This western territory became the battleground of a momentous struggle over what kind of country the new United States would become. Would it emerge as a replica of the small, religiously conservative farming communities of New England? Or would it come to resemble the Jeffersonian society of the South, dominated by deistic-minded slaveholding planters? As it turned out neither the religiously conservative society of New England nor the secular Jeffersonian South came to dominate the West. Instead, the West experienced a struggle within Protestantism between what Haselby labels “frontier revivalism and national evangelism.”
By “frontier revivalism” Haselby means the religion of the migrants, mostly small farmers, who became members of the dynamic Protestant sects that dominated the frontier. And by “national evangelism” he means the northeastern elites, mostly gentry and capitalists, who organized the nationalist Protestant missions program that sought to save the West from the barbarism of the revivalists. The religious conflict between these large movements within Protestantism fundamentally shaped America’s sense of itself as a nation. The ultimate resolution of this conflict, Haselby contends, was expressed in the rise of Andrew Jackson.
The post-revolutionary decades in America may have seen the greatest explosion of Christian religiosity since the seventeenth century or even the Reformation. The entire religious landscape of America was transformed. In 1760 the dominant denominations in colonial America had been the Anglicans and the Congregationalists—traditional state churches with Old World connections. By the end of the eighteenth century the dominant denominations had become the Baptists and Methodists—revivalist sects that had no connection with any state whatever. And the West was where these revivalist sects especially flourished. Not only were the traditional Old World churches fragmented but the fragments themselves shattered in what seemed at times to be an endless process of fission, ultimately creating sects that no one had ever heard of. “All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces” in a “fiery furnace of democracy,” said a bewildered New England Federalist, Harrison Gray Otis.
Haselby is at pains to emphasize that this explosion of religiosity in the West was not shaped by American nationalism. Despite what Tocqueville claimed in his Democracy in America, he says, “popular religious movements on the frontier flourished independently of nationalist ideals and influences.” In the absence of a strong state and an established church, popular Protestantism “offered alternative forms of sovereignty” and “invented new forms of authority.” For the people in the trans-Appalachian West it was “a greater and more radical force than the revolutionary republicanism of secular intellectuals.” Protestantism created its own religious nationalism.