Rally the Scattered Believers

Shelby M. Balik

Description

Winner, 2014 Phi Alpha Theta First Book Award

Northern New England, a rugged landscape dotted with transient settlements, posed challenges to the traditional town church in the wake of the American Revolution. Using the methods of spatial geography, Shelby M. Balik examines how migrants adapted their understanding of religious community and spiritual space to survive in the harsh physical surroundings of the region. The notions of boundaries, place, and identity they developed became the basis for spreading New England's deeply rooted spiritual culture, even as it opened the way to a new evangelical age.

Foreword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein
Acknowledgments
A Note on Places
Introduction: Churching the Northern Wilds
1. No Schism in the Body: The Town Church in Crisis
2. Zion Travels: The Itinerant Enterprise
3. Scrambling for the Right: Disestablishment and the Town Church
4. 'Tis All on Fire: Landscapes of Religious Community
5. Fairly Missionary Ground: The Congregationalist Turn to Itinerancy
6. A City Set on a Hill: Northern New England's New Religious Geography
Conclusion: A Place of Paradoxes
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Methodist
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Methodism
• History of religions
• Christianity
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253012135
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

RALLY the SCATTERED BELIEVERS
RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA
Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
RALLY the SCATTERED BELIEVERS
NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND S RELIGIOUS GEOGRAPHY
SHELBY M. BALIK
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
2014 by Shelby Balik
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Balik, Shelby M.
Rally the scattered believers : northern New England s religious geography / Shelby M. Balik.
pages cm. - (Religion in North America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01210-4 (cloth) -ISBN 978-0-253-01213-5 (ebook)
1. New England-Church history. 2. Ecclesiastical geography-New England. 3. Religion and geography-New England. I. Title.
BR530.B35 2014
277.4 081-dc23
2013043182
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
To Bill, Carly, and Peter, with much love.
Contents
Foreword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein
Acknowledgments
A Note on Places
Introduction: Churching the Northern Wilds
1 No Schism in the Body: The Town Church in Crisis
2 Zion Travels: The Itinerant Enterprise
3 Scrambling for the Right: Disestablishment and the Town Church
4 Tis All on Fire: Landscapes of Religious Community
5 Fairly Missionary Ground: The Congregationalist Turn to Itinerancy
6 A City Set on a Hill: Northern New England s New Religious Geography
Conclusion: A Place of Paradoxes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Shelby M. Balik s new book showcases movement, travel, and the scatteredness that comes with them. Scattered believers, we can guess, have a more stressful time than those who stay in one place. That reality provides an important clue to the importance of her work for American religious studies. Balik uses a spatial-studies approach to assess religious change in northern New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) in the years following the Revolution and into the early national period. The region was isolated by the standards of the time, and within this vast and challenging arena, two religious systems competed. The first, Congregationalism, followed the town-church model of lower New England. Here, residency meant orthodoxy, and doctrinal aberrations were frequently overlooked to preserve geographical unity. The second, a cadre of movements, ranging from Baptist to Methodist to Universalist to Freewill Baptist, embraced itinerancy, with the piety promoted by the Second Great Awakening as its major calling card. As the two models interacted, argues Balik, a new physical and spiritual topography emerged, a crazy quilt of faiths sewn together by threads of exchange, competition, and debate.
Balik brings to her subject theoretical perspectives gleaned from the spatial-studies work of scholars such as Edward Linenthal, David Chidester, Belden Lane, and Amy DeRogatis. In her own application, however, Balik moves spatial studies into a new and more complex terrain. Most such studies focus on existing landscapes or on built environments considered as (at least temporary) fixed structures. By contrast, Balik follows movement across space, emphasizing fluidity and change. The geographical hinterland brought travel and migration to be sure. But, even for those who remained in towns, it also brought inexorable change. Mission societies undercut town churches and re-formed Congregationalism to fit an itinerant landscape.
