In the 1830s Lyman Beecher looked west and worried. The great American frontier–at that time pretty much all of North America west of the Appalachians–remained largely untouched by the firm Congregationalist Calvinism which Beecher saw as necessary for civilization, morality, and the salvation of the human soul. Beecher came from proud old Connecticut stock, but was willing to make some compromises religiously to win the west. In 1801 the Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches in northern states created the Plan of Union, whereby any New England Congregationalist who went west of the Hudson River to do missionary work gained near automatic membership in the Presbyterian church.

Beecher (1775-1863) and other missionaries went west, and founded Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, ostensibly to keep Roman Catholics from winning the territory. While anti-Catholic and nativist aspects of missionary work have been duly noted by historians, Beecher and other Early Republic Protestants had other reasons for wanting to ensure a firm religious governing hand in frontier locales. Instead of celebrating democratic and enthusiastic frontier religiosity as a normative expression of a particularly American Christianity, Beecher, Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase (1775-1852), and others saw the frontier as a pernicious and irreligious geography that needed control and regulation. For Early Republic Protestants, the frontier was not a place to be celebrated or idealized; it was a potential danger that needed to be controlled, colonized, and eventually stripped of what made it a frontier in the first place.^[1]

An Irreligious Frontier?

What was religion like on the American frontier? Visions of There Will Be Blood-style fire and brimstone preachers in the movies leap to mind. Any sincere faith, we imagine, was likely as individualistic and rugged as the cowboys we so fondly imagine populating the landscape. Such a vision is, in fact, not all that far from the prevailing scholarship on the question. In a 1993 symposium on the great theorist Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1861-1932) frontier thesis,^[2] historian John Boles proposed that Turner “had little to say about religion, on the frontier or elsewhere.” Boles observed that Turner was not religious himself and had no interest in theology. The supposedly sparse treatment of religion in Turner’s 1921 opus, The Frontier in American History, was hardly surprising to his contemporaries or subsequent readers. Turner’s essential claim regarding religion and the frontier was that any effect organized religion had on the frontier was dwarfed by the effect of democracy: “Democracy became almost the religion of the pioneer. He held with passionate devotion the idea that he was building under freedom a new society, based on self government, and for the welfare of the average man.” Democracy, according to Turner, formed the basis for frontier civilization. Correspondingly, the idealized American pioneer, as a preacher of “the gospel of democracy, ”feared that institutions that abrogated the individual spirit that actuated frontier democracy would destroy the civilization of America. In Turner’s rendering, American civilization was the frontier, and whichever religion hewed most closely to frontier ideology was most representatively American.^[3]

Religion Goes West

Turner, however, did write on religion, albeit only in the shadow of democracy. If democracy was the true religion of the frontier, then whatever traditional religion existed among white settlers on the American frontier would become reflexively democratic. Frontier religion and democracy existed symbiotically in Turnerian thought. Turner defined the frontier as the “outer edge” of the wave of white settlement, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” The United States–and therefore the religion of the United States–was most distinctly American within this ambiguous syncretism of civilization and barbarism. The East—essentially the parts of the American republic along the Atlantic that held on to some Old World civilizational customs—was, in Turner’s account, the great obstacle to frontier Americanism. Eastern clerics and intellectuals wanted to control the frontier, and impose Old World–and therefore less American–frameworks on it.^[4]

Turner names Lyman Beecher as just one of the men leading “the most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier…through its educational and religious activity.” Beecher and other Protestants, argued Turner, exerted Eastern influence through “interstate migration and by organized societies.” Eastern Protestants “appealed to the conscience of New England,” with Beecher making “appeals to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West.” Protestant divines like Beecher felt a “dread of Western emancipation from New England’s political and economic control” which Turner believed was “paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her religion.” A missionary magazine in 1850 commented on settlement in Wisconsin and noted a distinct ambiguity regarding the morality of white frontier settlement. The magazine editors “scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements.” Although they sympathized with “whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country,” these Easterners could not forget “that with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less.” Fear, not celebration, drove Eastern Protestants to establish home missions and Protestant colleges in the Midwest such as Kenyon, Hillsdale, Oberlin, and others. “As seaboard cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of Western trade, so the various denominations strove for the possession of the West.” And so Turner’s story set up a paradigm by which less institutional, more democratic, and less traditional evangelical Protestantism came to be seen as American, while Protestant religiosity that smacked of tradition, institutionalism, the metropolitan East, or the Old World, was by inference less American. ^[5]

