On an October evening in 1811, Presbyterian missionary Robert May presided over one of the first evangelistic and child-centric Sunday school gatherings in the United States. An emissary of the London Missionary Society, May was bound for Calcutta, but he stopped first in America to assist friends from the Presbyterian-operated Evangelical Society of Philadelphia with founding a Sunday school designed to convert young people. Nearly one hundred children and their parents gathered for the inaugural service. May began with a blessing and led attendees in a series of prayers, scripture readings, and songs from the Children's Hymn Book. He marveled at the children's eagerness to engage in the service, describing in his record book how “one and all . . . [fell] upon their knees before God.”Footnote 1 May then delivered a sermon about the importance of spiritual nurture for the young, which left many in tears. Following the closing exercises, May took down the names of children who wished to attend future Sunday school services, recording sixty-seven total. Each child also received a hymn to learn before the next meeting. May left the gathering “full of gratitude and pleasure,” hopeful that his evangelistic endeavor would continue to attract even more young pupils.Footnote 2 His hopes were soon fulfilled. The Sunday school quickly drew over one hundred children weekly, and within five years over 1,800 students were enrolled.Footnote 3
Robert May was certainly not the first to develop child-centric methods of spiritual nurture. Ministers, revivalists, and religious writers of the colonial era were deeply concerned with evangelizing children and encouraged their participation in adult-led religious movements, such as the First Great Awakening.Footnote 4 However, May's endeavor does represent a pivotal moment in American religious history when Protestant reformers from a wide range of denominations, from Baptist to Unitarian, joined forces to create formal institutions and ministries dedicated exclusively to children. Concern over raising moral Christian citizens for a new republic in which the place of the church remained uncertain led to a heightened focus on young people within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Protestant reform movements. Activists like May stressed the imperative of evangelizing children and promoting youth leadership, prompting them to begin designing evangelical institutions for specific life stages. Age thereby became an increasingly crucial factor in determining the shape and substance of American religious experiences, and childhood became its own distinct religious marketplace. This, in turn, redistributed spiritual authority to more marginalized groups, including young people themselves, and reshaped the structure of American Protestantism.
Transformations within the Sunday school movement exemplify the scope and significance of this shift. While the earliest Sunday schools focused on literacy instruction and encouraged the practice of recruiting adult pupils, leaders of the movement adopted an increasingly evangelistic outlook in the early nineteenth century, motivating them to target children as the primary objects of Sunday school education. Although some adults, particularly African Americans, continued attending Sunday schools, the movement focused on childhood and adolescent spiritual formation by the 1820s. The rapid dissemination of these child-centric institutions created physical and imagined communities of faith specifically for young people that offered children new avenues for pursuing religious activity. They also fostered unprecedented levels of youth religious leadership due to the practice of recruiting adolescents to serve as teachers, challenging inherited patterns of social and cultural authority. Sunday schools thereby became transformative and transactional spaces where young people could both shape and be shaped by the growing Protestant community. In the process, the movement helped inaugurate a period within American Christianity when institutions and ministries were designed for children on mass scale, permanently altering the American religious landscape. The rise of child-centric and evangelistic Sunday schools, therefore, reveals that young people directly shaped the formation of early nineteenth-century Protestantism, even as evangelical institutions were integral to the creation of early nineteenth-century childhood.
Despite the presence of young people within early national benevolence movements, historians often minimize the influence of childhood when debating the origins of nineteenth-century voluntarism. Initial scholarship characterized reform as a tool for social control and class domination.Footnote 5 Recognizing that this interpretation delegitimized reformers’ religious beliefs, subsequent works have emphasized voluntarism's revivalist origins, asserting that evangelicals aspired to save souls and produce social uplift.Footnote 6 Recent scholarship affirms that both social concerns and religious ideals motivated benevolence, striking a consensus course that stresses the multiplicity of reformers’ intentions.Footnote 7 The newest scholarship subsequently seeks to diversify scholarly narratives about the forces propelling voluntarism. For example, Amanda Porterfield highlights the role of authoritarianism and skepticism in building reform institutions, while Sam Haselby argues that early nineteenth-century Protestantism should be understood as a contest between the “frontier revivalists” of the west and the elite, reformed-Protestant “national evangelists” of the northeast.Footnote 8
While these studies make important interventions, the large-scale religious and social changes prompted by shifting constructions of childhood, along with the actual activities of children and youth, are generally omitted from the narrative. Even studies focused on Sunday schools are similarly limited in their treatment of the broader relationship between childhood and voluntarism. Multiple scholarly works about the movement exist, the most thorough being Anne Boylan's superb 1988 monograph, Sunday School.Footnote 9 These studies are primarily institutional histories, with Boylan's book being a product of the new social history. They do not account for more recent findings from the rapidly growing fields of religious history and childhood studies, leaving Sunday schools in need of a fresh scholarly analysis. Consequently, narratives of American religious history have yet to integrate young people as either inspirations behind or participants within reform.
On the other hand, historians of childhood often overlook religion as a major force shaping children's lives. Scholars have analyzed how childhood is a cultural construction formulated within constantly shifting dialogical frameworks of meaning.Footnote 10 They further emphasize that concepts of childhood and age are grounded in systems of power relationships that cut across and encompass other sources of authority.Footnote 11 The result is a growing body of scholarship on issues like childhood agency and the role of relationally-based frameworks, particularly the family unit, in structuring children's lives.Footnote 12 The significance of institutions, especially political and educational ones, in shaping and constraining the world young people inhabit has also been a particularly salient theme. However, historians of childhood have yet to fully analyze how religious authorities and organizations have historically created age-defined frameworks that both enhance and restrict childhood spirituality, or how children experienced these constructions.Footnote 13 Within the field of early American history, historians of childhood have produced important work that argues powerfully for the child's significance in nineteenth-century society and culture. Nevertheless, while these works sometimes discuss religion, they tend to focus on issues of race, gender, or politics.Footnote 14
Merging these disconnected fields reveals that ideas about childhood combined with religious beliefs to undergird the impulse toward social reform in the early republic. Reformers’ growing obsession with formalizing childhood religious development, along with young people's participation in evangelical institutions, left indelible impressions on the priorities and strategies that sustained the Benevolent Empire. This synergistic relationship between childhood, youth, and benevolence is particularly evident within the early growth of the Sunday school movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. American Sunday schools emerged from two related educational models. The first, exemplified by republican-humanitarian Sunday schools founded in the late eighteenth century, emphasized literacy instruction for the purpose of creating a virtuous citizenry. The second model also aspired to create virtuous citizens but envisioned using Sunday schools primarily to evangelize and sanctify the nation. By the early nineteenth century, the latter model outpaced the former in growth. The increasing emphasis on evangelism produced an even more significant structural shift: the transformation of Sunday schools into child-centric institutions that facilitated youth religious leadership.Footnote 15 The Sunday school movement's evolution demonstrates that shifting constructions of childhood and the rise of voluntarism reinforced and enriched each other, helping propel the growth of American Protestantism and transform religious practice. For reformers such as Robert May, children were key to social and spiritual renewal, making them essential to the Christianization of the Republic.
