Contesting the Evangelical Age: Protestant Challenges to Religious Subjectivity in Antebellum America

This dissertation examines several Protestant challenges to the rise of evangelical religion in the mid nineteenth century. Concerned that religious and political cultures were too readily blending into each other--to the detriment of both--leading Protestants criticized populist evangelicalism for its easy accommodation to and sanction of American cultural norms. They held that strong ecclesiastical traditions and institutions, rather than weak ones, could nurture a lasting Christian identity as well as stabilize national progress. Unlike many American Protestants, these churchmen (principally of Lutheran, Episcopalian, Old School Presbyterian, and German Reformed background) rejected the aims and tactics of revivalism and of experimental religion more generally. They were, moreover, deeply and controversially attracted to elements of the Roman Catholic tradition, and they sought a conservative, organic politics that would protect them from the radical doctrines of abolitionists, European revolutionaries, and sectional ideologues. Most important, in their contest with evangelical notions of the church as an invisible and ideal community of truly regenerate humans, churchly Protestants insisted that the church was also a visible body of Christians who gather regularly for worship in specific locations. Less concerned with purity, such Protestants sought unity under stable confessions of faith less susceptible to the impulses of popular culture. Neither a political nor even a religious party--in fact principally opposed to the tactics of 'partyism'--these Protestants directed their energies into the welfare of their respective churches. The cultural and political crisis that led to the Civil War, however, while giving impetus to the churchly vision in the 1840s and early 1850s, proved in the late 1850s to undermine it. The churchly agenda of mid nineteenth-century Protestantism collapsed in the years leading up to the Civil War as a new more stridently nationalistic evangelicalism transformed the aspirations of those who sought to ground Protestant identity in what many perceived as antiquated Old World traditionalism. This study includes discussions of important Protestant leaders like John Williamson Nevin, Philip Schaff, Charles Hodge, William Rollinson Whittingham, and Charles Porterfield Krauth, Samuel S. Schmucker, among others.