The title of this very fine, fresh reinterpretation might suitably end with an “s” to read “Religious Nationalisms.” Haselby revisits the oft-told tale of the spread of protestant and kindred movements across the fast growing new nation. To that extent, it recalls other sweeping narratives, perhaps especially that of Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1989). And like Hatch, Haselby attends to the array of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century fresh religious impulses birthed in Virginia and New England and expressed in the array of quite divergent visions-schemes-machinery-messages for the spreading American peoples. Especially noteworthy in his explication of the various movements and of their agendas are the detailed expositions he provides of key actors and their publications. A subtitle of “an intellectual history” or some variant thereof would describe well the richness of his assessment of the diverse religious motivations, programs and achievements.
However, while noting and describing the vying movements he discerns the “main contest” as “between a popular, anti-elitist frontier revivalism and a bourgeois nationalist metropolitan missionary” enterprise (22). Unlike Hatch's mapping of the full landscape, Haselby offers aerial views of the country but then drops down, as it were, to the detailing and describing of selective, determinative sites and the action thereon. He devotes much of the book to depicting the two transformative dramas as staged—major actors, their agenda, their witness or writing, and the action that unfolds. Chapters 3 and 4 attend to frontier revivalism. Chapters 2, 5 and 6 attend to the background and then schemes for the alternative and carefully piloted missionizing of the nation by a coterie of “New England Protestant literary intellectuals and the Northeastern bourgeoisie” (193). The first chapter attends to the political skirmishes, actors and theories that advanced religious toleration through disestablishment. There he unpacks the writings and political visions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. But if they provided ground rules for the American religious game, Jefferson and Madison did not assemble the teams and instill fervor for popularizing their secularist and politicized sport.
Chapter 2, “The Songs of a Nation,” Haselby devotes to New England and the visions of the nation as an empire entertained by “the Connecticut Wits.” Their Federalist scheme got voted out of office but its ambitions, albeit recast, would find new expression when these Congregationalists later joined with the Presbyterians to create institutions for stamping their Christian order on the nation (chapter 6). Notable in the second chapter and indeed throughout the book is the attention, as noted above for Jefferson and Madison, given to important and transformative publications. So in treating the New Englander aspirations for a “New English Empire” he devotes five pages to writings of Noah Webster (69–74), twenty to Timothy Dwight's (75–77, 83–106), six to John Trumbull's (77–83) and four to Joel Barlow's (74, 108–111).
Haselby depicts popular revivalism with the Methodists and their circuit-rider, camp-meeting evangelization of the spreading American settlements (chapter 3) and with the Shakers' outreach to Native American communities (chapter 4). In the latter, he features the leadership and agendas of Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh and the outreach and publications of Richard McNemar and James Smith. To Smith's writings he devotes eight pages. For Methodists he rightly tracks Francis Asbury's “writing” of holiness and the disciplined life across the landscape. His assessment of early Methodism accords well with my own so I, of course, commend it highly. Dialogue with another OUP volume, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists by John Wigger (New York: Oxford University, 2009), would have been interesting and instructive. Of late and seemingly, OUP has taken on the office of Methodist Publishing House at least for serious scholarship.
The fifth chapter attends to religious worldviews and machinery that countered, often quite deliberately and programmatically, the populist revivalism of Methodists and Shakers and treats Unitarianism, Transcendentalism and the emerging coalition of Presbyterians and Congregationalists. These six movements and especially the first two and last two constitute the actor guilds in Haselby's drama. Baptists, Episcopalians, Disciples, Lutherans, Catholics and smaller denominations make only brief appearances in this two act play. So also black religion gets modest attention, though Haselby does focus on abolition schemes (black churches did emerge fully after the years covered in the book). Instead of attending to the various particularisms, including those of the coalition parties own past, Haselby examines the more ecumenical, shared and therefore modest religious views that yielded a theology of and for the nation. Tracking the emergence of this nationalism, he attends to publications of several advocates and to their description of the emerging organizational program that the coalition was birthing, including those of William Ellery Channing (194–197); Samuel Gilman (204–211); Elias Boudinot (211–220, 223–227); Charles Buchanan (220–223); and Samuel Mills (228–230).
In his sixth chapter, Haselby revisits the New York-based publication and distribution phalanx—American Bible, tract, missionary societies—and their incredible reach across the nation. Here, too, he treats important leaders, their mass produced writings (and tracts) and their fears of unruly and Shaker-Methodist populist disordering of the spreading unruly populace. And he attends in some detail to the both literary and programmatic ways the Presbyterian-Congregationalist-led coalition backed away from Federalist anti-slavery and into colonization. The same is true of the tracts, The Happy Negro and The Dairyman's Daughter.
The final chapter, shows as its subtitle, declares “The Revolution of Frontier Revivalism and National Evangelism.” Here, Haselby shows how Andrew Jackson's views, commitments, popularity and campaigns melded the two religious impulses but on his terms and with great cost to Native Americans and efforts on their behalf.
This is a very important and readable volume. The introduction effectively lays out the argument for the book as a whole and for each chapter. Initial paragraphs in each chapter provide further detailed summations of its agenda and relation to the volume as a whole.