I. The Republican-Humanitarian Sunday School Model
The American Sunday school movement was founded during a post-Revolutionary Era restructuring of the political and social significance of childhood.Footnote 16 As James Marten argues, the revolution produced a hopeful campaign to integrate children into the republican experiment.Footnote 17 Emphasizing that young people were citizens in training, celebrated educational reformer Noah Webster urged adults to remember that they had “a national character to establish” in the hearts of their children.Footnote 18 Education thereby became idealized as the means of disseminating republican values of liberty and disinterested benevolence to the rising generation, producing a civic virtue that would in turn create a coherent national identity.Footnote 19 This drive to inculcate virtue within youth was optimistic, but children also functioned as a focal point for the founding generation's fears.Footnote 20 If young people failed to respect the principles of liberty, the republic could crumble.Footnote 21 Rising birthrates also produced mounting social anxiety. Between 1790 and 1825, the population swelled from four million to over eleven million.Footnote 22 This population spike occurred simultaneously with a perceived breakdown in traditional family and apprenticeship structures. The spread of industrialization gave youth, especially boys, more economic options that inspired many to seek their fortune in cities.Footnote 23 Urban populations rose at an astonishing pace, roughly quadrupling between 1790 and 1825. By leaving the protection of home for unsupervised city life, young people ostensibly removed themselves from moral safeguards and risked descent into vice.Footnote 24 Thus, the revolution elevated children's status only insofar as they remained within the confines of the traditional family and embraced republican virtues. Young people that transgressed these boundaries were considered a threat to the republic.
American Sunday schools were born out of this combination of optimism and anxiety about childhood. The movement was created in the 1780s in England under the direction of newspaper editor and philanthropist, Robert Raikes, who wanted to create educational institutions to curb the growth of poverty and teach literacy.Footnote 25 Within a decade, Sunday schools were imported to the United States, due primarily to the efforts of Bishop William White, a preeminent leader of the Episcopal Church.Footnote 26 White probably learned of Raikes's schools when he traveled to London for consecration in 1786. He returned to his hometown of Philadelphia in 1787, determined to make Sunday schools a part of the philanthropic efforts for which the city was already famous. White drew upon prevailing republican and humanitarian ideologies of the day to promote his idea, asserting in a sermon about Sunday schools that this sort of institution was an ideal solution to the problem of poverty-induced vice that threatened the nation.Footnote 27 Like other republican theorists, White believed that lack of education usually led the poor into lives of crime. By using Sunday schools to teach literacy to impoverished children, White believed that the institution would not only dispel the ignorance that promoted crime, but it would also be instrumental “for securing the public peace and private rights.”Footnote 28 Such a system would also accomplish “the preventing of much disorder, on that day [Sunday] in particular, in the streets.”Footnote 29 White cited the British movement as proof that literacy-oriented Sunday schools improved “the morals of the common people.”Footnote 30 Establishing a similar system in America, he believed, would produce identical social benefits while also contributing to the higher goal of preserving the republic.Footnote 31
This logic was marketable and appealing during the socially and politically tumultuous post-Revolutionary Era, especially in Philadelphia. In the 1780s, Philadelphia was the largest city in the United States and was dominated by members of the mercantile and upper classes, such as Benjamin Rush, a Universalist physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.Footnote 32 This progressive and religiously tolerant group felt that the poor population—who comprised at least fifteen percent of Philadelphia's citizenry by 1784—threatened their efforts to create the ideal republican city.Footnote 33 Hoping to check the spread of degeneracy, republican elites promoted weekday charity schools that taught rudimentary subjects, such as reading and writing.Footnote 34 Rush was one of the most-articulate spokesmen for this civic-minded form of education. He believed that the remedy for social vices was to develop humanity's common moral sense through formal schooling, an idea derived from Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Francis Hutcheson.Footnote 35 He was also an avid supporter of John Locke's educational theories, which advocated that educators avoid harsh disciplinary methods in favor of engaging children's innate intellectual curiosity, inculcating morality through example and logic.Footnote 36 Rush felt that if educators merged these enlightenment principles with Protestant values, “the combined and reciprocal influence of religion, liberty and learning upon the morals, manners and knowledge” of the rising generation would raise American society to immeasurable “degrees of happiness and perfection.”Footnote 37
Rush was White's neighbor, and the two men shared similar educational philosophies. It did not take long, therefore, for Rush to join White's Sunday school cause. By 1790, White recruited at least nine additional supporters, all of them male. Like Rush, these men were keen philanthropists, such as Matthew Carey, a printer and Roman Catholic social reformer.Footnote 38 Other influential supporters included the mayor, Samuel Powell, and Quaker merchant, Thomas P. Cope.Footnote 39 As enlightened republican gentlemen, these men were united in believing that education could transform indigent children into virtuous patriots.Footnote 40 In December of 1790, the group formally launched the First Day Society, an organization dedicated to managing, promoting, and funding Sunday schools. White was elected President. In March of 1791, the society opened three Sunday schools in Philadelphia: two for boys and one for girls.
