The American Reformation:
A Historiography of the Social History of Early American Christianity
While reading the book Myth of a Christian Nation, by Gregory A. Boyd, I came across a passage where Dr. Boyd recounted a familiar scene in my own past experience: sitting in church during a service dedicated to Independence Day where an old rugged cross made of wood sat in the back corner of the stage with an American flag wrapped around it while the projector played video clips of fighter jets flying over the Capitol in Washington and the congregation sang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In my youth I thought nothing of the images, the sounds or the general spectacle of this kind in a church service. After reading Myth, however, I began to realize how peculiar and – in a way – how distinctly American this blending of patriotism, democracy and Christianity were. Many of the American Christians I’ve had the opportunity to know personally – whether conservative, moderate or liberal – believe that American political and social values are uniquely suited to host vibrant communities of evangelical Christianity and celebrate a marriage of American exceptionalism and Christian millenarianism. The courtship of this relationship in the early republic period of American history has come under renewed study and recent scholarship has attempted to fill in the gaps left my previous historians. Early modern contemporaries and modern historians alike have found themselves challenged in trying to understand not only one of the most significant political revolutions during this period but, arguably, one of the most important socio-religious transformations in Western history as well. While the greater body of research done on early American Christianity has been centered on the theology and biographies of prominent Puritans and evangelical ministers, recent scholarship on the subject has begun trending toward an understanding of this transformation in the context of social history.[1] In this sense, the democratic and populist changes that swept across America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are no different than other similarly researched events. As with most historical research, there is no significant consensus among the scholars on many ideas expressed in each of the studies I have researched for this essay. From ideas about socio-economic conditions to clerical abuse, political power struggles, and a developing hunger among contemporaries for a new kind of ethics, it is possible to come away from each text with more questions than answers. Having completed similar research on a related social movement, the European Protestant Reformation, it has become clear that many of the research techniques, scholarly approaches and even conclusions overlap significantly between the two periods. Just as European social historians very clearly claim that the religious nature of the Protestant Reformation contained significant political connotations, American historians surveyed in this essay suggest that the political revolution in the late eighteenth century accompanied, if not altogether responded to, a budding religious revolution in North America. It is within this transatlantic historical perspective that I refer to the changing religious landscape of the early republic as an “American Reformation”. It is understandable that some may object to my reference of this period of religious history as an “American Reformation” but – as I hope to show early in this essay – the reference is not only justified, but fitting. Moreover, this essay will attempt to trace the topical evolution of the American Reformation as a “social history” in order to understand the questions it has raised, the fresh viewpoints it has unveiled, and the significant contributions it has made to our understanding this groundbreaking movement.
As mentioned previously, there are several shared themes, techniques and conclusions between the social historiography of the European Protestant Reformation and the American Reformation. The foremost and – hopefully – most obvious between these two historiographies is the attempt by social historians to place significant developments in religious history into a broader social, economic and political context. Social history surrounding the Protestant Reformation in Europe began in the mid 1960s by, mostly, German historians during a very troubled time in modern German history. As any historian might remember, Germany was divided into two separate nations – one communist, one democratic – and the clash of ideologies bled over into every facet of life, including historical research. Produced as a post-modern descendent of Marxist economic-historical critique, the new social history attempted to place new interpretations on previously settled historical questions like the German Reformation. Firstly, I would like to show that the social historians of the American Reformation not only shared similarities in technique and findings with their European counterparts, but also that there is a solid chronological continuity from the European studies to the analogous American ones. Whereas the bulk of European Protestant Reformation scholarship was published between 1979 and 1988, most of the current scholarship on the American Reformation was done between 1985 and 1994. There are, of course, a few outlying exceptions for both research fields on both sides of the timeframe, but, again, the large majority of published works fall into those timeframes. Researchers like Max Weber, Steven Ozment, Hans Hillerbrand, Peter Blickle and Lee Palmer Wandel – among others – took up the history of the common man’s Reformation with particular enthusiasm, exploring questions of increased involvement of local layman on the eve of the Reformation, the German Peasant War of 1525, Christian millennialism, iconoclasm, clerical antagonism, the notion of sola scriptura, local election of church pastors in conjunction with increased laity control over church administration and access to the Bible in vernacular German. As will hopefully become evident through the course of this essay, American and European social historians shared as much in common as the two religious cultures they studied.[2]
