Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism.

Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism. By Ellen Eslinger. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxii, 306. $38.00, ISBN 1-57233-033-3.)

Emotional conversions, fiery sermons, overnight stays: the camp meeting, which grew out of the Great Revival of the early 1800s, has long attracted the attention of social and religious historians. Ellen Eslinger's Citizens of Zion makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of this subject with an indepth look at the social origins of camp meetings in Kentucky. Eslinger attempts to revise traditional interpretations of the Second Great Awakening, that, she argues, still dominate standard histories of the United States despite the work of more recent scholars. These older views center around Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, portraying the religious awakening of the early 1800s as a direct result of the lonely, isolated life of frontier settlers. Bereft of permanent social or political institutions and facing an uncertain future, frontiersmen and women found in individualized religious experiences a fundamental source of emotional solace and support.

Citizens of Zion displaces some of these traditional assumptions with two fundamental premises. First, by the time of the Great Revival, Kentucky had shed much of its frontier environment. Victories over American Indians in the 1790s led to dramatic white population growth; simultaneously, economic activity flourished. Political and religious institutions became stronger on the local and community levels, providing a more permanent institutional framework for a burgeoning society. Complete optimism did not prevail, however. Kentucky settlers, like other Americans, struggled with the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of new nationhood. But more than many other parts of the nation, this uncertainty was exacerbated in Kentucky by the relatively new development of the region. Such anxiety helped bring about the Great Revival and, with it, a new form of worship called the camp meeting.

Which leads to Eslinger's second point--that the camp meeting, rather than providing believers an individualistic religious experience, afforded Kentucky residents a valuable sense of collective identity, both for those who experienced conversion and for those who did not. Later revivals, she argues, would take on much more of an Arminian emphasis, but during the initial Kentucky camp meetings Calvinism still dominated religious thought. Thus the most important function of the early camp meeting "was not that it offered people a form of worship more reflective of the emerging liberal culture" but instead that it "enabled great masses of people to more comfortably relate to that new culture" (p. xxi).

Eslinger's book is a well written and generally convincing study of the beginnings of the Great Revival. The author is very thorough in her examination of political and social changes in Kentucky and does an admirable job of integrating the history of a specific region into a national context. A stronger discussion of how Eslinger's views support or challenge more recent scholarly treatments of the Great Revival, however, would benefit this work. One also wishes that, in accordance with the "new interpretive framework" of backcountry studies (p. xiii), Eslinger had examined American Indians, women, and African Americans with more detail and depth. Eslinger devotes only passing attention to white women, for instance, whose attendance at camp meetings played a major role in the success of the Great Revival. Nevertheless, this sophisticated work greatly increases our understanding of both early Kentucky settlement and the social origins of the Great Revival and will certainly generate further scholarship on both subjects.

KIMBERLY R. KELLISON

Baylor University