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Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 16:17:23 -0500
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Subject: Andrews on Adams and Van Mirren, _Religious and Secular Reform_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (March, 2000)

David K. Adams and Cornelis A. Van Minnen, eds. _Religious and
Secular Reform in America:  Ideas, Beliefs, and Social Change_.  New
York:  New York University Press, 1999.  xiv + 273 pp.  Notes.
$55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8147-0685-1; $20.00 (paper), ISBN
0-8147-0686-X.

Reviewed for H-AmRel by Stephen Andrews <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, Stanford University

One of the criticisms often leveled at some American
scholars,especially historians, is that they are overly insular and
see little need to place their work in an international or
trans-Atlantic context.  Another, too-often fair accusation is that
American historians have little interest in becoming familiar with
the work of non-American specialists on American topics.  Many
hallowed and near-legendary historiographical essays take little
notice of the vast amount of work done outside of American
universities. A welcome corrective to this tendency is David K.
Adams and Cornelis A. Van Mirren's collection of twelve essays that
cover the history of American religious and secular reform from the
eighteenth century into the late twentieth. Since nearly all of the
authors are scholars working outside of the United States, the
volume provides an intriguing insight into the kinds of work being
done by European writers and researchers in this field.

The pieces utilize a mix of secondary and primary sources, and the
various essays approach the topic of reform from national, regional,
local and biographical perspectives.  Some of the essays provide
solid, if often overly familiar, overviews of well-known issues
while others advance interesting new questions based on focused case
studies.  However, a general, but perhaps unavoidable, criticism of
the volume is that many of the pieces make ambitious statements that
cannot be convincingly proven in the limited space available.
Another problematic element present in many of the essays is the
interest in proving that the idea of "consensus" in American history
is an unfounded myth.  It seems surprising that this conclusion,
which seems universally accepted among American academics, would be
such a prominent feature throughout a volume that covers the
struggles to reform and change American society.  However, this
might point to the different questions being asked by researchers in
different parts of the world. Overall, however, this text gives
valuable insights into how America is conceived as a subject by
historians largely working outside of the United States.

The essays are arranged in chronological order, and begin with three
pieces that consider the ongoing conflicts between established
religious movements and the increasing presence and popularity of
evangelical and enthusiastic religion in America.  In the first
essay, "Reform, Authority and Conflict in the Churches of the Middle
Colonies, 1700-1770," Mark Haberlein argues for a conception of the
Great Awakening that places the revivals of the eighteenth century
into a much longer time period and follows the revivals through a
comparative, multi-denominational and multi-ethnic approach.
Haberlein focuses on four colonial churches in the middle
colonies--the Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, German Lutheran and
German Reformed. Haberlein's argument centers around the intra- and
interdenominational conflicts over the distributon of power between
ministers and the laity.  Also, Haberlein gives important attention
to the powerful effects of migration, settlement patterns and
population growth on religious authority, institutions and reform
efforts. His argument minimizes the role of the Great Awakening as a
single event and sees the revivals as part of a constant
re-negotiation of the balance of power within colonial churches.
According to Haberlein, the eve of the American Revolution found
churches that had experienced simultaneous periods of religious
renewal and calls for more ministerial authority.

Louis Billington examines many of the same issues as expressed in
the history of New England's "radical Evangelicals" in the early
republic.  Billington uses this collective term to describe
Arminian, anti-institutional, and anti-clerical members of Quaker,
Baptist, Methodist and Congregationalist churches. In "'The Perfect
Law of Liberty': Radical Religion and the Democratization of New
England, 1780-1840" Billington asserts that radical Evangelicals
emerged in the period surrounding the American Revolution and began
to spread throughout the New England countryside despite resistance
from the more traditional elements of the Congregationalist Standing
Order.  Billington traces the socio-economic status of this varied
group and follows their eventual entry into the political process.
He also takes issue with Charles Sellers' portrayal of this group as
"antinomian" in _The Market Revolution_ because by the 1840s the
Evangelicals had undergone a process of "embourgeoisement" and had
become more like their more orthodox counterparts. By 1840, these
one-time radicals had settled down to become respectable
denominations.  Although well-written and interesting, his use of a
broad cultural definition makes it hard to know exactly who the
Evangelicals were at any given moment. This construction becomes
more problematic when they begin to drop the cultural habits that
defined their inclusion in the general category of radical
Evangelicals.

