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The Democratization of American Christianity

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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)

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.

This well researched and written book is worthy of the honors it has received. This book was suggested to us by our Pastor because of our prevailing struggle with a democratic view of the Church. Even though we are laypersons and not in the academic world, we found this work helpful in pointing to the root of our faulty thinking.

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.

A precis: Hatch's thesis is narrow. The American Revolution spurred the democratization of American Christianity. But, at the same time, Hatch implicitly alludes to the effect of insurgent Christian sects had on American democracy. Hatch limits the book's chronology to c. 1780-1830 and the scope of discussion to the Protestant insurgent faiths of the Methodists, Baptists, Mormons and Christian `generalists' who claimed no specific sect as their own. He does mention in passing the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, but essentially neglects Anglicans, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, except to use them to illustrate a point about one of the other sects. To Hatch, it seems the older, traditional sects were spared the effects of democratization, save losing members to itinerant preachers. The primary effect on religion of the social democratization of the Revolution was to remove religious power from the few hands of the educated and organized traditionalists and put it in many more hands, similar to the Revolution's anti-aristocratic effect on the holders of political power. According to Hatch, anticlericalism gained strength at the end of the 18th century due to a profound upsurge to erase the distinction between gentleman and commoner[,] . . . reflecting the same fundamental division between those who believed in the right of the natural aristocracy to speak for the people and those who did not. (p. 44).

Hatch reads Gordon Wood as suggesting "that this issue was the essence of the struggle between Federalist and Anti-Federalists." (p. 44). Thus, the realm of religion was not immune to the same sorts of battles that were fought in the political arena. The substance of the religious battle was whether the illiterate and unsophisticated majority of Americans should get their religion from the traditional orthodoxy, or should religion be accessible, understandable and a product of individual conscience from itinerant preachers and religious newspapers. The orthodoxy reasoned by analogy that a person would wish to trust his health or property to a properly trained doctor or lawyer, so she should only trust her soul to a properly trained pastor. Logical as the argument might be, simultaneous to the Second Great Awakening, movements democratizing law and medicine were gaining popularity as well. This overall movement toward "democracy," reinforced by the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment, is to Hatch the origin of contemporary differences between the U.S. and other industrialized nations, namely that we have a strongly embedded religious heritage of Christianity in all levels of society, from the richest to the poorest. Removing the exclusive right to interpret the Bible from the hands of Harvard and Yale divinity school graduates and giving it to everyman, limited only to the constraints of his own conscience, was a second American revolution; it could not have happened without the first.

Hatch traces the religious revolution as a personality driven cult, the message occasionally lost to the drama of the speaker. The purpose of the insurgent sects was similar to that of the new political party system emerging at the same time. The preachers wanted to fill camp meetings, converting new souls. The politicians wanted to fill offices with candidates loyal to the party.

Though the book is important and takes us a step closer to understanding the depth of democratization on American social history (as opposed to political history), there is much to criticize. First, "democracy" is not an easy or clear-cut term. Hatch uses it alternately to mean individualism, anti-intellectualism, popular culture, popular sovereignty, leveling, anti-aristocracy and ignorance; his grails of democratic religious culture are individual conscience, interpretation of Scripture in light of daily experience and the use of the vernacular in music, newspapers and sermons. One must be careful when using a word of art in a crossover context. Democracy is a political term; to use it as a religious term, one must do so carefully, beginning with a clear definition. Hatch does not.

Second, though Hatch does stick with his thesis-the impact of democracy on Christianity-he does not develop the underlying counter-thesis, the impact of Christianity on democracy. To have done so would have logically widened the scope of the book while maintaining the integrity of the argument. And, students of American political history would have benefited as well as those of religious history.

Last, his discussion of the relevance of music to his thesis is tantalizing, but ultimately inadequate. Hatch introduces the relation of music to the democratization of religion and gives a brief discussion of how popular music was born. However, he glosses over, in one sentence, the mutual influence of blacks and whites on religious music in the 18th century Methodist churches, before the birth of A.M.E.

At times, he tests the waters of popular culture, but when he jumps in, he is immerses himself in only white culture of the time. He neglects, like many historians, the primary place of African-American culture in all American popular culture. If Hatch is truly interested in the effect of 19th century democratization on the modern world, he should explore a little farther into the history of African-American spirituals.

