The reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835-1845

Church History

Volumn 67, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 52-82

  Bratt, James D ^a,b  

^a Department of History ^*

^b CALVIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449092534     PISSN: 00096407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3170771     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Charles Finney, "Hindrances to Revivals," Lecture XV in Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 306
2. extended with more critique by Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965), pp. 3-95
3. and Keith J. Hardman, Charles G. Finney, 1792-1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987)
4. Winthrop E. Hudson, Religion in America, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1987)
5. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972)
6. Robert T. Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
7. Martin E. Marty, Protestantism in the United States: Righteous Empire (New York: Scribner's, 1986)
8. George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990)
9. Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992)
10. Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 27-69
11. Stephen Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)
12. Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
13. and William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press, 1959), unpack these traits for successive eras in American revival history. Sociological Analysis 44 (1983) is devoted to a discussion of cyclical theories of the revival phenomenon
14. see also Michael Barkun, "The Awakening Cycle Controversy," Sociological Analysis 46 (1985): 425-43
15. George M. Thomas, Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation-Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), gives a social-theoretical analysis of some of the same concerns treated here
16. Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
17. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)
18. James Tanis, Dutch Calvinist Pietism in the Middle Colonies: A Study in the Life and Theology of Theodorus J. Frelinghuysen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968)
19. Jon Butler, "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction," Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 305-25
20. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)
21. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)
22. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)
23. Hatch, Democratization
24. Marini, Radical Sects, Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978)
25. Ahlstrom, Religions History, pp. 415-71, remains a fine-tuned overview of both tracks' geographical extension
26. on Unitarian-ism, Ahlstrom, Religious History, pp. 388-402
27. and Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revival in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979). Hardman's biography of Finney is flush with detail, Hambrick-Stowe's adds keener insight
28. Hardman, Charles Finney, pp. 258-76
29. Wyatt Brown, Lewis Tappan, especially chapter 9
30. Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 95-96, 186-90, 208, 216
31. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 85-107
32. George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 59-87
33. Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator. Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 144-60, 201-48
34. and George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), although these do not attend much to religion and date the trend in question somewhat later than I
35. On the contours of the new immigration, see Philip Taylor, The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the U.S.A. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 32-42
36. A recent study of its ultimate political manifestation is Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
37. On the Philadelphia riots, see Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975)
38. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), argues that the Protestant-Catholic divide dominated American religion through World War II
39. Among others, Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1981)
40. and William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), posit ethnocultural primacy in this transition
41. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)
42. and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), give the case for the slavery issue
43. Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 5-10, 26-32
44. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles Finney, pp. 211, 252
45. Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism, pp. 45-53
46. See also Richard Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
47. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, pp. 144-49
48. Lori D. Ginsberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), offers an evaluation of the course of women evangelicals compatible with the argument being offered here
49. Marsden, New School Presbyterian Experience
50. Elwyn A. Smith, "The Forming of a Modern American Denomination," Church History 31 (1962): 74-99
51. Samuel C. Pearson Jr., "From Church to Denomination: American Congregationalism in the Nineteenth Century," Church History 38 (1969): 67-87
52. Byron C. Lambert, The Rise of the Antimission Baptists: Sources and Léaders, 1800-1840 (New York: Arno Press, 1980)
53. Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), notes this explicitly (p. 273) as of 1854, but the book offers much evidence of such well before that date
54. John R. McKivigan, The War on Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)
55. Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
56. David Nord, "The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media, 1805-1835," Journalism Monographs 88 (1984): 1-31
57. and Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), are recent analyses
58. Russell B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970)
59. and Carl Bode, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840-1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), have interesting data and detail
60. Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 93-100
61. Mark Y. Hanley, Beyond a Christian Commonwealth: The Protestant Quarrel with the American Republic, 1830-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
62. On Princeton, see Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)
63. and Jack W. Stewart, "The Tethered Theology: Biblical Criticism, Common Sense Philosophy, and the Princeton Theologians, 1812-1860" (Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan, 1990)
64. I understand Edwardseanism more genetically in the mode of Sydney Ahlstrom, Religious History, pp. 403-14
65. I have relied on Ruth Alden Doan, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987)
66. David Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800-1850 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985)
67. Gordon D. Pollock, In Search of Security: The Mormons and the Kingdom of God on Earth (New York: Garland, 1989)
68. Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830-1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
69. On sacraments, Hill, Quest, pp. 113-14
70. and Winn, Exiles, pp. 106-51
71. Everard M. Upjohn, Richard Upjohn: Architect and Churchman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939)
72. For the more general movement, see Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968)
73. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 143-57, 272-87
74. Alfred Cave, An American Conservative in the Age of Jackson (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1969), emphasizes Colton's economic thought
75. For the religious dimension, see Cave, "Calvin Colton: An Antebellum Disaffection with the Presbyterian Church," Journal of Presbyterian History 50 (Spring 1972): 39-53
76. Richard E. Wentz, John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a concise study in culture and theology
77. James H. Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), supplies greater detail
78. For overviews of Missouri Synod history, see Walter A. Baepler, A Century of Grace: A History of the Missouri Synod, 1847-1947 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1947)
79. and Abdel Ross Wentz, A Basic History of Lutheranism in America (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1955), pp. 114-36
80. On Walther in particular, see Lewis W. Spitz, The Life of Dr. C. F. W. Walther (St. Louis: Concordia, 1961)
81. and in Conser, Church and Confession, pp. 13-96, 257-63
82. See further Tappert, Lutheran Confessional Theology, and Conser, Church and Confession, pp. 257-73
83. On the dynamics of New England identity after the Great Awakening, see Nathan Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd sen, 31 (1974): 407-30
84. For Bushnell's life, see Robert L. Edwards, Of Singular Genius, Of Singular Grace: A Biography of Horace Bushnell (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1992)
85. For his social and political thought, see Howard A. Barnes, Horace Bushnell and the Virtuous Republic (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991)
86. and Daniel Walker Howe, "The Social Science of Horace Bushnell," Journal of American History 70 (September 1983): 305-22
87. On his views of religious language, see James O. Duke, Horace Bushnell: On the Vitality of Biblical Language (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984)
88. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973); on religion in her later life, pp. 203, 260-63
89. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class
90. and Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840-1900 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986)
91. On Finney's post-1835 development I have relied on Hambrick-Stowe, Finney, pp. 165-298
92. for theological interpretations, compare Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 103-13
93. Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrick-son, 1987), pp. 63-84
94. and Gresham, Finney's Doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit
95. Very sympathetic biographical studies are Harold E. Raser, Phoebe Palmer: Her Life and Thought (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen, 1987)
96. and Charles E. White, The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as Theologian, Revivalist, Feminist, and Humanitarian (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986)
97. But see also Theodore Hovet, "Phoebe Palmer's 'Altar Phraseology' and the Spiritual Dimension of Women's Sphere," Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 264-80