This book review is just trying something new on CF. As I am retired, I read various books. As a help to my pastor I read books for him and write reviews. This book was my own choice for him. I wrote this review years ago, underscored the text and gave him the review and the book.
The author Nathan Hatch is an interesting character. After writing this book, he received numerous rewards...and made The Guinness book of Worlds Records....the HIGHEST PAID UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT EVER. He made $4M annually at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hatch comes from a Baptist background. Who says an historians can't make good money?
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The belief the Second Great Awakening as a positive movement in American history is now being questioned. How could such a movement which started around 1790 with a population of 3.9 million Americans, account for hundreds of different religious sects and belief systems by 1840 with 17 million Americans, without much influence of immigration?
American religion is about to go through profound changes as Americans start to understand just what the post-Revolutionary nation would look like. A religious upheaval is about to occur, where American Christianity is going to explode in unlikely directions. Comparisons have been made to the Reformation era, however the difference is the Reformation is seen as a unified correction of Medieval abuses; but due the American Revolution, early American Christianity splinters into groups too numerous to count. What accounts for the great diversity of religious beliefs in American?
Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity delves deep into this era in American History. Why so many religious movements in such a short period of time? Hatch was a graduate of Wheaton (summa cum laude) and was provost of Notre Dame University. Religion in American at the time of the of the Revolution was popular, but it will get real messy very quickly.
Hatch uses three ‘American nationalistic” social concepts to describe the fracturing of early American Christianity. Liberty, Equality, and the first two clauses of the First Amendment “free exercise” and “free speech.” These political concepts almost immediately were infused into Christianity from about 1780 to 1830. Built upon these socio-political concepts, the democratic art of persuasion is equally important.
LIBERTY: Liberty was what characterized the early Americans both political and religious. Even though an American “nationalism” or common theme can’t be seen as dominate in the early days after the Revolution, all Americans could articulate they were free.
A streak of anti-authoritarian begins by repudiating all things English at first, then European. This is freedom at work both politically and religiously. Politically, the War of 1812, galvanized and burned political liberty in the minds of the early Americans.
Religiously, freedom became was a quest for gospel liberty. There was a disdain for any sanctioned or official Christianity. Two of the three branches of Reformation theology will come under attack with Lutheranism exempted. Lutheranism barely had any influence in the early years of the Republic for two reasons; first, Germany was not a colonizing power, and secondly, The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) destroyed much of Germany’s civil infrastructure and nearly took the life breath out of Lutheran thought.
The reason why Baptists and Methodists grew so fast in early America is that both movements were born in England, but rebelled against the English church. One might think Methodists would have a disadvantage in this new Republic with its old world “undemocratic” belief in a hierarchical form of church government. But once the Methodist missionary went over the Appalachian Mountains, they were free to preach and practiced as the new American social concept “liberty” allowed.
In every history book of religion in America the story of Ann Hutchinson (b. 1634) is prominent. She disagreed with some of the Church of England’s belief and was put on trial. But not only were church authorities present but also civil judges were also apart of her condemnation. William Rogers her advocate (a dissenter of the church of England) was a fierce critic of Church-State commingling with one another. After the trial, Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rogers left in protest. From this, massive event…the separation of Church and State was extremely important in the minds of the Americans, which early Americans never forgot. Baptist theology capitalized on this, along with absolute right of self-governance, which still is the hallmark of Baptist theology today.
One of the benefits of Baptist local church autonomy would be seen about 100 years later.
Both the Methodists and Baptists did intense evangelism among the slave population, but the American Negro preferred there own church government as modeled after Baptist polity. African-Americans, both free and slave, could now worship in their own form, with their folk music turned into the Negro Spiritual. African-American preachers now assert a separate autonomy from the whites. The local church now becomes the first national institution the American Negro sought refuge.
Local church autonomy slowly becomes the preferable form of Church government in early America.
With English Anglicanism repudiated, the last bastion of organized “denominational religion” is attacked with ferocity—Calvinism. Hatch states four reasons:
1) its implicit endorsement of the status quo, 2) its tyranny over personal religious experience, 3) its preoccupation with complicated and arcane dogma, and 4) its clerical pretension and quest for control.
