Evangelicalism needs to be understood not only as a
religious movement, but also as a social movement. As such, it
was an integral part of a broader organizational revolution that
transformed nineteenth-century American society. For the most
part, eighteenth-century Americans lived their lives within
hierarchically ordered institutions. They were oriented
primarily to place, and they valued order and stability in their
families, work lives, and communities. Communities were composed
of a recognizable set of "ranks and orders" in which the higher
orders governed and the lower orders were expected to defer to
the greater wisdom and virtue of their betters. Families were
mini-hierarchies governed by male heads of household who sought
suitable marriages for their daughters and tried to place their sons in
appropriate occupations. By the early nineteenth century, however, Americans increasingly had become a people in
motion, constantly moving across social and geographical space.
Under the force of this fluidity, families, towns, and
occupational structures lost much of their traditional capacity
to regulate individual and social life. Instead, Americans
devised a different kind of institutional order as they turned to
an increasingly dense fabric of new organizationsreligious
sects and denominations, voluntary societies of various sorts,
and political partiesto give needed structure and direction
to their lives.
Historians have usually looked to political parties,
reform societies like temperance organizations, or fraternal
associations like the Masons for the origins of this new
associational order. In fact, evangelicals were its earliest and most energetic inventors. Indeed, as historian
Donald Mathews has pointed out, the Second Great Awakening was an
innovative and highly effective organizing process. Religious
recruitment was intensely local, a species of grass-roots
organizing designed to draw people into local
congregations. But recruitment into a local Baptist, Methodist,
or Universalist church also inducted people into a national
organization and affiliational network that they could participate
in wherever they moved. Moreover, adherence to a
particular evangelical denomination also inducted them into the
broader evangelical campaign. Conversion thus not only brought
communicants into a new relationship to God, it also brought them
into a new and powerful institutional fabric that
provided them with personal discipline, a sense of fellowship, and channeled their benevolent obligations in
appropriate directions. Aggressively exploiting a wide variety
of new print media, evangelicals launched their own newspapers
and periodicals and distributed millions of devotional and reform
tracts. (By 1835, the cross-denominational American Tract
Society and the American Sunday School Union alone distributed
more than 75 million pages of religious material and were capable
of delivering a new tract each month to every household in New
York City.) They deployed home missionaries, circuit-riding preachers, and agents from town to town preaching revivals,
organizing new churches and religious reform societies, and
distributing Bibles and other religious materials. By the
l830s, these devices, in conjunction with the aggressive
revivalism that was the hallmark of the new evangelicalism, had
assembled a huge new evangelical public. Not for nothing did
evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike dub this new religious
phalanx the "Evangelical Empire."
Guiding Student Discussion
One way to help students understand the character and scope
of this religious mobilization is to see it as analogous in form
and comparable in scale to the new democratic politics associated
with the Jacksonian era. Just as a new form of politics emerged
in which the pursuit of power came to center on
intense, organized competition for the allegiance of
an expanding democratic electorate, so too did religion come to
revolve around the intense competition of religious bodies old
and new to win adherents of their particular
belief. Sects and denominations thus can be seen as directly
analogous to political parties. Similarly, just as the new-style
politicians like Martin van Buren made their mark as much by
their skill as organizers as by their oratory, so too
did new-style evangelical clergymen like Methodist John Asbury,
Congregational-Presbyterian Lyman Beecher, or Universalist
Alexander Campbell. When viewed from this perspective, the
religious practices associated most fully with evangelicalism
represent what historian Nathan Hatch has referred to as "the
democratization of American religion."
Just as the intense competition for their votes seemed to enshrine "the people" as
the ultimate arbiter of politics, so too did the competition for
religious adherents give communicants power. To succeedto
win electionspoliticians had to fashion their message to the
needs and interests of their constituents; similarly, if a
clergyman wanted to win and hold adherents, he had to fit his
preaching to the spiritual needs of his communicants.