Keeping the focus on New England, Anthony Mann explores the roots of
the Boston Brahmins in "Unitarian Voluntary Societies and the
Revision of Elite Authority in Boston, 1780-1820."  Like the earlier
two essays, Mann wants to look at the struggle between elite
elements of Boston culture as they struggled against the growing
power of an evangelical lower and middle class. Mann contends that
it is crucial to trace the founding of the institutions,
organizations and families that would become central to Brahmin
culture to understand how they emerged as a cohesive and powerful
group that exercised political, cultural and economic power later in
the nineteenth century.  To do this, Mann focuses on four Boston
cultural and philanthropic associations founded in the 1790s--the
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Humane Society of Massachusetts,
the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Massachusetts Society
for Promoting Agriculture. He carefully illustrates the membership
and goals of each organization, and shows how they attempted to
insure a stable social order through the creation of a virtuous
elite class.

Two important and deeply analytical nineteenth-century New England
reformers, Orestes Brownson and William Lloyd Garrison, merit
special treatment of their own in a pair of biographical essays.  In
"Orestes Brownson and the Relationship between Reform and
Democracy," Naomi Wulf uses Orestes Brownson's peripatetic path
through the religious and reform movements of the 1820s and 1830s to
answer questions about the relationship between reform efforts,
individuals and governments.  This intellectual biography traces
Brownson's increasing impatience with limited and particular reform
movements and his acceptance of universalist conceptions of reform.
Also, Brownson tried to reconcile politics and reform, going as far
as to rally support for the Democratic Party. Wulf's presentation of
Brownson's thinking shows him to be a uniquely deep thinker who
carefully considered many of the most important movements in the
antebellum United States. Louis Kern, one of two scholars in the
volume who works in the United States, follows Wulf's essay with
another intellectual biography entitled "Sectarian Perfectionism and
Universal Reform: The Radical Thought of William Lloyd Garrison."
Although it may seem that there is nothing left to be said about the
most famous abolitionist in antebellum America, Kern produces a
powerful mix of historiography and an reconstruction of Garrison's
thoughts about reform. Kern traces the particular theological
traditions which Garrison drew on to construct a coherent and
consistent view of reform and the possibility of universal
regeneration.  Kern persuasively shows that all of Garrison's reform
efforts were part of a single campaign for the liberation of
humankind from bondage.  Kern also makes it clear that his steadfast
appeals to a higher law and passive nonresistance created a powerful
symbol for future generations of reformers.

A subsequent pair of essays explore the sometimes contentious
debates over leisure activities in the nineteenth century.  Robert
Lewis' "'Rational Recreation': Reforming Leisure in Antebellum
America" focuses on the contentious place of recreation in American
society.  Like the opening essays, Lewis explores the debate between
Evangelicals, who largely opposed leisure activities as
self-indulgent and ungodly luxuries, and more liberal intellectuals
and clergy who saw recreation as a way to use refinement and beauty
to improve popular morals. Lewis traces the gradual success of the
liberal position, as predominantly elite reformers looked to
recreation as a way to heal class divisions, uplift the poor, and
control man's baser instincts.  Alexis McCrossen, the other scholar
based in an American university, also examines the struggle between
evangelicals and liberals in her study of the efforts of
Sabbatarians to make Sunday sacred through coercion and persuasion.
In one of the best essays in the volume, "Sabbatarianism:  The
Intersection of Church and State in the Orchestration of Everyday
Life in Nineteenth-Century America," Alexis McCrossen sees
Sabbatarianism as both a religious and secular reform, and traces
the arguments used to set Sunday aside as a day somehow different
from the rest of the week.  McCrossen follows the debate from the
earliest efforts to prohibit mail delivery using arguments based on
the fourth commandment to later pseudoscientific and secular efforts
to give a physiological explanation for one day of rest.  Despite
the lack of legal proscriptions to forbid Sabbath-breaking,
McCrossen judges the Sabbatarian effort a success because its
advocates managed to persuade the state and the American people to
see Sunday as distinct.

In "The Woman's Christian Temperance Union Reform Movement in the
South in the Late Nineteenth Century," Valeria Gennaro Lerda
explores the creation of one of the most important mass woman's
movements in the nineteenth century. She argues that the formation
of a non-denominational and broad geographical movement organized
around "feminine" reforms like temperance and the defense of the
home allowed American women to carve out a position in the public
sphere.  The piece does not advance a new formulation of the WCTU,
but it does make fresh use of the papers of activists like Rebecca
Latimer Felton and Julia Tutwiler.  However, this close engagement
with the personal papers of the reformers has produced a
hagiographic approach towards these leaders.  For example, it seems
unlikely that Frances Willard, despite her amazing successes, "was
able to overcome all the boundaries of southern culture and liberate
herself" (p. 172).