“People at the bottom end of the social scale have rarely warmed to the doctrines of predestination. The anguish of injustice and poverty makes unacceptable the implication that God is ordaining and taking pleasure in, what ever happens. African-Americans found little place for predestination in their understanding of Christianity. In Wilkinson County, Mississippi, a slave grave digger with a younger helper, ask a white stranger a question:
“Massa, my I ask you something?
“Ask what you please.”
“Can you ‘splain how it happened in the first place, that the white folks got the start of the black folks, so as to make dem slaves and do all de work?”
The younger helper, fearing the white man’s wrath broke in:
“Uncle Pete, it’s no use talking. It’s fo’ordained. The Bible tells you that. The Lord fo’ordained the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] to work, and the white man to boss.”
“Dat’s so. Dat’s so. But if dat’s so, then God’s no fair man!”
For forms of Christianity that prospered among African-Americans were not in acceptance of the status quo. They support a moral revulsion of slavery and promised eventual deliverance putting God on the side of change and freedom.”
Equality An unanticipated passion for equality arose quickly among the people of the post revolutionary period in the religious realm and the secular realm. This is what Hatch calls a “crisis of authority.”
The American concept of “Equality” radicalized the new citizens of American. With the American free press, newspapers grew from 70 to 340 between 1790 and 1810. Now the average man had access to what the privileged had before. The average man was reading what the average man wrote. Reading the newspaper became the American way of life. These newspapers criticized the thought of any social distinction, whether it by lawyer, physician or clergy. A streak of anti-authoritarianism ran rampant. This included American Federalism. The Sedition Act of 1798, tried to curtail some of the anarchy developing. Newspapers assailed the Fed’s…the “elites” and the American Federalist King George was trying to destroy the free press. Americans ate it up.
There was an explosion of Methodist and Baptist ministers, but they were seen as individualistic outsiders rather than conformers to the European Reformation. The rugged “American individualist” motif, lead to a hostility to any organized religious authority of the past. Itinerant preachers became the norm.
Reacting against English royalty and egalitarianism, the American concept of equality, lead to a benign denial of any “called” pastor to a congregation. All Christians were equal with respect to preaching the Word.
A massive debate raged. What was the function and purpose “called” minister of the Church? Just after the Revolution, the local congregation in the frontier who had a“called” minister was replaced by “American Individualistic preachers,” who vied for the attention of anyone who would listen. Gone were the days of a religious education, and replaced by young men with relentless energy to compete in the market place as divine spokesman.
On the theological side, seminaries at Yale and Andover remarked during this period, that Americans wanted a seven year apprenticeship for making a shoe or an ax, but were “satisfied to place their Religion, their souls, and their salvation, under the guidance of quackery.”
Anti-authoritarianism also included the anti-Christian philosophic leaders of the European Enlightenment. This explains why for a short period of time in American history, religion was popular. It was not encumbered by European philosophic theological liberalism including its rationalistic counterparts. Dissent political and religious becomes more and more universalized.
Out of these circumstances, is what Hatch calls the “blurring of the two worlds.” At the macro level of the early American society, there was this strange mixture of naturalism and supernaturalism, orthodoxy and religious ecstasy, superstition and science, medicine and quackery. Hatch states this was the “golden age of empiricism and of imposters and counterfeiters.”
Counterfeit equality can be readily seen in medicine. The early Americans were plagued with rise of roving snake oil salesmen. At the time of the Civil War, full page miracle medicine tonic advertisements became the norm. The rise of the Medicine Show provided much wanted entertainment to the early Americans with a bait and switch at the end, for selling Mother-Nature’s natural elixirs.
As the West opens up, the American population starts going over the Appalachian Mountains. American starts to become a mobile nation. From this, individuals or families are cut off from their former families, churches, even communities. This is where the Camp Meetings start to take shape. They bought people together again. This starts in 1801, by the Presbyterian Church and has been popular ever since.
