Great Awakening Research Articles

“In All Ages and All Churches”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism

“In All Ages and All Churches”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism

Joseph and Lucy Smith's Tunbridge Farm: An Archaeology and Landscape Study

joseph and lucy smith's tunbridge farm by Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders is a chapter in a Latter-day Saint Book of Hours (a meditative guide to be read throughout the day filled with prayers meant to focus on guidance from God). Staker and Enders's volume uses archaeology and landscape to ponder a moment in God's intervention in the course of human life. The authors are ordinary, honest archaeologists digging at a founding and farming site in the lives of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. The Smiths were the parents of ten children, including Joseph Smith Jr., who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This early hour of a new church and its material culture—the landscape, flowing water, hills, groves, cherry trees and apple trees—is a Genesis and this brief, well-written meditation allows readers to walk, touch, and witness the material culture of that important hour in the church's beginnings.There is a fair amount of archaeology done on sites of early Mormonism by Latter-day Saint archaeologists. It is all good archaeology, following standard methods, resulting in good reporting, and sometimes allowing for more authentic reconstructions like the Nauvoo Temple. Further, the archaeology of the early Mormonism that led to the Utah church is well-established and integrated into LDS Church projects. But there is not much archaeology within Mormonism that is considered foundational either to Mormonism or to historical archaeology. And the archaeology of early socialist communities or plural marriage communities is missing. Could all these archaeologies be considered different from conventional historical archaeology done for secular purposes? To be sure the excavation and reporting are equally responsible. Could we say that archaeology on Latter-day Saint sites is good to think with for spiritual purposes? Like reading a book of hours, or walking the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Suppose they are meditations instead of being only good site reports. Suppose we read Latter-day Saint archaeology as a way of understanding how the material culture and its context of a very hard farming village existence and the quest to experience the spirit of God during Second Great Awakening are a way into seeing, understanding, and even—for an LDS Church member—living again the early context of the founding moments of Mormonism. If this might be the effect of mainline Latter-day Saint archaeology, then it does not matter whether the church publishes the archaeology or the Society for Historical Archaeology presents it. What matters is how we see a Book of Hours. They are chapters to be read during the day to let you into another part of daily life so that you can get through a day the way you are supposed to. They are perfectly reasonable prayer books drawn out of an empirical context. It is an archaeology of relics that works because the relics are real. This is what material culture is supposed to do, after all. It is what a bone from St. Peter in St. Peter's Basilica, from his tomb below the church, is also supposed to do. It tells us that another world—one that was important and is now gone—did happen.The key chapter, the best chapter, the reason for the book, is chapter 8: “Lucy's Meadow, Her Grove, and Her First Vision.” This is an understanding of the farm's landscape in Joseph and Lucy Smith's quest to be led by God and in her and secondarily, his, experiences in lively Methodism, rational Universalism, and evangelical Presbyterianism. This is one of the best tellings of the world of religious awakenings in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that I have ever read. It is a chapter not about religious confusion but about how Federal Period America (c. 1776–1820) tried to sort out how to be religious while also dealing with a lack of serious government, a quirky economy, high infant mortality, large families, and the question of how to find a way through it all. The rationality of Hosea Ballou's Universalism, an early form of American socialism, and Methodism with its deep emotional acting out through spirit possession, were all attempts at navigating this situation. Where was God to be found? And how? It's all here in this chapter, led by Lucy Smith's path, a woman with her man following her lead. Actually walking the landscape where it all happened with this chapter in your hands is a meditative journey that focuses the mind on those founders and their events. So, as happens all too often in American religious history, the quest is led by a woman, while the history and victory are taken by a man. But, and even so, this Book of Hours is devoted to a woman.