Turning now to the research on the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy it seems appropriate to begin with Alexis de Tocqueville. Certainly, it feels suitable to begin with Tocqueville by the simple fact that he was among the first scholars to write extensively about the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy, or that he is quoted ubiquitously on the subject by twentieth-century historians, but it is also fitting that should begin a comparison of Protestant religious phenomena on two continents with the observations of a Catholic that had a foot in both. While it is true that Tocqueville was not an American, a Protestant or a “common” man, he does provide an important window into understanding this relationship during the early republic period. In the book Tocqueville’s Civil Religion, Sanford Kessler attempts to bring Tocqueville’s astute observations and claims about American “civil religion” into a context of the contemporary social history. Kessler’s understanding of Tocqueville, constructed from an analysis of the book Democracy in America, begins from the starting point that religion was the first of America’s political institutions. Claiming that Protestantism – from the very beginning with Luther – required a very real and present reliance on private judgment, Tocqueville draws an invisible, but direct, line from the events in America to the events in Reformation Europe. Not only is this reliance on private judgment a hallmark of Protestant confessions, it is – as he reminds us – a requirement democratic polity. Moreover, Tocqueville’s unique attunement to the contemporary cultural phenomena of democratic populism led him to claim, well ahead of his time, that religious authority had shifted dramatically after Jefferson’s election to become vested in public opinion for most Americans. This new democratic atmosphere not only fostered the Enlightenment and sectarianism, but also allowed religion to function as a practical apparatus for common people to access political franchise and even political power.
This is not to say, however, that Tocqueville believed that these changes did not come without considerable risk. Indeed, the principles of democratic equality, if implemented in daily life, had such a decentralizing and individualizing potential that he feared it might bring down traditional Christian institutions. As some modern historians would later argue, Tocqueville could not have been more correct. These dangers were born out of evangelical religious leaders and itinerant preachers – most of whom placed such a central emphasis on eternal salvation and eternal damnation – making the acceptance of Christianity dependent on self-interested motivations. Kessler, in his appraisal of Tocqueville’s study, finds few faults in this visionary observer, but primary among them is his most serious failure to anticipate or acknowledge the importance of American evangelicalism, which goes almost completely unmentioned in Democracy in America.[3] These conclusions and observations of Tocqueville on the effects of individualization and democratic values on American Christianity are similar, in many respects, to those that were made in European Reformation studies about the affirmation of the laity and the relationship between the Reformation and the German Peasant War of 1525 as a means to access power through the close-knit religious communities made by Gunther Vogel, Heiko Oberman and Peter Blickle. Where the German Peasants had failed in their revolt against oppressive ecclesiastical and feudal lords, the Americans succeeded and – in doing so – secured even more control over their local religious and political communities than the Reformation-era Germans were able to.
One topic that few other historians even attempted to seriously address in their research was the concept of evangelical millennialism. I found that the relatively surprising gap in this field of research was sufficiently and pleasantly filled with Ruth Bloch’s 1985 book, Visionary Republic. Millennialism, according to Bloch, returned with vigor to the forefront of Christian communities after the Protestant Reformation – especially among the more radical denominations – and, in response to magisterial persecution, these communities were forced to migrate to America bringing the millennialist expectation with them. For the English colonists, she claims that millennialism started mostly in the English Civil War in 1640 by the Whigs, and Radical Whig ideology came, in part, from some of the more radical elements of the Reformation. While the Puritans were especially attuned to this concept, Bloch believes that the French and Indian War on the eve of the American Revolution helped advance the belief that the end was near as it was the worst in a series of wars between England and France, Europe’s two largest and strongest powers. Moreover, the French and Indian War saw an uncommonly high increase in the employment of terms such as “liberty” and “tyranny” especially when drawing a distinction between English civil liberty and French monarchy, or Protestant and Catholic values. The American millennial vision was almost wholly centered on the American belief that these colonies had a special role to place in bringing about the end of days and the coming of the Lord, and soon after the French and Indian War charges of “Romish” behavior – which was synonymous in eighteenth century English society with antichristian – in the Church of England were also levied as veiled attacks against the English political institutions. The American Revolution, then, was not simply a political revolution, according to Bloch, but also may have been understood as Christians participating in a movement that would bring them one step closer to the coming of the Kingdom of God. After establishing that American colonists were abundant in comfort with Great Britain being paralleled with the Beast of Revelation, she outlines a very meticulous path among American evangelicals in the earliest years of the republic of disillusionment with the centralization of American government. This disillusionment translated, in Bloch’s research, to a direct religious change of Christianity’s enemy from the British Empire to moral and social reform at home. In other words, with the enemy from without subdued, American Christians turned their attention to the myriad of enemies within near the turn of the nineteenth century.[4] While Bloch’s survey of American millennialism stops, rather abruptly, around 1800, what she does provide is fascinating and enlightening. What she does appear to lack, however, is the permutation of American millennialism that inevitably came in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Her more than fifty pages of endnotes demonstrate both the extensive and diverse research she conducted for this book, much of which are primary sources ranging from sermons to hymns and even early modern prophetic pamphlets. Bloch’s work not only does much of the heavy lifting in drawing a thematic line between European religious phenomena and the American Revolution, but also sets up a perfectly acceptable foundation for understanding the kind of political, social and religious expectation that set the evangelical revolution in motion in the nineteenth century.
