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

Abstract

Reviewed by: America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel Matthew Bowman America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest By Stephen T. Kissel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 240. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $110.00; paperbound, $28.00.) This book is a throwback to the historiography of American religion in the very best and most appealing ways. Over the past twenty years, American religious history has turned toward culture, politics, and business, producing some very fine studies of "religion &"—that is, religion and economics, religion and white supremacy, religion and the Republican Party. Kissel does a bit of that here, calling attention to political reform and to issues of race and gender. But overall, this book made me think of Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity (1991), a [End Page 98] landmark social history that showed how the democratizing impulses in post-Revolutionary American culture and society transformed the structures, theology, and even hymnody of American Protestantism. Like Hatch, Kissel offers us a very fine look at lived religion among American Protestants, Roman Catholics, and some new religious movements, like the Mormons and the Shakers, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War. My favorite chapters of this book walk us through, step by step, Protestants' slow transformation of an ad-hoc system of itinerant education into Sunday schools and eventually full-fledged institutions of higher education, like Oberlin College or Kissel's own alma mater, McKendree University. They also show us how Protestants and Catholics began, in the rough frontier towns of the Old Northwest, worshipping in homes or above general stores, eventually constructing grand neo-Gothic edifices. Kissel excels at methodically assembling narratives that illuminate the day-to-day reality of being a believer, the sort of lived religion that many scholars grew interested in during the 1990s. Yet, in its own way, Kissel's book is also "religion &." Hatch's book focused on democratization and the ways in which Protestants undermined and rejected traditional religious authority and hierarchy. Kissel shows that while this impulse was quite real—there are in these pages no shortage of entrepreneurial itinerant preachers, circuit riders, and layfolk who, in the absence of a trained ministry, simply shrugged and built congregations on their own—religious institutions in the early nineteenth century did not simply suffer entropy. Rather, in the particular arena of the Old Northwest, where social order and stabilizing institutions were thin on the ground, Protestantism became the vector for building organization. Through meticulous research, Kissel shows how those Sunday schools grew, developed, and often ended up serving as the primary source of education in these rural communities; how congregations that built chapels often produced buildings used not simply for worship but for town gatherings, celebrations, and political organization; how Protestant congregational discipline often served as the only means to enforce good behavior in frontier towns; and how the Christian tract societies and publishing companies became vital sources of connection and communication. In the process of constructing a society out of the ragged settlements of the Old Northwest, Christianity changed too. The realities of isolation and limited education and economics meant that often different denominations had to cooperate in the construction of meetinghouses or Sunday schools. The spaces of worship were often cooperative projects, and resulted in the sort of mingling of ideas and identities not imagined in formal theology. [End Page 99] In short, Kissel gives us a robust narrative of how religion formed, and was formed by, the emergent communities of the Old Northwest. It is a work of impressive research, and its argument bears beyond the precise spaces that it studies. It is a welcome contribution to the field. Matthew Bowman Claremont Graduate University Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Indiana University