The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America by Paul K. Conkin (review)

296 BOOK REVIEWS deeply involved. The discussion here has more to do with political issues than religious ones, but McLoughlin wants to demonstrate that it was impossible to separate religion and politics and that national survival was more important than either. In any case, the volume presents in capsule form, with the author's usual literary grace, some of his major contributions. For a reader unacquainted with McLoughlin's larger works, the book is an ideal place to begin. And it will once again remind scholars of the important place that McLoughlin established for himself in his two decades of concentrated study of the Cherokees. Francis Paul Prucha, SJ. Marquette University The Uneasy Center:Reformed Christianity inAntebellumAmerica. By Paul K. Conkin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1995). Pp. xx, 326. $39.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.) In this era of margins and rivulets, it is startling to find a survey text on American religious history (or on anything else,for that matter) that so unswervingly pursues a Protestant "center" or "mainstream." Paul Conkin serves up such a volume . Without being cranky, obstinate, or unseeing, Conkin valiantly attempts to define a Reformed center in American religion in the colonial and antebellum periods—one that, however factionalized or attenuated, has survived into the late twentieth century. With all the new ways of "siting" America's pluralistic pieties and practices, Conkin returns to seasoned narratives about Protestant hegemony and offers a fresh, balanced rendering of some familiar, important tales. After a broad-brush sketch of pre-Reformation Christianity, Conkin sets upon his synoptic account of Reformed Protestantism—a slippery label under which he includes Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Separate Baptists, as well as (somewhat surprisingly) Anglicans and Methodists, but not, for example, Lutherans, Campbellites, or Holiness groups. Conkin's interpretive aims, rooted in intellectual history, revolve around four themes: theology, doctrine, polity,and worship. In giving attention to the first three of these—for example, the New England theology from Edwards to Bushneil—Conkin holds to well-traversed terrain, but in turning to the fourth, worship, he adds a more innovative component to his survey as he scrutinizes the ritualistic texture of revivals or summarizes the High Church/evangelical tensions within the Protestant Episcopal Church. By way of afterword, Conkin is sensitive to the damming or diversion of this "mainstream" through outside competition and internal fragmentation. Conkin has crafted an appealing general account of Reformed and evangelical Protestantism in early America—one that represents the careful distillation of three decades of teaching and writing in the field. His summaries are often BOOK REVIEWS 297 sterling (for example, his treatment of Methodist foundations or his synopsis of Samuel Hopkins). When complemented by other works, his volume could be profitably used as a textbook in an undergraduate course in the history of Christianity or in American religious history. But it would carry certain drawbacks. For one, the more general surveys, such as those by Edwin Gaustad orWinthrop Hudson, offer much about this Protestant "center" without introducing a classificatory muddle and without sharply subordinating pluralism. For another, Conkin rarely, ifever, lets the actors themselves speak; instead he offers his own calm, measured narrative voice, almost never giving his text the richness of expression that would come from the direct quotation of his protagonists. Also, most surveys well know the value of illustrations, and Conkin's treatment, whether of field preaching or the new geology, would be more pedagogically useful with its own share of pictures. Finally, Conkin's text would be more effective if it included more than an occasional nod to popular or folk dimensions of these multilayered Protestant traditions, an endeavor he rather curtly dismisses at the outset in admitting that he has "not moved very far into popular distortions or vulgarizations of normative beliefs and practices." As it stands, there are only tantalizing traces of these popular, syncretic concerns (for example , in his observations on "Methodist style" or on Bushneil as "a Christian spiritualist "). In the end, though, Conkin should be applauded for his efforts at synthesis, for his labors to locate an uneasy center in a now riotously decentered historiography. Leigh Eric Schmidt Princeton University The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America. By...