The First Day Society's founders aimed to create a civic-minded republican and humanitarian organization, rather than a narrowly religious one. The society's constitution did not advance any specifically Christian aims, focusing instead on two social concerns. The first was that poor children, or “the offspring of indigent parents,” lacked the opportunity to attend weekday schools, often because they had to work.Footnote 41 The society found this trend disturbing due to its belief that “the good education of youth is of the first importance to society.”Footnote 42 The second major concern was that poor children often used their free time on Sunday to engage in idleness and petty crime, resulting in “the depravation of morals and manners.”Footnote 43 The First Day Society proposed to remove these social threats by teaching literacy.Footnote 44 Additionally, the society required pupils to follow a strict behavioral code of deference, cleanliness, and self-discipline.Footnote 45 Rewards and punishments were based on behavioral and academic progress, standards that were designed to teach the pupils to act like “opulent and respectable members of the community.”Footnote 46
In attempting to make poor children into virtuous citizens, the First Day Society utilized religious tools that were considered vital to an enlightened education. The society's constitution stipulated that its schools should use the Bible and “other moral and religious books” as textbooks.Footnote 47 Rush expressed particular enthusiasm for using the Bible as a Sunday school textbook in 1791, asserting that this practice was “the best means of awakening moral sensibilities in [children's] minds.”Footnote 48 Additionally, pupils were required to attend a church service between the morning and evening literacy sessions, although they were not overtly encouraged to make professions of faith.Footnote 49 Rather, the First Day Society supported “religious improvement” as a means of pursing its primary goal of disciplining impoverished youth in republican virtues.Footnote 50 As Mark Noll argues, this synthesis between Christian principles and republican ideals was uniquely American.Footnote 51 Thus, by grounding Sunday schools in a Christian republican model, the First Day Society not only Americanized the movement but invested it with a purpose that went beyond the amelioration of poverty, aiming at the loftier goal of securing a stable and prosperous future for the republic.
Although few in number in the late eighteenth century, several other Sunday schools founded in other parts of the country exhibited similar ambitions. For example, Samuel Slater, a British immigrant who assumed a leading role in founding the American textile industry, started Sunday schools for child-factory workers in his famed company mill towns at Pawtucket, Webster, and Slatersville, Rhode Island. Slater was also inspired by Raikes's system and designed his Sunday schools to “condition children for their primary duty in life as hewers of wood and drawers of water.”Footnote 52 Similarly to the First Day Society, these schools emphasized teaching literacy as a means of instilling values, such as deference, punctuality, and other virtues considered necessary to the development of a conscientious labor force. Slater's male factory managers served as the teachers.Footnote 53 Like the First Day Society, the Sunday schools in Rhode Island used the Bible as a literacy textbook along with basic spellers. Slater's friend and biographer, George White, asserted that these company mill Sunday schools “successfully combated the natural tendency of accumulating vice, ignorance and poverty. Such remedies not only prevented occurrence but had a tendency to remove them, when they actually existed.”Footnote 54 This optimism matched the idealism of the First Day Society's members, who asserted in an open letter to the citizens of Philadelphia that the social advantages of republican-humanitarian Sunday schools would prove obvious to “the friends of humanity and virtue,” thereby ensuring the movement's success among “the many other public spirited institutions which now flourish among us.”Footnote 55
Initially, this assumption seemed correct. The First Day Society's three schools began with approximately 120 pupils, and by 1800, the schools had enrolled a total of 2,120 students.Footnote 56 However, the society continually struggled to fund its schools. Donations declined within a few years of the organization's formation, and by 1813, the founders lamented that lack of funding was a major “cause of regret.”Footnote 57 Multiple factors led to this decrease in financial support. Besides the general economic turmoil that hampered many philanthropic initiatives during this period, support for the First Day Society also diminished after the deaths of several key leaders, particularly Rush, who died in 1813.Footnote 58 Additionally, the society's identity as one of Philadelphia's suppliers of public education for the poor was supplanted in 1818 by the establishment of state-supported common schools.Footnote 59 With its function and message failing, the First Day Society was forced to permanently close its schools in 1819.Footnote 60 Slater's Sunday schools followed a similar path, operating inconsistently due to unreliable funding and finally ceding all activity to the new churches and weekday public schools that were eventually established in the mill towns.Footnote 61
Linking Sunday schools with the post-revolutionary political and social elevation of childhood ensured the institution's initial acceptance in America. But the republican-humanitarian focus alone proved unable to sustain a coherent and widespread movement, especially in the face of increasing competition from weekday public schools. Nevertheless, the demise of organizations such as the First Day Society did not translate into decline for the entire movement. Rather, the organization's goals and ideals were incorporated into another model of Sunday school education that emerged simultaneously with the republican-humanitarian model. This iteration reframed the project of inculcating virtue within the young as a vital part of the Protestant initiative to Christianize the nation, thereby producing a second wave of Sunday school growth oriented around evangelism.
II. The Evangelistic Sunday School Model
Multiple factors converged to produce the shift toward evangelism within Sunday schools in the early nineteenth century. This overtly religious model echoed eighteenth-century anxieties over population increase, declining patriarchal family structures, and the apparent rise of youth degeneracy. At the same time, these social concerns were increasingly overshadowed by other compelling motivations generated by the explosive growth of American Protestantism. Following the disestablishment of religion, nineteenth-century churches were thrust into a religious marketplace that required them to compete for converts, producing a proliferation of Protestant congregations and sects.Footnote 62 Religious revivals, known collectively as the Second Great Awakening, also released powerful religious energies that mobilized evangelical activity, particularly in the urban Northeast.Footnote 63 Haselby argues that the executive leadership within these northeastern voluntary associations were often members of the intellectual elite or the merchant middle class, a group he calls “national evangelists.” Haselby describes adult-male members of the northeastern gentry, including New England Congregationalists and Federalists, as being particularly influential in shaping evangelical reform institutions, especially since they dominated official leadership roles by the antebellum period.Footnote 64
However, young people of both genders were also heavily involved in the rise of revivals and evangelical benevolence.Footnote 65 Revivalists repeatedly noted that awakenings often began and expanded due to involvement from “youth,” a flexible term that encompassed ages ranging anywhere from ten to twenty-five during this period.Footnote 66 Surveying the revivals from 1798–1810, Ebenezer Porter, a Congregationalist minister and professor at Andover Seminary, reported that “in respect to age, the subjects of these revivals were generally in early and middle life. . . . very young children were often deeply impressed, and in many instances continued to give evidence of a saving change of heart.”Footnote 67 A Universalist minister from Connecticut, Menzies Rayner, made a similar claim, describing how youth often “exhorted” in revival meetings and were usually “the subjects of these extraordinary movements . . . especially females.”Footnote 68 A revival that swept Boston from 1803 to 1805 exhibited high levels of youth involvement.Footnote 69 Similarly, in his Accounts of Revivals covering 1815–1818, Baptist minister Joshua Bradley repeatedly marveled that children and youth experienced conversion at revivals alongside adults. In numerous cases, children and adolescents were responsible for bringing revivals to a town. Recounting an 1816 revival in Maine, Bradley wrote that “it was first reported that several youths were thought to be under serious concern for their souls. In September, a revival was apparent.”Footnote 70 Bradley's observations led him to conclude that children “appeared to be the favored instruments in the hands of God, of awakening, convincing, and converting each other.”Footnote 71 Bennet Tyler's New England Revivals contains similar accounts, such as an awakening that began in Canton, Connecticut, from 1798–1799 due to the spread of “serious impressions” among the children.Footnote 72
Nineteenth-century revivalists recognized that youth possessed the zeal required to follow Christ, leading many to assert that late adolescence was an ideal age for conversion.Footnote 73 Reformers therefore turned their attention to preparing young people to make professions of faith, primarily through religious education. Tyler noted that in Washington, Connecticut, local churches established regular catechetical meetings for young people as a result of a revival that occurred in the town in 1802.Footnote 74 Porter claimed that “it was a common thing that hopeful converts exhibited a strong desire for improvement in religious knowledge.” In response, churches regularly organized meetings for youth to study the Bible and “promote their advancement in intellectual and religious knowledge.”Footnote 75 Bradley reported that, following an 1816 revival in Greensborough, Vermont, parents began organizing meetings for children “to assemble for the purpose of reading the Scriptures, and repeating different catechisms.” Bradley considered these meetings to be forerunners of the Sunday school movement, but he noted that at the time, “this was done without any knowledge of similar institutions in the United States.”Footnote 76 These meetings encouraged young people's continued participation in revivals and provided a venue for parents and ministers to evangelize the rising generation.
