Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989)
In his classic work of revisionist social history, The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch explores popular religious culture in America from the end of the Revolutionary era through the Second Great Awakening (c. 1780 – 1830). Previous scholarship had defined religion of the early republic as rather subdued and tame. The Second Great Awakening was seen as conservative, intellectually respectable, and institutionally cohesive. Its religious debates generally took the form of sedate gentlemen’s tussles over theological differences. The authoritative description of Finney’s revivalism belonged to historian Paul Johnson, who described it as “order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois” (225). Hatch’s book combats these historiographical trends and paints a markedly different picture of religion in the early republic. Bypassing established denominations and arcane theology, Hatch directs his attention on popular religious movements, such as the Disciples of Christ, the Methodists, the Baptists, the black churches, and the Mormons. These groups, he finds, were animated by a passionate struggle with power and authority and embodied a Jeffersonian spirit of egalitarianism and democratization. Far from conservative and repressive, the early republic represented “the most centrifugal epoch in American church history” (15).
“Crazy” Lorenzo Dow, an independent quasi-Methodist itinerant, is one of the most interesting democratic figures Hatch delivers from archival obscurity (36-40; 130-33). An eccentric supernaturalist and a radical Jeffersonian, he was a formidable force on the revival scene. People flocked to this extemporaneous preacher with disheveled clothes and long hair, who bellowed coarse and humorous sermons on the dictates of individual conscience, the necessity of the peasantry to think for themselves, and the moral bankruptcy of traditional authorities and upper classes. Dow was famous for reducing an entire audience to its knees in the throes of ecstasy (below).
Especially relevant to my own interests is Hatch’s thorough work on the print culture of the period. The influence of pamphlets, booklets, tracts, hymnbooks, journals, and newspapers on the current of democratization cannot be underestimated. Popular religious publishing barely existed in 1800; by 1830, the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society produced over one million Bibles and six million tracts annually. The Methodist Christian Advocate claimed a circulation of twenty-five thousand weekly (141). An estimated four hundred thousand subscriptions to religious journals were recorded circa 1830 (142). But even these numbers pale in comparison to the frenetic output of William Miller and the Adventists, who produced a whopping four million pieces of literature in four years during the 1830s, including fascinating visual material such as the esoteric charts illustrating the coming of 1843 apocalypse (see below). These various religious publications competed for readership, employing the “democratic power of persuasion” to appeal to capricious religious seekers. The medium utilized “communication strategies that conspired against any form of social distinction,” such as vulgar language, wicked satire, appealing visual aids, and sharp ridicule of learned clergymen (25).
Hatch takes evident pride in describing the early republic’s democratic welter. His is a deeply American story—it showcases the best of American values, making us feel better for being Americans. But such a flag-waving history has major blind spots.
Hatch takes the freedom, egalitarianism, and empowerment of the common folk professed by early republican populists wholly at face value. Hatch never questions the contradictions of Jeffersonian ideals of freedom and equality during a time characterized by chattel slavery, the near-total absence of women’s rights, and the increasing marginalization of native Americans. (Aside from ten politically inert pages on “the flowering of African-American Christianity” concentrating mostly on free blacks (102-113), slavery is hardly mentioned at all.) At minimum, I think that Hatch’s populist democratization needs to be eminently qualified as a movement with an overwhelmingly white and male face. What is ultimately needed, however, is a steely-eyed analysis of how “freedom” was developed in this period by white men—not merely to the exclusion of other groups, but on the backs of other groups.
I also think that Hatch’s book could benefit from some attention to the historicity of the concepts of freedom, choice, and individualism. What I mean is that these concepts themselves, it seems to me, became their own form of establishment. What arrests my attention about early America is not that everyone was savoring their own individualism, but that they professed radical individualism as a group. Not that they insisted on making their own choices, but that the making of choices itself became a form of unquestioned orthodoxy. Not that people were finally free, but that a certain class of white men insisted on an ideology of freedom.
