When it comes to the evangelism of poor whites in the upper South prior to 1850 or so, it's a mistake to assume that such is an indication of what we would consider social conservatism. There's an excellent book called
The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch that talks about how groups like the Baptists and the Disciples of Christ were a liberal reaction to the conservative ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Episcopal Church. In the period immediately following the Revolution,
| | America's nonrestrictive environment 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 who 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 outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution. (1) |
In short, while upsurge in evangelism associated with the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century was a democratizing force in American Christianity, and sprung from the same Jeffersonian faith in the common people and suspicion of established hierarchies that defined American liberalism during this period. While eventually, as new denominations became more established, like all institutions of Southern society they too would be called upon to provide the social and political defense of slavery, in the beginning these denominations were somewhat more likely to include moderate anti-slavery elements. Barton Stone, an ordained Baptist minister and one of the leading figures in the Disciples of Christ, published anti-slavery essays in his paper
The Christian Messenger in the 1840s, while Alexander Campbell, another leader in the DoC, was an advocate of colonization; Campbell later abandoned his anti-slavery stance for fear of sowing divisions within the church. As president of Bethany College, he played a prominent role in an explosive controversy within the church surrounding the expulsion of several students who argued that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. (Some of the students were subsequently admitted to North Western Christian University, later Butler University, in Indianapolis, that school having been established by abolitionist and church leader Ovid Butler in the later 1850s.)
The slaveholding class tended to be Episcopalians, and while some like Jefferson were drawn toward a liberal political philosophy, they tended to be conservative politically —supporting the Federalist party in the 1790s and the Whigs after 1833. George Washington was baptized in the Anglican Church and remained a member throughout his adult life. Lucretia Hart Clay, the wife of Senator Henry Clay, was a devout Episcopalian; Clay himself was not a practicing Christian, but became more religious later in life. As Alcibiades notes, they occupied the role of landed gentry in the quasi-feudal society of the Antebellum South and were broadly opposed to democratization and other liberal political ideas, except when (as in the case of the Virginian gentry and free trade) it could be made to suit their economic self-interest.
(1) Nathan O. Hatch,
The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale, 1989) 9.
