Book Review

The works under review offer an engaging set of approaches to the interplay of spiritual and secular reform.	1
The editors David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen present twelve papers on reform delivered at a 1997 conference in the Netherlands. Several articles shed new light on familiar themes. Louis Billington demonstrates how, by the late 1830s, "radical" evangelicals in postrevolutionary New England grew more "respectable" in their economic, political, and social outlooks. Anthony Mann argues that voluntary societies created by Boston's postrevolutionary elites aimed at general social uplift as well as reform of the elite community's own behavior. Naomi Wulf maintains that Orestes Brownson's complex and shifting reform career captured the tension his contemporaries felt between self- and social reform. Louis J. Kern locates William Lloyd Garrison's radicalism in principles drawn from Calvinism, evangelicalism, and antinomianism. Robert Lewis traces shifting notions of leisure, examining evangelical fears, market interests, and the compromises fashioned between piety and pleasure. Valeria Gennaro Lerda contends that Woman's Christian Temperance Unionists in the South defied the region's conventions on drink and the status of women but deferred to its codes on race.	2
A second group of essays reassesses conventional historical assumptions about reform. Mark Häberlein argues that the Great Awakening stimulated popular empowerment and religious cooperation but also reinforced traditional authority and denominational identity. Alexis McCrossen explains how sabbatarians helped set Sunday apart as a special day, though ironically not for the specific theological reasons they originally intended. Howell John Harris questions the monolithic, progressive nature of American Quakers and examines how one group reinvigorated a commitment to reform through the American Friends Service Committee. Melvyn Stokes identifies significant parallels between Progressivism and poststructuralism, criticizing historians who steer scholarship away from a recognition of those linkages. Jan C. C. Rupp notes deep divisions among "consensus" reformers in post–World War II America over the best means of securing national unity. And Axel R. Schaefer addresses the diverse nature of modern evangelicalism, showing that the social conservatism of adherents does not necessarily translate into economic conservatism.	3
The volume covers an admirably broad range of topics, periods, and methods. Ten of the authors are based at European universities, providing American readers with a refreshingly different perspective on their history. And most of the essays contain useful historiographical analyses of reform. Unfortunately, the collection's breadth is also one of its weaknesses. The editors offer a very general, inclusive introduction that does not rigorously examine the nature of "religious" or "secular" reform—or the meanings of "reform" itself. The authors do not engage one another in their essays. And for all the variety offered in the articles, most do not offer much insight into factors of race or gender or the activities of rank-and-file reformers.	4
Still, several themes emerge from the essays. Most treat reform movements as "forward-looking" in their anticipation of later social principles and strategies. The authors frequently uncover significant conflicts within reform movements. Several point out transatlantic connections in the history of American reform. And the works commonly treat theological principles as key factors in explaining the roots of reform.	. . .