| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Beth Barton Schweiger. The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia. (Religion in America Series.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 267. $49.95.

Beth Barton Schweiger's fresh and innovative study of Methodists and Baptists in nineteenth-century Virginia challenges many standard historical interpretations of southern evangelicals; indeed, she rejects the idea that any such homogeneous group existed. In her view, southern evangelical churches were not "bastions of premodern and antimodern sentiment" or "havens of old-time religion" (p. 4) but rather the source of religious, social, and material progress. Schweiger refutes the argument that southern churches languished in cultural captivity, and she refuses to accept the declension theory that condemns southern religion as a failure for its embrace of the proslavery ideology. She focuses on the most important transformation in the history of nineteenth-century American religion: the dramatic shift from sects to denominations, or what H. Richard Niebuhr referred to as the inevitable "institutionalization and securalization of the kingdom" (The Kingdom of God in America [1937]). In order to understand that shift, she compiled biographical data for 800 Methodist and Baptist ministers who built those denominational bodies. . . .

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