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Book Reviews
Politics as Evangelical Crusade
| CREECH, JOE. Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xxx + 232 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-252-03074-5; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 0-252-07315-0.
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In this illuminating study, Joe Creech explores the agrarian upheaval that culminated in the Populist movement in the late nineteenth century, adding significantly to the literature.1 Creech's particular contribution is his demonstration that Populism's rise and rapid decline in the 1890s can be attributed to the prevalence of evangelical Christianity, particularly in the Jim Crow South. Thus, his study fuses discussions of politics, economics, religion, and race to present a detailed and persuasive account of one of the most ambitious third-party movements in American history. |
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Creech's introduction provides a brief overview of the Populists' abrupt rise and decline, as well as a short analysis of twentieth-century historiography of the movement. Prior historians, he explains, oscillated between viewing Populists as reform-oriented protoprogressives and seeing them as "backward-looking localist reactionaries" (xxiii). Examining Populists' religious outlook, Creech insists, navigates between these extremes—Populists longed for political reform in the present but couched their revolt in appeals to biblical traditions of the past. Creech maintains: "In identifying with Jesus the agrarian reformer and in imagining themselves the twelve disciples," evangelical Populists "understood their movement to be at the heart of a sacred struggle in the twilight of the nineteeth century" (90). But at the same time, evangelical Populists espoused competing traditions of congregational independence, ambivalence toward clerical authority, and respect for private property, all of which made them renounce socialism and question labor radicalism and strikes. Populism thus emerged as a middle ground between extremes—attempting to reinstate a divinely-sanctioned political, economic, and social order based on fair competition (and eliminating "private interests" and illicit business trusts), elevating small-scale producers, and ensuring independent politics. Creech's most insistent (and persuasive) argument is that reform-oriented farmers infused their movement with "patriotic millennialism" that turned Populist agitators into Christian crusaders intent on restoring biblical egalitarianism and Jeffersonian ideals. |
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The evangelical culture at the heart of Creech's analysis eludes easy classification (and perhaps the greatest strength of this study is its ability to present a nuanced portrait of late nineteenth-century Protestant Christianity that captures its complexity). Creech's discussion touches on Primitive Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, and other evangelical Protestants who rejected denominationalism altogether. What these religious strands share was a passion for independence from centralized authority, both in religious worship and in political behavior. White southerners, who form the basis of Creech's account, viewed independence from political "bosses," paid clergy, and the "crop lien" system as a necessary condition for full manhood and as Americans' inheritance from Christian traditions and Revolutionary ideals. And it was precisely the fear of losing this independence (at the hands of Wall Street, corrupt banks, railroad executives, or political opportunists) that sparked the creation of the Farmer's Alliance in the 1880s, followed by the People's Party, which emerged in 1892 and was soundly defeated by the end of the decade. |
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Evangelical religion provided not merely the ideological and rhetorical foundation for the Populist crusade, but gave the movement practical support as well. Denominational newspapers supported Populist causes and candidates, ministers founded grassroots reform groups, church buildings served as party headquarters, and revivals doubled as party rallies. Given this overlap between evangelicism and politics, debates over the Silver Standard took on a heightened meaning—reflecting not simply America's fiscal policy but Christian hopes that "economic laws reflecting the voice of God would again govern the nation's political economy" (79). |
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