The Democratization of American Christianity [Paperback]

Nathan O. Hatch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 1991

A reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American Republic, arguing that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. This book was co-winner of the 1990 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hatch examines the Christian movement, the Methodists, the Baptists, the black churches and the Mormons in early America to show how powerful influence was often exerted by common people, thanks to the democratization of religion.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (January 23, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300050607
• ISBN-13: 978-0300050608
• Product Dimensions: 2 x 1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A "must-read" for anyone "doing theology" in America November 6, 1998

By [e-mail] (Jeff Ahonen)

Format:Paperback

I always like a book in which the author sets out his or her thesis clearly. In this case, such a statement comes in the first two sentences of Chapter 1!

"This book is about the cultural and religious history of the early American republic and the enduring structures of American Christianity. It argues both that the theme of democratization is central to the understanding the development of American Christianity and that the years of the early republic are the most crucial in revealing the that process." (p. 3)

But the clear thesis statement is not the only reason why I enjoyed reading "The Democratization of American Christianity." In presenting his argument, Hatch tells a highly entertaining story about a fascinating time in the history of the American Protestantism. It was a time filled with such colorful characters as Barton Stone, Francis Asbury, Lorenzo Dow, and Charles Grandison Finney. It was a time during which developed such famous -- or perhaps infamous -- American Church institutions as the circuit rider, the camp meeting, and "the anxious bench." And, most importantly -- as Professor Hatch points out -- it was the time during which the spirit of independence and democratic idealism that had propelled the Americans successfully through the Revolutionary War seeped into the American churches, giving shape to the distinctive form of Christianity in present-day America.

In this 312-page book, Hatch examines five separate religious traditions, or "mass movements," as he terms them, that played upon the American stage during the early 19th Century: the Christian movement, the Methodists, the Baptists, the black churches, and the Mormons. Despite the wide-ranging theological opinions represented among these distinct bodies, "they all offered common people, especially the poor, compelling visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence." (p. 4) Moreover, these movements "took shape around magnetic leaders who were highly skilled in communication and group mobility." (p. 4) Hatch studies these men and others who rose to distinction on the American religious scene from the 1780s to the 1830s. He finds that "the fundamental religious debates in the early republic were not merely a clash of intellectual and theological differences but also a passionate social struggle with power and authority." (p. 14) Hence, the story of American religion within this time frame mirrors the story of American politics; both tell "how ordinary folk came to distrust leaders of genius and talent and to defend the right of common people to shape their own faith and submit to leaders of their own choosing." (Ibid.)

Such a profound change within the religious realm implies a fundamental shift in theology. Indeed, the rise of popular religious leaders unschooled in theology did result in theological competition, with the popular theology eventually winning out. This is due, in large measure, to the transfer of authority regarding religious matters from the Bible to the sovereign mind of man:

"The study of religious convictions of self-taught Americans in the early years of the republic reveals how much weight was placed on private judgment and how little on the roles of history, theology, and the collective will of the Church. . . . This shift occurred gradually and without fanfare because innovators could exploit arguments as old and as trusted as Protestantism itself. Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and Backus had all argued for the principle of sola scriptura; unschooled Americans merely argued that they were fulfilling that same mandate. Yet, in the assertion that private judgment should be the ultimate tribunal in religious matters, common people started a revolution." (p. 182)

Also significant were the means by which the new dogma was spread, and Hatch provides a penetrating analysis of these factors as well. The rise of the untrained preachers points to the fact that the ordained clergy "had lost their unrivaled position as authoritative sources of information." (p. 125) Preaching became "increasingly folk- rather than clergy-dominated." (p. 133) Moreover, popular religious newspapers provided a new forum for dissemination of ideas, "the grand engine of a burgeoning religious culture, the primary means of promotion for, and bond of union within, competing religious groups." (p. 126) The medium of music was employed as well, as new folk hymnody was

developed. Consequently, "[b]y systematically employing lay preachers, by exploiting a golden age of local publishing, and by spreading new forms of religious folk music, they ensured the forceful delivery of their message." (p. 127)

