The Democratization of American Christianity
The Democratization of American Christianity
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.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars "We the people" religion
Thanks Mr. Hatch for writing this book!
How did the church in America get to its present position where it fails to realize that the body of Christ is dependent on God raising up distinctly graced individuals to authoritatively, accurately, and relevantly preach the Word? Read this book and find out.
Clearly demonstrates how the church which is supposed to be led by the Spirit of Christ, has instead been disasterously infected by the spirit of '76 since the time of the revolution. God help us!
5 Stars An Eye-Opening "People's History" of American Protestantism
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.
5 Stars A Christian perspective.
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.
5 Stars "Religious Populism" in the Early Republic
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.
5 Stars The Democratization of American Christianity
Bought this for my friend Justin D. Vollmar. Justin mentioned to me that he was so excited to read the book!
Related posts:
- American Originals – Homemade Varieties of Christianity
- American Originals – Homemade Varieties of Christianity
- Why American Christianity is Failing
- The Old Religion in a New World – The History of North American Christianity
- Enlightenment, Deism – The Foremost External Threat to Christianity and the Role It Has Played in American Protestantism
- Religious News Verses: Exporting That Good Ol' American Christianity
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada
- Christless Christianity The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
- Counterfeit Christianity – How Ancient Paganism Mixed with Christianity
- The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787
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Those are some amazing reviews. All 5 stars, that is great! This is one topic I have been interested in ever since I took World Religions in high school. Will be going to read this shortly. Thanks for your post on this topic.
Amazing reviews! I\'m going to use them for my project. Thanks a lot!