Charles Sellers’s “Antinomians” and “Arminians”: Methodists and the Market Revolution

Abstract

Abstract No one can doubt the profound significance of the flowering of evangelical religion in the United States during the early national period, Intellectual and church historians have long regarded the waves of revival that made up the Second Great Awakening as expressing and accelerating a major ideological and theological reorientation, as well as demonstrating the American churches’ extraordinary practical energy and enterprise in the years following disestablishment1. More recently, exponents of the “new social history” have contributed a variety of painstaking and impressive local studies that have done much to anatomize the religious life of particular communities in the early Republic2. Even those who favor a primarily ideological explanation of the awakening see the value of pursuing the linkages between evangelical revivalist culture and an expanding market economy whose salient features included better communications, urban growth, incipient industrialization, increasing class tensions, changing gender roles, and a mobile population3.