Social Sources of Denominationalism Reconsidered: Post-Revolutionary Boston as a Case Study

Abstract

PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONS HAVE LONG CLAIMED THE ATTENTION OF scholars as a key to understanding institutional religious experience. Religious historians have ranged in judgment from the critical stance of H. Richard Niebuhr, who saw denominations as obstacles to church unity, to the endorsement of Sidney Mead, who valued individual groups as useful proponents of specific views that improve with denominational competition. Nevertheless, most agree on the persistent role of denominations in religious organization. Sociologists, beginning with Max Weber, stress the social functions of religious bodies; among contemporary writers, Bryan Wilson is particularly concerned with denominations as agencies of protest or accommodation. Most recently, social historians have used such methods as case study and statistical analysis in historical settings to investigate denominational alignments as expressions of social ones. This work by Anthony Wallace, Stephanie Wolf, Bruce Laurie, and others invites further research. While socialhistorical techniques have been applied to religious records to clarify social structure, the significance of these findings for explaining denominationalism as a religious system has been little considered. ' Denominationalism can be defined as an institutional arrangement where religious groups, usually composed of individual congregations connected by national organizations, enjoy legal equality.2 This kind of religious community evolved earliest and most fully in America. The present essay uses methods of social history to address a pair of questions about the development of denominationalism in America. First, how much has social diversity contributed to denominational distinctions? Was H. Richard Niebuhr correct in his judgment that although spiritual energy must account for religious enthusiasm, secular