In addition to youth involvement in revivals, Protestant concern with providing specialized gatherings and institutional settings to support the nurturing of young people was also born out of the spread of sentimentalized conceptions of childhood. Historians identify the early nineteenth century as a time when attitudes toward childhood and youth changed dramatically, surpassing eighteenth-century republican reconstructions.Footnote 77 New romanticized ideals of childhood depicted young people as innocent creatures who experienced the world through their emotions. Childhood began to be treated as a distinct category of life when individuals received their most formative and lasting impressions.Footnote 78 Based on John Locke's idea of tabula rasa, children were increasingly portrayed as unusually malleable, requiring protected environments designed to cultivate their innate sensitivity and goodness. Consequently, nineteenth-century Protestants began asserting that children were blessed with special purity and spiritual sensitivity that, if nurtured with kindness, could potentially make them more ideal candidates for conversion than adults.Footnote 79
As childhood was reconstructed into a period of prolonged innocence and malleability, evangelical leaders developed a heightened interest in creating specialized learning environments in which children's emotional, intellectual, and moral capacities could be cultivated simultaneously.Footnote 80 James Dana, a Congregationalist minister from Connecticut, asserted in an 1806 sermon that the Bible commanded parents to give children “the earliest instruction” in spiritual matters in a manner customized to their sensitive minds.Footnote 81 In an 1814 sermon entitled Religion Recommended to Children and Youth, minister Isaac Smith exemplified the growing belief in the plasticity of childhood by urging congregants to remember that “the earliest impressions are commonly reckoned the most lasting.” Thus, every effort should be made to acquaint children with religion early to ensure that faith becomes “more familiar and . . . more agreeable” as they advance in age.Footnote 82 Protestants began taking it for granted that childhood was a crucial preparation period for conversion, underscoring the need for religious educational structures that developed children's unique spiritual sensibilities.
Embracing this optimistic view of childhood, reformers made young people their mission field. Rodney Hessinger argues that the competition between different evangelical groups to establish themselves as the primary influence over the rising generation “became a central dilemma in emerging bourgeois culture” in the first part of the nineteenth century, producing a religious marketplace that catered to youth.Footnote 83 Much of this competitive energy was oriented around packaging evangelical print culture into child-friendly formats, leading to a proliferation of books, tracts, and other publications for youth.Footnote 84 Additionally, many benevolent associations catered directly to children's temporal needs. Weekday public schools, orphan asylums, houses for juvenile delinquents, and infant schools were all designed to facilitate intellectual and social uplift. Women were especially active in pioneering child-centric reforms. In keeping with emerging concepts of true evangelical womanhood, female reformers were encouraged to pursue such work because their supposed predisposition to emotional sensitivity and nurturing capabilities made them particularly suited to the field of childhood education.Footnote 85 With women leading the charge, evangelicals became increasingly invested in creating institutions customized to specific life stages.Footnote 86
Inspired by this growing enthusiasm for age-specific reforms, Protestants set to work transforming Sunday schools into vehicles for child evangelism. As noted above, one of the first overtly evangelistic Sunday schools in America began under Robert May's direction in 1811 in Philadelphia. May based the school on a similarly evangelistic system recently implemented within British Sunday schools.Footnote 87 This system completely removed literacy instruction from Sunday schools and devoted the class periods to Bible reading, prayer, singing hymns, and reciting scripture passages memorized by the children during the previous week. Pupils could also earn tickets for scripture recitations, which could be traded in for religious books or tracts.Footnote 88 May emphasized that his Sunday school model differed from that of the First Day Society, describing in his record book how in the latter organization “their teacher was paid . . . and religious instruction” was not conducted.Footnote 89 In contrast, May's Sunday school operated on a volunteer basis, demonstrating its affiliation with the emerging culture of disinterested benevolence.
As May's school quickly achieved success, other societies were inspired to adopt the same educational model. The Union Society of Philadelphia, a female-led organization created in 1804 to educate poor girls, also opened a Sunday school in 1811 that enrolled over three-hundred students.Footnote 90 Similarly, the Boston Society for the Religious and Moral Instruction of the Poor opened the city's first evangelical Sunday schools in 1816, largely due to women's efforts, attracting approximately five hundred pupils within one year.Footnote 91 Women also brought the movement to New York, beginning with the creation of the New York Female Union Society for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools in 1816 by educational pioneer Joanna Bethune. Already a respected reformer, Bethune became interested in Sunday schools when she noticed that “the ladies of Philadelphia . . . outran their sisters in New York, in this useful work.”Footnote 92 Bethune initially assumed that “gentlemen would have come forward in the business” of founding Sunday schools, but they failed to take initiative.Footnote 93 Undeterred, Bethune rallied middle-class female reformers from Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed churches to the cause. The Female Union was established soon thereafter.Footnote 94 According to the Female Union's 1817 report, Bethune's actions made male reformers ashamed of their apathy, and they soon “pleaded for the same privilege” of founding a gender-specific Sunday school society.Footnote 95 Consequently, one week after the foundation of the Female Union, Bethune's husband, Divie, gathered a group of reformers and created the male-run New York Sunday School Union Society.
