W. Jason Wallace deftly uses sermons, tracts, and religious journals from antebellum America to discover and track the ways that evangelicals and Catholics, North and South, wrestled over the ideas about liberty, republicanism, democracy, slavery, and America's place in God's design. He argues that northern evangelicals—at once fired up by revivalism, committed to social activism, and outraged by the post-Napoleon conservative movements in nineteenth-century Europe—constructed a national millennialist narrative that cast America as God's chosen people and northern evangelical churches as His instrument for providing the moral instruction, correction, and direction necessary to redeem the nation and realize its promise. That narrative cast slavery and Catholicism as twin evils threatening individual rights, the integrity of republican interests and identity, and, thus, America's moral and national progress. By likening slavery and Catholicism variously to barbarism, feudalism, and tyranny, the northern evangelicals made “compromise” with them impossible. In turn, Wallace shows, southern proslavery apologists and Catholics, despite their theological differences, found common ground in defending slavery as an institution sanctioned by God and calling for a stable hierarchical society and a conservative Christian order. Although southern evangelicals and Catholics were never “allies,” they did join in castigating their northern evangelical critics as theologically unsound and dangerously political. The result of such debates and differences, Wallace concludes, was an irreparable distrust that magnified the sectional divide and undermined the American party system.

Wallace carefully and copiously mines the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominational literature in making his case that northern evangelicals saw southern slavery and Catholicism as conjoined corruptions demanding moral and political action. He also appreciates the dilemma of American evangelicals who agreed that America's purpose and destiny was to be a Protestant nation but disagreed on scriptural interpretations as to the particular nature of society God demanded. Their “common sense” approach to the Bible, after all, invited many, and differing, readings. As Wallace also shows, southerners resented their northern evangelical counterparts as much for their arrogance and hubris in supposing that their millennialist interpretation alone mattered as for their theological and political barbs against slavery.

Wallace also makes an important contribution in placing Catholic responses to northern evangelical criticism in context and in showing that, contrary to some scholarship on the church and slavery, Catholics did not avoid the issue. He is especially mindful of Catholic references to their own pre-Reformation history as the intellectual foundation of their insistent and persistent call for orthodoxy in belief and hierarchy in society. Therein, they argued, lay the security necessary to ensure “liberty.” The unsettling revolutions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century did much to frame Catholic thinking about the need for stable institutions and an ordered, and thus orderly, society. Wallace exegetes the writings of John England and other southern prelates regarding accommodating Catholicism with republicanism and American institutions, especially the church's acceptance of slavery as divinely allowed but also its criticism of slave-trading and the neglect of Christian duty to the enslaved. Catholics opposed abolitionism because of the abolitionists' anti-Catholicism and nativism and because they believed its premise of individual rights and conscience invited anarchy. Catholics also never conceded to evangelical Protestants their conceit that they were God's anointed moral compass for the nation. They regarded the pre-Reformation church as the proper model for a Christian state. At the same time, for all the toleration of Catholics in their midst, southern evangelicals never conceded to them any special place at the altar of southern rights. Southern evangelical and Catholic agreements were grounded in interest rather than theology. Then, too, as Wallace might have noted, the small Catholic presence in the South, and its accommodations to the political powers there, posed no threat to southern evangelical political or cultural interests. The circumstances were very different in the North where Catholics were increasing in numbers, assertiveness, and self-confidence.

Wallace's arguments will not surprise close readers of antebellum religious literature already aware of the evangelical push for social reform, antislavery, and nativism. But they will inform readers regarding the theological underpinnings of northern evangelicals' ideas about church and state, the imperatives of moral activism, and the northerners' constant juxtaposing of the “slave power” and the “Catholic menace” as of a piece.

Wallace overstates the extent of northern evangelicals' preoccupations in that he equates New England Protestants with the main thrust of northern evangelicalism. His is really a study of the New England mind rather than a full accounting of the varied strains of northern Protestantism. He also slights other concerns among northern Protestants, such as fears about Mormonism (which the Republican party equated with slavery as one of the “twin relics of barbarism”), worries about politics taking over pulpits, and concerns about backsliding congregants and unconverted masses. Wallace makes it seem as if northern evangelicals spoke with one voice, which they did not. Also, one wonders how the Civil War altered perceptions and priorities, especially as many Catholics rallied to the cause of “the Union” and claimed a blood right for their military service and other sacrifices.

But such questions and concerns should in no way detract from Wallace's significant achievement in making clear the antebellum evangelicals' fundamental dilemma—namely, “the problem of unity and authority when there was more than one claimant to ecclesiastical authority” (3). That dilemma begat others, as Wallace demonstrates. It also points to a persistent problem in American Protestant millennialism—namely, that any self-proclaimed monopoly on knowing God's will for America can breed an arrogance that defeats the possibility of human reconciliation and national redemption.