Competing Narratives of Frontier Christianity

Historians since the 1920s have offered varying interpretations of frontier religion. Peter G. Mode’s The Frontier Spirit in American Christianity proposed that Christianity in the United States was highly fluid precisely because it was so wedded to the social changes of the American frontier. “The spirit of the frontier,” Mode argued, “was to imprint itself upon the type of religious life imported into its borders by the herculean missionary effort of the East. True to its developmental genius, the Christianity of the frontier” gradually took on “the characteristics of its new environment.” As the frontier stage of American civilization passed, American Christianity found itself “vastly changed from what it was before our fathers began to move toward the West. And the changes effected in it during the period are what today give distinguishing characteristics to American religious life.”^[6]

If Mode saw the frontier change religion, William Warren Sweet (1881-1959) argued that such change was not one-way: religion changed, but did so in order to influence certain locales. Churches, Sweet noted, became islands of community in regions where basic civilizational hallmarks were still few and far between. According to Boles, Sweet “emphasized how religion adapted to the frontier situation, producing a peculiar form of Christianity; unlike Mode, however, Sweet went on to suggest how religion in turn influenced the frontier.” 

Evangelical historians have often played on the fluid non-institutional nature of so-called American evangelicalism–and this remains true in their discussion of frontier religion. Mark Noll has proposed that “evolution of the new nation’s political thought almost necessarily entailed a corresponding evolution of the theological reasoning with which that thought had become so closely entwined.” Directions “in which political conceptions moved defined also the direction of theological change.” During the Early National era (c.1780-1860), “that evolution was away from a republicanism largely defined by civic humanism, with ideals of disinterested public virtue and freedom defined as liberation from tyranny.” Noll posited that the movement in political thought was “towards republicanism aligned with liberalism, with ideals of individualized private virtue and freedom defined as self-determination.” The republican liberalism combined with other intellectual resources allowed Protestant evangelicals to “spread the gospel, stabilize the nation, and subdue the frontier.”^[7]

Against Cowboy Religion

Noll’s proposition identified important aspects of the relationship between the frontier and religion. Unlike Turner, Mode, or Sweet, Noll rightly observed that evangelicals did subdue the frontier. There seems to be evidence, however, that the evangelical Christianity that subdued the frontier was neither as liberal, nor as individualistic, as Noll and other historians have traditionally assumed–or as our instinctive image of a lonesome “cowboy religion” may suggest. Robert Elder’s The Sacred Mirror helpfully argues that southern evangelicals in the Early Republic were not meaningfully individualistic or divorced from older types of communitarian social boundaries and penalties. More importantly, if the definition of “evangelical” is broadened to reflect the term’s historical inclusion of Episcopalians, Lutherans, and openly anti-revivalist Presbyterians, the halting and uneven subjugation of the frontier seems to have been done through religious institutions that were at best ambivalent about democracy, liberalism, and individualism.^[8]

Most American Protestants saw the near miraculous population growth on the frontier in the early nineteenth century as an indication of God’s providential blessing. Yet they also feared the frontier being left to its own devices. Even supposedly frontier-friendly Protestants—Baptists and Methodists—supposed that frontier Americans needed the steadying hand of religion to keep themselves from slipping into money-grabbing, amoral anarchy. Few if any settlers, save a few New England Congregationalists and Virginia Episcopalians, participated in any meaningful religious culture or society. The American frontier, far from being a bedrock of Christianity, was a socio-moral terra incognita. When Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury (1745-1816) traveled to Tennessee in 1797, he figured that “not one in a hundred” Tennessee frontiersmen “came here to get religion.” They came instead “to get plenty of good land.”^[9] Frontier behaviors horrified travelers from the East. Sunday worship, even in locales that had a church, was generally disregarded, and settler irreligiosity meant that easterners were “shocked at the balls, the drinking,” and “the utter disregard paid to the sabbath day” in frontier communities. “Pious men were terrified at the drunkenness, the vice, the gambling, the brutal fights, the gouging, the needless duels they beheld on every hand.” White boatmen in Kentucky “had become more dreaded than the Indians.”^[10] Presbyterian ministers in Tennessee and Kentucky at the turn of the nineteenth century complained that most of their fellow ministers and potential congregants “were bad men” and that “drunkenness, wrangling, licentiousness, and heresy brought most of them to grief sooner or later.”^[11] Asbury’s Methodists and a few enterprising Presbyterians certainly worked more aggressively among frontier populations, but that did not mean total conformity to or acceptance of frontier civilizational norms. Asbury actually worried that “some or many” white settlers would “eventually lose their souls” in their new frontier homes. Asbury in particular worried about the democratic tendencies of frontiersmen and their potential religious formation. Asbury followed his forerunner John Wesley (1703-1791) and held tightly to anti-democratic politics in both the ecclesiastic and civil realms. Asbury practiced what one historian called “ecclesiastical paternalism” in the hope of eradicating any tendency towards democracy in American Methodism.^[12]

Even more than Methodists, Episcopalians along the Atlantic seaboard, from Boston to Charleston, saw controlling frontier religion as an absolute necessity for the future of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the United States. George Washington Doane (1799-1859), the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey, believed that the region was destined to be socially benighted no matter how much material progress was made along the frontier. He and other bishops consecrated Jackson Kemper as missionary bishop to the states of Indiana and Illinois in the 1830s, precisely because the frontier needed to conform religiously to more traditional forms of Protestantism. The rise of frontier revivalism and the presence of Roman Catholic missionaries worried Doane and other Episcopalians, who saw frontier Roman Catholicism and revivalism as twin recipes for civilizational anarchy or tyranny: “Through the regions of our own unbounded West see how the stream of life sets onward. Behold, in arts, in wealth, in power, a progress such as earth has never seen, outrunning even fancy’s wildest dreams.” The settlement of the West, Doane warned, was proceeding without “provision that at all keeps pace with it, for the securing of man’s nobler and immortal interests.” The American West was populating, but Protestant churches were not keeping pace. He lamented the “keen and shrewd regard [with which] the Church of Rome has marked that region for her own, and with what steadiness of purpose she pursues her aim; and seeks to lay the deep foundations of a power which is to grow as it grows, and to strengthen as it gathers strength.”^[13]

For Doane, Anglicanism represented the best chance of making the American frontier civilized and Protestant. It also represented the best chance of fending off heterodox frontier revivalism. He argued that “The Church of England, long by God’s protecting favour, the stay and hope of Christendom, now needs her utmost succours for her own defence against the impious combination that attempts her overthrow.” This impious combination consisted of Revivalists and Roman Catholics. “The Christian brethren, not of our communion, who have seemed to grow and multiply about us with a vigour so prolific…[had begun to feel and own] the want of those inherent principles of union which alone can bind in one large masses of mankind.” Revivalist sects were “destitute of ancient landmarks,” which made them “stray insensibly from ‘the old paths,’ in which alone God’s promise gives assurance of protection and of peace.” Believers who passed through revivalist churches “turn instinctively to us. They recognize the doctrines which we hold, as the old faith which once was given to the Saints.” Doane’s sermon exemplified the Episcopal Church’s self-perception as the only Protestant body capable of securing historic Christian doctrine and practice on the frontier, and the only body capable of keeping the Roman Catholic Church from securing a foothold for ecclesiastical expansion on the Early Republic’s northwestern frontier. ^[14]

Episcopalians remained circumspect about frontier evangelical religiosity in the South as well. The less-institutional nature of frontier religion did not, they noted, create the type of educational milieu that educated young Episcopalians in their faith. Revivalist frontier colleges—typically founded by Baptists, Methodist, or the Disciples of Christ—were seen as insufficient. When Episcopalians passed “from under the parental eye” in preparatory schools they did not have “institution fairly within our reach” where confirmed Episcopalians could be “kept under the influence of those Christian principles” and churchly instruction “to which we pledged them in baptism, which we have accepted and hold as of the essence of Christ’s religion, which we would transmit in their vigor to them and through them, unmarred, to our latest posterity.” Frontier education and frontier colleges were not appropriate for the small but growing number of Episcopalians in southern states only a generation removed from being untamed wilds. Bishop James Hervey Otey (1800-1863) in particular believed that the evangelical South had not created a true religious society or churchly religious practice. Bishop William Mercer Green (1798-1887) noted that Otey “saw that religious culture was the great want of the people of the South-West.” Otey was convinced that knowledge “of the Church in its Catechisms and Creeds, and its lifegiving sacraments, should be taught side by side with the usual branches of both an elementary and a higher education.” It was Otey who first called “the attention of our South-Western Churchmen to the necessity of establishing such a University as this.” And such a university did, indeed, come to be: the University of the South (familiarly known as Sewanee) was founded in 1857.^[15]

The efforts of Green and Otey in founding the Sewanee, represent an opportunity to rethink scholarship that over-privileges democratization and liberalization as hallmarks of Protestant education in the Early Republic. Sewanee was not illiberal, but it was fundamentally traditional in a time and place where Nathan Hatch argued culture, religious culture included, mounted a frontal assault on tradition, mediating elites, and institutions. Something similar may be said of the founding of Southern Seminary in 1859, the flagship Southern Baptist institution. At this time, Baptist clerics in frontier locales such as Texas, Arkansas, and parts of Northern Louisiana, often sought fast ordination for pastors in order to staff rapidly growing Baptist churches in the Southwest. Many, therefore, balked at the idea of a denominational seminary imposing centralized standards on local churches. However, college founder James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888) made clear his commitment to academic and intellectual excellence, refusing to allow Southern Baptist adoption of any rhetoric downplaying education and theological acumen. Boyce studied at Brown, and then at Princeton Seminary under Charles Hodge, and imported the same academic standards to Southern. Against his critics, he asserted that “Baptists are unmistakably the friends of education, and the advocates of an Educated Ministry.” Frontier church or no, Baptists pastors needed an education.^[16]

Civilization and education forced on the West by Protestants did in fact subdue the frontier and ultimately remade it in the image of not only the eastern states, but of the Old World. Philip Schaff (1819-1893) toured the United States in the 1850s and opined that “the further west, and the newer the country, the more unformed and changeable is the state of society.” “On the frontiers, and in uncultivated regions, the rudest state of nature sometimes appears.” Schaff announced that even in gold-rich California, “I would not live for any price.” Frontier society in the United States was still too given too much to “chaotic confusion” to be meaningfully civilized, and law and order was a tenuous proposition at best in places where lynch law ruled more convincingly than government.

German immigration mitigated Schaff’s fears about the American frontier somewhat. If Germans shed their particularities and “if only his virtues, his depth of mind and of heart” remained, they could be “enriched and quickened with the undeniable energy and practical turn of the Anglo-American.” Germans and Anglos, Schaff delightedly told a Berlin audience, mixed “much easier than other nations” and were “both, in fact, essentially Germanic or Teutonic. The shared “simplicity and honesty of character” in Germans—now German Americans—and Anglo Americans boded well for the frontier geographies where they mixed. These mixed Anglo and German communities were not given to violence in the same way other frontier localities were because they had a “deep-rooted respect for woman, love for home and the family life, especially moral earnestness and a religious turn.” Even the ecclesiastical life of Germans inevitably helped make them civilized. Germans and Anglos were the two populations who supported “ideas and institutions of evangelical Christianity.” Together they held “in their hands the theoretical and practical mission of Protestantism for the world.” Anglos and Germans had a duty “where they are brought by Providence into immediate contact, and meet in all the relations of social life,” to refuse “to hate and fight one another.”^[17]

