This dissertation will probe the culture of the gilded-age campmeeting holiness movement, using methods from recent interdisciplinary study of emotion to discern how that culture developed in both modern and antimodern ways.

The much-noted “emotionalism” of the holiness movement drew intensity and form from a tension between the movement’s central relational values and certain modernizing values and habits of Victorian American society. In their pursuit of the allied (but at times conflicting) goals of divine communion and human community, holiness people used language of embattlement—against self-sufficiency, consumerist materialism, and the cult of domestic affection. They also developed “scripts” for managing and expressing emotion that drew on the thoroughly modern romantic rhetorics and anthropological assumptions of Victorian sentimentalism. In so doing, they both fought and participated in social modernization.

This dissertation’s central contribution to American religion is its exploration of the question: How do modernizing values and habits such a rationalization, efficiency, contractualization of relationships, materialism, and self-culture shape modern pietistic religious movements, both integrally and oppositionally? This is a particularly pressing question to ask of the Campmeeting holiness culture that parented the Pentecostal and grandparented the charismatic movement—since these latter movements are still spreading rapidly in America, and in modernizing societies around the world.