| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Douglas M. Strong. Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy. (Religion and Politics.) Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 263. $39.95.

Although many scholars have described the religious impetus behind American abolitionism, few have examined antislavery as it operated in those northern churches most hostile to slavery. Douglas M. Strong examines "ecclesiastical abolitionism" (p. 2) in upper New York State and argues that members of antislavery sects—chiefly the Wesleyan Methodists, Free Baptists, dissident Congregationalists and Presbyterians who became known as "Unionists," and Franckean Lutherans—constituted the core of the abolitionist Liberty Party. 1

Ecclesiastical abolitionists' driving force was perfectionism. Among evangelical Protestants, this nineteenth-century belief required that the faithful cleanse themselves and society from sin. Those perfectionists who subscribed to "entire sanctification" took a "convictional step beyond their initial 'new birth,'" received God's "second blessing" (p. 4), and no longer sinned. Achieving a sanctified society would prepare the world, in the minds of these postmillennialists, for Christ's second coming. The realization of sanctification, furthermore, could occur only after the faithful withdrew from impure institutions—especially churches—that failed to recognize all dimensions of slavery's sinfulness. This spirit of "comeouterism"—based on Revelation 18:4 ("Come out of her [Babylon], my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins")—was instrumental in creating antislavery congregations and denominations. . . .

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