Neo-Gnosticism and the American Dissident Right

Neo-Gnosticism and the American Dissident Right

Essays on American Indian and Mormon History

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the most successful religions to have emerged from the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s. Today it boasts a membership of over 16 million worldwide and an estimated net worth of several billion dollars. Its foundational text, the Book of Mormon, purports to be a story of the peoples of the America prior to European colonization. These peoples supposedly descended from refugees from Jerusalem who came to be divided into Nephites and Lamanites, the latter of whom bested the former and came to populate the Americas.Although Joseph Smith Jr. founded the LDS church in New York state, under his successor Brigham Young, it came to dominate Utah and the Intermountain West as part of the conceit of Manifest Destiny. The Mormon takeover of the territory of the Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Navajo was as racist and ruthless as other invasions, even as it was also fraught with efforts at peace and reconciliation.This collection of essays came out of a seminar hosted by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University in 2015. Participants “sought to make American Indians the subjects rather than the objects of discussions in relationships with Mormons.” The resulting anthology includes “personal testimonies” such as Michalyn Steele's “Sovereignty and the Corn Soup Social,” in which she describes a peaceful embrace of both Seneca and Mormon culture. It also includes case studies of “Mormonism and the Catawba Indian Nation” and “A History of the LDS Northern Indian Mission, 1964–1973.”One of the most poignant essays is “When Wakara Wrote Back” by Max Perry Mueller. Walkara was the powerful Timpanogos Ute chief and slave trader who was able to stall but not prevent Mormon takeover of the land and resources his people held. In the world that would soon overpower his, words on the page mattered more than words in the air. Walkara, who spoke several languages, came to understand this, and so he “wrote” a letter to Brigham Young: a letter of looping lines that cannot be read literally but that can be read as an attempt to “repeal a violent army of colonizers” (the Mormons) who were bent on destroying the Ute way of life.One of the most provocative essays is “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in which Elise Boxer denounces the LDS church as a “colonizing enterprise” and the Book of Mormon as “a powerful tool to subjugate Indigenous Peoples.” By promoting the Book of Mormon as the history of the original inhabitants of the Americas, Boxer argues, the church obliterates any Indigenous histories; by privileging Mormon settler stories, the church erases any Indigenous claims to land.In “Reclamation, Redemption, and Political Maneuvering,” Erika Bsumek interrogates the Mormon beliefs of Senator Arthur Watkins and the lawyer Ernest Wilkinson in their push for the federal termination program of the 1950s, which left several tribes stranded and at the mercy of rapacious bankers and developers. On the other hand, Farina Noelani King uncovers a tangled web of cooperation and confrontation as Hawaiian missionaries worked in Navajo country in the 1960s and 1970s. Some returned to settle there, sharing beliefs in the beauty of harmony, “Aloha in Diné Bikéyah.”In efforts to decolonize Mormonism, Thomas W. Murphy offers “Other Scriptures,” suggesting a parallel between Joseph Smith, a “seer from a colonializing society,” and Handsome Lake, a Seneca seer who created the Code, in which he attempted to simplify the spiritual practices of the Iroquois. Lori Blaine Taylor, in “Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country,” refutes the idea of a collaboration between Smith and Handsome Lake as “wishful thinking.” However, Michael B. Taylor's “In the Literature of the Lamanites,” is an invitation to consider Native writers who depicted Latter-day Saints as a way to “create more bilaterally respectful and beneficial future relationships.”How has the LDS church reframed relationships with Native Americans? The Indian Student Placement Program, ably described by Megan Stanton, has been dismantled, as has the American Indian Studies Program at BYU, which R. Warren Metcalf writes about. The LDS church is ending its ethnocentric dramas, such as the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which had been performed annually in Palmyra, New York, since 1937. And the church nowadays explains the Book of Mormon as a spiritual guide not necessarily as a literal history of American Indians.Hafen and Rensink's volume could serve as a guide for further decolonization of the LDS church. It is thick with documentation: there are seventy-three pages of endnotes. The authors are earnest and skilled in their efforts to explore the intertwined histories and experiences of Mormons and Native Americans. This is an anthology that should be widely read.

