my review of Shelby Balik's Rally the Scattered Believers

From the Dec. 2015 American Historical Review: 

In the early nineteenth century, a Baptist named Betsey Walker wrote to a trusted minister about a revival sweeping Arundel, Maine. For a month Walker attended twice-a-day prayer meetings, assemblies that fueled an awakening which eventually seemed to sweep up all of Arundel’s adults. “Tis all on fire,” she exclaimed, “such times I never expected to see” (140).

Walker’s observation could serve as an apt description of religious and population growth throughout northern New England during the early republic. Shelby Balik’s deeply researched Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography offers a finely grained picture of that era of burgeoning development. Along with Alan Taylor’sLiberty Men and Great Proprietors (1990), Balik’s book delivers one of the best histories of precisely what the “Second Great Awakening” amounted to in northern New England.

Through prodigious archival work, Balik draws out the voices of legions of Methodists, Baptists (both Calvinist and Freewill), Universalists, and others. She explains that the fundamental transition in the “geography of religion” during that period was from the “town-church” model of traditional Congregationalism, to the “itinerant” system of the Methodists, Baptists, and others. Although we knew prior to Balik’s book that this era represented a time of remarkable Baptist and Methodist growth, her religious geography approach provides a substantially new way of understanding religious change and church-state controversies during the period.

As the oxymoronic “dissenting establishment” of colonial New England, the Congregationalists had followed a parish model of spiritual responsibility for the people of a village or neighborhood. Of course, the Puritans were also concerned with discerning whether people had experienced conversion before admitting them to full membership. But even after church attendance was no longer legally enforced, there was a sense in Massachusetts and its northern hinterlands that all people in a town were somehow affiliated by default with the nearby Congregationalist church, which typically received support from mandatory religious taxes.

Itinerant preaching, and the advent of Separatist and Separatist Baptist breakaways from many established churches during the First Great Awakening, represented the initial major challenge to New England’s town-church system. Because of the onset of the Revolution, the rise of the Methodists, Freewill Baptists, and others, and the pressure to disestablish Congregationalism, the itinerancy system gained more traction. Under itinerancy, religious affiliation was assumed to be voluntary, not an accident of one’s birth or residence. As floods of immigrants moved into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Baptist and Methodist itinerant preachers kept pace and threatened the older town-church model.

Balik notes that the Congregationalists, and their allies in the New England state governments, did not accept this transition without a fight. Congregationalists (again dating back to the First Great Awakening) engaged in their own itinerant and missionary practices, eventually turning Congregationalism itself into an “itinerant movement” (178). Yet even after formal disestablishment, the New England governments provided practical support and preferences for Congregationalist churches and their pastors. The era of close church-state cooperation was hardly over. Itinerant churches also could drift toward a greater emphasis on settled town ministers and neighborhood churches (a local and voluntary model Balik calls the “denominational church”). For Balik, the town and itinerant models represented tendencies rather than fixed positions—all denominations demonstrated aspects of both over time.

Similarly, Balik demonstrates that the itinerancy-based denominations were not as “democratic” as they are often portrayed. “The religious transformation of the early nineteenth century depended not on the advent of democratic theology,” she writes, but on the ways both Congregationalists and their challengers “negotiated new physical and spiritual ground” (8). Often the Methodists, Freewill Baptists, and others created more heavily centralized organizations than did the Congregationalists, organizations which helped to guide these churches’ expansion into the frontier. Nathan Hatch most famously made the argument for evangelical populism in his Democratization of American Christianity (1989), although even Hatch emphasized the contradictory role of authoritarian leaders in the “democratic” evangelical movements. And in spite of her skepticism about rising religious democracy, Balik also notes that the end of establishments and growth of religious competition inevitably meant that regular people could exercise more choice in their religious practices and affiliations, or lack thereof.

As successful as Balik’s religious geography framework is, there are points at which her rather functionalist approach to religion may not have fostered precise understandings of the ideas which drove pastors and laypeople. Rally the Scattered Believers speaks of the Baptists, for example, in some peculiar ways. Penitents converted not to Baptist principles, the book says, but to a movement Balik calls “Baptism,” as in the statement that “reading the Bible led [one man] to convert to Baptism” (120). This is a confusing usage that I do not believe most Baptists or religious historians have employed. Further, we are told that because they “believed that full immersion was the one way to bring about the new birth, Baptists considered anyone who had not undergone the ritual unconverted” (40). Countless Baptists who rejected infant baptism, and then received believer’s baptism, after their own conversions would find this claim strange. The act of baptism symbolized the new birth, but it did not bring it about.

I hesitate to point out these concerns because Rally the Scattered Believersis not a theological history, and because it is otherwise so successful in making the case for a spatial/geographic understanding of change in the period. But more attention to theological particularities—ideas about the nature of the church, salvation, and baptism—that drove the upstarts to revolutionize that geography would have only enhanced Balik’s compelling argument about the religious transitions of New England’s Second Great Awakening.