In his 1987 book, Faith of Our Fathers, Edwin Gaustad attempted to build, in some respects, upon those initial observations about the institutionalized nature of religion in America by analyzing not only the state of American religious sentiments in the early republic but also the doctrinal confrontations between evangelicals and the Founding Fathers. Gaustad argues that in the decades leading up to the Revolution, evangelicals began a socially intrusive campaign against ecclesiastical authority. This campaign, he claims, stemmed from the popular opinion among Americans that civil and religious authorities were co-conspirators in the effort to keep men in servility, thus the liberty of one necessitated the liberty of the other. This attack on religious authority did not happen in a vacuum, however. The Church of England went wherever England went, and to attack the legitimacy of the Church of England was to attack the legitimacy of England in whole. In the same way that the Reformation movement was a rebellion against papal and Catholic ecclesiastical abuses, so too was the rise of evangelical reform movements a rebellion – of sorts – against England in Gaustad’s opinion. After the success of the Federalist agenda in 1789, churchgoers in America found it more appropriate to become closely involved in both the administration both of their local church as well as government policy. The explosion of evangelicalism is in some respects, according to Gaustad, a response to Federalist success in government of keeping power both centrally located and in fewer hands than many Americans were comfortable with. It should be no surprise – in the way that Gaustad frames his message – that the explosion of evangelical religion in America coincided with the Jeffersonian presidencies. In simple terms, evangelicalism was most certainly an exercise in popular authority by lay churchmen. Gaustad’s conclusions are drawn, if not too heavily, on the overwhelming statistical data that illustrates just how quickly the Methodists and Baptists replace the Congregationalists and Episcopalians as the churches with the most members. Indeed, in just seventy years Methodism grew to be over 500,000 members and outnumbered Congregationalism, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheranism combined. Like many of his contemporaries, he finds solid footing on the inter-related nature of the cultural transformation as he claims that the “age of volunteerism turned into an age of reform – an American revolution all over again, only this time not in politics but religion.”[5] In the epilogue of his book, Gaustad initiates what will become a recurrent theme in the study of Western Christianity, by claiming that religion, like politics, found itself torn between establishing liberty and equality via individualization and governing via community. Where Gaustad might earn some criticism is that his endnotes cite, so lopsidedly, secondary resources from the mid-to-late twentieth century in contrast to some contemporary works that do far more analysis of primary documents. This is not to suggest, however, that Gaustad did not perform an appropriate amount of research but the question of how much of his conclusions and arguments rely on other historians remains. I also found it curious that his analysis of the social dimensions of American evangelicalism were located in the beginning and the end, but the middle sections of his book – where one might find evidence of extensive and exhaustive research in the primary sources – were only biographic profiles of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. These chapters were not entirely unrelated to the central thesis of this book, but the unusual format certainly made it harder to follow the thread of thought from start to finish. In all, however, I think Gaustad’s argument that challenges to ecclesiastical authority in the eighteenth century paved the way for American challenges to English political authority are valid and deserving of further investigation.
