Confessional protest: The Evangelical origins of social movements in the United States, 1800--1840

In the 1830s, the United States were convulsed with moral protests. Crusades against intemperance, slavery, and the sexual license of men mobilized hundreds of thousands of Americans. Common to all three movements was an innovative and defining form of collective action which I refer to as confessional protest. This form of moral protest emerged from a surprising combination of specialized agencies within the para-church institutions of orthodox Calvinists and unruly traditions of public confession developed under populist revivals of religion. Confessional protests were part of a wider historic rupture in European and North American forms of collective action. The prevailing account of this rupture contends that the modern forms of popular protest that crystallized in the early nineteenth century and remain current to this day are a "crucial heritage of the consolidated state" and capitalizing economies. This early-nineteenth-century American invention in collective action, however, suggests that the national social movement and current forms of moral protest first emerged in the U.S. on the underpinnings of evangelical Christianity. This dissertation provides an analysis of the emergence of the form of collective action that linked and launched the defining reform campaigns of the antebellum period: the popular struggles against alcohol, slavery and sexual sin. Drawing on a wide range of data including newspapers, the official publications of reform societies, the public addresses of ministers and leading reformers, and the letters, memoirs and diaries of leading activists, this research provides a detailed empirical analysis at the level of national associations, local societies, and activist biographies of the basic dimensions of the form of protest shared by these three movements. Built on a motivational system of public confession and the prolific institution building of evangelicals, these movements and this enduring form of protest testify to the persistence of the disruptive power of religious schemas and the considerable institutional assets of organized religion in the U.S.