Schaff’s vision of Anglo-German—and religiously Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed—civilization subduing the wilds of North America was hardly utopian. Demographically stable communities in the Upper Midwest and the West revolved around Lutheran settlement and Anglican missions. The founding of Nashotah House in 1840s Wisconsin led to one of the first major efforts among Protestants to provide material progress to an otherwise still rudimentary society in Wisconsin. Bishop Jackson Kemper (1789-1870) hauled books, bells, bedroom linens, kitchen appliances, and a host of other household items to Nashotah. The Episcopalians nurtured good relationships with local Lutheran emigrants at Pine Lake, Wisconsin. Nashotah—like other frontier settlements—was largely populated by young men; but the fact that it did not have the levels of violence present in the frontier South and Southwest is ample evidence that high levels of religiosity mapped neatly onto more stable communities.^[18]

By the 1840s, even the leaders of revivalist sects rethought the democratization they unintendedly brought about in American frontier religion. Barton Stone (1772-1844), a former Presbyterian who helped lead the revivals of the 1820s which constituted an important part of the so-called Second Great Awakening, grew disillusioned with the political realities of the regions infiltrated by his own revivalist enterprises. At the end of his life he downplayed his participation in the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801, the event that is generally credited with instigating the Second Great Awakening. Stone’s hatred of slavery and his belief that the frontier had slipped back into godlessness and lawlessness convinced him that his attempt to return Christianity to primitive purity had been co-opted by a form of religious Americanism that upheld frontier lawlessness and immorality even as it borrowed some forms of institutionalized Christianity.^[19]

In 1843, John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) published his The Anxious Bench, a searing indictment of the frontier revivalism that Barton Stone and others worked so hard to implement. In the 1830s Nevin—a graduate of Princeton Seminary—took a post at Western Seminary in the then still small city of Pittsburgh. The city’s hinterland still very much remained frontier in the 1830s and 1840s, and dislike of his democratic frontier neighbors made his professorship an uneasy post to fill for a figure like Nevin who disliked democracy and untrammeled liberalism. For example, a few years after writing The Anxious Bench, Nevin denounced the liberal democratic revolutions in Europe as antichrist. Nevin’s mission to the frontier seminary and his polemics against revivalist frontier Christianity did not come from a place of affectionate revision, but of antipathy. Nevin wanted to conquer and subjugate frontier religion, not refine it. He called John Wesley—who Nevin associated with the worst excesses of frontier religion—a “small man” compared to Reformation era luminaries like Philip Melanchthon. Nevin’s dislike of frontier religion carried over into his dislike of frontier life in general. D.G. Hart helpfully notes that “tenuous existence in a frontier town” annoyed Nevin to the point he sought a posting elsewhere.” Nevin found a new professorship back east in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania and he found a decidedly more Old World communion—the German Reformed church—as well.^[20]

Conclusion

Frontier revivalism has filled the imaginations of religious and non-religious observers from the nineteenth century to our own time. The idea that such religion is typically American, is reinforced by telemedia like HBO’s hit The Righteous Gemstones and by the popular association of so-called “Christian nationalism” with theologically charismatic Christians closely aligned to Donald Trump. The rise of so-called “evangelicalism” in the latter half of the twentieth century further clouded the nature of frontier revival in the United States. Presbyterians like D. James Kennedy (1930-2007) made common political cause with charismatics and pushed ideas of national revival using language downstream from democratic frontier revivalists instead of his own Presbyterian confession.^[21]

The frontier, however, never represented American religiosity, even among religious bodies associated with the frontier. In 1968, seventy-five years after Frederick Jackson Turner declared that there was no longer a frontier, even the frontier churches had been thoroughly domesticated and subjugated to the older social norms of the east. Joan Didion could narrate the history of her hometown, Sacramento, California, as a place settled by inferentially Scots-Irish frontiersmen eventually domesticated by older forms of Protestantism that rejected revivalism: “The settlers came—the farmers, the people who for two hundred years had been moving west on the frontier, the peculiarly flawed strain who had cleared Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri; they made Sacramento a farm town.” That same farm town of the 1850s turned into a twentieth century American city where the prominent citizens owned Cadillacs, lived in Country Clubs, and worshiped at Trinity Episcopal Church. Frontier religion was never as powerful or as influential as advertised. Even the revivals themselves were never particularly frontier in spirit. They were undertaken, argued Bernard Weisbrger, “entirely in the spirit of counterattack, and with the awful urgency of the defensive.” Figures like Beecher, Episcopal bishops like Otey and Kemper, and Nevin, set in motion that eventual conquest of the frontier by older forms of Protestant religiosity, and they undoubtedly succeeded. There’s a reason why people across the country watch The Righteous Gemstones–and it’s not because they think it’s representative of the Protestant church down the street.^[22]