The suggestion that evangelicals were the “principal subculture” and among the principal shapers of the larger American social, religious and political culture is the topic that occupies Richard Carwadine’s 1993 book, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Focusing his research primarily on the larger denominations of the nineteenth century, he claims that there was considerable pressure from within the rank-and-file membership for ministers and organizations to throw their collective weight behind moral legislation during this period. Whatever prior objections Christianity had about getting into bed with politicians and governments had to be laid to rest quickly as, Carwadine claims, to abstain from political involvement would have been to swim against the current of mainstream American expectations, religious or otherwise. Providing an uncompromising tone to American politics, the visionary and idealistic evangelical Christian communities exercised a more active role in influencing the direction that American society took, after complaining from the political sidelines about corrupt electioneering by the party-driven system that flourished after Jefferson. The most important contribution that this hefty work of scholarship provides to the field is an explanation of the evolving relationship between evangelical denominations, especially Baptists and Methodists, and political parties, such as the Whigs, to deliberately and effectively influence the legislative process in America. Moreover, what is particularly significant about this relationship is that it was driven by pressure from within those denominations and it represents a radical change in status for the Methodists and Baptists who, until then, had been denominations that represented those on the disenfranchised margins of American society.[6] The similarities in the evolution of church-state relations between the Methodists and Baptists in America and the Lutherans and Calvinists in Europe are striking and, as with several other topics, are prime targets for further review.
Approaching the topic of early American evangelicalism from the rare perspective of gender studies, Susan Juster’s Disorderly Women strikes a delightfully balanced note between respecting the evangelical movement on its own terms while incorporating important questions about how masculine and feminine relationships influenced the dominant religious and political values of the time. While the gender perspective is both important to historical studies in general and to this topic in particular, I am particularly interested in the arguments that she raises with regard to the relationship between American religious communities and the political development of American democracy. This selective treatment of the text should not be interpreted as a lack of respect for the body of Juster’s research, rather it simply reflects the focus of this essay’s historiographical question. As Juster, herself, claims that this book is more about political discourse and the boundaries of power than simply gender in Christianity, I feel that my interpretation of the text for these purposes is within bounds. Juster’s overriding theme in Disorderly Women is that evangelicalism was a “particularly powerful way” to construct the relationship between self and community and, in light of that, New Light Puritanism can be understood as movement that facilitated a “relative egalitarianism” with regard to church government in colonial America. Perhaps more directly to the point, Juster claims that early American history can be understood as an “evolution of political ideology away from the consensual model of republican virtue to the mechanical mode of democratic self-interest”. It is precisely this theme of transference from republicanism to democratic ideologies. The Great Awakening overturned the hierarchy and structure of sacred space, while social arrangements and social orders were abandoned at revival camp meetings. Not only would you find the poor, the marginalized and the sinners, but you would also find the itinerant preacher providing access to the power of God. Drawing from a concept that the “feminine” element of society does not simply include women – but also the marginalized – her claims at evangelical egalitarianism begin to take sharp focus. These camp meetings had both religious and political significance in that the Puritan community was made up of highly ordered people and space, and the evangelical community was one of language: something everyone had equal access to and – at least theoretically – equal control over. It was this quasi-egalitarian “golden age” that was sacrificed during the Revolution as the cultural tide in America shifted to a hyper-masculine sense of independence, making a revolution for property rights and right of self-rule for proto-Victorian values against Britain more important than the retention of Christian communal equality. Turning to the question of the American Revolution, Juster claims that was radical in that evangelicals – especially Baptists – wanted to see the apparatus of church and state disappear, but less radical in that they sacrificed many of their “called out” values at the alter of political revolution. In the midst of the American Revolution, Evangelicals began to transfer their position from “outside” temporal and spatial arrangements of power to engage them from within and, in doing so, secured a powerful position in that alliance. Post-Revolutionary America, to Juster, represented the completion of a shift in values from the egalitarian qualities of primitive evangelicalism – an expression best seen in the Anabaptist communities of southeastern Germany – to a renewed affirmation of cultural masculinity. In the end, she we are asked to revisit the age-old question of “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?” as she argues that evangelicals sacrificed too many of the egalitarian principles that made them attractive to the “feminized” element of American society in order to become mainstream and acceptable within the new masculine-dominated social order.[7] Disorderly Women is a particularly well-researched book and the number of Puritan and Baptist church records books she pored over in order to write this book is overwhelmingly impressive. Her interpretation of masculinity and femininity in the negotiation of social power provides an altogether rare vision of American power politics and the role that evangelicals played in creating, then abandoning, a true vision of inclusion for all.
