God. The stories embody spiritual struggle, the renunciation of greed and desire, and mother love. The home is a shrine that is juxtaposed to the marketplace and
the world of competition and power. Unlike the female characters in British and
European novels of the time, the women in these American novels are intelligent,
generous persons who grow in strength and independence. (The French visitor
Alexis de Tocqueville commented that European women “almost think it a privi-
lege to appear futile, weak, and timid. The women of America never lay claim to
rights of that sort.”)
In sentimental domestic fiction, women assume the role of evangelical minis-
ters, demonstrating Christian living by precept, example, and moral persuasion.
Female moral influence, wielded by women who had given themselves to God, is
at war with the male world of politics and the marketplace—areas of power, greed, and moral compromise. Although few sentimental writers shared the views of the
feminist Margaret Fuller, they would have agreed with her on the place of religion in women’s lives. “I wish women to live first for God’s sake,” she wrote. “Then she will not make an imperfect man her God, and thus sink to idolatry.”
Popular sentimental novels were not, as Hawthorne and his friends believed,
frivolous fairytales into which housewives retreated from the real world. They
were subversive depictions of a higher spiritual reality that would move the feminine ethos of the Christian home to the center of civilization. That vision drove an organized public assault on irreligion, drunkenness, prostitution, slavery, and
other practices and institutions that substituted passion and force for Christian love (see Chapter 12), an assault that tried to “domesticate” the world and shape it in the image of the middle-class evangelical home.
THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF THE NORTH
From the 1830s onward, northern reformers proposed their religious and domes-
tic values as a national culture for the United States. Even in their own region, however, most people rejected their cultural leadership. The plain folk of the
North were a varied lot: settlers in the lower Northwest who remained culturally
southern; hill-country northerners who had experienced little of what their
middle-class cousins called “progress”; refugees from the countryside who had
taken up urban wage labor; and increasing thousands of Irish and German immi-
grants. They did share a cultural conservatism—often grounded in the traditional, father-centered family—that rejected sentimentalism and reformist religion out of hand. As often as not, that conservatism was grounded in religious values that
were very different from those of the new middle class.
The Decline of
The Founding Fathers had been largely indifferent to orga-
the Established
nized religion. A few were pious men, and some, like George
Churches
Washington, attended church out of a sense of obligation.
Many of the better educated, including Thomas Jefferson,
were deists who believed that God had made the universe but did not intervene
in its affairs. Many simply did not think about religion. When asked why the
Constitution mentioned neither God nor religion, Alexander Hamilton is reported
to have smiled and answered, “We forgot.”
The Plain People of the North
349
In state after state, post-revolutionary constitutions withdrew government
support from religion, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly
prescribed the separation of church and the national state. Reduced to their own
sources of support, the established churches—Congregationalism in New En-
gland, the Church of England (renamed Episcopalians) in the South and much of
the mid-Atlantic) went into decline. The Connecticut Congregationalist Ezra Stiles reported in 1780 that 60 parishes in Vermont and an equal number in New
Hampshire were without a minister. In Massachusetts, according to Stiles’s
reports, 80 parishes lacked a minister. In all, about one-third of New England’s
Congregational pulpits were vacant in 1780, and the situation was worse to the
north and west. In Vermont between 1763 and 1820, the founding of churches
followed the incorporation of towns by an average of 15 years, indicating that
settlement in that state proceeded almost entirely without the benefit of organized religion. In 1780, nearly all of the 750 Congregational churches in the United
States were in New England. In the next 40 years, although the nation’s popula-
tion rose from 4 to 10 million, the number of Congregational churches rose only
to 1,100. Ordinary women and men were leaving the churches that had domi-
nated the religious life of colonial America, sometimes ridiculing the learned
clergy as they departed. To Ezra Stiles and other conservatives, it seemed that
the republic was plunging into atheism.
The Rise of the
They were wrong. The collapse of the established churches,
Democratic
the social dislocations of the post-revolutionary years, and
Sects
the increasingly antiauthoritarian, democratic sensibilities
of ordinary northerners provided fertile ground for the
growth of new democratic sects. These were the years of camp meeting revival-
ism, years in which Methodists and Baptists grew from small, half-organized sects into the great popular denominations they have been ever since. They were also
years in which fiercely independent dropouts from older churches were putting
together a loosely organized movement that would become the Disciples of
Christ. At the same time, ragged, half-educated preachers were spreading the
Universalist and Freewill Baptist messages in upcountry New England, while in
western New York young Joseph Smith was receiving the visions that would
lead to Mormonism.
The result was, first of all, a vast increase in the variety of choices on the
Northern religious landscape, but within that welter of new churches, the fastest growing sects shared a roughly uniform democratic style. First, they renounced
the need for an educated, formally authorized clergy. Religion was now a matter
of the heart and not the head. Crisis conversion (understood in most churches as
spiritual transformation that resulted from direct experience of the Holy Ghost)
was a necessary credential for preachers; a college degree was not. The new
preachers substituted emotionalism and storytelling for Episcopal ritual and Con-
gregational theological lectures. Stories attracted listeners, and they were harder for the learned clergy to refute. The new churches also held up the Bible as the
one source of religious knowledge, thus undercutting all theological knowledge
and placing every literate Christian on a level with the best-educated minister.
These tendencies often ended in Restorationism—the belief that all theological
350