The next essay is a fascinating exploration of the evolution of
American Quakerism in the twentieth century.  Howell John Harris, in
"War in the Social Order:  The Great War and the Liberation of
American Quakerism," contends that at the beginning of the twentieth
century the Quakers were a fractured and largely apolitical sect
which had drifted from the reforming role they had played in the
United States for nearly two hundred years. Harris posits that the
Quakers rediscovered their social activism during the First World
War.  Their pacifism, expressed by individual conscientious
objectors and organizations like the American Friends Service
Committee, pushed them out of the cultural mainstream towards
broader political and social causes.  To Harris, their response to
the Great War was the start of a period of spiritual rebirth that
set the stage for the Quakers role in civil rights later in the
decade.

The two essays that follow Harris' piece take a more overtly
trans-Atlantic perspective on American reform movements and find
deep connections between the thinking of reformers in the United
States and European, especially French, philosophical and political
movements. In one of the most interesting and ambitious essays in
the collection, Melvyn Stokes draws unexpected but compelling
comparisons between the thinking of turn-of-the-century Progressives
and modern poststructuralists.  Stokes argues that many of the
philosophical positions of French writers such as Jacques Derrida
and Michel Foucault were anticipated by arguments about power and
language advanced by writers like John Dewey and Edward A. Ross. He
further contends that these elements of Progressive thought are
often overlooked because of the narrow understanding of
Progressivism advanced by influential historians like Richard
Hofstadter. Stokes successfully draws parallels between these
thinkers, and shows that these connections should not be so
surprising, since "both Progressive writers and French
poststructuralists were, in a real sense, members of the same
intellectual world"(p.214).  Even without the connection to French
thinkers, Stokes makes a convincing case that several compelling
questions about Progressivism remain unanswered.

In a similar way, Jan C.C. Rupp argues that during the 1940s and 50s
American society advanced many, often conflicting, arguments in
favor of democracy. Like Stokes, Rupp asserts that these debates
drew on European sources, in this case French personalist political
programs and French anti-Enlightenment thinking.  In "The Cultural
Foundations of Democracy: The Struggle between a Religious and a
Secular Reform Movement in the American Age of Conformity," Rupp
contends that following World War II there was an extensive debate
about the reforms necessary to the vitality of democracy.  He
focuses on two groups, a committee of "religious absolutists" called
the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion and an
organization of "secular relativists" entitled the Conference on the
Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith.  These groups championed
different views of the role science and religion played in the
foundations of democracy. In this well written article, Rupp brings
to light the deep cultural divisions among American thinkers on the
same side of the political spectrum.

The concluding essay returns to many of themes touched on by the
opening pieces of the collection.  Again, the focus is on
Evangelicals and their place in the landscape of American religion
and reform. Axel R. Schaefer offers a thought-provoking essay
entitled "Evangelicalism, Social Reform and the US Welfare State,
1970-1996." To his credit, Schaefer sees the rise of Evangelical and
fundamentalist movements as a complex and varied collection of
believers, most of whom do not fit into many popular conceptions of
the New Religious Right.  Instead, he argues that there are few real
connections between religious fundamentalists and economic
conservatives and contends that most Evangelicals are actually in
favor of the welfare state.  He also points to the often
unrecognized existence of an Evangelical Left, and traces this group
to the increasing numbers of poor, minority and liberal
fundamentalists and the spread of Christianity onto college
campuses.  He then convincingly details the role these Evangelicals
have played in the ongoing debates over the American welfare state.

All of the contributions are clearly organized and presented, with
introductions and conclusions that make the substantive arguments of
each essay clear.  This clarity makes this collection a wonderful
volume for students, especially in classes that focus on the general
subject of reform in American history.  While many of the essays
cover territory that will be familiar to experts in the field, they
also assume a substantial amount of knowledge about the topography
of American religion.  Because of this combination, the best
audience for the text is graduate students who have a solid
background in American history and want to move into the subject of
religion and reform in greater depth.  However, many of the essays
will also be of interest to specialists who want to see how scholars
outside of the United States approach some of the crucial issues in
the history of reform in America.

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