Religious populism even today "has remained a creative, if unsettling force at the fringes of major Protestant denominations. . . . American clergy have remained subject to democratic forces." (p. 16) "[T]he people continue to serve as custodians for their own beliefs, communicating them in understandable terms." (p. 218) This democratic ideal, penetrating more deeply into the soul of the American church than any theological dogma, has resulted in a polarization in American Christianity, as the two camps are drawn in opposing directions. The leaders of the mainline Protestants are oriented toward the norms of "high culture" and are "irresistibly pulled toward values and attitudes prevalent in the modern academic world." (Ibid.) The opposite side is populated by the Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who "share all the virtues and vices of popular culture" and -- most significantly -- have embraced social institutions and subcultures that "are still populist through and through, reflecting the deepest convictions of their own constituencies and anointing new leaders by virtue of their popular appeal. . . . They will not surrender to learned experts the right to think for themselves." (p. 219) As Hatch concludes: "For two centuries Americans have refused to defer sensitive matters of conscience to the staid graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They have taken faith into their own hands and molded it according to the aspirations of everyday life. American Christianity continues to be powered by ordinary people and by the contagious spirit of their efforts to storm heaven by the back door." (Ibid)

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Class-Oriented Hatch Delivers October 22, 2001

By Cory R. Hartman

Format:Paperback

Hatch's approach to the religion of the early republic is to define the principal conflict along class lines--the educated, eastern, Reformed, Federalist establishment versus the unschooled, western, anti-creedal, Jeffersonian populists. Judging from the prizes this book has won, numerous historians have considered it a landmark perspective on the early republic and subsequent American epochs, which must be taken into account in any future study.

Hatch marshals a copious amount of testimonial evidence as to the methods and convictions of both the religious populists and the clerical aristocrats against whom they rebelled. Unquestionably, Hatch is on to an integral part of early 19th-century religious life. Unfortunately, though, we are left to take Hatch's word for exactly how much this class warfare dominated the religious landscape. Hatch provides little statistical evidence to back up the populists' claims of a vast gulf between rich and poor, and one is left wondering about an excluded middle. Imagine writing an account of the religious history of our time purely from the quotes of Jerry Falwell and Ted Turner, and you see the problem--a vast, silent middle ground of religious opinion is neglected amid the rhetorical blasts of the polarized belligerents.

He never clearly locates the middle class (such as the mercantile bourgeoisie of New York City) on his socio-religious spectrum, only mentioning them in his penultimate chapter, which addresses the years 1830-1860. Similarly, though Hatch mentions a few counter-cultural educated Jeffersonians like Francis Asbury and Jefferson himself, he does not explore their unique fit into this era. Likewise, he implies that the entire under-class rejected clerical authority, never explicitly commenting on whether or not any of the illiterate laity remained faithful to their religious betters during this time.

Despite these silences, Hatch's exciting work provides the basis for a new paradigm in the study of American religious history. After tracing the theme of religious democratization up to the Civil War, he briefly sketches the theme through the 20th century in an epilogue. Anyone who has lived and moved in contemporary evangelical circles plainly sees the cyclical legacy of the early republic: a determined populist insurgency rebels against moribund, worldly religious institutions, but in the following generation, the insurgency itself becomes institutionalized and establishes rapport with higher culture, providing the ground for a new populist insurgency to arise. With an evangelical in the White House and upper-middle-class evangelical churches and institutions entrenched in the suburbs, it would seem the dialectic may be about to turn again, especially if current evangelical materialism becomes full-blown apostasy in the succeeding generation.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Eye-Opening "People's History" of American Protestantism December 12, 2008

By E. L. Fay

Format:Paperback

The United States is unique among its peers due to the strong religiosity of its people in comparison to other Western industrial powers. "The Democratization of American Christianity" by Nathan O. Hatch, a highly influential scholar of American religious studies and current president of Wake Forest University, argues that this is due to the ongoing force of a populist strain of Protestant thought that first arose in the 1790s with the widespread demand that the Revolutionary rhetoric of freedom and democracy be fully realized in politics, society, and, inevitably, religion. The Second Great Awakening, which ran through the 1830s, was a time of millennial experimentation and renewal, as well as upheaval within the old Calvinist denominations.

