Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building and the Market in the Nineteenth Century United States

The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, the author addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the 19th century. He argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, Thomas claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy.