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Evangelical Reform in Early Nineteenth Century America

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To American evangelicals, the new century seemed anything but hospitable. Many Americans had stopped going to church. Some openly doubted Christianity, preferring to place their hopes in reason alone rather than a God who intervenes in human affairs. The nation’s cities were turning into havens of crime, promiscuity, and alcoholism. Radical social reformers dotted the landscape, attracting enthusiastic interest, if not outright support. One of the more provocative of the radicals proposed a “Declaration of Mental Independence” that denounced private property, traditional religion, and marriage as “a TRINITY of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon [man’s] whole race.”

Even in politics, traditional religion and morality were flouted. Thomas Jefferson, one of the era’s most influential presidents, scoffed in private at the miracles of the Bible and historic Christian doctrines such as the Trinity. Another popular chief executive, Andrew Jackson, was the only president in American history who had killed another man in a duel. Yet voters didn’t seem to care.

In many ways, the culture wars of America in the early 1800s seem eerily like some of the cultural conflicts in America today. Yet most historians wouldn’t describe nineteenth-century America as especially secular or amoral. If anything, the period is often held up as the epitome of a Christian America—when Christianity, or at least the Protestant variety of Christianity—was the dominant religion of the state, and when Biblical ethics supplied the basis for social relations. Nor would criminologists describe the nineteenth century, at least the second half of it, as particularly awash in crime. In fact, lawlessness went down in the latter half of the nineteenth century—despite urbanization, industrialization, and other factors typically associated with increased crime rates.

What is going on here? Both depictions of nineteenth-century America can’t be true. Or can they?

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Originally published as the chapter on “Nineteenth Century America” in Don Eberly, editor, Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance (Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), pp. 181-199.

John G. West

Senior Fellow, Managing Director, and Vice President of Discovery Institute
Dr. John G. West is Vice President of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and Managing Director of the Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Formerly the Chair of the Department of Political Science and Geography at Seattle Pacific University, West is an award-winning author and documentary filmmaker who has written or edited 12 books, including Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, and Walt Disney and Live Action: The Disney Studio’s Live-Action Features of the 1950s and 60s. His documentary films include Fire-Maker, Revolutionary, The War on Humans, and (most recently) Human Zoos. West holds a PhD in Government from Claremont Graduate University, and he has been interviewed by media outlets such as CNN, Fox News, Reuters, Time magazine, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post.