role in early American political discourse, blending Calvinist theology with emerging republican ideals during the formative decades of the United States. McKeen's intellectual legacy reflects the broader transition in late eighteenth-century New England from strict Calvinist orthodoxy toward a more moderate, educationally-oriented Protestantism that would characterize nineteenth-century American religious thought.