Historians continue to make important additions to the mountain of scholarship on colonial Massachusetts puritanism. The Bay Colony frequently stands in for New England as a whole—minus “licentious” Rhode Island. In the early republic and antebellum decades, scholarship focuses on Massachusetts Congregationalism and disestablishment, the rise of Unitarianism, the Second Great Awakening, and the emergence of institutional reform. In the dominant narrative of New England's religious history from the colonial era to the Civil War, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont only play bit parts. As Shelby M. Balik's comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources documents, across the arc of New England religious history Maine, New Hampshire (which most resembled Massachusetts), and Vermont have been the subject of only a handful of studies. None examines the three states together. Balik's exhaustively researched book represents the most comprehensive and important study of northern New England's religious history published to date. It is also a significant contribution to a small body of scholarship on the spatial study of religion.

Balik's richly textured, “low to the ground” analysis begins with the town-church ideal transported from southern New England. As tens of thousands of migrants flocked northward in the decades after 1780, Congregational leaders discovered that the town-church settlement arrangement proved largely unworkable, even in parts of New Hampshire, which had the most developed traditional civic-religious order. For one thing, physical geography worked against reproducing southern New England's town-church settlement pattern. Mountainous or hilly terrain, extensive thick forests, and an expansive maritime landscape helped scatter the population instead of encouraging migrants to form nucleated settlements. Thin, rocky soil and short growing seasons fostered poverty. Too often settlers did not possess the resources to support a minster or build a meetinghouse. Moreover, poverty produced high rates of geographic mobility. Balik uses numerous church dismission letters, where they exist, to trace the movement of Congregationalists. People tended to move short distances within the same state or remain in northern New England.

Rather than the town-church ideal, the circuit system of insurgent religious sects was better suited to the dispersed, impoverished, and mobile realities of the lay life in northern New England. Calvinist Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists formed regular preaching circuits to serve and organize believers. Numerous maps form one of the strengths of Balik's book. One map delineates the circuits of sectarian preachers and demonstrates their reach. Another pinpoints the growth of the competing groups from 1780 to the late 1820s. Led by Free Will Baptists emergent new denominations found “ephemeral places” to worship, from schoolhouses to outdoor settings (9). In addition to its adaptability to the physical and social landscapes of northern New England, the circuit system ushered in heightened lay leadership of religious life. Exhorting, lay-led prayer meetings, and revivals, all became fixtures of frontier communities, and so did an expanded role for women religious leaders. Such lay activism, Balik argues, sprang from the nature of religious communities and not from an “anticlerical or antinomian” (147) impulse.

Congregationalists mounted a robust response to their challengers. Long the guardians of a vital print culture, they inundated northern New England with religious tracts, revival accounts and periodicals. Most importantly, Congregationalists organized multiple missionary societies to win back the unchurched, many of whom preferred to sample the region's religious fare rather than declare membership in a single church. Some licensed Congregational preachers followed the path blazed by their opponents. Fulltime missionaries traveled throughout northern New England's scattered settlements. In other cases, missionary societies provided financial assistance to a settled minister, who was then required to serve as a missionary for part of the year. Such arrangements created a void that was filled by lay activism. In other words, Congregationalists in northern New England often adopted practices of their religious rivals. This flexibility helped stave off Congregational decline. In Vermont alone, 178 Congregational churches were founded between 1780 and 1829.

In the meantime, sectarian groups, whose circuits and preachers had been centrally controlled, evolved toward churchly denominations. As early as 1822, Balik points out, “80% of Free Will Baptists had settled clergy” (193), with most responsible for a single church. By challenging the narrative of Congregational decline and stressing the central organization of sects and their trajectory toward structured denominations, Balik seeks to modify, though not refute, the “democratization of Christianity” thesis.

Balik's argument that an “ecumenical culture” ultimately became common in northern New England is less persuasive. Also she might have said something about the advantage Congregationalists possessed in institutions that helped educate prospective minsters: Bowdoin College and Bangor Seminary in Maine; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; and Middlebury College in Vermont. On the whole, however, her fine-grained analysis is compelling. It rests on an impressive range of sources: church records; quarterly and yearly meeting records; memoirs, diaries and correspondence; and personal papers. In sum, this is a major work of extraordinary scholarship.