Introduction

Introduction

Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature by Lindsay V. Reckson (review)

Reviewed by: Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature by Lindsay V. Reckson Carolyn M. Jones Medine Lindsay V. Reckson. Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature. New York: New York UP, 2020. 319 pp. $29.00. In Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature, Lindsay V. Reckson uses the current scholarship on secularism to examine, as she notes, a period that this theory has ignored: post-Reconstruction America and the emergence of Jim Crow. Reckson argues that this era, with its consolidation of notions of race and its creation of racial segregation, is “central to . . . a regulatory regime of secularism” (5). African American uneasiness with the secular regime, held in place by a predominately Protestant Christian majority culture, is performed in racial, ethnic, artistic, and religious forms. Ecstatic performance of racialized persons, therefore, is multiply located—behind, before, and beside the dominant culture (234)—a formulation that she takes from the “Bacchic performance” (236) in a church in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). Reckson argues that “realism gives us a sense of how deeply encoded the secular is with structures of white supremacy” (3). As she examines the semiotics of the “frenzied black body,” Reckson argues that even as realism struggles to forget how it is implicated in white supremacy, its effort to leave it behind is haunted by what it tries to contain. For example: “Naturalizing racial and spiritual boundaries as part of its steadfast attention to the material world, realist practice nevertheless remains strikingly animated by ecstasy’s occluded histories of violence” (234), signaling a “very real proximity between ecstasy and terror.” Realism’s autonomy, therefore, is “haunted by what [it] can ever completely forget.” Ecstatic performance, however, happens not just within but also beside these ongoing histories, opening often occluded possibilities of freedom as they both archive the past and present and open “(counter)investments” (235). In Jim Crow America, Reckson writes that secularism is a drama “at or of the skin” (7). Therefore, performance is constrained by a Gordian knot of “racial violence, compulsion, and the ‘religious’ ” (2). Her objects of inquiry are sites of inspiration, contagion, and enthusiasm, religious forms and gestures emerging from the Second Great Awakening, which included emotional, ecstatic, and personal conversion experiences, and which, in its relative openness to people of color, led to reform movements and progressivism. Yet for Reckson, these movements reinscribe rather than transcend racism as they stand within its structures and strictures. Reckson examines the particular fascination in Black spiritual experience with Black and other racialized bodies in ecstasy, while also demonstrating how progressivism is interwoven with racially coded white supremacy. The stability of this secular order is continuously haunted, however, by a Derridean return of what post-Reconstruction America thought or hoped was dead and buried. This return happens because the material world is structured by this haunting, by the “pervasive systems of racial capital, imperialism, and genocide” that shaped the present moment. Haunting, Reckson argues, “might be the dominant affect of secularism,” and is “integral to what it means to be modern” (5). Secularism is both epistemological and formative as it disciplines the reason and the imagination (6), as her opening example of the figure of Henry Johnson in Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898) demonstrates. Alongside this disciplining, however, Reckson recognizes how Black bodies in ecstasy and in the case of the Ghost Dance, Native American bodies as well, threaten [End Page 353] secular intelligibility: They stand somewhat outside the regulatory frame. Race and personhood are problems that the secular realm struggles to make legible and interpret. Racialized bodies in ecstasy approach, open, or suggest only a meager proximity, an attenuated space in which freedom can be performed. These performances suggest the possibility of arrangements other than those of the reigning secular order, as bodies in motion unsettle fixed understandings. As Reckson writes, “This unsettling, transfixing, spellbinding performance of the unintelligible— circulating in dynamic ways through realism’s taxonomic enthusiasms, its broadside effort to forge sense out of a turbulent social sense—is at least part, I want to suggest, of what Jim Crow secularism feels like” (3). The possibilities, as we have noted, are not...

The Rights of God's Stewards: Property, Conscience, and the Great Awakening in Canterbury, Connecticut

Abstract The struggle for religious liberty in Canterbury, CT, was fought over property. When the Great Awakening divided church against town, evangelical “Separates” withdrew from the establishment and launched a campaign against ecclesiastical taxation, using concepts of conscience, stewardship, and property rights to defend estates and create a voluntary religious economy.