In a PC world, African-American is the only true mixed ethnic designation. Africans, because of their forced segregation from whites, retained much culture, musical and otherwise, from before the middle passage. This retained ethnicity merged with American culture, first in the white churches and in the plantation fields, then in freedom, to form a call-and-response relationship in music. Call and response was super-imposed on the traditional African drumming, and a form of music (removed from its sectarian origins) evolved in the secular world, a form called the Blues. Over time and geography, the Blues evolved into jazz and rock-and-roll as alternate branches of the same family tree. Though not the topic of the book, this evolution warrants at least a footnote.

In "The Democratization of American Christianity," author Nathan O. Hatch looks at five Protestant religious traditions that became "mass movements" between 1780 and 1830: Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, the black churches, and the "Christians." Hatch analyzes these five groups and finds that they broke free of the restraints imposed by the more established churches and, as a result, had a democratic influence on their followers. Hatch argues that "the theme of democratization is central to understanding the development of American Christianity" (p. 3). Hatch believes that the leaders of these movements were "outsiders, interlopers, and marginal men who created the turmoil, defined the issues, formed the organizations, and preached the gospel that captured the hearts and minds of so many citizens" (p. 46).

Hatch shows how the diversity of the five groups created an atmosphere of freedom of choice in the early Republic. Hatch celebrates this diversity because it resulted in the Christianization of America. Hatch sees the religious diversity as a democratizing process and contributing to the Christianizing of America. Therefore, Hatch tends to see the movements as inclusive. Hatch also views the movements as helping to spread democracy and democratic ideas. The religious leaders of the five groups spoke the language of the people, they defended the rights of people to make their own religious choices according to their own individual thoughts, and they exhibited a religious conviction that contributed to the rise of a "populist impulse." These movements empowered ordinary people because they took their beliefs at face value and they did not have to follow orthodox doctrines or respected clergy. Hatch also believes this was a democratic movement because theses religious outsiders had little sense of their limitations. They were breaking the chains of authoritarian control. People were given a chance to think and act for themselves rather than depending on an educated elite. These leaders used democratic persuasions to reconstruct the foundations of religious authority. Hatch sees the changes in politics shaping religion, as the early republic became more democratic, so did religion. Hatch sees America shaping religion.

Hatch makes an interesting argument in his book. He attacks elitists who have refused to credit the contributions of "lesser" religions. Hatch tends to subordinate religion to politics; that political influences are the prime movers of the society that enable the variety of religions to take off. Hatch deemphasizes the importance of religious beliefs and tends to ignore many of the traditions that laid the groundwork for their development in the early republic. However, Hatch has written a work that helps to place religion within the framework of changes taking place within American society as a whole.

Nathan O. Hatch uses the second sentence of The Democratization of American Christianity to inform the reader that the book argues "both that the theme of democratization is central to understanding the development of American Christianity, and that the years of the early republic are the most crucial in revealing that process" (3). To this end, Hatch focuses on the diffusion of the Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Disciples of Christ, and African-American Christians across post-revolutionary America as a challenge to more established denominations, like the New England Congregationalists and Virginia Anglicans, and political elites.

The brilliance of Hatch's argument lies in its illustration of a confluence of Protestant growth with the expansion of democratic thought and application in the country. The book's most central contribution to the study of American Christianity is the concept of "religious populism" in the early republic, which at once speaks to the American Christianity's innovative ability to reach out to various populations, and to the loyalty to American religion that such outreach efforts endeared among its adherents. In some sense, a demand for less-elitist, more-egalitarian forms of worship and congregational life existed, and the predominantly unlettered, zealous, "bold intruders" (aka ministers) of faith adapted preach styles and techniques to meet that demand.

The book begins to fill a gap in our understanding of religious life in 1780s and 1790s America. In the historiographical section--a must-read for any scholar--"Redefining the Second Great Awakening: A Note on the Study of Christianity in the Early Republic," Hatch confronts the question of difficulties surrounding the religious history of the early national period. "There are more generalizations and less solid data on the dynamics of American religion in this period than in any other in our history" (p. 220). Though he cannot single-handedly erase this deficiency, Hatch, for his part, has crafted a needed work that illumines the power of popular religious movements through the actions and travels of their dynamic leaders.