Individual communicants were great preacher shoppers, ever ready
to abandon a "cold" and "formal" preacher for someone from a
different denomination whose "edifying" preaching was more to
their liking. Congregations readily dismissed clergymen whose
preaching failed to move them or whose other ministrations fell
short. But the tie between democracy and evangelicalism was even
stronger. Not only had religion become more democratic, it was
in itself a democratizing force. Evangelicalism reinforced the
growing sense of the sovereign power of the individual: it made
the individual's own religious experiencenot the clergy's
learning and authority, not formal creeds and doctrinesthe
ultimate spiritual arbiter. Moreover, for evangelical converts,
self-esteem came not from secular social status but from
spiritual standing, measured by intensity of feeling and
dedication to evangelical disciplines. The respect of their
brothers and sisters in the faith was more important to them than
external social standing. They counted themselves in no way
inferior to any person who possessed mere wealth and secular
prominence.
Ideas about conversion, revival strategies, new modes of
organizingall these things were essential to the extraordinary growth of early nineteenth-century evangelicalism. But in the end they are not sufficient to account for its prosperity.
It is the appeal of evangelicalism for so many Americans that
needs to be explained. To get at this question we need to place
evangelicalism in the context of what historian Gordon Wood has
called a "social and cultural revolution as great as any in
American history." No longer a relatively stable order
in which people occupied a recognizable secure place, American
society seemed to have become a chaotic jumble in which few
things remained unchanged and few people remained in the same
place, a scramble of aspiring individuals moving from place to
place and situation to situation in what Abraham Lincoln called
"the race of life." Americans embraced this new society as
unprecedentedly democratic, a land of vast opportunity
in which the individual (so long as he was male and white) was
free to rise to whatever position his talent and effort took him.
But if American society held out unprecedented opportunity for
"rise," "betterment," and "improvement," it was also a site of
uncertainty, isolation, frustration, and anxiety.
For many, evangelicalism provided a counterworld to the
chaos and isolation of American life and an antidote to its
insecurities and anxieties. Just as had Puritanism,
evangelicalism held out a vision of order, direction, and
discipline and provided its adherents with the sense of security
that came with the salvational promise. As they enlisted
themselves in God's plan for history, "the world" lost its hold
over them. But whereas Puritanism had involved a kind of
breaking of the penitents' will, the practical
Arminianism of evangelicalism actually strengthened its communicants' sense of
the power of their own will. Evangelical conversion did not
break the will of sinners, but energized and redirected it, giving
them a powerful sense of control in their lives. People came out
of conversion not with a sense of the incapacity of the human
will, but as Christian activists imbued with a strong sense of
the power of their own individual will. In this
sense, in fact, evangelical activism can be seen not simply as a
response to the new individualism but as an expression of it.
Indeed, though cast in a different idiom, the moral perfectionism
within much of evangelicalism was not very far from the ethic of
self-reliance preached by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Finally, evangelicalism inducted its communicants into an
institutional setting that was in many ways the direct opposite
of the chaotic, competitive, isolated, and lonely world of
everyday life. Evangelical churches were essentially affectional
communities, gatherings of the like-minded and like-feeling that
were organized around ideas of mutual concern, love, and
obligation. Church membership was not simply a matter of going
to church on Sunday. It involved participation in prayer
meetings, other worship sessions like the Methodist "class
meetings" and "love feasts," and in various allied charitable
societies, all of which reinforced a sense of fellowship and
obligation. Devotional forms were often highly communal. Sunday
worship services deployed various forms of collective
participation including the increased singing of hymns. In
addition, enlistment in an evangelical church involved accepting
rules for behaving towards each other that were designed to
counter the conflict of the outside world. For
example, church members were forbidden from bringing lawsuits
against each other, and many churches set up mechanisms for
adjudicating conflicts between communicants. Church members,
moreover, were charged to tend to the needs of the less fortunate
among them and offer aid to other communicants who had suffered
misfortune. People often sought employers or employees, business
partners, and marriage partners from the ranks of their coreligionists. And when they moved on, often one of the first things they did when they entered a new town was to seek the fellowship of a comforting church.
Donald Scott was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1985-86.
He has taught at the University of Chicago, North Carolina State
University, Brown University, the New School, and is currently Dean of
Social Science and Professor of
History at Queens College / City University of New York. He is the
author of From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850
(1978), America's Families: A Documentary History (1982, with Bernard
Wishy), The Pursuit of Liberty (1996, with R. J. Wilson, et al.); and he
is the co-editor of The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and
American Culture (1993). He is currently at work on a book entitled
Theatres of the Mind:
Knowledge and Democracy in 19th-Century America.
Address comments or questions to Professor Scott through TeacherServe "Comments and Questions."