Writing on the legacy of post-Revolutionary era Christianity in America in his book, The Democratization of American Christianity, historian Nathan Hatch attempts to determine what the driving force was behind it all. He notes that American Christians certainly did not develop "a genius for ecclesiastical organization...[but instead] muddled along in a state of anarchic, free-market pluralism." It did not have leaders of great prestige, nor "an ability to make faith plausible to the modern world" (212-213). So what was the driving force, then?

A central force [in American Christianity] has been its democratic or populist orientation. America has lived in the shadow of a democratic revolution and the liberal, competitive culture that followed in its wake. Forms of popular religion characteristic of that cultural system bound paradoxical extremes together: a reassertion of the reality of the supernatural in everyday life linked to the quintessentially modern values of autonomy and popular sovereignty. American Christians reveled in freedom of expression, refused to bow to tradition and hierarchy, jumped at opportunities for innovative communication, and propounded popular theologies tied to modern notions of historical development. No less than Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson, populist Christians of the early republic sought to start the world over again. By raising the standard 'no creed but the Bible,' Christians in America were the foremost proponents of individualism even as they expected the open Bible to replace an age of sectarian rivalry with one of primitive harmony. Like the egalitarian credo of the early republic, this vision has taken a powerful hold on the American imagination despite the disparity between the quest for unity and actual religious fragmentation and authoritarianism (213).

There is no doubt that we continue to see this legacy today in American Christianity. I find it particularly interesting that while we so often attribute the problem of individualism to Enlightenment thought and its vindication of autonomous man, Hatch here demonstrates that, in American culture at least, individualism is in part owing to the forms of Christianity which gained such prominence in the early years of the republic.

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