Whither Revivalism and Reform

Abstract

Whither Revivalism and Reform Raymond James Krohn (bio) Ryan C. McIlhenny, To Preach Deliverance to the Captives: Freedom and Slavery in the Protestant Mind of George Bourne, 1780–1845. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. ix + 257pp. Acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Ben Wright, Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. vii + 253pp. Acknowledgements, notes, and index. $45.00. In 1976, historian Ronald G. Walters opened a chapter-length analysis of religion and the reformist ethos by contending that crusading abolitionism in the United States "could not . . . have been what it was after 1830 if there had not been an evangelical Protestant tradition behind it and if there had not been evangelical Protestants in it from beginning to end." Despite acknowledging that revivalism in and of itself did not fuel the drive to immediately emancipate the enslaved, at the section's close he nonetheless reaffirmed the revivalistic inheritance of post-1830 antislavery, whose zealous adherents appropriately transformed their cause into "a church." Thirty years later, sociologist Michael P. Young premised the emergence of the American social movement on a solidly spiritual foundation, claiming that pre-Civil War antialcohol, antislavery, and anti-vice crusaders harnessed both the "genteel orthodoxy" of older Protestant sects and "boisterous populism" of newer ones while launching campaigns against individual immorality and societal wickedness. The instrumental connections that antebellum reformers had made between "the intimate and the far-flung," he observed, "stemm[ed] from an evangelical sense of the dynamic of sin, repentance, and reformation . . . .[a] reflexive force [that] projected personal sins onto national problems and introjected national evils into personal affairs." So closely intertwined are religious revitalization and the resurgence of such early nineteenth-century reforms as temperance and abolitionism in the scholarly literature, that any decoupling or reconceptualization is difficult to envision.1 Across the twentieth century, scholars crafted an array of texts on reformist religion that collectively produced a richly textured tapestry. Listing several of [End Page 127] these books suggests the warp and woof of a century-long conversation about reformism's nature and meaning: Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (1944); Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (1950); Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-19th-Century America (1957); Clifford S. Griffin, The Ferment of Reform, 1830–1860 (1967); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976; rev. ed., 1997); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (1978); William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakening, and Reform (1978); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, 1822–1872 (1984); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (1990); Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (1994); Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (1995); and Leo P. Hirrel, Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform (1998). Yet, were it not for the 1933 intervention of Gilbert Hobbes Barnes's The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830–1844, the contours of historiographical debate would have taken shape very differently. In that classic study, Barnes effectively rescued antebellum abolitionism from historical neglect by marginalizing the philanthropic prestige of the supposedly fanatical and obsessively self-important William Lloyd Garrison and his coterie of New England followers, while also magnifying as eminently respectable the evangelically inspired activism of Theodore Dwight Weld and like-minded reformers from the revivalist areas of western New York and the Old Northwest. Even though subsequent scholars eventually reclaimed The Liberator's editor from the "incubus" designation that Barnes had provocatively bestowed on Garrison, later students of reformism benefited from and expanded upon Barnes's emphasis on enthusiastic religion as the abolitionist crusade's major impetus. The respective monographs of Ryan C. McIlhenny and Ben Wright, among the recent entries in the LSU Press series "Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World," therefore invite an inquiry into the current status of a venerable construct. Each author...