By 1817, a vibrant network of conversion-oriented Sunday school societies emerged that stretched from South Carolina to Maine. These schools generally adopted May's approach, emphasizing prayer, worship, and scripture memorization. Most schools also continued to incorporate literacy training into their curriculum, since public weekday schools were not established in many parts of the country until the 1830s.Footnote 96 Eager to continue the movement's growth, the New York and Boston organizations expanded into rural parts of their respective states. In 1817 fourteen Philadelphian Sunday school societies consolidated into a regional organization called the Sunday and Adult School Union (SASU).Footnote 97 The SASU established and supervised Sunday schools throughout the mid-Atlantic region, providing auxiliaries with materials and funding.Footnote 98 Like the New York and Boston associations, the society adopted an interdenominational structure, explaining that “the comparative fewness of Christians calls for all practicable and profitable union among themselves.”Footnote 99 In reality, the organization was run by Presbyterians and Episcopalians, since these denominations were numerically dominant in Philadelphia. Over time, auxiliaries from Dutch Reformed, Methodist, Lutheran, and Baptist denominations also joined.Footnote 100 The SASU quickly grew to become one of the strongest associations, helping promote a strictly child-centric educational approach that reshaped the Sunday school movement's trajectory by the 1820s.
III. Shifting to a Child-Centric Model
As its name indicated, the SASU initially taught pupils of all ages, a pattern that also applied to the other regional Sunday school organizations. At its founding in 1819, the Pendleton Sunday School Society in South Carolina did not impose an age limit, stipulating instead that “indigent children and adults who are unable to read may be admitted as learners.”Footnote 101 Illiterate adults were often interested in attending Sunday schools due to the literacy training provided by these associations. Nevertheless, child pupils usually constituted the majority, prompting the new Sunday schools to target this age group. Despite the Pendleton Society's inclusion of adults in its mission statement, its instructions to Sunday school teachers only mentioned young people, stressing that instructors had a “special duty to impress upon the minds of the children the necessity of repentance towards God, and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”Footnote 102 The SASU expressed a comparable intention to make children its primary mission field.Footnote 103 The reports rarely mentioned adults, asserting instead that the organization's driving motivation was to ensure that “all our children may be taught of God.”Footnote 104 Boston's Society for the Poor also focused on children. Employing the sentimentalized language of the period, the society argued that “children are pliable. . . . and capable of impressions.”Footnote 105 The society claimed, therefore, that children were easier objects of conversion and that reformers could not “hope to be more useful than by laboring” in Sunday schools on behalf of the rising generation.Footnote 106
In contrast to this positive emphasis on children, many Sunday school organizations increasingly cast adults in a negative light, describing them as set in their sinful ways and unresponsive to religious instruction. In 1818, an SASU affiliate, the Auxiliary Evangelical Society, complained that adult pupils were unreliable and prone to “abandon themselves to their wonton vices.” As a result, the auxiliary decided to direct its “principle attention to the instruction of children.” The Boston Society for the Poor stated in 1822 that adults, “who are grown accustomed to evil are, for the most part, incorrigible.” Although acknowledging that divine providence could bring anyone to salvation, the society portrayed adults as unlikely candidates for conversion in comparison to children, asserting that as the former advanced in age, they “will plunge . . . deeper and deeper into wretchedness.” This probability, the society asserted, should intensify Sunday school workers’ focus on bringing youth to salvation. “If their fathers and mothers are beyond the reach of its healing balm—if no exertion of benevolence can wean them from the practices which habit has rendered imperious—at least let the community see that the evil descends no further.”Footnote 107 As youth conversions during revivals multiplied and sentimentalized views of childhood became established parts of evangelical thinking, Sunday schools gradually stopped recruiting adults. By the 1820s, most organizations catered exclusively to children.Footnote 108
African American adults were the noticeable exception to this change. In major urban centers like Philadelphia, free African Americans had begun carving out independent communities by celebrating their own holidays, founding their own reform organizations, and establishing the first African American denomination in 1816 under the guidance of Richard Allen. Nevertheless, black pupils were excluded from most public school systems, making African American adults eager to access the literacy instruction provided by Sunday schools.Footnote 109 For example, in 1819, African Americans represented nearly two-thirds of the SASU's almost 1100 adult students.Footnote 110 The society was probably willing to overlook the ages of these students because most white Protestants tended to infantilize African Americans, and thus black adults’ supposed state of childlike dependency enabled them to be an exception to the growing child-centric rule. The Auxiliary Evangelical Society reported patronizingly to the SASU that these students, “notwithstanding their unpromising appearance, evince a capacity for improvement not to be despised. More rapid improvement had not been witnessed in any school than here.”Footnote 111 The Boston Society for the Poor also opened several schools specifically for black students in 1820, stating that the adult pupils “are very attentive to instruction, respectful and grateful to their teachers.”Footnote 112 Samuel Bacon, founder of a Sunday school society in York County, Pennsylvania, justified the existence of an African American Sunday school by asserting that “the moral condition of no class of the population of Pennsylvania exhibits so much debasement and wretchedness, as that of the free blacks.” Bacon therefore sought to give African American adults an “opportunity for improving their minds,” which many embraced.Footnote 113 Similarly, the New York Female Union intentionally recruited African American adults. Believing that women were the best teachers of women, the society was particularly concerned with educating black female students, calling them “long neglected beings” in need of salvation and literacy.Footnote 114 This paved the way for higher numbers of African American women to attend New York's Sunday schools. In some auxiliaries, adult black students outnumbered child pupils of both races.Footnote 115
Benevolent associations in the south also recruited black pupils during the initial transition to an evangelistic Sunday school model. Yet in contrast to northern Sunday schools, southern organizations apparently struggled to sustain comparable levels of enthusiasm for teaching African Americans. During a special meeting held in April of 1822, the Pendleton Sunday School Society resolved to start a school for black students.Footnote 116 A few months later, the school's superintendent, Major Elam Sharpe, reported to the association that he was able to convince “many respectable people in the neighborhood . . . . of the necessity of defuring [sic] the principles of the Christian religion even among negroes.”Footnote 117 He went on to describe how “the coloured people under my care have behaved themselves with distinguished propriety and been generally very attentive to their books . . . . I have found no difficulty in the capacities of negroes more than in white people and think they may easily be learned to read the Scriptures.” Nevertheless, Sharpe asked to be released from his post, citing family obligations.Footnote 118 The society was only able to maintain the black school by passing a special resolution allowing teachers in this particular auxiliary to be paid.Footnote 119 The Pendleton Society's use of payment to incentivize teachers’ participation in black Sunday schools indicates that southerners were hesitant to integrate African Americans into the movement, a reluctance that hardened into overt hostility by mid-century.Footnote 120