Editorial

IN this number, the New England Quarterly proudly announces the publication of the 2021 Colonial Society of Massachusetts Walter Muir Whitehill Prize winning essay, “The Rights of God's Stewards: Property, Conscience, and the Great Awakening in Canterbury, Connecticut” by Erik Nordbye. The prize recognizes Whitehill's contributions to the Colonial Society, but at the same time we acknowledge the Colonial Society's larger contributions to scholarship on early America. Walter Muir Whitehill was, in the words of the New York Times, “one of Boston's most outspoken champions of historic preservation.” Whitehill presided over the Colonial Society, managed the publication of collections of primary source documents in volumes remarkable for their editorial integrity and beauty—a practice continued, after 1978 by Fredrick Scouller Allis Jr. and, then since 1993, by John Tyler—and laid the foundation for its current programs. The establishment of the Whitehill Prize represents the extension of the Colonial Society's mission to encourage scholarship on early American history. Readers of this journal know that the prize annually offers an honorarium to an outstanding essay on the early republic (up to 1815) which the Quarterly agrees to publish.A doctoral student in theology at the Harvard Divinity School, Erik Nordbye illustrates the Colonial Society's support of innovative scholarship. Rather than pursuing the evangelical arguments separating New from Old Light theology, Nordbye correlates institutional and structural attributes of that division with questions about the impact of the contexts of property and possessory rights in shaping the disputes of the Great Awakening and provides us with an unusual view of its social controversies. In brief, who owned the church, who were subject to the costs of maintaining it, and what this meant for the larger conversation about colonial Connecticut's policies regarding taxation and established religion?Fortuitously, two other essays also provide complementary perspectives on eighteenth-century New England. Francis Russo's “Sonic Piety in New England” reviews the controversies over “Regular Singing” to recapture the significance of sound in religious life and ascertain its place in the larger story of the Great Awakening. Russo makes the case for a re-evaluation of our understanding of the function of sound in puritan or congregational piety. In our Memoranda and Documents Section, Leah Orr subjects bookstore owner Benjamin Guild's Daybook to an intense, deep analysis, traces the details of each transaction, and unexpectedly finds minimal changes in customer purchases in the midst of the American Revolution. In a detailed examination of the ebb and flow of Guild's custom, Orr breaks down Bostonians’ book purchases and finds that interest in British fiction continued relatively unabated in this period. These three essays together argue for the need to challenge simple axioms regarding change over time and the importance of the historian's charge to ascertain the significance of its complexities.While topically an outlier, our fourth essay, Eve Raimon's careful study of New England's hidden Black history, shows how memories allow us to elide the unpleasantness of our shared past. Examining four recent local commemorations of Black history, Raimon points to the way in which these sites impel the confrontation of the past, challenge the false pride of moral exceptionalism, and provide a sense of historical if not moral humility.Although long thought a Chinese curse, the greeting, “May you live in interesting times,” probably originated with Austen Chamberlain, the British diplomat, brother of Neville, and step-son-in-law to American Mary Endecott Chamberlain, the daughter of Cleveland's secretary of war William Crowninshield Endecott. As we approach the New Year, we express our appreciation for what seems to be the restoration of normality—masks are optional, the pandemic is (maybe) over, and the Red Sox missed the playoffs. Here at the Quarterly, we are especially grateful for the normality that carried us through interesting times: the many scholars who submitted essays, patiently awaited our review process, which despite our best efforts, seemed slower than usual, reviewed submissions and books, our subscribers and supporters, the Colonial Society, its Council, and its president Robert Alison for their sustained support. To our delight, we continue to find readers and authors who share their great affection for the journal with us. The staff of the Quarterly wishes all of you the happiest of holidays and the blessings of a normal New Year.

The Bible in Native American Literature

For at least a century the Bible played a significant, positive role in Native American letters starting with the eighteenth-century writings of Samson Occom. A product of the Great Awakening, Occom’s engagements with the Bible resembled those of other Protestant thinkers and writers of his time, although his sermons were sometimes specifically tailored for Indian audiences and topics. After Occom, Indian authors in the nineteenth century such as Elias Boudinot and William Apess drew upon the Bible to make arguments against removal and “scientific racism.” In the twentieth century writers like Zitkala-Ša and Charles Alexander Eastman cast a critical eye on Christianity and reconsidered the virtues of traditionalism. John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1932) was the century’s fullest literary depiction of a traditional religion, but it came at the cost of concealing Black Elk’s actual religion, Catholicism. During the 1960s and 70s oral tradition was privileged over sacred scripture, as seen in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968). While the Bible makes fewer appearances than it used to in Native American literature, it would be premature to suggest that Christianity is finished in Indian country.