In narrating what happened as the two models of itinerancy and fixed location met, Balik is at pains to show that the story is not a simple one of Congregationalist decline. Instead, she suggests a more complex set of transformations in which each model in some ways imitated the other and ended in an identifiably different form from its shape at the beginning of the period. Town churches faced the migration of their congregants and consequent instability as well as a lack of ministers. As time passed, they employed visiting ministers and cooperated with new networking mission societies that made them look increasingly like itinerants. In their turn, itinerants moved into new definitions of community that brought emergent religious groups into collaboration with one another on a multi-denominational basis and also into settled parishes. Piety continued to abound among them, intensely familial and also denominational. As Balik tells the story, the only part of itinerancy that died was itinerancy itself-an ironic twist, to be sure, to the earlier announcement of a traveling Zion.
As Balik unfolds this narrative, she makes impressive use of available evidence and provides helpful charts and summaries. With her focus on the distinctly understudied northern New England region in a relatively circumscribed time period, she brings significant new material to the attention of specialists in the post-Revolutionary and early national eras. But her story should not be read as simply one that fills a gap in post-colonial religious historiography. Rather, with its attention to how competing cultural forms negotiated their differences in a time of change, her work gives readers not only historical but also sociological insight. In short, she exposes difficult processes of cultural coping that anticipate the way religion would be worked out in much of the new United States. As she explores these processes in one specific area, Balik underscores the unlikely combination of tradition and innovation. This north country was truly a place of paradox-expanding outward with a new and ecumenically open pluralism at the same time that it narrowed with the restricted vision of intense and beleaguered religious groups.
So Rally the Scattered Believers signals a metaphorical and spiritual journey, an inner expedition, if you will, that historical actors were compelled to undertake. That said, the irony of the end of itinerancy in the emergence of a new order takes on additional meaning. Spatial studies become not merely a scrutiny of topography. They look beneath the surface of maps and movements to discover a geography that is distinctly interior and moral (to borrow a phrase from Amy DeRogatis). Traveled landscapes, in Shelby M. Balik s book, are inner as well as outer. Scattering affects the heart.
Catherine L. Albanese
Stephen J. Stein
Series Editors
Acknowledgments
If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a metropolis to write a book. This one has been in the works for some dozen years, which means I owe quite a lot of thanks to quite a lot of people. I am delighted, at last, to make good on those debts.
This book is, in large part, a product of other people s great teaching. Teachers rarely get enough credit, and the fruits of their labor often do not become apparent until decades after the fact. So, as long as I have this forum for giving thanks, I am going to use it to recognize the teachers who worked so hard on my behalf. Long (long) ago, Karen Armstrong and Elyse Eisner taught me to love writing. Susan Turner-Jones and Joannie Parker challenged me to write better. Leni Wildflower and Kevin O Malley showed me a much bigger world than I had known and nudged me out into it. Timothy Harris and the late Jack Thomas taught me to write like a historian. Howard Chudacoff taught me to think like one. More importantly, he got me wondering (whether he knew it or not) if I should try thinking like a historian for a living.
The teachers to whom I owe the most are my graduate school professors. In seminars with Steve Kantrowitz and the late Paul Boyer, I read books and asked questions that led me to my research topic. Bill Cronon inspired me to think about landscapes in ways that have carried into this book, and Ron Numbers and Bill Reese helped advance the project by posing thoughtful and challenging questions. The late Jeanne Boydston s keen intellect sharpened my thinking from the very first seminar I took with her, and her feedback helped me pinpoint my argument as I whittled down a behemoth of a manuscript. Even more importantly, Jeanne provided the best model I can imagine of an unfailingly incisive but always generous-minded and humane scholar. I wish I had thanked her for that while I had the chance. And I owe especially profound thanks to Charles Cohen. During my years at Wisconsin, he spilled vats of red ink on my papers and chapters in an effort to turn me into a more precise thinker and writer. If I have argued my points and defined my terms clearly in these pages, it s very much to his credit (and if I haven t, the blame is all my own). Since I finished at Wisconsin, Chuck has offered patient and steadfast support, despite a few twists and turns that left my professional future very much in question. I hope this book offers reassurance that his faith in me was well-founded.
Devising a research topic is one thing. Carrying it out is quite another, and my project-which led me to twenty libraries scattered throughout nine states-posed major financial and logistical challenges. It would have been impossible without the support I received from the American Antiquarian Society, the Graduate Student Council and History Department a