The stars of The Democratization of American Christianity are Lorenzo Dow, Alexander Campbell, Richard Allen, Francis Asbury, Joseph Smith, John Leland, and other religious leaders. Hatch builds his case for a popularizing religion on the backs of deft religious leadership and their success at movement-building. Although these Christian "insurgents" held differing beliefs and employed various techniques, these men excelled at popular written and verbal communication, triggered a revolt against Christian tradition, and inaugurated a new era of religious life in America. Hatch's portrayal of early America's religious leaders presents them as revolutionaries, not wholly unlike the colonials in Philadelphia who laid an ideological foundation for the Revolution.

Christian adherents and secular historians alike will benefit from this excellent account of Christianity's democratic and westward shift in the early republic. The Democratization of American Christianity is neither dogmatic nor apologetic. Well-researched and brilliantly-conceived, the book locates the spread of American Christianity within a post-Revolutionary context marked by less paternalistic and more populist ideas. To that end, "the most striking evidence of the democratization of Christianity in the early republic was that black preachers successfully laid claim to 'the sacred desk'" (p. 112). Hatch's book and Gordon Woods' Pulitzer-Prize winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution demonstrate the fertility within the first generations of American nationals for popular democracy and religious zeal.

Hatch's emphasis on movement-making and the management of revivals distorts his analysis of Christianity's spread across America by limiting or excluding any discussion of spiritual renewal. The fault, however, is now entirely his. The historical profession remains largely incapable of documenting and validating the role of spiritual activity within the human condition. Historians are much more comfortable attributing mass religious conversions and life-changing ideals to marketing techniques and popular political environments. Yet, when the eighteenth-century camp meetings and preachers awakened "spiritual convulsions" in revival participants, it seems incumbent upon scholars to more fully examine and evaluate peoples' interaction with God in religion. That said, Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity is a bold step in a constructive direction; a step that the current and future field of historian would do well to follow.

Hatch pits John Leland up against Isaac Backus in regards to Calvinism. I did some checking and though Leland was a strict Jeffersonian he was still an orthodox Calvinist. Leland and Backus had more in common theologically than not.

That said, this is a masterful book on how the Revolutionary war completely turned American Christianity on its head and the populist movements began. The educated clergy was looked down upon as grassroots, rough-and-tumble preachers popped up from all over the American landscape. This had a great impact on theology as well as Calvinism was seen as elitist and tyrannical.

Hatch traces the growth of the Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Disciples of Christ and Black Churches respectively.

Hatch has a smooth writing style that is never dry or choppy. This is a book that every theologian, student of Church History and American History needs in their library. Hatch does a good job and showing how the Revolution and the birth of America led eventually to the birth of modern American Christianity.