Shifting to a child-centric model not only reflected the movement's embrace of sentimentalized constructions of childhood, but it also underscored the growing prevalence of an evangelistic orientation within Sunday schools. As noted, the principle objective behind orienting Sunday schools around children was the belief that they were easier to convert than adults. Unlike the First Day Society, which targeted children to alleviate poverty and cultivate citizenship, early nineteenth-century Sunday schools were child-centric because they aspired to save souls. The SASU asserted that Sunday schools existed to instruct pupils in the “essential principles of the gospel.” Moreover, teachers were the divinely-appointed “instrument of bringing these little children to Christ.”Footnote 121 The Boston society declared that Sunday schools were not designed merely “to instruct the ignorant,” but to “fix the attention of youth on divine things, by inducing them to reverence the Sabbath, to attend on public worship, [and] to read the Bible.”Footnote 122 The New York Female Union affirmed an identical goal, boldly declaring that it aimed “at nothing lower than the salvation of immortal souls.”Footnote 123 These organizations also believed they had a distinct part to play in inaugurating the millennium, asserting that converting children was pivotal to society's eventual sanctification.Footnote 124 The SASU even claimed that Sunday schools were “among the most efficient and successful means of extending the kingdom of ‘Emanuel God with us.’”Footnote 125 This self-designation endowed the movement's pursuit of child conversions with a larger objective than ensuring individual salvations or even sustaining the republic. By tying child-centric reform to the inauguration of the millennium, Sunday schools aspired to make childhood religious formation an indispensable component of the Benevolent Empire's desired outcomes.Footnote 126
Hoping to maximize the Sunday school's evangelistic potential, reformers developed curricular models that embraced romanticized conceptions of children's malleability. In a popular 1817 manual, The Sunday School Teacher's Guide, Sunday-school instructors were told to focus on “awakening” children's spiritual sensibilities by appealing to their emotions. “By all that is awful, and all that is pathetic in religion, admonish and exhort the children. Endeavor to awe them by the terrors of the Lord, and melt them by his mercies.”Footnote 127 Another instructional book, Teacher's Manuel, reminded Sunday school workers that children were like “wax” that was “warmed and softened by the heat of youthful feeling, and awaits the impressions” that teachers wished to fix upon them.Footnote 128 According to contemporary theories, one of the most effective ways to convey these impressions was through memorization.Footnote 129 Consequently, a student's ability to memorize and recite scripture became a standard means of measuring spiritual growth. The SASU reported with satisfaction that in some schools, children regularly recalled entire books of the Bible, considering this to be a sign of “great love for and delight in the holy Scriptures.”Footnote 130 The Boston Society for the Poor praised its pupils for memorizing sizeable portions of scripture, devoting sections of each annual report to describing how many passages children could recite.Footnote 131 John Gulliver, superintendent of Boston's School Street Sabbath School, reflected a common view when he asserted that pupils’ memorization skills and moral improvement proved that their “consciences are tender, and their minds very seriously impressed.”Footnote 132
Gulliver also used moral improvement, defined as an increase in respectful and reverent conduct, to assess impact. Most Sunday school teachers followed the same practice, using students’ behaviors to determine if the religious impressions they sought to impart struck the right emotional chords. SASU auxiliaries regularly exulted that “evident improvement in the morals of the children has been the reward of the teachers.”Footnote 133 The SASU also rejoiced when mischievous students became more punctual, orderly, and attentive.Footnote 134 Similarly, the Female Union believed that behavioral improvement was evidence of spiritual formation. The second report claimed that, after the establishment of both New York Unions, “the reformation in our streets must be apparent to everyone.”Footnote 135 The societies failed to mention, however, that they gave prizes to students for good conduct, providing a less than spiritual incentive to adopt Protestant behavioral norms. Prizes were also awarded to students that recited the most verses. Thus, children may have memorized scripture for temporal gains. The associations consistently deflected attention away from these additional motivators, believing that memorization and moral uplift were signs of the Sunday school's transformative power.
By using behavior to measure success, evangelical reformers continued to affirm the Sunday school's founding mission of disseminating virtue to the rising generation in order to preserve the republic. Most Sunday schools still catered to impoverished children in the early-national period, since they were deemed in special need of religious instruction.Footnote 136 Like the First Day Society, the Boston Society for the Poor maintained that “among an ignorant and neglected population, the tendency to vice . . . is strong and rapid.” Therefore, “a wise economy, and a regard to the protection and security of property, require, that the means of moral and religious instruction be furnished to all classes of society, but especially to the poor.”Footnote 137 Other evangelistic Sunday schools also embraced the Christian republican view that religion produces virtue as an additional incentive for their work.Footnote 138 Yet unlike eighteenth-century Sunday schools, the evangelistic associations expressed frustration if moral transformation was not followed by progress toward conversion. The SASU's 1818 report stated that an auxiliary called the Canaan Society School “speaks favourably of the progress and deportment of the scholars, but laments that so little of saving benefit appears to be the result of their labours.”Footnote 139 For the SASU, true progress was made when students “exhibited such a change of conduct, as indicates a change of heart.”Footnote 140 Similarly, the New York Female Union spoke for the entire movement when it affirmed that, in addition to temporal and social benefits, the Sunday school's “most glorious fruit” was generating youthful conversions.Footnote 141
Yet as indicated by the reports above, many Sunday schools struggled to meet their evangelistic aims. Narratives of student conversions are noticeably absent from auxiliary reports. Although it was the largest Sunday school organization, the SASU did not generate many converts. In 1818, the Combined Schools of the Northern Liberties, an SASU auxiliary, reported only one conversion out of four hundred fifty students.Footnote 142 Another SASU auxiliary, the Newtown Sabbath School Association, reported that none of its scholars had converted and apologized for not presenting “a more satisfactory report.”Footnote 143 The New York and Boston Sunday schools often lamented that, despite signs of moral improvement, “there does not appear to be decided evidence of real piety” among most pupils.Footnote 144
The organizations dealt with this lack of verifiable converts by emphasizing the romanticized ideal that childhood was a crucial period of spiritual preparation, which would be followed by conversion in adolescence or adulthood. As the Sunday school supporter and Unitarian minister from Boston, Ezra S. Gannett, stated, “we are not educating children so much for immediate excellence as for the duties and trials of future life, for manhood and womanhood, for death and eternity. It is unreasonable to repine because we cannot gather fruits which immortality must ripen.”Footnote 145 Accepting the sentimentalized view of childhood as an exceptionally malleable life stage allowed the organizations to stress that the battle for a child's soul was partially won once they started attending Sunday school. The SASU claimed that God would “open the hearts of the children” who attended consistently and lead them to faith.Footnote 146 While this process was often slow and imperceptible, the societies never doubted that their religious instruction would eventually produce “fruit unto eternal life.”Footnote 147 By making attendance, memorization, and good conduct likely precursors to salvation, auxiliaries could assert that they made children “hopefully pious,” even if verifiable conversions were slow to appear.Footnote 148
IV. Empowering Youth Leadership
