Confessional Protest

Abstract

Abstract The social movement term “confessional protest” originates in Michael P. Young's work on the rise of national social movements in the United States in the 1830s (Young 2002; Young & Cherry 2005; Young 2007). Young argues that the first sustained and interregional social movements in US history were shaped by a particular form of protest that called Americans to bear witness against particular sins such as slavery and intemperance. He terms this form of religious and political dissent confessional protest, and argues that religious forces, not political institutions, were decisive in the emergence of the national social movement in the United States. Arguing against Tilly's state‐centered explanation of the rise of the national social movement, Young presents a cultural explanation that hinges on the combination of the intensive and extensive evangelical schemas of public confession and special sins (Tilly 1986, 1995; Young 2002). In Bearing Witness Against Sin , Young demonstrates how temperance, antislavery, and the beginning of the women's rights movements emerged as evangelicals joined together in this particular form of religious dissent fusing intensive projects of personal redemption with extensive projects of particular national reform. This interlacing of intimate responsibility and far‐flung social problems fueled the first national wave of social movements in the United States. These confessional protests emerged as two religious movements driving the Second Great Awakening started to interact: the “new measure” religious revivals associated most closely with Charles Grandison Finney and an emerging network of national benevolent societies including the American Tract Society and the American Home Missionary Society. Evangelicals closely associated with new measure revivals and the increasingly rationalized work of organized benevolence spearheaded the wave of protest. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, the popular religious revivals of the upstart or populist sects and those influenced by them came into contact with the agencies of benevolent societies centered in the northeastern cities (Hatch 1989). The combination proved radical. As public confessions, the dramatic centerpiece of the populist revival, became central to the specialized campaigns of organized benevolence, a wave of social movements independent of ecclesiastical order broke across the United States. This unprecedented national wave of social movements emerged as hundreds of thousands of Americans joined together bear witness against special sins. Although religious in origin, these movements quickly became secular forces pushing for political reform (Young & Cherry 2005).