Church Questions & American Answers: Denominational Resurgence and the Making of Christian America, 1830-1900

Team Members/Contributors

R. Bryan Bademan University of Notre Dame Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Church Questions and American Answer explores the development of Protestant identity in America from 1830 to 1900. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed a sharpening critique of revivalistic evangelicalism. Leading Protestants from a wide variety of denominations opposed the individualism and fragmentation of American religious life. Their quarrel with revivalistic forms of Christianity brought many to stress high doctrines of the church. While scholars have studied these dynamics in the thought of isolated individuals (e.g., the Mercersburg theologians or John Henry Hobart), a full-length treatment of the movement as a whole has not been written. Nor have scholars studied the influence of churchly thinking on late-nineteenth-century Protestant identity. The first section of my dissertation charts the emergence of the churchly critique. American Protestants sought to challenge the evangelical paradigm without conceding to “Romanist” authoritarianism and sectarianism. The second section follows these arguments through to the 1860s. The Civil War intensified religious tensions in the U.S.; yet the national crisis also stimulated the search for a nonsectarian basis for Christian belief. Political exigencies prompted conservative Protestants to rethink their ideas about the church’s role in society, and most came to embrace the evangelical notions of Christian catholicity their predecessors once denounced. The third section of my dissertation looks closely at the relationship between the new Protestant identity and late-nineteenth-century American nationalism.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  Contesting the Evangelical Age: Protestant Challenges to Religious Subjectivity in Antebellum America 2004 Dissertation R. Bryan Bademan