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America

For nearly a decade, I taught an advanced undergraduate seminar entitled “Apocalypse.” Among other things, the course considered how Christian and Jewish ideas about the end of human history have affected and even directed the behavior of believers. Jonathan Todd Hancock’s Convulsed States would have made an excellent supplemental textbook for that course.This work is framed around the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812, the epicenters of which were located near the town of New Madrid, Missouri, not far from the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The quakes, at least one of which was probably a 7.0 on the Richter scale, were felt from Philadelphia to what is now western Nebraska, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a truly startling span of territory.Those who are attuned to end times speculation have long been inclined to see natural disasters as harbingers of the apocalypse. Hancock helpfully locates the earthquakes among a series of events, each of which alone would have jolted millenarians into a state of excited anticipation: the Great Comet of 1811; wars with Native Americans for control of the Northwest Territory; the outbreak of the War of 1812; and a massive fire that killed seventy-one people in Richmond, Virginia, including the state’s governor (17). Had these been insufficient to raise the anxiety of the faithful, “two charismatic religious figures laid out visions of destruction” that alarmed both white society and Native Americans.First was the 1807 prediction of Shawnee spiritual leader Tenskwatawa (also known as The Prophet) that earthquakes and other natural disasters would herald a “day of judgment” caused by the “white people [who] had taken possession of so much of the Indian country, and had lately killed so many Indians on the Wabash” (83). This book is remarkable in its thorough explication of the belief and governance systems of the indigenous people of the region, particularly the Shawnee, Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw, and how Tenskwatawa’s visions, supported by his brother Tecumseh’s aggressive militarism led to—among other things—the decline of intertribal cooperation. Second was the publication of Nimrod Hughes’s 1810 pamphlet, A Solemn Warning to All the Dwellers upon the Earth, an apocalyptic date-setting exercise based on Hughes’s interpretation of the Book of Daniel, combined with his understandings of numerology and kabbalism, in which he announced the coming apocalypse (59).Hancock aptly situates this confabulation in the context of the Second Great Awakening, which of course looms large in the history of American Methodism. “Methodist and Baptist conversions were common spiritual responses” to the earthquakes, he writes, identifying 1812 as a “watershed year for the growth of evangelicalism in the trans-Appalachian West” and crediting fears about the earthquakes for Methodism’s dramatic growth that year, with nearly 19,000 new members (61). He points out that more than 15,000 of those were in the Western Conference, where the quakes had significant impact and argues that conversions that year dramatically changed the organization of Methodism, leading to the creation of two new annual conferences. He also argues that John Wesley’s Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Earthquake in Lisbon (1756) and other writings articulate his understanding that in the face of unfathomable catastrophe, humans should seek comfort from a loving God who receives the repentant with open arms.Hancock offers a thoughtful analysis of the dramatic end-times preaching of Lorenzo Dow, whose “sprawling theological treatise” published in 1812 identified ten signs of the coming “day of vengeance,” which included the power of the papacy, wars, famines, plagues, and, of course, earthquakes (75). My only criticism of this book is that the author does not connect Dow with Methodism. The eccentric evangelist’s tortuous relationship with the Methodists was somewhat tangential to Hancock’s argument. Still, since both Methodism and Dow are significant characters in the book, a brief acknowledgment of their connection might have been useful.

Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North by Richard J. Boles

Reviewed by: Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North by Richard J. Boles Antonio T. Bly Richard J. Boles, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North (New York: New York University Press, 2020) "It is appalling," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously noted, "that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning."1 Long before the civil rights movement, the apostle of non-violence declared that Americans venerated a God who had seemed "a respecter of persons." Indeed, throughout America's long history, the cursed children of Ham had been compelled to acknowledge the God of Abraham in segregated spaces. Racism defined, in both implicit and explicit ways, the marrow of America's religious traditions. In Dividing the Faith, Richard J. Boles revisits the early history of churches in the North, challenges this conventional wisdom, and uncovers a forgotten world in which Dr. King's aphorism might not have always held true. An insightful analysis of extant church records, meeting minutes, and unpublished manuscripts of over four hundred congregations, the portrait Boles reveals is an appealing one. Building on the work of John Wood Sweet, Joanne Pope Melish, Gary B. Nash, Margaret Ellen Newell, and others, Boles argues [End Page 99] that early churches in British America were more integrated than segregated. Between 1730 and 1776, integrated churches were more or less a common part of life in the North. From the early to mid-eighteenth century, segregated congregations were incongruous to the practice of the Christian faith. Instead, "most Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in the northern British colonies were interracial congregations as blacks and Indians participated through weekly church services and the rituals of baptism and communion" (5). Between the Great Awakening and the Revolution, the number of these churches increased significantly. Among the famed devotees who considered themselves members of these multi-racial and multi-ethnic houses of worship were Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Richard Allen, and Absalom Jones. One hundred years before the Tremont Temple Baptist Church of Boston had been recognized as the first integrated church, the Gospels had been preached in numerous churches to mixed-race congregations. These diverse places of worship peaked around the advent of the new century (4, 222). Then, between 1821 and 1850, the number of integrated churches fell as African Americans, Afro-Indians, and Native Americans began to establish their own churches. In retelling the history of these mixed communities of faith and how they varied over time, space, and denominations in the North before 1860, Dividing the Faith seeks to challenge our understanding of race, history, and religion in early America. A comparative analysis of African American and Native American peoples' participation in white churches, Boles's study encourages us to reconsider the conflicting politics of history and memory; specifically, how the social and cultural views of subsequent generations of Americans have distorted the assorted nature of the past (92–131, 106–107, 70–73, 158–159, 162–234). However, missing in this study of the rise of segregated churches in the North is a much more nuanced account of the politics of race in America and the role it undoubtedly played in dividing the faith. Before the Revolution, African Americans and Native Americans were indeed members, but they were not members in full. They could not, as Boles makes plain, vote or lead the congregation, rendering questionable the extent to which they actually participated as members of these supposedly integrated flocks (6, 164, 182). Even when their numbers grew as a result of the Awakening and the Revolution, whites continued to hold fast to their position as the theological heads of the congregations. Why? Clearly, Boles overreaches; he downplays the nature of race in the northern colonies, conflating, inadvertently, obligatory attendance and participation. Little is made of the fact that baptism signified, at once, education and the possibility of a better life for most, if not all, African Americans and Native Americans. Even less attention is given to early African American and Native American expressions [End Page 100] of religiosity (66–67, 194–195). Phillis Wheatley embodies best...

On the Value of Doubt

On the Value of Doubt

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

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

Reviewed by: America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel Luke Ritter America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest. By Stephen T. Kissel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 240 pp. $28.00. This clearly written, well-researched book examines the common methods by which various organized religions established viable communities in the Old Northwest from the adoption of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to the entrance of Wisconsin as a state in 1848. Entering a distant region, sparsely populated, bereft of civil institutions, and increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity and religious affiliation, early pioneers often relied on religion to create a shared identity, purpose, and system of trust. Kissel argues that organized religions coalesced "chain migrations" to the Old Northwest into a collective, ecumenical "mosaic" of faith-based communities, and thus accelerated the region's development (2, 8, 147). How exactly did migrants find unity across such vast landscapes in the midst of unprecedented ethnic and religious pluralism? Kissel explains how humble homes served as initial meeting places for religious adherents in the Old Northwest. According to Kissel, "the neutral setting of the home offered a more ecumenical environment for religious worship than was generally possible under the rigid doctrines of formal church congregations." Home meetings also advanced the role of women, youths, and people of color (16). In the Old Northwest, itinerancy was necessary. Various denominations invented ways to minister to pioneers across space, including the Methodist itinerant preachers who adopted circuit-riding, Catholic priests who traveled throughout their vast dioceses to connect with incoming Catholic settlers, and Presbyterian ministers who engaged in mission efforts. Unlike in the East, the Great Awakening in the West also promised fresh opportunities for utopian communities such as the Mormons, Shakers, Quakers, and Rappites. As "the antebellum Northwest became a leading national center of religious literary production and distribution," Kissel writes in chapter two, communities came to rely on a steady stream of Bibles, religious [End Page 63] tracts, devotionals, and sermons to articulate their faith (38). Organizations such as the American Bible Society, Western Book Concern, American Sunday School Union, and a host of newspapers promoted popular literacy through the mass production of religious literature. Even utopian communities encouraged literary production, such as the Church of Latter-Day Saints, which relied on the publication of the Book of Mormon for converts. Sunday Schools in the West, funded by Christian missionary efforts, advanced regional literacy long before common schools were established. Women played a prominent role as teachers. Denominationally backed seminaries and colleges established formal higher education in the West, for both Catholics and Protestants, men and women. Colleges helped to promote and advance newly settled towns. Mission schools geared towards Indian students proved problematic, however, since "Religion and civilization were inseparable in the eyes of antebellum missionaries," Kissel writes (78). Americans constructed "sacred spaces" for public fellowship, such as the church, the revival campground, and the utopian settlement, more rapidly than secular meeting places, thus ensuring religion's influence over the region's civic landscape (82). African Americans and immigrants from Europe likewise insisted on building their own sacred havens of worship as a sign of their belonging and participation in the bourgeoning American civic order. Financial assistance trickled in from the East, but the duty to build such institutions often fell upon lay congregants, volunteers, and donors in the West. Church dedications were often widely celebrated, ecumenical events, since they "marked a religious and civic milestone in the evolution of pioneer communities" (96). Revival campgrounds brought in hundreds of people from afar. Utopian settlements, although more closed to outsiders, integrated church and town governance into a sacred space for those on the inside. At a time when civil courts and police were sporadic, churches arbitrated civil and land disputes. Churches frequently administered justice in full view of entire congregations, even entire towns. Church-based disciplinary procedures likewise managed ministerial misconduct. Finally, in chapter six, Kissel shows how various denominations worked together to improve their towns morally, socially, and economically. Religious organizations became intricately involved in civic service, charitable outreach, commerce, and politics. Kissel's claim that the antebellum...

