Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T05:18:01.815Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Church Vitality and the American Revolution: Historiographical Consensus and Thoughts Towards a New Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Douglas H. Sweet
Douglas H. Sweet
Affiliation:
Mr. Sweet is a graduate student in Columbia University,New York, New York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The historical literature on colonial America is extensive and wide-ranging. Those works which deal with seventeenth-century New England in particular describe a society in which the church was an institution of overwhelming importance, and religious concerns were closely integrated with all aspects of life. Even in the diversifying and more secular picture of the eighteenth century, religion continued to occupy a central position in society, and the historiography of the period reflects this reality. Many attempts to trace the origins of the American Revolution are laced with the religious dynamic, and the influence of ministerial leadership is considered significant. In Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, religious issues and the clergy are prominent in the unfolding political struggle.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 341 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1976

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

2. Baldwin, Alice M., The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1928)Google Scholar; Thornton, John Wingate, The Pulpit of the American Revolution: or the Political Sermons of the Period of 1776 (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1860)Google Scholar; Joyce, Lester Douglas, Church and Clergy in the American Revolution: A Study in Group Behavior (New York: Exposition Press, 1966).Google Scholar

3. Baird, Robert, Religion in the United States of America: or an Account of the Origin, Progress, Relations to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches in the United States with Notices of the Unevangelical Denominations (1844; New York: Arno Press, 1969).Google Scholar

4. Ibid., pp. 221–224.

5. Walker, Williston, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1894), p. 319.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 306.

7. Ibid., p. 304.

8. Ibid., p. 319.

9. Bacon, Leonard Woolsey, A History of American Christianity (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1897), p. 208.Google Scholar

10. Ibid., p. 230.

11. Ibid., p. 819.

12. Sweet, William Warren, The Story of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), p. 322.Google Scholar

13. Smith, H. Shelton, Handy, Robert T., and Loetcher, Lefferts A., American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960), 1: 619.Google Scholar Professor Handy has acknowledged authorship of this segment.

14. Hudson, Winthrop S., Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Life (New York: Charles S. Scribner's Sons, 1965), pp. 115–116.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 131.

16. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 365.Google Scholar

17. Marty, Martin E., “Vice and Virtue: Our Moral Condition,” Time, 1975, 10 27.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 82.

19. Ibid., Smith, , Handy, , and Loetscher, , American Christianity, p. 519.Google Scholar

20. Hudson, , Religion in America, p. 116.Google Scholar

21. Beecher, Lyman, The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Cross, Barbara M., 2 vols. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 1: 27.Google Scholar

22. Bacon, , History of American Christianity, p. 230.Google Scholar

23. Beecher, Lyman, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints: A Sermon Delivered at Worcester, Massachusetts, October 15, 1823, at the Ordination of the Rev. Loammi Ives Hoadly, to the Pastoral Office Over the Calvinistic Church and Society in That Place (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1823), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

24. Newman, Albert Henry, A History of the Baptist Churches in the United States (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1894), p. 271.Google Scholar In his Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalism and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, C. C. Goen has given us a more documented account of certain elements of the Baptist expansion in late eighteenthcentury New England—see specifically chaps. 6 and 7. Due to his particular focus, however, this work remains but a tantalizing glimpse of the exciting story which badly needs to be fully told. For a discussion of the Free Will Baptists' growth see Baxter, Norman Allen, History of the Free Will Baptists: A Study in New England Separatism (Rochester, New York: The American Baptist Historical Society, 1957).Google Scholar McLoughlin, William G. in New England Dissent, 1630–1833 (2 vols., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971),Google Scholar has given us an extensive and very useful study of the development of the Baptists in New England. But his analysis of the late eighteenth century is so heavily based on the writings of Isaac Backus that its reliability for the movement as a whole is questionable, and his concentration on those points of conflict between the Baptists and the established order diminishes his treatment of some areas of the denomination's overall growth.

25. Cole, Otis and Baketel, Oliver S., History of the New Hampshire Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church Based on the Historical Sketches Gathered During a Period of Nearly Forty Years by George Henry Hardy (New York: For the New Hampshire Conference by the Methodist Book Concern, 1929), pp. 22–27, 33.Google Scholar

26. Morgan, Edmund S., “The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement,” in Paths of American Thought, ed. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. and White, Morton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), p. 11.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., pp. 15–16.

28. Ibid., pp. 17–18.

29. Ibid., p. 20.

30. Miller, Perry, “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in The Shaping of American Religion, ed. Smith, James Ward and Jamison, A. Leland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 322–368.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., p. 325–327.

32. Ibid., p. 328.

33. Ibid., pp. 343–344.

34. Heimert, Alan, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

35. Mathews, Donald G., “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21 (01 1969): 23–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. Ibid., pp. 34–35.

37. “Hopkinton Congregational Church Records,” vol. 1, 1757–1798, vol. 2, 1798–1818,Google Scholar MS, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, New Hampshire: “A Book of Records of the Baptist Church of Christ in Hopkinton, 1769–1799,” MS, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, New Hampshire.

38. Hanley, Thomas O'Brien, The American Revolution and Religion: Maryland 1770–1800 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, Consortium Press, 1971).Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 3.

40. See above p.

41. Riley, B. F., A History of the Baptists in the Southern States East of the Mississippi (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1898).Google Scholar

42. Ibid., p. 110.

43. Ibid., p. 112.

44. Ibid., p. 111.

45. Norwood, Frederick A., The Story of American Methodism: A History of the United Methodists and their Relations (Nashville and New York: The Abingdon Press, 1974).Google Scholar

46. Ibid., p. 8.

47. Ibid., p. 119.

48. Ibid., p. 120.

49. Ibid., p. 156.

50. Loveland, Clara O., The Critical Years: The Reconstruction of the Anglican Church in the United States of America, 1780–1789 (Greenwich, Connecticut: The Seabury Press, 1956), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

51. Hooker, Richard James, “The Anglican Church and the American Revolution,” (PhD. diss.: University of Chicago, 1943).Google Scholar

52. Ibid., p. 284.

53. Ibid., pp. 286–287.

54. Ibid., pp. 338–339.

55. Gewehr, Wesley M., The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740–1790 (1930; Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1965).Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 167.

57. Ibid., p. 184.

58. Ibid., p. 185.

59. Boles, John B., The Great Revival, 1787–1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1972).Google Scholar

60. Ibid., p. 7.

61. Ibid., p. 11.

62. Ibid., p. 19.

63. Marty, Martin E., The Infidel: Free Thought and American Religion (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961).Google Scholar

64. Ibid., pp. 19–20.

65. Ibid., pp. 56–57.