While there are many good questions yet to be raised over what the “spiritual center” of Christianity in America is, there are few scholarly discussions that take place on this question without Mark Noll’s extensive research coming to the table. His many books and papers on the topic of American Christianity are considered to be among the highest and most exhaustive secondary sources in modern historical research. One of the earliest papers Noll wrote on the subject of American Christianity was, titled “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865”, wherein approaches the centrality of the Bible as a text of private as well as political significance in the early republic. To Noll, the Bible was not only used in private for personal “nourishment”, but ministers used it to explain and encourage the American vision that saw exceptionalistic potential and destiny. From the most unlikely success of the Revolution, ministers were able to claim that America had a divinely providential place in God’s plan to redeem the world and establish the Kingdom. In this way, the Bible was both a source of truth, the source of a narrative that could be replicated to produce prosperity and power. In a later paper, titled “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies”, Noll explores what he sees as a consistent relationship between evangelical revivalism and political revolution in North Atlantic countries. Market revolution was a very close ally to evangelicalism at “every state in its North Atlantic history”, Noll claims and suggests that Evangelical preachers “exploited” revolutionary environments in various regions. The success of evangelical revolution in America – among other regions – was due to the success of political revolutions. Noll claims that successful economic and political revolutions have the effect of destroying traditions. In the midst of disarray, the individualization of evangelical religion found it much easier to spread than under the more traditional – if not more repressive – social conditions. It does not take much to see how these observations are related to those arguments – made especially by Peter Blickle – that the German Reformation was a hand-in-hand collaborator of the German Peasant Revolt of 1525. It is in his 576-page tome, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, that Noll shows his most exhaustive research. In this book, he claims that there was – and some say there still is – a symbiotic relationship between American socio-political identity and American religious identity. Tracing the beginning of the major social changes to the population booms following the American Revolution, he claims that churches in America had to meet the needs of a growing and diverse communities, produce enough trained ministers to meet the demands of that growth, and expand their influence to the “hinterlands” of the colonies in response to the migration and expansion. The subsequent revivals that contributed to the Great Awakening saw the Gospel preached more to the socially outcast element of America more than any other time in history. Instead of insisting that sinners come to church, the revival mentality saw that church came to the sinner. He also claims that the Great Awakening was America’s first truly “national” event: it facilitated an identification of individuals as Americans and fostered a growing distrust of European hierarchical order. The fear of centralized political tyranny after the French and Indian War led many Americans to affirm that the human being was responsible for his own conscience and this translated to religious beliefs as well, thus leading to the evangelical revolution. Noll attunes his argument about the values-smashing nature of revolutions in general to the American Revolution in particular and claims that it stimulated social changes of every kind, including the “new tide of democracy” that influenced the old denominations and created new ones. The result of these changes was that by the midpoint of the nineteenth century evangelicals were no longer the “outsiders” of American religion but, rather, occupied the greatest and highest positions of social and political recognition. This is not to say, however, that there were not still “outsiders” to reach – or exploit – as he turns, albeit briefly, to the question of Mormonism and Joseph Smith. Smith’s religion, Noll claims, drew upon culturally surging themes of democracy – the right of one to choose and think for himself – and republicanism – the distrust of power to corral a new congregation of followers for an entirely new dispensation: a topic that is brilliantly researched by the next author, John Brooke.[8]
In his book, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of a Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, Brooke immediately introduces the reader to one of the most powerful differences between Mormonism – now referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – and the rest of the Christian denominations that were created and flourished in the early nineteenth century: Mormonism was not a new denomination, but an entirely new dispensation – equal to the ones given to Moses and Jesus. Brooke, while on shaky ground according to some criticism he has received in response to this book, is insistent that the cultural “preparation” among the disenfranchised members of American society was linked, albeit via a rather ambiguous and confusing route, to the Radical Reformation movements of Europe. Similarly to Bloch’s arguments about the transmutation of expectant millennialism from the Radical Reformation communities to American evangelical groups, Brooke also claims that Mormon cosmology was influenced heavily by restorationist millennialism and occultism. Occult practices, Brooke claims, accompanied the migration patterns of communities that came over from Europe