One of the best historical works I've read is The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). by Nathan Hatch. As a professor of history and vice president for Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Notre Dame, Hatch clearly oc¬cupies an established niche in academia and writes as a professional historian. This book received the 1988 Albert C. Outler Prize in Ecumenical Church History from the American Society of Church History as well as the 1989 prize for best book in the history of the early republic from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. But it's more than a learned treatise for historians--it's a well-told, masterful tale, one which helps us grasp important aspects of this nation's religious experience. The title announces the book's thesis: Hatch "argues both that the theme of democratization is central to understanding the development of American Christianity, and that the years of the early republic are the most crucial in revealing that process" (p. 3). In that era revivalism, a "wave of popular religious movements," mainly inspired and di¬rected by Baptist and Methodist preachers, christi¬anized the fledgling nation by mid-century.
Given the democratic tendencies sparked by the American Revolution--"the most crucial event in American history" (p. 5)--those religious movements which incorporated demo¬cratic ideology and polity most easily prospered. Between 1780 and 1830, uniquely American approaches established what we no label "evangelical" churches, and this emergence "of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution" (p. 9). Ordinary men and women, many of them marked by the rough practicality of the frontier, installed an Americanist version of the Christian faith in the new nation. They had little interest in European traditions, formal education, or theological subtleties. Thus they nurtured and followed "populist" preachers--largely self-educated leaders like the Methodist itinerant Lorenzo Dow who freely charted their own course. According to Dow, "larning isn't religion, and eddication don't give a man the power of the Spirit. It is the grace and gifts that furnish the real live coals from off the altar. St. Peter was a fisherman--do you think he ever went to Yale College?" (p. 20).
Democratic forces tended to disestablish the learned professions, law and medicine as well as the ministry. In "back country" regions, dissent thrived and democratic impulses throbbed. "In the wake of the Revolution, dissenters con¬founded the establishment with an approach to theological matters that was nothing short of guerilla warfare. The coarse language, earthy humor, biting sarcasm, and commonsense reasoning of their attacks appealed to the uneducated but left the professional clergy without a ready defense. The very ground rules of religious life were at stake" (p. 34). The ground rules shifted. People embraced populist preachers and democratic evangelicalism triumphed. New evangelistic methods, most notably the camp meeting, took American Chris¬tianity in novel directions. When Lorenzo Dow tried to im¬plant the camp meeting in England, Metho¬dist leaders opposed it, finding offensive its "uncensored testimonials," emotionalism, and "use of folk music that would have chilled the marrow of Charles Wesley" (p. 50). But America, the camp meetings helped Methodists and Baptists reach "common" men and women; just as Andrew Jackson inaugurated the era of the "common man," so too evangelicals inaugurated the church of the common man. With some accuracy Michael Chevalier described frontier camp meetings as "'festivals of democracy'" (p. 58).
The individualism, as well as the democracy, of the new nation also shaped American Christianity. The proliferation of new religious move¬ments, ranging from Freewill Baptists to Universalists, from Disciples of Christ to Mormons, from Cumberland Presbyterians to Shakers, testifies to the fact that individuals freely launched and embraced a multitude of denominations, sects, and cults. The freedom which enabled Methodist circuit riders to adapt to their audience and call into being a distinctive American Methodism also enabled less "orthodox" prophets to successfully cast their nets into the turbulent waters of the new republic.
In a democratic society, where the will of the majority prevails, religious as well as political leaders must court the masses. Still more: they must grant each person the right to think for oneself, for the "new ground rules measured theology by its acceptance in the marketplace" (p. 162). Charles Finney, clearly the most successful reviva¬list, openly "called for a Copernican revolution to make religious life audience-cen¬tered. He des¬pised the formal study of divinity because it prod¬uced dull and ineffective communica¬tion" (p. 197).
Alarmed by such tendencies, Philip Schaff and John Nevin, scholarly architects of the Mercersburg Theology, asserted: "Anyone who has, or fancies that he has, some inward experience and a ready tongue, may persuade himself that he is called to be a reformer; and so proceed at once, in his spir¬itual vanity and pride, to a revolutionary rupture with the historical life of the church, to which he hold himself immeasurably superior" (p. 165). As German Reformed theologians, they knew traditional theologies, such as their own Calvinism, stood at a disadvantage in the struggle for the hearts of independent-minded Americans who instinc¬tively sided with "free will" Methodistic proclamation.
Hatch argues that the churches which reached the common man, preeminently the Methodists and Baptists, democratized American Christianity. They are, he argues, more important than the more sedate and scholarly churches which have frequently provided the focus for historians' presentations of American church history. Much like Timothy Smith, in Revivalism and Social Reform, Hatch insists we understand the religious dynamic of this nation by getting in touch with the distinctively democratic movements which shaped it. Rich with anecdotes and illustrations, thoughtfully analytical, balanced and judicious, this is a marvelous historical work.

If you want to understand why the twenty-first century American Evengelical Church is rife with heretical teachings and outright apostasy, read this book. In The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch demonstrates how the American Revolution spawned the so-called Second Great Awakening, a religious rebellion, which led to an abandonment of Orthodox Christianity in favor of a pluralism that plagues American Protestantism to this very day. The egalitarian values of the Enlightenment that dominated the American conscience of the early nineteenth century allowed a host of false teachers to lead a revolt of the laity against a clergy that, while Biblically Orthodox in their doctrine, had allowed affluance and intellectualism to overcome their sense of Christian charity. Spicing their sermons with coarse language, emotional appeals, Jeffersonian quotations, quaint stories and rabald humor, these populists taught that every individual must interpret the scriptures according to their own conscience. These "teachings" led to an "anything goes Christianity" that included the embracing of such heresies as Arminianism, Mormanism, Perfectionism and Universalism, the apostasy of Unitarianism and even Transcendentalism: anything other than Biblical Orthodoxy. One hundred and fifty years later, this pluralism continues to permeate American Protestanism, currently manifesting itself in the Emerging Church movement, which is a blending of Christianity with New Age spiriualism that denies the authority of scripture itself. Though Hatch does not set out to do so, he demonstrates the great truth that heresy always leads to apostasy.