Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. By John H. Wigger. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ix, 269 pp. $55.00, isbn 0-19-510452-8.)

John H. Wigger's argument in this well-crafted study is that American Methodism constituted the "most significant large-scale popular religious movement of the antebellum period" and that the democratization of American religion, embodied in this movement more than in any other, was one of the most important social and cultural developments of the early republic. He contends further that Methodism and the larger culture in which it was situated were integrally linked, that the religious movement shaped the ethos of the early national era almost as much as the secular culture eventually altered the ethos of Methodism. The book amplifies Nathan Hatch's argument that the primary feature of religious development in this period was democratization, an argument linked to larger claims advanced earlier by Gordon Wood and Alan Taylor about the democratizing consequences of the Revolution. . . .

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