| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christopher H. Owen. The Sacred Flame of Love: Methodism and Society in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1998. Pp. xx, 290. $50.00.

This book joins half a dozen recent studies of the origins and evolution of early American Methodism. Although Christopher H. Owen has a narrower geographic focus than John H. Wigger's Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (1998) or Gregory Schneider's The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (1993), his long chronological sweep enables him to chart the changes and adaptations that help to explain Methodism's persistence in the American South from the period of its inception into the early twentieth century. 1

Chastising historians for characterizing southern evangelicalism as unchanging over two centuries, the author contends that the literature has largely stereotyped white evangelical churches as conservative defenders of the social order and black churches as prophetic arenas of struggle for social justice while overlooking the complex biracial interaction among them. To correct these flaws, the book traces the long process of church consolidation in early nineteenth-century Georgia and continual retrenchment thereafter—a process that, despite the author's protests, is largely familiar from previous scholarship. . . .

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