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Title: The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch ISBN: 0-300-05060-7 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: ignorance is bliss
Comment: This is an in-depth treatment of religious fads and movements of Christianity during the times of formation of this country. Hatch shows how the religious character of individualism, democratic populism, and just outright ignorance of tradition and church authority were viewed as the american way of determining what works in the American spirit. It should read for classical Protestants to show the damaging effects of SOLO scriptura in our churches. This book should lead one to Keith Mathison's book The Shape of Sola Scriptura. Hatch could have went further, but i guess he wanted to spare us the anti-intellualism of popular americana.
Rating: 4
Summary: Class-Oriented Hatch Delivers
Comment: Hatch's approach to the religion of the early republic is to define the principal conflict along class lines--the educated, eastern, Reformed, Federalist establishment versus the unschooled, western, anti-creedal, Jeffersonian populists. Judging from the prizes this book has won, numerous historians have considered it a landmark perspective on the early republic and subsequent American epochs, which must be taken into account in any future study.
Hatch marshals a copious amount of testimonial evidence as to the methods and convictions of both the religious populists and the clerical aristocrats against whom they rebelled. Unquestionably, Hatch is on to an integral part of early 19th-century religious life. Unfortunately, though, we are left to take Hatch's word for exactly how much this class warfare dominated the religious landscape. Hatch provides little statistical evidence to back up the populists' claims of a vast gulf between rich and poor, and one is left wondering about an excluded middle. Imagine writing an account of the religious history of our time purely from the quotes of Jerry Falwell and Ted Turner, and you see the problem--a vast, silent middle ground of religious opinion is neglected amid the rhetorical blasts of the polarized belligerents.
He never clearly locates the middle class (such as the mercantile bourgeoisie of New York City) on his socio-religious spectrum, only mentioning them in his penultimate chapter, which addresses the years 1830-1860. Similarly, though Hatch mentions a few counter-cultural educated Jeffersonians like Francis Asbury and Jefferson himself, he does not explore their unique fit into this era. Likewise, he implies that the entire under-class rejected clerical authority, never explicitly commenting on whether or not any of the illiterate laity remained faithful to their religious betters during this time.
Despite these silences, Hatch's exciting work provides the basis for a new paradigm in the study of American religious history. After tracing the theme of religious democratization up to the Civil War, he briefly sketches the theme through the 20th century in an epilogue. Anyone who has lived and moved in contemporary evangelical circles plainly sees the cyclical legacy of the early republic: a determined populist insurgency rebels against moribund, worldly religious institutions, but in the following generation, the insurgency itself becomes institutionalized and establishes rapport with higher culture, providing the ground for a new populist insurgency to arise. With an evangelical in the White House and upper-middle-class evangelical churches and institutions entrenched in the suburbs, it would seem the dialectic may be about to turn again, especially if current evangelical materialism becomes full-blown apostasy in the succeeding generation.
Rating: 3
Summary: It's a good start, but it is incomplete.
Comment: A precis: Hatch's thesis is narrow. The American Revolution spurred the democratization of American Christianity. But, at the same time, Hatch implicitly alludes to the effect of insurgent Christian sects had on American democracy. Hatch limits the book's chronology to c. 1780-1830 and the scope of discussion to the Protestant insurgent faiths of the Methodists, Baptists, Mormons and Christian 'generalists' who claimed no specific sect as their own. He does mention in passing the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, but essentially neglects Anglicans, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, except to use them to illustrate a point about one of the other sects. To Hatch, it seems the older, traditional sects were spared the effects of democratization, save losing members to itinerant preachers. The primary effect on religion of the social democratization of the Revolution was to remove religious power from the few hands of the educated and organized traditionalists and put it in many more hands, similar to the Revolution's anti-aristocratic effect on the holders of political power. According to Hatch, anticlericalism gained strength at the end of the 18th century due to a profound upsurge to erase the distinction between gentleman and commoner[,] . . . reflecting the same fundamental division between those who believed in the right of the natural aristocracy to speak for the people and those who did not. (p. 44).
Hatch reads Gordon Wood as suggesting "that this issue was the essence of the struggle between Federalist and Anti-Federalists." (p. 44). Thus, the realm of religion was not immune to the same sorts of battles that were fought in the political arena. The substance of the religious battle was whether the illiterate and unsophisticated majority of Americans should get their religion from the traditional orthodoxy, or should religion be accessible, understandable and a product of individual conscience from itinerant preachers and religious newspapers. The orthodoxy reasoned by analogy that a person would wish to trust his health or property to a properly trained doctor or lawyer, so she should only trust her soul to a properly trained pastor. Logical as the argument might be, simultaneous to the Second Great Awakening, movements democratizing law and medicine were gaining popularity as well. This overall movement toward "democracy," reinforced by the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment, is to Hatch the origin of contemporary differences between the U.S. and other industrialized nations, namely that we have a strongly embedded religious heritage of Christianity in all levels of society, from the richest to the poorest. Removing the exclusive right to interpret the Bible from the hands of Harvard and Yale divinity school graduates and giving it to everyman, limited only to the constraints of his own conscience, was a second American revolution; it could not have happened without the first.
Hatch traces the religious revolution as a personality driven cult, the message occasionally lost to the drama of the speaker. The purpose of the insurgent sects was similar to that of the new political party system emerging at the same time. The preachers wanted to fill camp meetings, converting new souls. The politicians wanted to fill offices with candidates loyal to the party.
Though the book is important and takes us a step closer to understanding the depth of democratization on American social history (as opposed to political history), there is much to criticize. First, "democracy" is not an easy or clear-cut term. Hatch uses it alternately to mean individualism, anti-intellectualism, popular culture, popular sovereignty, leveling, anti-aristocracy and ignorance; his grails of democratic religious culture are individual conscience, interpretation of Scripture in light of daily experience and the use of the vernacular in music, newspapers and sermons. One must be careful when using a word of art in a crossover context. Democracy is a political term; to use it as a religious term, one must do so carefully, beginning with a clear definition. Hatch does not.
Second, though Hatch does stick with his thesis-the impact of democracy on Christianity-he does not develop the underlying counter-thesis, the impact of Christianity on democracy. To have done so would have logically widened the scope of the book while maintaining the integrity of the argument. And, students of American political history would have benefited as well as those of religious history.
Last, his discussion of the relevance of music to his thesis is tantalizing, but ultimately inadequate. Hatch introduces the relation of music to the democratization of religion and gives a brief discussion of how popular music was born. However, he glosses over, in one sentence, the mutual influence of blacks and whites on religious music in the 18th century Methodist churches, before the birth of A.M.E.
At times, he tests the waters of popular culture, but when he jumps in, he is immerses himself in only white culture of the time. He neglects, like many historians, the primary place of African-American culture in all American popular culture. If Hatch is truly interested in the effect of 19th century democratization on the modern world, he should explore a little farther into the history of African-American spirituals.
In a PC world, African-American is the only true mixed ethnic designation. Africans, because of their forced segregation from whites, retained much culture, musical and otherwise, from before the middle passage. This retained ethnicity merged with American culture, first in the white churches and in the plantation fields, then in freedom, to form a call-and-response relationship in music. Call and response was super-imposed on the traditional African drumming, and a form of music (removed from its sectarian origins) evolved in the secular world, a form called the Blues. Over time and geography, the Blues evolved into jazz and rock-and-roll as alternate branches of the same family tree. Though not the topic of the book, this evolution warrants at least a footnote.
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