The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia. (Book Reviews).

The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia. By Beth Barton Schweiger. Religion in America Series. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 267. $49.95, ISBN 0-19-11195-8.)

This is a carefully researched and beautifully written book with a clear and persuasive thesis. Focusing mainly on the Methodists and Baptists in Virginia during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Schweiger argues that the ministers of these denominations worked steadily toward a vision of religious and social progress. The two, in the minds of these ministers, necessarily went hand in hand. Instead of relying on the enthusiastic revival preaching of an earlier generation, ministers of the late antebellum and post-Civil War periods turned to schools, printing presses, and denominational bureaucracies to evangelize the South. In doing so, Virginia preachers positioned themselves on the leading edge of middle-class urban culture in their region.

The focus of Schweiger's research is the letters, journals, notes, and memoirs of Virginia ministers, along with denominational publications and newspaper articles. Much of the substance of her research is presented in twenty-six tables located in a helpful appendix. Through the evidence she has amassed, Schweiger offers a powerful case against those who would argue that nineteenth-century southern popular religion was backward-looking and somehow regressive, locked into a nostalgia for the past. Schweiger is perhaps most convincing in describing how ambitious young preachers from humble, rural backgrounds could use education as a way to better their lot in life, eventually allowing them to move to the city and gain a measure of financial security and social prestige their parents could only have dreamed of. These men turned the pulpit into a profession, something that it had not been among an earlier generation of southern Methodists and Baptists. This new class of ministers built increasingly complex denominational bureaucracies to meet a series of pressing needs: defending slavery in the wake of growing sectionalism, evangelizing soldiers during the Civil War, temperance reform, foreign missions, and so on. As a result, the new urban middle class among Methodists and Baptists increasingly left their country cousins far behind. According to Schweiger, "Denomination building--that is, the bureaucratization of religion in the late antebellum South--was an inherently innovative and forward-looking task. It was, in a word, modern" (p. 85). It was in this sense that the gospel most clearly worked "up."

Like all good books, this one raises as many questions as it answers. Schweiger is dealing mainly here with middle-class white Virginians who lived in cities. She argues that these people, by virtue of the resources they commanded (in the form of denominational funds, schools, publications, and organizations), exercised an influence far beyond their numbers. Yet there were limits to their reach, as Schweiger acknowledges. In addition, her account deals less substantially with the experiences of the majority of women, African American religion, and the popular religion of the urban and rural working classes. As the denominational bureaucracies that Schweiger describes increasingly lost touch with these people, what became of their religious beliefs and practices? To what extent did the gospel "work up" in their lives?

These questions notwithstanding, Schweiger has given us one of the most compelling recent histories of nineteenth-century southern religion. Along with such recent works as Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill, 1997) and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (New York, 1998), this book will help to redefine the way historians look at the development of southern religion.