As Camp Meetings becomes a national phenomenon, uneducated itinerant preachers started competing for followers. With the over abundance of these new popular preachers with large charismatic personalities, they sometimes followed their new converts back to their homes and started their own churches.
By simply appealing to the Bible as their authority, new strains of theology came about in isolated communities by these populist preachers influenced by democratic free speech. This causes a massive fragmentation from European reformation theology. Christian beliefs now start to become fluid. Religious diversity and pluralism become the norm. This is where the splintering of American Protestantism occurs. Hatch writes, “The authoritative center becomes the preacher with this charisma.”
Due to individualism, emphasis was placed upon the individual’s conscience, not external sources of religious teaching. Hatch states, “An inversion occurs: divine insight was reserved for the poor and humble, rather than the proud and learned. Individual interpretation of the Scriptures, without guidance from the history or ecclesiastical authority was preferred.”
Hatch writes “Christian churches were constructing roofs over their heads, but they lacked the ecclesiastical walls of liturgy, governance, theology and instruction that are normative in a given church tradition.”
Free Speech and Free Religion
One young man from New York in the 1827 took advantage of the “splintering era” along with the twin national treasures: Free Speech and Free Exercise. His name was Joseph Smith, and declared all the splinter groups false. Itinerant preacher as he was, he was the model of the anti-authoritarianism, proclaimed a new religion from anything historic of the European belief systems of Christianity. He believed that he could develop religion in a direction he saw fit.
Today, American religious sociologists correctly state that Smith is the most influential religious leader in American history. Post-revolution anti-religious authoritarianism is seen as one of the root causes of Smith’ success. Smith success in starting a whole new belief system could not have started in Europe. Mormonism is truly “Made in America.”
The movement of Restorationism begins to take root the nation. The “gates of hell” did prevail against the historic western Church until these new preachers came along. Thomas Jefferson’s belief in “primitive Christianity” infused with this political thought, influences the nation. The Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ church bodies, along with the Jehovah Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventist begin to rebuild Christianity bypassing 1,700 years of theological development.
Now one can see how Darby brings his new theology of Dispensationalism from Scotland to America in the 1820’s and Americanized it by giving it an optimistic spin. William Miller prediction of Second Coming of Christ in 1844, captivated the nation.
A trend now starts to develop within the various Christian belief systems…a focus on the future. Premillenialism begins to develop and fifty years later during the industrial revolution, Postmillenialism heavily influences American Christianity.
Sola Scriptura. The Reformation articulation of “Sola Scriptura” had both a positive and negative effect on the preachers of the new republic. On the positive side, the early preachers clearly had an understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture; on the negative side, due to a lack of training and study this lead to an extreme individualistic interpretation, coupled with the isolation of the early frontier preachers, “individualized strains of theology” painted the American landscape.
Hatch writes, “Historians are presently paying more attention to how violent, messy and decisive the American Revolution was. The rejection of an ancient regime [Adams, Jefferson, Madison, et. al.] and struggled to establish a new social and political order involved in social strain and dislocation towards the end of the eighteenth century. John Murrin suggests that the Revolution reversed the dominant integrative trend of eighteenth-century America.”
It took the Age and Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1837-45) to destroy the last of the political elites who decided the which candidates could run for president This elitist power was fully passed on the “ordinary” man. Theologically, the educated “called” minister was also seen as elitist, and now the plowboy who could read his Bible was a candidate to be God’s spokesman.
Baptist theology was clearly the dominate “religious” movement that won hearts and minds of Americans in the middle years of the republic; however that movement took just a mere two hundred years from the Pilgrims/Puritans to 1830 to develop and reach stability. It will take another seventy-plus years for another branch of Baptist theology to reach stability: Reformed Baptists.
It wasn’t until the end of the Nineteenth Century when mass European immigration reversed the “equality” of the ordinary man with his unbridled interpretation of the Bible. The establishment of seminaries of the Reformation era served as a proper corrective.
Modern American Evangelicalism is indeed rooted in the Second Great Awakening. American Evangelicalism distinctives are:
a) birthed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution,
b) decoupled from past dominant theologies,
c) extreme religious and theological diversity,
d) the right of individual Biblical interpretation,
e) the democratic art of persuasion,
f) and the influence of Baptist Theology.