after magistrates started cracking down on Radical Reformation sects, though he does little to substantiate that claim. Where his argument does find stronger footing is in the area of social franchise. Mormonism gave radical Christians a place to belong and captured a popular need to restore authoritative polity to Christian religion in a very decentralized and fragmented faith, while not being strictly hierarchical. In this way, Brooke claims that the founding families of the Mormon faith were all “particularly prepared” because of the outsider and dejected social conditions they came from. Not only did Mormonism give outsiders ground-level access to a new community that promised both social and cosmically metaphysical power, but Smith also relied on the economic anxieties of these families. In the new faith debt was emphatically placed as a supreme enemy, but Smith also placed a premium on alchemical and counterfeiting practices that – according to Brooke – many of these families would have already been familiar with. Alchemy was important for these radical Christian sects, Mormonism included, because it was a vehicle of wealth for poor families and communities. The ability to change common materials to precious metals or stones was, as Brooke alludes to, the ultimate “get-rich-quick” scheme of the day. Moreover, the creation of a new money economy in America saw an unprecedented growth in counterfeiting, from coins to bills or – in Smith’s case – religious documents. These documents were worth more than money to those that needed to hear what was contained within and it was the content of those documents, rather than the dubious nature of their creation, that were valuable to the early Mormon families. In this way, Brooke argues that a “ church of miracles attracted a particular kind of convert”, with the implication being that those converts were either naïve, desperate or both. Whatever the case, Brooke’s book – despite some of the criticisms it received – does quite a bit not only to trace a line via similar cultural conditions between radical, post-Reformation American Christianity and radical, post-Reformation European Christianity, but he draws an intentionally direct one as well, linking the two research fields together as well.[9]
With his two books, The Sacred Cause of Liberty and The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch has shown why his is one of America’s leading scholars on the topic of the American Reformation. Tracing the symbiotic revolution of evangelicalism and populist democracy in America from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, Hatch has provided the kind of research and analysis that only a very few American historians of this period have ever reached. A fellow professor of history at Notre Dame with Mark Noll, Hatch’s work matches a similar quality and, in the process, has earned several prestigious awards in American history. In his earlier work, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, Hatch outlines how republican liberty came to be known as a cardinal Christian belief – thus necessitating a strong reliance on individual conscience – and how between 1740-1780 the clergy were asked to be ever-increasingly involved in the formation of a prosperous and republican nation. Among other topics, this book’s central area of focus is on American ministerial involvement in the Revolution via the vision of “God’s elect” against the “antichrist” of oppression and tyranny. Hatch claims that the civil millennialism of the Revolution grew directly from politicizing the millennialist expectations and experiences of New Englanders for the prior 20 years and that American ministers were convinced that they were to play a special role in the providence of the coming of the millennium. Hatch also claims that the “vision of history” in Revolutionary New England was that the success or failure of liberty was the single thread of events that connected the European Protestant Reformation to the Revolution. Once the Revolution was over and independence from Britain had been secured, the quest for virtue – the lack of which in history showed to be the death of the ancient republics – was the preeminent quest of American clerical and political patriotism, according to Hatch. The republic’s future was understood to be tied to the amount of its direct investment in American Christianity, both in public education an the promotion of public worship and which assisted in a developing belief, for many Christians, that “cosmic forces” were arrayed against liberty to continue seeking religious and civil oppression. Moreover, a sense of romantic patriotism provided ministers and churches with the solidarity of Christian unity that they required in a time of intense denominational splitting. It is the occasion of this intense fragmentation of American Christianity that occupies Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity, wherein he argues that democratization is the key to understanding American Christianity and suggests that an increasing value of populism changed both the political and social landscape. Claiming that the Revolution changed the dynamic of American society in all forms, he goes on to argue that people could take charge of their own lives not only in politics, but in their religious associations as well. In this wildly changing climate of religious associations, American Christianity suffered from a form of “withering” institutional establishments, as American congregants wanted their churches to come down to their level. Moreover, Hatch’s claims are pinned on the suggestion that the establishment of major print in America made all of these changes possible and this change shifted the power to produce information away from the elites of American society to commoners. What immediately becomes obvious, with Hatch’s expert help, from analyzing the