| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Piety in Providence: Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island. By Mark S. Schantz. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. xvi, 280 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8014-2952-8.)

During the eighteenth century, Providence's Protestant churches assembled people from all walks of life. This world began to shift in the early nineteenth century when the concept of an organic community began to crumble in the face of rising individualism. Reflecting the changes in the larger society, religious congregations became segmented by class and produced religious cultures that Mark S. Schantz identifies as "bourgeois" and "plebeian." "Refinement, emotional reserve, and gentility" characterized members of the former. Their wealth was drawn from the emerging capitalist economy, and enthusiastic religion seemed foreign to their world of rational calculations. Revivalism, in contrast, proved to be the basis of the plebeian congregations. This working-class constituency adopted a worship style that celebrated Arminian theology, "embraced itinerant and female preaching, acknowledged the validity of dreams, visions, and intense displays of emotion, and manifested a tenacious spirit of institutional independence." These differences developed into fault lines, particularly during the Dorr rebellion of 1842. Thomas Wilson Dorr found support among Rhode Island's underclass and members of Providence's plebeian congregations and was opposed by leading male adherents of Providence's bourgeois churches. Some bourgeois women, however, lent moral support to Dorr and simultaneously "offered stinging critiques of the economic and political structures crafted by bourgeois men." . . .

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