Miles Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College

1. Mary Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 179. ↑

2. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) penned his famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner posited that the subdual of the American frontier had a profound effect upon the American character in its attitudes towards democracy, violence, exceptionalism, opportunity, and more. It has become, one way or another, one of the foundational ideas of American historical discussion. ↑

3. John B. Boles, “Turner, the Frontier, and the Study of Religion in America,” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (1993): 205–16. ↑

4. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American” (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894), 1-4; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921), 36. ↑

5. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American,” 1-4; Turner, The Frontier in American History , 36. ↑

6. Peter G. Mode, The Frontier Spirit in American Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 14. ↑

7. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 210. ↑

8. George R. Fairbanks, History of the University of the South, at Sewanee, Tennessee (Jacksonville, FL: H. & W.B. Drew Co., 1905), 1. ↑

9. Merrill E. Gaddis, “Religious Ideas and Attitudes in the Early Frontier.” Church History 2, no. 3 (1933): 152–70; Francis, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church Vol. II (New York: N. Bangs, and T. Mason, 1821), 286. ↑

10. John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, From the Revolution to the Civil War Vol. II (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1914), 577-78. ↑

11. B.W. McDonnold, History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (Nashville, TN: Board of Publication of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1888), 7. ↑

12. Asbury, The Journal of the Rev. Francis Asbury, 286; John Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4 ↑

13. Kenny A. Franks, “Missionaries In The West: An Expedition Of The Protestant Episcopal Church In 1844.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 44, no. 3 (1975): 318–33; George Washington Doane, The Missionary Bishop: The Sermon at the Consecration of the Right Reverend Jackson Kemper D.D. (Burlington, NJ: J.L. Powell, 1835), 12-14. ↑

14. Doane, The Missionary Bishop, 12-14; E. Clowes Chorley, “The Missionary March of the Episcopal Church.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 17, no. 1 (1948): 3–43. ↑

15. George R. Fairbanks, History of the University of the South, at Sewanee, Tennessee (Jacksonville, FL: H. & W.B. Drew Co., 1905), 1, 12-13. ↑

16. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1989), 182; James Petigru Boyce, Three Changes in Theological Institutions, An Inaugural Address Delivered Before the Board of Trustees of the Furman University (Greenville, SC: CJ. Elford), 5. ↑

17. Philip Schaff, America: A Sketch of the Political, Social, and Religious Character of the United States, In Two Lectures (New York: C. Scribner, 1855), 35. ↑

18. Thomas C. Reeves, “James Lloyd Breck and the Founding of Nashotah House.” Anglican and Episcopal History 65, no. 1 (1996): 50–81.  ↑

19. Matthew D. Smith, “Barton Warren Stone: Revisiting Revival in the Early Republic,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 111, no. 2 (2013): 161–97 ↑

20. Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge of American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 114; John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, PA: 1844), vii; D.G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2005), 57-58.. ↑

21. Phil Christman, “The Surprising Profundity of The Righteous Gemstones,” The Atlantic (4 Aug 2023). https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/08/the-righteous-gemstones-season-3-finale-review/674912/; Leah Payne and Erica Ramirez, “The Christian sect that has always cheered on Donald Trump,” Washington Post (21 March 2018). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/03/21/the-christian-sect-that-has-always-cheered-on-donald-trump/; D. James Kennedy, What If America Were a Christian Nation Again? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003), 230; ↑

22. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, orig 1968), 156-58; Bernard A. Weisberger, They Gathered At The River The Story Of The Great Revivalists And Their Impact Upon Religion In America (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1958), 4. ↑