The Common People and the Shaping of American Christianity
A friend and I are doing a bit of a research study on the history of Christianity in America, and one of the books we are working through is The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch. His book has been recognized by many scholars as one of the foremost works on the history of Christianity in America. The main thesis, which comes out a little in the paragraph I've quoted below, is that religious groups, led by the common people, both fostered democracy and profoundly shaped American culture in the early 19th century.
America's nonrestrictive environment [in the late 18th and early 19th centuries] permitted an unexpected and often explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty. It was this engine that accelerated the process of Christianization within American popular culture, allowing indigenous expressions of faith to take hold among ordinary people, white and black. This expansion of evangelical Christianity did not proceed primarily from the nimble response of religious elites meeting the challenge before them. Rather, Christianity was effectively reshaped by common people who molded it in their own image and threw themselves into expanding its influence. Increasingly assertive common people wanted their leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and singable, and their churches in local hands. It was this upsurge of democratic hope that characterized so many religious cultures in the early republic and brought Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and a host of other insurgent groups to the fore. The rise of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outline by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution.
Because there are so many factors at work in the study of the history of Christianity in America, it is at the same time both fascinating and complex. Books like Hatch's are very helpful in navigating through the panoply of persons, events, and circumstances that gave shape to American Christianity.