papers produced by this print revolution is that there was a deep-seated animosity against the educated and highly-trained professionals in American society and that this anticlericalism was part of a larger movement of class struggle. Traditional institutions were portrayed as incompetent, there were ubiquitous comparisons of the educated clergy to an aristocracy or canonical tyrants and a general equation of “elite” professionals with the antichrist. The religious free-market principles that Hatch sees in the early nineteenth century lowered the quality of religious rigor as the population of America – then as now – favored the majority of individuals with little or no education over the elite few that received extensive educational training. Sermons of this time became very similar in nature to campaign speeches, with elements of demagoguery and party-style membership recruiting, where populism in religion borrowed from revolutionary ideas of dissent as well as fear of consolidated and “back-room” power. Hatch claims that there was a complete lack of uniform recognition in religious circles and that this coupled nicely with a cultural development that helped democracy and nationalism became the uniform idea that everyone could jump on board with. This is not to say, however, that there was a declension of religious zeal in favor for the political sphere, but rather that Hatch sees transference of popular assent from traditional institutions to the enthusiastic revival. This period, according to Hatch and many others, is characterized by an unprecedented buffet menu of Christian churches from which the average citizen could choose, and since the common man had a tendency to identify with itinerant and unschooled preachers, the solidification of evangelical populism became complete. Hatch’s work helps bring the question of the American Reformation back to a practical question of, “how did this period shape the landscape of American religion today?” He suggests that democratization has led to a complete, downward trend in the kind of men that American religion and statecraft produces reminding today’s Americans of the woeful fact that post-democratic America has not produced the kind of theologian as Jonathan Edwards or the kinds of statesmen as our Founding Fathers. The term “winning souls” has become an indicator of a capitalistic numbers game of quantity over quality in both American churches and American politics and, barring another epoch-splitting catalyst, it is unlikely to ever do so again.[10]
It is a common axiom among historians that a topic will receive as many unique interpretations as there are scholars researching it. The American Reformation, while able to be loosely grouped into a finite number of mildly contending groups, is no exception. Perhaps one of the strongest qualities of modern historical research is the diversity of viewpoints offered among scholars. There should be no doubt that the studies of social historians on topics of both European and American religious phenomena have irrevocably impacted the modern historical discipline and, by my estimation, for the better. What we may now see more clearly through the efforts of both historical fields is that each respective religious Reformation served not only to reinvigorate religious affections among groups of people that may have otherwise seen declension, but that they served another – perhaps even greater – purpose of providing those outlying members of society access to political, economic and social power that had been so long to them denied. Perhaps more importantly, with regard to the history itself, this socialization of historical research provided both the inspiration and the means for scholars to research the most underrepresented demographic in history: the everyday person. From comprehensive social studies, like A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, to gender-related research projects, like Disorderly Women, social history of the American evangelical revolution has cast an increasingly bright light into the shadows of our common past. Understanding such an important turning point in American history is crucial for understanding the world we currently live in. It is difficult to resist, in history, the dangerous temptation of an easy explanation and the potential overzealousness to draw direct causalities, especially on a subject so profoundly important as democratization. The rich heterodoxy of the American Reformation research provides generous material for not only understanding the nature of the movement itself, but also insights into the culture that produces the historiography.
[1] Harry Stout, “George Whitefield in Three Countries,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 68.
[2] See attached bibliography for list of published works cited in German Reformation social history
[3] Sanford Kessler, Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2, 17, 50, 86, 93, 95, 98, 169.
[4] Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3, 4, 13, 37, 43, 47, 58, 68, 87, 107, 110.
[5] Edwin Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 13, 21, 110, 122, 123, 136.
[6] Richard Carwadine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ix, xv, xix, 9, 17, 34, 61.
[7] Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), vii, 3, 4, 10, 11, 22, 24, 33, 108, 113, 144.
[8] Mark Noll, “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113-30.
Mark Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865” in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan O. Hatch, Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41-3.
Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 83-243.
[9] John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of the Mormon Cosmology, 1644 – 1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
[10] Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
