The Democratization of American Christianity
Book Review
In his award-winning book, The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch explores the hypothesis and the process by which American Christianity was both influenced and overtaken by the rising spirit of democratic populism in the early years of the republic. Drawing from scores of primary and secondary sources, including such abstract sources as sheets of gospel music and the diaries of itinerant preachers, Hatch delivers a thoughtful and compelling synthesis, providing a window into the cultural phenomenon of popular religion. This phenomenal reshaping of American religion, in Hatch’s worldview, was not simply an evolution of religious ideas, but a revolution in values and cultural norms that Christianity needed to respond to in order to survive in the early republic.
Hatch, approaching the subject of early American Christianity through the lens of social history, lays the foundation of all subsequent claims by suggesting that this era in American history is defined by the popular leaders it produced in all sectors.[1] The religious movements of the time are no different in this respect than intellectual, political, social, economic and commercial movements from this period. The religious leaders he investigates in-depth are: Baron Stone of the “Christian” movement, William Miller of the Adventists, Francis Asbury of the Methodists, John Leland of the Baptists, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal church and Joseph Smith of the Latter-Day Saints. To Hatch, the key to understanding both the history and the future of American Christianity is in the exploring the process and the effects of democratization. Revealing his perspective as a social historian, he argues that all of Christianity can be read as a “dialectic between atomization and authority,” and the early republic-era of American Christianity can be seen as a time when centralized authority was subverted both in professional vocations as well as sacred ones.[2]
Relying on a trans-Atlantic tradition of intellectual and social movements, Hatch traces the dramatic shift in American values, initially, to a post-Revolution population boom born from high land availability and massive immigration coupled with a contemporarily high birth rate. This population boom radically altered the religious and political climate of America. An increasing value shift toward populism assisted in the change of the religious, political and social environment in the United States, while the attitudes in American rural communities changed to favor itinerant preachers, “untutored” men that resembled the folk they ministered to. Hatch argues that the Revolution ushered in a new social order whereby increasing numbers of people could take charge of their own lives, and that paradigm shift in political and social theory bled over into the religious sphere of American life.[3] In the aftermath of the Revolution, Hatch suggests that American Christianity suffered from a “withering” institutional establishment claiming that, essentially, American congregants wanted their churches to condescend to their level. This was directly linked to a Reformation-era belief that the clergy were not, in fact, “set apart” from the laity of the congregation and was coupled with a developing populist cultural movement, the virtue of the volk was valued far above any concept of elitism. These two factors combined to commence the removal of an overriding orthodoxy to scrutinize the beliefs, traditions and practices of congregations.[4]
What ranks as certain among Hatch’s arguments is the degree of importance he places on the emergence of major print. Publishing the journals and diaries of itinerant preachers not only aided in propagandizing the devotion and innovation of “unlettered” preachers, but these sectarian groups immediately recognized the importance of major print was profound and even part of divine providence. Hatch does a considerable job outlining the efforts of evangelical groups working to wrest the power of print away from elitists and into common hands, which enabled ordinary folks to produce religious tracts.[5] Furthermore, the ever-expanding presence and role of newspapers in this period worked to chip away at the foundation of credentialed elites by undermining and ridiculing those educated and highly trained professionals from all vocations.
Getting to the heart of the argument, Hatch focuses most of his energy on tying the phenomenon of religious development of the early republic to the cultural movement of populism in post-Revolution America. Like their political, social and economic counterparts, Hatch argues that populist religious movements are created out of class struggles, egalitarianism, theories of equality and spirituality, putting a very popular and social spin on a field of research that has been traditionally dominated by research into intellectual elites, no easy task.[6] While much of Hatch’s argument is reliant on proving a hypothesis that common people believed that learned men were understood to be trying to mediate between God and men. His attempts to unveil an underlying antagonism between elites and commoners – while undeniably influenced by Marxist political and social theory – produces the interesting claim that American clergymen, historically and even currently, have been subject to democratic ideals even more than lawyers and physicians. Summing up this viewpoint, Hatch articulates that a “free-market economy continues in the field of religion, however, and credentialing, licensing or statutory control is absent… This stringent populist challenge to the religious establishment included violent anticlericalism, a flaunting of conventional religious deportment, a disdain for the wrangling of theologians, an assault on tradition, and an assertion that the common people were more sensitive than elites to the ways of the divine.”[7] The development of early republic Christianity was influenced as much by social and class issues as intellectual and theological ones and, with respect to that foundational thesis, these groups sought to develop new religious cultures that were devoid of traditionally educated theologians.[8] To Hatch, the thriving splinter-denominations of Baptists, Methodists, Latter-Day Saints and Adventists were not only successful in this venture, but that success ultimately ensured their survival in the competitive, free-market environment of American religion.
After poring over the appendices and notes for this book, it becomes readily apparent that Hatch has done an overwhelming amount of research to prepare for this project. Mentioning earlier that Hatch had been able to draw from such obscure sources as gospel music and diaries, one should also count his investigation of the rise of Yale University scholarships for theology students as equally obscure and brilliant. In many ways, Hatch seems to have left no stone unturned in order to shift the paradigm of early American religious studies. No less important or useful to his research are the numerous sermons, speeches and pieces of artwork that helped inform his thesis. As if anticipating at least some criticism for not presenting very many in-depth analyses or micro-historical presentations of religious movements and leaders, Hatch preemptively admits that he will be focusing mostly on national, non-regional trends. Perhaps one of the earned criticisms for this project is that Hatch’s research emphasis is clearly on the “fringe” of contemporary religious movements. Assessing these fringe movements through the dual lenses of transatlantic and social history, Hatch comes away with a slightly incomplete appraisal of religious development. Perhaps nowhere is this better seen than in the conclusion he draws with regard to what these movements left as inheritance in American society. Hatch’s conclusion that the legacy of democratization in American Christianity is, partly, that there remains a considerable gap in the “vitality” of religious experience between the educated and the working classes.[9] Hatch perceives that “intellectually modern” is still as reviled today as it was during the populist social revolution of the early republic and that the line of religious “vitality” is drawn along seam of education.[10] His faith – no pun intended – in American religious culture is also negatively affected by his underlying worldview, claiming that the process of democratization has led to a downward shift in the quality of thinking and men that modern American religion produces.[11] The quality of a theological argument, in modern religion, is assessed by its popularity rather than the intellectual merits and the rigor of the methodology that produced it, confirming the stated fears of Lyman Beecher – which Hatch quotes early in his book.[12] Having unlocked the “key” to understanding both the history and the future of American Christianity, Hatch concludes that the landscape of American Christianity is one of unbridled individualism where the success of a church will continue to be measured by the size of its multi-media viewer- and membership.[13]
This book stands both as a bridge and as a paragon of transatlantic and social history. The fact that Hatch has so brilliantly applied the discipline and techniques he developed in those two historical traditions to the study of religion is particularly noteworthy and it cannot be any surprise that Hatch has received the academic accolades that he has. Some of the most outstanding scholarship produced in the late twentieth century was produced from coming to a new social and popular understanding of religious movements, particularly the so-called “magisterial” and “radical” Reformation movements in Europe. Hatch, via this project, delivered as outstanding of an analysis of American populism’s effects on Christianity as any Reformation historian fashioned for their field of research.