The author Nathan Hatch is an interesting character. After writing this book, he received numerous rewards...and made The Guinness book of Worlds Records....the HIGHEST PAID UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT EVER. He made $4M annually at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hatch comes from a Baptist background. Who says an historians can't make good money?
---------
The belief the Second Great Awakening as a positive movement in American history is now being questioned. How could such a movement which started around 1790 with a population of 3.9 million Americans, account for hundreds of different religious sects and belief systems by 1840 with 17 million Americans, without much influence of immigration?
American religion is about to go through profound changes as Americans start to understand just what the post-Revolutionary nation would look like. A religious upheaval is about to occur, where American Christianity is going to explode in unlikely directions. Comparisons have been made to the Reformation era, however the difference is the Reformation is seen as a unified correction of Medieval abuses; but due the American Revolution, early American Christianity splinters into groups too numerous to count. What accounts for the great diversity of religious beliefs in American?
Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity delves deep into this era in American History. Why so many religious movements in such a short period of time? Hatch was a graduate of Wheaton (summa cum laude) and was provost of Notre Dame University. Religion in American at the time of the of the Revolution was popular, but it will get real messy very quickly.
Hatch uses three ‘American nationalistic” social concepts to describe the fracturing of early American Christianity. Liberty, Equality, and the first two clauses of the First Amendment “free exercise” and “free speech.” These political concepts almost immediately were infused into Christianity from about 1780 to 1830. Built upon these socio-political concepts, the democratic art of persuasion is equally important.
LIBERTY: Liberty was what characterized the early Americans both political and religious. Even though an American “nationalism” or common theme can’t be seen as dominate in the early days after the Revolution, all Americans could articulate they were free.
A streak of anti-authoritarian begins by repudiating all things English at first, then European. This is freedom at work both politically and religiously. Politically, the War of 1812, galvanized and burned political liberty in the minds of the early Americans.
Religiously, freedom became was a quest for gospel liberty. There was a disdain for any sanctioned or official Christianity. Two of the three branches of Reformation theology will come under attack with Lutheranism exempted. Lutheranism barely had any influence in the early years of the Republic for two reasons; first, Germany was not a colonizing power, and secondly, The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) destroyed much of Germany’s civil infrastructure and nearly took the life breath out of Lutheran thought.
The reason why Baptists and Methodists grew so fast in early America is that both movements were born in England, but rebelled against the English church. One might think Methodists would have a disadvantage in this new Republic with its old world “undemocratic” belief in a hierarchical form of church government. But once the Methodist missionary went over the Appalachian Mountains, they were free to preach and practiced as the new American social concept “liberty” allowed.
In every history book of religion in America the story of Ann Hutchinson (b. 1634) is prominent. She disagreed with some of the Church of England’s belief and was put on trial. But not only were church authorities present but also civil judges were also apart of her condemnation. William Rogers her advocate (a dissenter of the church of England) was a fierce critic of Church-State commingling with one another. After the trial, Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rogers left in protest. From this, massive event…the separation of Church and State was extremely important in the minds of the Americans, which early Americans never forgot. Baptist theology capitalized on this, along with absolute right of self-governance, which still is the hallmark of Baptist theology today.
One of the benefits of Baptist local church autonomy would be seen about 100 years later.
Both the Methodists and Baptists did intense evangelism among the slave population, but the American Negro preferred there own church government as modeled after Baptist polity. African-Americans, both free and slave, could now worship in their own form, with their folk music turned into the Negro Spiritual. African-American preachers now assert a separate autonomy from the whites. The local church now becomes the first national institution the American Negro sought refuge.
Local church autonomy slowly becomes the preferable form of Church government in early America.
With English Anglicanism repudiated, the last bastion of organized “denominational religion” is attacked with ferocity—Calvinism. Hatch states four reasons:
1) its implicit endorsement of the status quo, 2) its tyranny over personal religious experience, 3) its preoccupation with complicated and arcane dogma, and 4) its clerical pretension and quest for control.