Despite the Sunday school's questionable proselytizing influence, shifting to a child-centric and evangelistic model was indisputably successful at attracting a wide range of supporters. While executive leadership within these associations usually hailed from Haselby's national evangelist camp, many of the volunteers on the ground included supporters from more diverse backgrounds. Describing the York County Sunday School Association, Bacon asserted that the lower class actively participated in Sunday schools in rural Pennsylvania. Bacon, who was a lawyer, wrote that “with the exception of myself . . . we do not have one active member above the grade of a mechanic. We are shoe-makers, tailors, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths—almost to a man.” Significantly, he noted that one leader “is yet a mere youth.” Because of this, “all our learned and genteel people stand aloof.” He explained that this middle-class resistance was not only due to the low social status of many Sunday school enthusiasts, but also because numerous leaders “are all young.” Bacon was undeterred by such criticism, asserting that “Christ is our leader, and we shall triumph.”Footnote 149
The York County Sunday School Association was not unusual in relying on youth leadership. Most nineteenth-century Sunday school associations exhibited high levels of involvement from an age group that, while substantially comprised by individuals that fell within the category of what would be considered adolescence in the modern day, was usually described with the broader term “youth.” As noted above, youth was a flexible term during this period that not only included traditional adolescence, but it also encompassed a wider category of ages that ranged from late childhood to early adulthood.Footnote 150 Within the Sunday school movement, any teacher as young as thirteen or as old as twenty-five was usually called a youth. Gannett asserted that by the 1830s, “seventy-five thousand teachers are engaged in Sunday schools,” most of whom were “young men and women.”Footnote 151 Many of the teachers who pioneered evangelistic Sunday schools were adolescent converts seeking outlets to express their newfound faith. For example, young men from Andover Theological Seminar regularly visited the Boston Sunday schools to assist instructors, particularly by making house calls to visit with pupils.Footnote 152 The Boston Society for the Poor felt that these young men were unusually effective at bonding with students and recruiting new pupils, asserting that they “deserve a tribute of gratitude for their kind and gratuitous cooperation with us in our exertions among the poor population of the city.”Footnote 153 Similarly, reports from the New York Unions asserted that most of its teachers were “the youth of our country.”Footnote 154 The Unions took great pride in their young teachers, upholding them as paragons of virtue who were genuinely concerned for students’ spiritual welfare.Footnote 155 In 1819, the Female Union report included a letter from fourteen young female teachers, who entreated “the prayers of all interested in the work, that they may not only be instrumental in improving minds, but also in benefitting the souls of those committed to their care.”Footnote 156 By joining Sunday schools as teachers, adolescents of both genders were empowered to shape children's religious formation while also establishing their own identities as evangelical activists who belonged to a network of like-minded volunteers.Footnote 157
Sunday school teaching often held particular appeal for unmarried adolescent women. The ideal of true evangelical womanhood prioritized women's spiritual influence as wives and mothers, yet the Sunday school movement provided a forum for single women to exercise spiritual authority over children in their own right. This was the case with Harriot Lathrop Winslow, who converted in 1809 at the age of twelve after attending revivals in her hometown of Norwich, Connecticut.Footnote 158 As she grew into young adulthood, Winslow dedicated herself to evangelical activism, starting groups such as the Society for the Relief of Poor Women and Children. During a visit to New York City in 1816 at the age of eighteen, Winslow met Joanna Bethune and learned about Sunday schools. Inspired by Bethune's success, Winslow returned to Norwich determined to start a school of her own. Local clergymen initially opposed her endeavor, fearing that her efforts to instruct children in the faith would usurp their authority.Footnote 159 As a result, Winslow initially had trouble recruiting pupils. But when a few of the students converted, Winslow convinced the ministers of her the school's value and subsequently continued the work unopposed.Footnote 160 Winslow's role as a Sunday school superintendent proved to be a turning point in her spiritual journey, empowering her to pursue even more controversial forms of benevolence. She went on to become one of the first American female missionaries, an unusual role for women at the time.Footnote 161
Other adolescent female converts, like Sarah Connell Ayer of Massachusetts and Anna J. Linnard of Pennsylvania, were equally influential in founding Sunday schools in their respective states.Footnote 162 As with Winslow, these young women sometimes found that serving as Sunday school superintendents challenged prevailing social and religious norms. This was especially true for single women in the South that supported African American Sunday schools, since such work was often deemed a perverted use of feminine influence that might incite revolt. For example, young female students from the Cedar Park School in Prince Georges County, Maryland, met strong resistance from local gentlemen when they attempted to start a Sunday school for black children.Footnote 163 Other young women used Sunday schools to bring similarly marginalized children into the Protestant fold. Victorine, Eleuthera, and Sophie du Pont, three sisters who ran the Brandywine Manufacturers Sunday School in Wilmington, Delaware, regularly welcomed Catholic and immigrant pupils.Footnote 164 Although lacking the social authority of ministers, these young women used Sunday schools to expand the scope of female voluntarism. They also pushed Sunday schools in new directions by instructing children of diverse racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Largely due to the efforts of these adolescent teachers, women dominated the movement by the antebellum era.Footnote 165 In fact, local auxiliaries were sometimes compelled to issue special pleas for male involvement. In 1827, the South Carolina Sunday School Union expressed confusion as to why “active intelligent men of every congregation” did not match female participation, which “outpaced the males by one half.”Footnote 166 Despite these pleas, women continued to comprise the majority of Sunday school teachers well into the twentieth century. Moreover, in contrast to critiques leveled at Winslow, young single women were encouraged to lead Sunday schools by the antebellum period, enabling many adolescent women to use the movement as a pathway to religious authority.Footnote 167
In other cases, Sunday schools became a space for youth to experiment with voluntarism while wrestling with their personal faith. In the Boston Sunday schools, adolescent pupils were encouraged to serve as teachers for younger classes. The society hoped that such work would fan the flames of activism within these youth and produce “a succession of Teachers of Sabbath schools raised up from among those who had been scholars themselves.”Footnote 168 Significantly, many of these young teachers were unconverted, a trend exhibited by other Sunday schools associations as well. The Male Union justified recruiting unconverted youth volunteers by arguing that Sunday schools could be a means of salvation for instructors, not just students.Footnote 169 The Union asserted that many of its teachers, “while endeavoring to explain to their pupils the doctrines and duties of religion, have been strongly impressed with their own need of divine illumination and forgiveness; and whose convictions and anxieties have issued their hopeful conversion to the love of God.”Footnote 170 The Female Union was similarly hopeful that Sunday school work would result in the conversion of teachers. These hopes were often fulfilled. Between 1816 and 1821, ninety-eight Female Union teachers were converted in the society's Sunday schools, while only sixty-nine students were converted.Footnote 171 Because Sunday school teaching could be the final step in a young adult's journey to salvation, most organizations were reluctant to deny unconverted individuals a chance to participate. Indeed, since many of the societies exhibited higher conversion rates among adolescent teachers than child pupils, they probably recognized that fostering youth leadership was one of the most effective ways for Sunday schools to achieve their evangelistic aims.
