America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel

Abstract

Reviewed by: America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel Jon Butler Stephen T. Kissel, America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 268 pp. $28.00 (paper). Stephen Kissel's new study of religion in the Old Northwest does almost exactly what its title describes. It demonstrates how the new nation's rapidly multiplying Christian groups shaped community among the European immigrants and White and Black Americans who flooded into the fertile lands of the Northwest Territory from Ohio to the Mississippi River between 1790 and 1850. One might regret Kissel's decision not to include Jews and Judaism or expand his discussion of religion and community among American Indians uprooted by unrelenting European-American migration; their experiences likely would have extended Kissel's argument that community was as much the work of religious as of secular forces throughout the Old Northwest. Still, the breadth of Christian groups in the region and the depth of Kissel's research provide a vivid portrait of the fluid means through which Christian groups shaped community in this first "Midwest." Kissel argues that Christian churches' emphasis on family, vigorous print cultures, education, congregations functioning as community centers; their promotion of morals and civic order; and their political engagement shaped the region's culture far beyond the specific spiritual ethos that defined each group (105, 127). Kissel's observations may be standard fare in denominational histories, certainly those of the past half-century. Readers [End Page 106] of Timothy L. Smith's still-vibrant and urban-focused Revivalism and Social Reform (1957) will recognize several themes—education, the role of women, and religious demands for broad social change. But Kissel's success in documenting the range of these values among the Old Northwest's largely rural Christian groups reveals how denominations that seemed so different shared strong cultural values, whether Catholics or Presbyterians, African American or White Methodist Episcopalians, and Baptists or Mormons. Kissel begins with home and family. Before sanctuaries could be built, he notes, settlers "packed private homes to attend prayer meetings, baptisms, weddings, and funerals." The practice bolstered their public authority and reinforced women's roles in family and public life (18). Denominations flooded the region with religious newspapers, tracts, and Bibles, turning Cincinnati especially into a national powerhouse of religious printing. Sunday schools led by Protestant laywomen and Catholic nuns proliferated amidst the common religious focus on education. Having become sites of community gatherings in the earliest years of settlement, congregations became symbols of community commitment as they proliferated. Religious groups that defended "civil order and moral accountability" in their disciplinary proceedings advocated the same values across society at large (105). When denominations' voluntary societies lobbied for temperance and the abolition of slavery in state legislatures, they bespoke their commitment to an "active faith" (127). Not all this activity produced happiness. African Americans employed clergy and congregations to support literacy and education, defend escaped slaves, and demand slavery's abolition. But White Christians segregated them in the Old Northwest, buttressing their beliefs about African American racial inferiority with biblical support. American Indians remained of interest to White Christians largely as subjects of conversion, although some Christian figures strenuously supported ethical treatment of Indians by federal and state authorities. Worse, violence rooted in religious tension rolled across the Old Northwest. A Presbyterian minister led a mob assault against a Shaker community in Union Village, Ohio. Protestant mobs relished attacks on Catholics. Cincinnati Whites, likely churchgoers, destroyed the city's first African American congregational home not just once but three times. Schisms set congregants against each other, and Joseph Smith was not beyond destroying the printing press of a rival Mormon group in his exasperation with Mormon dissidents. State authorities and vigilantes targeted Mormons [End Page 107] and murdered Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, the most consequential murder of an American religious figure until Martin Luther King Jr. a century-plus later. America's Religious Crossroads reads smoothly, with clear, crisp sentences set in well-organized chapters. Kissel's research is thorough, deep, and remarkably broad, especially for a first book. He has probed obscure...