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The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835–1845
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
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In March 1835 Charles Finney told a gathering in New York City: “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.” This statement has often served as an epigram for the era, the motto of that movement for revivalism and social reform that, having already swept the churches, was to so infuse the culture with its moral imperatives as to make a Civil War against slavery inevitable and the hegemony of evangelical Protestantism secure. On this reading Finney's declaration marks the midpoint in a story of triumph—triumph for revival religion, and triumph for a nation that aspired to righteousness.
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Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the Center of Theological Inquiry and the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University. I am grateful to the participants at both venues for their comments and questions; similarly to Professors Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Noll. The research was supported by generous grants from the Evangelical Scholarship Initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts and from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by in-kind assistance from CTI.
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2. This model was originally spelled out in Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Abingdon, 1957);Google Scholar extended with more critique by Miller, Perry, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965), pp. 3–95;Google Scholar and fully systematized in McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar
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25. Among others, Holt, Michael, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1981),Google Scholar and Gienapp, William E., The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), posit ethnocultural primacy in this transition.Google ScholarFoner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970),Google Scholar and McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), give the case for the slavery issue.Google ScholarKelley, Cultural Pattern, Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, Howe, Political Culture, and Brown, Bertram Wyatt, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), essay syntheses of the two forces.Google Scholar
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28. Compare Smith's paean to this episode, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 63–94, 135–62,Google Scholar with the more critical assessment of Long, Kathryn T., The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
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31. Robert Abzug's Cosmos Crumbling breaks off at 1840 with the promise of a subsequent volume to treat the formation of Utopian communities after that date as a new phase in the reformist quest.Google Scholar The classic model was articulated in Alice Tyler, Felt, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1944).Google Scholar
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34. Carwardine, Richard, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993),CrossRefGoogle Scholar notes this explicitly (p. 273) as of 1854, but the book offers much evidence of such well before that date. McKivigan, John R., The War on Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984);Google ScholarSchneider, A. Gregory, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).Google Scholar In Democratization Nathan Hatch interprets the Methodist turn toward respectability as a declension from their early republican virtue; I see it as part of an attempt to overcome the debilities in their traditional program and as an adaptation to a new national environment.
35. Goen, C. C., Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985);Google ScholarSnay, Mitchell, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The bourgeoisification of revivalism is clearly evident from Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, and Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
36. Nord, David, “The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media, 1805–1835,” Journalism Monographs 88 (1984): 1–31;Google Scholar and Zboray, Ronald J., A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), are recent analyses.Google ScholarNye, Russell B., The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970);Google Scholar and Bode, Carl, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840–1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), have interesting data and detail.Google Scholar
37. Bushnell and Nevin are treated below. Emerson's new career outside the Unitarian ministry was launched with the publication of Nature in 1836, a treatise that incorporated (secondhand) German Idealist approaches but that also echoed what I argue were the dying chords of unlimited possibility. By 1844, in “Experience,” and 1851, in “Fate,” Emerson was quite clearly articulating the dependence of the “Self” on “Nature”and the latter's course of development. That this development could be quite ruthless he had learned from the death of his son Waldo in 1841. Of more immediate import for traditional theological matters was Theodore Parker's translation in 1836 of David Strauss's Leben Jesu and his own “Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841).Google Scholar
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47. Wentz, Richard E., John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a concise study in culture and theology;Google ScholarNichols, James H., Romanticism in American Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), supplies greater detail.Google Scholar Nevin's place in international context is well presented in Conser, Walter H. Jr, Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America (Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp. 273–97.Google Scholar Recent interpretations and ample bibliography are contained in Hamstra, Sam Jr, and Griffioen, Arie, eds., Reformed Confessionalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Essays on the Thought of John Williamson Nevin (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995).Google Scholar
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49. The most convenient introduction to Krauth is Ahlstrom, Sydney E., ed., Theology in America: The Major Protestant Voices (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 52–57, 427–60.Google ScholarSee further Tappert, , Lutheran Confessional Theology, and Conser, Church and Confession, pp. 257–73.Google Scholar
50. On the dynamics of New England identity after the Great Awakening, see Hatch, Nathan, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 31 (1974): 407–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For Bushnell's life, see Edwards, Robert L., Of Singular Genius, Of Singular Grace: A Biography of Horace Bushnell (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1992).Google Scholar For his social and political thought, see Barnes, Howard A., Horace Bushnell and the Virtuous Republic (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991),Google Scholar and Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Social Science of Horace Bushnell,” Journal of American History 70 (09 1983): 305–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On his views of religious language, see Duke, James O., Horace Bushnell: On the Vitality of Biblical Language (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984).Google Scholar Conrad Cherry pulls these themes together in “The Structure of Organic Thinking: Horace Bushnell's Approach to Language, Nature, and Nation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 (03 1972): 3–20.Google Scholar
51. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973); on religion inher later life, pp. 203, 260–63.Google Scholar The common move from revivalism to domesticity exemplified by Beecher, and Bushnell, is explored in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977);Google ScholarRyan, Cradle of the Middle Class; and McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840–1900 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986).Google Scholar That these years represented a new departure in emphasis on the home as sanctuary is evident from Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study in Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
52. Bushnell, preached “The Northern Iron” (Hartford: E. Hunt, 1854) on the 14 April 1854 fast day occasioned by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.Google Scholar The ancestry of Grant and Sherman is noted in his address honoring Yale alumni who served in the Civil War, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” conveniently available in McLoughlin, William G., ed., American Evangelicals, 1800–1900: An Anthology (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 141–57; see especially pp.143–44.Google Scholar
53. On Finney's post-1835 development I have relied on Hambrick-Stowe, Finney, pp. 165–298; for theological interpretations, compare Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 103–13;Google ScholarDayton, Donald W., Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987), pp. 63–84; and Gresham, Finney's Doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.Google Scholar
54. Very sympathetic biographical studies are Raser, Harold E., Phoebe Palmer: Her Life and Thought (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen, 1987);Google Scholar and White, Charles E., The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as Theologian, Revivalist, Feminist, and Humanitarian (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).Google Scholar But see also Hovet, Theodore, “Phoebe Palmer's ‘Altar Phraseology’ and the Spiritual Dimension of Women's Sphere,” Journal of Religion 63 (1983):264–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
55. Niebuhr, H. Richard, Pauck, Wilhelm, and Miller, Francis P., The Church Against the World (Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1935).Google Scholar
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