World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000, by David Lindenfeld.

<i>World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000</i>, by David Lindenfeld.

Review: A Dream of the Judgment Day: American Millennialism and Apocalypticism, 1620-1890, by John Howard Smith

Coming as it does during a global pandemic and domestic political chaos, John Howard Smith’s A Dream of the Judgment Day is a timely reminder of just how deeply embedded are the twin themes of apocalypticism and millennialism in the American narrative. From the QAnon cult to antivaxxers, we have all witnessed how easily apocalyptic rhetoric has been used to mobilize segments of the population to levels of direct action rarely seen in recent memory. Given that Smith began his project some twenty years before, the book’s increased salience is fortuitous of course, but neatly underscores its need. The author’s original goal was simply to chart how “the prevalence of Enlightenment-oriented, optimistic, postmillennialism slowly and steadily gave way to pessimistic, bibliocentric, ‘fundamentalist’ premillennialism” (275). A Dream of the Judgment Day accomplishes this in admirable detail, but the very comprehensiveness of Smith’s approach leads him well beyond the evangelical mainstream. A significant amount of the book explores the impact of these twin eschatological themes on new religious movements, African American Christianity, Native American revitalization movements, and, to some degree, popular and political culture.Although Smith proceeds chronologically, the book is perhaps best evaluated topically. After brief introductory chapters defining apocalypticism and millennialism and discussing their origins in the religions of the Near East, most of the chapters concern the development of Protestant apocalypticism in America from the colonial period to the Gilded Age—in other words, from the Puritans to the Fundamentalists. Much of this is familiar territory, and the author dutifully charts the influence of apocalypticism on such events as the Great Awakenings, the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War. What is distinctive here is the author’s judicious use of texts both well-known and obscure, and his attention to both elite and nonelite voices, especially those of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. Smith is also attentive to the ongoing transatlantic aspects of Protestant apocalypticism throughout the period, as well as recognizing its national pervasiveness beyond the Northeast, which is typically privileged in discussions of this topic. Finally, the author highlights the constant interplay between pre- and postmillennial interpretations of America’s destiny, the agonistic oscillation of which has been a key component of the nation’s political and culture wars from the colonial period to the present.Throughout the volume, Smith makes the distinction between horizontal and vertical apocalypses, using apocalypse in its original Greek sense, “to reveal that which is hidden” (xvi). Horizontal refers to visionary experiences that reveal the events leading to the end of the world, while vertical refers to experiences of God and heaven, which typically authorize the former. With the lifting of institutional restraints on such experiences in the wake of the Reformation, countless visionary prophets promoted new combinations of horizontal/vertical apocalypses leading to a wide variety of new sectarian groups. Nowhere was this process more evident than in North America, where the democratization of Christianity encouraged radical experimentation in this regard. Students of new religious movements will therefore find this book useful because Smith devotes a great deal of space to exploring the varieties of apocalyptic sectarianism in the United States—from well-known groups such as the Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Oneida Perfectionists to the lesser-known, such as the City Hill community of the “Publick Universal Friend,” Jemima Wilkinson, and the Koreshan Unity of Cyrus Teed. Smith also points out the constant cross-fertilization of such movements, highlighting, for example, the tremendous influence of Shaker apocalypticism on American new religious movements far and wide.One unique aspect of A Dream of the Judgment Day is the close examination Smith gives to the apocalyptic and millennial elements of Native American revitalization movements. Beginning with the various indigenous prophets that arose during the colonial period among the Eastern Woodland peoples, Smith traces the key role apocalyptic ideologies played in resisting white settler violence all the way up to the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Again, in addition to such well-known prophets as Neolin, Tenskwatawa, and Smohalla, Smith also discusses lesser-known figures such as the Wyoming Woman and Kenekuk, all in order to emphasize the diversity of indigenous apocalyptic thought.Although library shelves are already heavy with good academic studies of American apocalypticism, John Howard Smith’s A Dream of the Judgment Day is, in my opinion, the best single volume on the history of apocalypticism and millennialism in the United States now available. It will serve not only as an excellent introduction to graduate students who wish to do research on these topics, but also as an up-to-date reference work for scholars working in American religious history, new religious movements, and African American and Native American studies.

