Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography by Shelby M. Balik (review)

Abstract

Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England's Religious Geography. By Shelby M. Balik. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Pp. 295. Cloth, $60.00.)Reviewed by Nathan S. RivesGod, it seems, had to fight uphill battle in northern New England in the early republic. The rugged, mountainous topography of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine isolated settlers from one another and from the communities that nurtured their spiritual needs. The region's culture, as Shelby Balik explains in her compelling book, was bound to the experience of physical and spiritual space. Significantly, space is not fixed in Balik's religious geography. Motion across space is equally important, for northern New England was region of restless mobility, which its culture self-consciously accommodated (1). Using church and town records, the personal writings and correspondence of laity and clergy, books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Balik has written engaging, ground-level history with larger implications.Northern New England's geography followed two competing spatial models. One was the town church of the region's dominant Congregationalism. Inherited from the colonial Puritan mission, town churches were tied to territorial parishes with fixed boundaries. Enjoying the privileges of legal incorporation and compulsory tax support, the Congregationalist parishes understood themselves to speak for all residents within their boundaries, whatever their preferences. Permanent meetinghouses symbolized idealized unity, and when members moved, town churches extended their spiritual space like canopy of protection through letters of dismission and recommendation that migrants carried with them to new places of residence (30). This town-church model flourished in southern New England but was tough sell to the north. New settlements lacked the funds and the sense of personal interconnectedness upon which permanent ingathering depended. Upstart churches-especially regular and Freewill Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists-turned instead to itinerancy. Here Balik puts persuasive twist on seemingly familiar story: Itinerancy was not merely stopgap measure conceived by wandering ministers operating independently, she insists, but an intentional strategy centrally managed and monitored by missionary societies, regional conferences, and ecclesiastical hierarchies (45). Though bearing ideology of unbounded freedom, itinerants were extending order through unmapped spaces.Nonetheless, the spatial order projected by town churches and itinerants differed. The former sought stability in fixed spaces with local roots; the latter understood space in terms of movement and fluidity. Scattered met in fields, barns, or schoolhouses; revivals and conferences served as temporary gathering points for far-flung believers (171). These spatial differences had import. Rooted Congregationalist town churches often emphasized unity over orthodoxy and were sometimes reluctant to dismiss members over differences. But dispersed itinerant churches could not rely on proximity to forge unity, and identified with one another through distinctive doctrines and practices. The paradoxical upshot, as Balik puts it, was geographic fluidity married to doctrinal rigidity (73). Upstart religions were frequently more concerned with orthodoxy and less democratic than their Congregationalist rivals. In short, popularity was not populism, in contrast to Nathan Hatch's classic view of democratization in the early republic. Lay choices did not imply rejection of clergy or hierarchy. Instead, clergy and laity were part of a complex conversation about the nature of religiosity, in which concentric circles of faith extended outward from individuals to larger communities, making room for churches and minister-directed rituals like communion and baptism alongside prayer meetings, family worship, and private acts of faith (111). …