By the antebellum period, rather than critique youth leadership as the York County Sunday School Association's opponents had done, reformers celebrated this practice for its multiple benefits. In a promotional book published by the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society entitled Letters on Sabbath Schools, an anonymous superintendent argued that Sunday school teachers not only exerted a powerful sanctifying influence over pupils, “but in the families connected with them, and thus through the community in which they are providentially located.”Footnote 172 An excerpt from the Methodist General Assembly 1824 report published in The American Sunday School Magazine asserted that “very much good has been accomplished by the instrumentality of young ladies and gentlemen” who served as Sunday school teachers in “new and destitute regions of the church.”Footnote 173 Other Sunday school organizations regularly made similar claims about young people's effectiveness in bringing Protestantism “into dwelling-places where before it was utterly unknown.”Footnote 174 Within the movement, therefore, the child-centric and evangelistic Sunday school model enabled youth to assume reformer status alongside adults. As Gannett explained, Sunday schools aspired to empower adolescents to shape “the destinies of the republic” through evangelism, helping propel the spread of youth voluntarism and raise young people's status within the Protestant community.Footnote 175
V. Conclusion
Inspired by sentimentalized reconstructions of childhood and fueled by the religious zeal of youthful volunteers, leaders of the Sunday school movement turned their energies to national expansion in the mid-nineteenth century using diverse recruitment methods, including hiring missionaries and developing new lines of juvenile literature.Footnote 176 These efforts quickly yielded positive results. The SASU had seven hundred twenty-three affiliates in seventeen states within seven years of its founding, while the New York and Massachusetts organizations grew to support hundreds of auxiliaries in neighboring states.Footnote 177 By 1824, this rapid expansion resulted in the creation of a national Sunday school organization named the American Sunday School Union (ASSU).Footnote 178 The ASSU was even more successful at popularizing the idea of using Sunday schools as “nurseries of the church of God.”Footnote 179 ASSU missionaries established over 70,000 new Sunday schools, and by 1832 over ten percent of white American children attended an ASSU school.Footnote 180 As Boylan argues, by the 1850s, a church without a Sunday school was considered an anomaly.Footnote 181 Reflecting on this expansion in a sermon delivered in Charleston to the South Carolina Sunday School Society in 1860, Lutheran pastor William S. Bowman exulted that although at their founding Sunday schools were “regarded as small work” because they were “connected with small people,” within little more than fifty years the movement stretched “from the rock-bound coast of Maine to the golden shores of California” and taught thousands of children “the way of life and salvation.”Footnote 182 Bowman rejoiced that this growth served to expand opportunities for young people to actively participate in their own religious formation. “The religion of Jesus,” Bowman asserted, “falls within their understanding as within the understanding of an adult.”Footnote 183
As Bowman's remarks indicate, the creation of Sunday schools helped embed sentimentalized constructions of childhood into American religious practice. Reformers from a range of Protestant traditions translated romanticized ideals of children's spiritual malleability and capacity for religious activity into an institutional framework that provided young people with an innovative avenue for formulating and expressing their faith. Combining the responsibility to rear virtuous citizens with the impulse to Christianize the nation, reformers embraced a child-centric Sunday school model as a pathway to creating standardized religious educational experiences for thousands of children and adolescents, thereby socializing them into the wider evangelical community. Moreover, the dissemination of these Sunday schools enabled young people to serve as teachers and activists in their own right, expanded the category of reformer to include youth. While the Sunday school's ideals and methods were sometimes contested, especially during the early years of recruiting youth leadership, the movement eventually achieved widespread cultural resonance. In contrast to other nineteenth-century reforms, such as temperance, Sunday schools demonstrated remarkable staying power. The movement not only continues to function as a primary site of values transmission within Christian churches into the modern day, but it also inspired the creation of other child-centric religious programming, such as Vacation Bible Schools and summer Bible camps.
By institutionalizing children's religious formation, the Sunday school movement helped give shape and substance to American childhood, even as it expanded the impact that age and life stage considerations played in structuring American religious culture. Determined to ensure that all young people would be “taught of God,” reformers used Sunday schools to integrate children's religious needs into the larger goals energizing the Benevolent Empire, enhancing young people's visibility and religious activity while making childhood a core value driving the Protestant project of creating a Christian nation. Using age as a lens of analysis to assess the development of early nineteenth-century voluntarism, therefore, reveals that American religion and American childhood developed simultaneously. Recognizing how the two narratives are interwoven broadens scholarly understandings of how religious power, belonging, and identities were defined and negotiated in the formative years of the nation's history. Young people were at the heart of nineteenth-century benevolent activity, making childhood and youth indispensable components of American religious life.