Prosperity Theology Goes Online: Will This Be a Fifth Great Awakening?

We are entering the latest incarnation of the religious great awakenings in the United States. While e-commerce has been ubiquitous for decades, uniting e-commerce with a great electronic religious awakening is new to our millennia.

American Babel: History and Empire in the Early American Republic

The history of Babylon, fused from the Christian Bible and classical sources, occupied a critical, but hitherto unacknowledged, place in the conceptual life of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By examining the uses of Babylon and Babel, which early Americans conceived of as the same historical place, this article works to expand historians' understanding of empire in the early modern Atlantic. From the American Revolution through a second "Great Awakening" and the demise of the Federalist party, many Americans turned to Babylon as a model to grapple with their country's growing imperial aspirations. Since the fall of the Tower of Babel the history of Babylon reflected and formed a larger ambivalence toward empire in ways that distinguished it from the familiar narrative of decline and fall. Those who wrestled with Babylon's story saw potential for a lasting empire in the world but were torn as to whether that empire aught to be one of liberty or uniformity. Ultimately, Babylon provided a conceptual space in which Americans wrestled with how best to be a Godly empire.

Spirituality in the Context of Tablighi Jamaat and its Implication on Muslim Society: The Sufi Perspective

This study aims to discuss the process of self-purification in the Tablighi Jamaat and an attempt to shed light on how this Sufi ideological movement has increasingly gained popularity worldwide. Tablighi Jamaat is known as the institutional da'wah activities introduced by Maulana Ilyas, considering the demands of the modern Muslim mind and society. Tablighi Jamaat's primary purposes are to spread the message of Islam among the people and self-purification through religious practice. At the same time, this movement works for the spiritual restructuring of Islam at the grass-root level of society. The people of this Jamaat have been urging Muslims worldwide to focus on the core religious practices in pursuit of self-development and socio-Islamic reform. On the other hand, their lack of interest in traditional politics also accelerates people's religious fervour; this is considered another big reason for their popularity. In recent times, the activities of Tablighi Jamaat have expanded considerably in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Through the efforts of the Tablighi people, a great awakening has taken place among the Muslim masses. Moreover, the people's interest in embodying Islam through practice and da'wah has increased anew. However, this paper considers analytical and qualitative research based on secondary data to give a detailed account of how Tablighi Jamaat's spiritual movement has received greater acceptance in Muslim society.

Religious Deviance and Psychological Medicine in the Second Great Awakening: The Asylum Narratives of Elizabeth T. Stone (b. 1811)

Religious Deviance and Psychological Medicine in the Second Great Awakening: The Asylum Narratives of Elizabeth T. Stone (b. 1811)