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Chapter 4 Protestant Diversity in the New Nation The postwar challenge to understand local, regional, and national life ranged far beyond the political arena examined in the previous chapter. Religion centrally shaped early national developments as inhabitants of these river towns negotiated a place for themselves in the new republic. As authority began to be reconstructed in the wake of the war, religious institutions and spiritual self-understanding increasingly became an arena of social contest. While distant debates and even unseen forces often determined political and economic trajectories, an intensely local struggle over the relationship between Christianity and Revolutionary ideals coursed through the Delaware Valley and the nation. National independence reshaped the denominations in all three towns, especially as they swiftly asserted their autonomous authority to ordain ministers without European oversight. Although less true for American Presbyterians, whose eighteenth-century schism had centered on issues of ordination, Anglican, Reformed, and Lutheran traditions all operated in a radically altered postindependence context that destroyed Old World religious control. The Revolutionary transition was especially traumatic for the Anglican Church, of course, since it had been so fully bound to royal authority and English rule.! Lutheran and Reformed ministers in colonial British America had somewhat more freedom from European control, but all still needed to confirm most major decisions with transatlantic authorities . By 1782, the Coetus of the Reformed Church (its chief American governing body) took steps to resolve their relationship to such oversight by declaring its "right at all times to examine and ordain those who offer themselves as candidates for the ministry, without asking or waiting for permission ... from the fathers in Holland." This decisive factor led it to separate from European control, a movement completed with the creation of the Synod of the Reformed German Church in the United States of America in 1793. 2 Pennsylvania Lutherans had made a similar change the previous year in drafting a constitution and renaming itself the German Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium in Pennsylvania and Adjacent States.f In both cases the termination of European authority included a key self-assertion as distinctively German. The Lutheran and Reformed 132 Chapter 4 churches fused ethnic, religious, and national claims in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Evangelical Protestantism had an even more profound impact on American life in the first three decades of the nineteenth century than these institutional changes in organized religion. The broad and varied social movements grouped under the label evangelicalism had two basic thrusts in the early republic that contrasted sharply with each other even as they shared important spiritual values. On the one hand, populist evangelicalism inspired ordinary Americans to a deep new Christian engagement centered upon a direct relationship with God, especially through an emotional personal conversion experience. The camp meeting revival is the best known institutional vehicle for this dimension of evangelicalism. This populist, and perhaps even "democratizing," movement helped shape and in some cases evolved into a more conservative cosmopolitan evangelical project committed to moral reform. This second wing of early national evangelicalism sought to renew social order through an enormous range of pan-Christian benevolent action. While populist evangelicalism built upon and often exacerbated local differences, thus making a central contribution to the Delaware Valley's Revolutionary identity politics, conservative evangelicalism placed a contrasting priority on respectability, decorum, and Christian unity." The importance of local autonomy during the Revolutionary War helped to stimulate an intensification and proliferation of diverse religious traditions in the new republic. In New Castle African American Methodism burst forth as the most novel and challenging new expression of Protestant diversity. Grounded in a strong commitment to Africanness, its public visibility and institutionalization as the Union Church of Africans highlights the unanticipated directions that Revolutionary identity politics could lead. Members of the Society of Friends in Burlington faced ongoing political and social coercion after the war and also confronted strong pressure to conform to emerging evangelical sensibilities that threatened Friends' traditional ways. Quakers had long occupied the margin of Protestantism in the Anglo-American Atlantic world; now even their preeminence in the region was lost. As Quakers were pushed from the center and blacks made a daring bid for public inclusion as African Christians, Pennsylvania Germans made steady gains from their former position as colonial outsiders. Yet this move to the center also caused new difficulties. Pennsylvania Germans in Easton had long cooperated closely in the kirchenleute's shared "union church" (gemeinschaftliche kirchen) and burial ground. New public legitimacy gained by Pennsylvania Germans, partly as...

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