“People at the bottom end of the social scale have rarely warmed to the doctrines of predestination. The anguish of injustice and poverty makes unacceptable the implication that God is ordaining and taking pleasure in, what ever happens. African-Americans found little place for predestination in their understanding of Christianity. In Wilkinson County, Mississippi, a slave grave digger with a younger helper, ask a white stranger a question:
“Massa, my I ask you something?
“Ask what you please.”
“Can you ‘splain how it happened in the first place, that the white folks got the start of the black folks, so as to make dem slaves and do all de work?”
The younger helper, fearing the white man’s wrath broke in:
“Uncle Pete, it’s no use talking. It’s fo’ordained. The Bible tells you that. The Lord fo’ordained the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] to work, and the white man to boss.”
“Dat’s so. Dat’s so. But if dat’s so, then God’s no fair man!”
For forms of Christianity that prospered among African-Americans were not in acceptance of the status quo. They support a moral revulsion of slavery and promised eventual deliverance putting God on the side of change and freedom.”
Equality An unanticipated passion for equality arose quickly among the people of the post revolutionary period in the religious realm and the secular realm. This is what Hatch calls a “crisis of authority.”
The American concept of “Equality” radicalized the new citizens of American. With the American free press, newspapers grew from 70 to 340 between 1790 and 1810. Now the average man had access to what the privileged had before. The average man was reading what the average man wrote. Reading the newspaper became the American way of life. These newspapers criticized the thought of any social distinction, whether it by lawyer, physician or clergy. A streak of anti-authoritarianism ran rampant. This included American Federalism. The Sedition Act of 1798, tried to curtail some of the anarchy developing. Newspapers assailed the Fed’s…the “elites” and the American Federalist King George was trying to destroy the free press. Americans ate it up.
There was an explosion of Methodist and Baptist ministers, but they were seen as individualistic outsiders rather than conformers to the European Reformation. The rugged “American individualist” motif, lead to a hostility to any organized religious authority of the past. Itinerant preachers became the norm.
Reacting against English royalty and egalitarianism, the American concept of equality, lead to a benign denial of any “called” pastor to a congregation. All Christians were equal with respect to preaching the Word.
A massive debate raged. What was the function and purpose “called” minister of the Church? Just after the Revolution, the local congregation in the frontier who had a“called” minister was replaced by “American Individualistic preachers,” who vied for the attention of anyone who would listen. Gone were the days of a religious education, and replaced by young men with relentless energy to compete in the market place as divine spokesman.
On the theological side, seminaries at Yale and Andover remarked during this period, that Americans wanted a seven year apprenticeship for making a shoe or an ax, but were “satisfied to place their Religion, their souls, and their salvation, under the guidance of quackery.”
Anti-authoritarianism also included the anti-Christian philosophic leaders of the European Enlightenment. This explains why for a short period of time in American history, religion was popular. It was not encumbered by European philosophic theological liberalism including its rationalistic counterparts. Dissent political and religious becomes more and more universalized.
Out of these circumstances, is what Hatch calls the “blurring of the two worlds.” At the macro level of the early American society, there was this strange mixture of naturalism and supernaturalism, orthodoxy and religious ecstasy, superstition and science, medicine and quackery. Hatch states this was the “golden age of empiricism and of imposters and counterfeiters.”
Counterfeit equality can be readily seen in medicine. The early Americans were plagued with rise of roving snake oil salesmen. At the time of the Civil War, full page miracle medicine tonic advertisements became the norm. The rise of the Medicine Show provided much wanted entertainment to the early Americans with a bait and switch at the end, for selling Mother-Nature’s natural elixirs.
As the West opens up, the American population starts going over the Appalachian Mountains. American starts to become a mobile nation. From this, individuals or families are cut off from their former families, churches, even communities. This is where the Camp Meetings start to take shape. They bought people together again. This starts in 1801, by the Presbyterian Church and has been popular ever since.
As Camp Meetings becomes a national phenomenon, uneducated itinerant preachers started competing for followers. With the over abundance of these new popular preachers with large charismatic personalities, they sometimes followed their new converts back to their homes and started their own churches.
By simply appealing to the Bible as their authority, new strains of theology came about in isolated communities by these populist preachers influenced by democratic free speech. This causes a massive fragmentation from European reformation theology. Christian beliefs now start to become fluid. Religious diversity and pluralism become the norm. This is where the splintering of American Protestantism occurs. Hatch writes, “The authoritative center becomes the preacher with this charisma.”
Due to individualism, emphasis was placed upon the individual’s conscience, not external sources of religious teaching. Hatch states, “An inversion occurs: divine insight was reserved for the poor and humble, rather than the proud and learned. Individual interpretation of the Scriptures, without guidance from the history or ecclesiastical authority was preferred.”
Hatch writes “Christian churches were constructing roofs over their heads, but they lacked the ecclesiastical walls of liturgy, governance, theology and instruction that are normative in a given church tradition.”
Free Speech and Free Religion
One young man from New York in the 1827 took advantage of the “splintering era” along with the twin national treasures: Free Speech and Free Exercise. His name was Joseph Smith, and declared all the splinter groups false. Itinerant preacher as he was, he was the model of the anti-authoritarianism, proclaimed a new religion from anything historic of the European belief systems of Christianity. He believed that he could develop religion in a direction he saw fit.
Today, American religious sociologists correctly state that Smith is the most influential religious leader in American history. Post-revolution anti-religious authoritarianism is seen as one of the root causes of Smith’ success. Smith success in starting a whole new belief system could not have started in Europe. Mormonism is truly “Made in America.”
The movement of Restorationism begins to take root the nation. The “gates of hell” did prevail against the historic western Church until these new preachers came along. Thomas Jefferson’s belief in “primitive Christianity” infused with this political thought, influences the nation. The Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ church bodies, along with the Jehovah Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventist begin to rebuild Christianity bypassing 1,700 years of theological development.
Now one can see how Darby brings his new theology of Dispensationalism from Scotland to America in the 1820’s and Americanized it by giving it an optimistic spin. William Miller prediction of Second Coming of Christ in 1844, captivated the nation.
A trend now starts to develop within the various Christian belief systems…a focus on the future. Premillenialism begins to develop and fifty years later during the industrial revolution, Postmillenialism heavily influences American Christianity.
Sola Scriptura. The Reformation articulation of “Sola Scriptura” had both a positive and negative effect on the preachers of the new republic. On the positive side, the early preachers clearly had an understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture; on the negative side, due to a lack of training and study this lead to an extreme individualistic interpretation, coupled with the isolation of the early frontier preachers, “individualized strains of theology” painted the American landscape.
Hatch writes, “Historians are presently paying more attention to how violent, messy and decisive the American Revolution was. The rejection of an ancient regime [Adams, Jefferson, Madison, et. al.] and struggled to establish a new social and political order involved in social strain and dislocation towards the end of the eighteenth century. John Murrin suggests that the Revolution reversed the dominant integrative trend of eighteenth-century America.”
It took the Age and Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1837-45) to destroy the last of the political elites who decided the which candidates could run for president This elitist power was fully passed on the “ordinary” man. Theologically, the educated “called” minister was also seen as elitist, and now the plowboy who could read his Bible was a candidate to be God’s spokesman.
Baptist theology was clearly the dominate “religious” movement that won hearts and minds of Americans in the middle years of the republic; however that movement took just a mere two hundred years from the Pilgrims/Puritans to 1830 to develop and reach stability. It will take another seventy-plus years for another branch of Baptist theology to reach stability: Reformed Baptists.
It wasn’t until the end of the Nineteenth Century when mass European immigration reversed the “equality” of the ordinary man with his unbridled interpretation of the Bible. The establishment of seminaries of the Reformation era served as a proper corrective.
Modern American Evangelicalism is indeed rooted in the Second Great Awakening. American Evangelicalism distinctives are:
a) birthed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution,
b) decoupled from past dominant theologies,
c) extreme religious and theological diversity,
d) the right of individual Biblical interpretation,
e) the democratic art of persuasion,
f) and the influence of Baptist Theology.
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