Impoverished Americans of the early nineteenth century have been nevertheless described as a "set of fierce republicans" fully aware of the Revolutionary promises of liberty and equality. The preachers of the Second Great Awakening frequently reminded their audiences of the humble origins of Christ and his early followers, as well as their oppression by the ruling classes - a theme that blended nicely with the fervent Jeffersonianism that characterized the early American republic. The post-Revolutionary era saw the rapid growth of newspapers, volunteer societies, the organization of political parties, new definitions of citizenship and the role of women, and virulent attacks on elite professions, especially the clergy. As forms of hierarchy in all areas of life began to collapse, radical Jeffersonians began to reclaim the Revolutionary rhetoric, which had once united colonists from all walks of life, to rouse the common folk against "aristocrats." Drawing on the anti-Federalists, they scorned the idea of society as an organic chain of command and argued that it was instead a veritable motley crew of competing interests. Dissent, in other words, came to be defined against accepted tradition, especially as the rush to settle the frontier removed many citizens from established centers of authority. Meanwhile, the deterioration of their economic prospects in the 1780s and '90s, despite promises of prosperity, only deepened the rural poor's resentment and sense of social alienation. Within this milieu the "coarse language, earthy humor, biting sarcasm, and commonsense reasoning" of backcountry preachers held enormous appeal and left educated ministers at a loss. Instead of respecting "tradition, learning, solemnity and decorum," upstarts such as John Leland, Alexander Campbell, Lorenzo Dow, and Francis Asbury exalted the individual conscience.

For all their differences, however, each of the upstart leaders and sects arising out of the Second Great Awakening stressed the simple motifs of sin, grace, and conversion. They embraced spontaneous experience and dismissed any religion that struck them as cold, detached, and intellectual. Unlike their predecessors of in the eighteenth century, they quite self-consciously threw off the weighted traditions of the past and rejected learned theology; they also demanded that clergy and laity be placed on equal footing, sought to create a new history that called for inquiry and innovation, and, above all, proclaimed the inalienable right of every Christian to read and understand the Bible for themselves. The story of Christianity since the time of the Apostles, they charged, has been a sad conspiracy of elite clerics to keep the full Truth out of the hands of the people to enrich their own power. Stone and Campbell pushed this logic to its extreme and renounced any form of church government; Stone and his colleagues even dissolved their own organization. There can be no creed, many argued, but the Bible. This was a crucial departure from the First Great Awakening, which had not gone so far as to use the Bible itself to combat theology, history, and tradition. The Bible also provided solid footing for a populace shaken by rootlessness, political controversy, and fragmentation.

Despite the radically decentralized nature of most of the period's religious movements - their overemphasis on subjectivity destabilized them in the long run - Hatch's book draws a clear line of descent from Second Great Awakening leaders such as Alexander Campbell, Elias Smith, Lorenzo Dow, John Leland, Francis Asbury, James O'Kelly, and Barton W. Stone and such modern Christians as Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, the late Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, Kathryn Kuhlman, Robert Schuller, and Jimmy Swaggart. The true power of American Christianity, Hatch asserts, has been its recognition of the supernatural in everyday life while maintaining the characteristically American values of autonomy and popular sovereignty. Fundamentalism, the Holiness movement, and Pentecostalism - dismissed by critics as "holdovers from an age of rural simplicity" - continue as vital spiritual forces to this day, especially among the rural Southern poor and urban working classes in the Midwest.

Nevertheless, too many historians, Hatch claims, have dismissed the early American republic as a mere epilogue to the Revolutionary years and prologue to the Jacksonian era. The result has been an unfortunate lack of scholarship covering this period, as well as little recognition of the continuity between the Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. What little work that has been done has all too often merely reinforced the tired stereotype of religion as tool of social control and repression. In order to demonstrate the inherently populist character of American Christianity that has distinguished it from other Western nations, Hatch draws extensively on both modern scholarship and a wide variety of contemporary pamphlets, sermons, religious journals, memoirs, journals, and letters. Most intriguing, however, is his inclusion of an appendix of anticlerical and anti-Calvinist songs and poems by ordinary Americans that "translate theological concepts into language of the marketplace, personalize theological abstractions, deflate the pretensions of privileged church leaders, and instill hope and confidence in popular collective action." Many were extracted from songbooks published by Elias Smith and Lorenzo Dow, demonstrating not only the spiritual sentiments of ordinary folk but of their leaders as well. All in all, "The Democratization of American Christianity" comes highly recommended, especially for anyone wondering at the comparatively religious character of American society.