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God's Continent Divided: Politics and Religion in Upper Canada and the Northern and Western United States, 1775 to 1841

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Christopher Adamson
Affiliation:
Hofstra University

Extract

Following the American Revolution, the social foundation supporting a settled ministry and sustaining the Old World tradition of an established state church began to crumble, prompting Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that in the United States, “the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely intermingled that it is almost impossible to conceive of the one without the other.” Large numbers of ordinary Americans who had internalized egalitarian, anti-aristocratic attitudes while advancing the patriot cause began to search for and find spiritual meaning in evangelical forms of religious expression. Indeed, the revivals sweeping the northern and western states between the American Revolution and the Civil War have been described as “the Revolution at work in religion.”

Type
Religion and Politics
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1994

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107 Quoted in Fahey, , In His Name, 98.Google Scholar

108 Quoted in Ibid, 94.

109 Finke and Stark, “How the Upstart Sects,” passim.

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118 Ibid, 140, 153, 180–81, 237. Talman, J. J., “Hanibal Mulkins,” D.C.B., vol. 10, 536.Google Scholar

119 Cf. Mathews, , “The Second Great Awakening,” 43.Google ScholarHigham, John, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History, 61 (06 1974), 1518CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith, Timothy L., “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800–1850,” Journal of American History, 53 (03 1967), 679–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

120 Quoted in French, , Parsons, 224.Google Scholar

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