W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University. He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the
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| Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. |
Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history?
W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment. Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well. Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history. Unlike European churches, American churches had to compete in the marketplace of ideas for adherents. People had choices. Religious affiliation was not simply a matter of genealogy or geography. As a result, in Nathan Hatch’s great phrasing, the democratization of the churches began in earnest. With the First Great Awakening the confessional boundaries established over the course of a century or so after the Reformation slowly lost influence. The Second Great Awakening all but ended the confessional church tradition in America. Revivalism combined with broad conceptions of evangelicalism to create new Protestant identities. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant traditions that valued creeds and liturgy found themselves overwhelmed by evangelical sentiment. Doctrine became less important than the individuals’ personal relationship with God, and behavior and public virtue came to be seen more and more as marks of “genuine” Christianity. In some ways these theological shifts made evangelicalism valuable to the growing country because it gave sanction to the importance of virtue and morality for national life. In other words, Christianity provided a code of behavior that could benefit everyone. But for Christianity to be useful it had to be contained. If disputes over theology and doctrine spilled into public life then Christianity could become divisive and socially destabilizing. In part, this is exactly what happened in the debate over slavery.
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