America’s Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel (review)

Reviewed by: America’s Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel R. Scott Hurd America’s Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest. Stephen T. Kissel. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-252-08627-4. 268 pp., paper, $28.00. Following the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, waves of European, Anglo, and African Americans settled in what by 1848 would become the states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. These new arrivals established not only homesteads and settlements but also faith communities, which, according to author Stephen Kissel, had an outsized impact on shaping the region’s culture and society. The predominating Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Quakers, and African Methodist Episcopalians, converged with adherents of the Rappite, Shaker, and Mormon utopian faiths, resulting in what Kissel describes as a “crossroads of religious activity” (2) during an era concurrent with the Second Great Awakening. These groups were not homogenous and at times coexisted in tension. Considered together, however, Kissel maintains that these disparate faith groups formed a beautiful “mosaic” that accelerated the region’s growth, stability, and cultural refinement. This mosaic can be seen by viewing the region’s history through a “religious lens of analysis,” (2) which Kissel argues is a growing trend among contemporary historians, constituting a “new wave of religious historiography” (xii). Previous historians of the antebellum Old Northwest, while not ignoring the presence of religious groups, had treated their societal contributions as peripheral. With his present volume, initially his doctoral dissertation, Kissel seeks to fill this gap in analysis, arriving at the following conclusion: “Organized religion facilitated many of the region’s earliest advances in literacy, formal education, civic and moral accountability, charitable public outreach, and social reform” (2). Kissel unfolds his thesis in six thematically focused chapters, beginning with how early settlers’ homes were centers of hospitality and worship, laying a “foundation for a potentially ecumenical and religiously tolerant society” (30). Publication and distribution of religious tracts and bibles, especially by [End Page 110] circuit-riding preachers, fostered a regional literacy boom. The establishment of Sunday schools, seminaries, and religious colleges dominated the region’s educational infrastructure and offered a religion-based pedagogy. The erection of churches swelled civic pride, revivals fostered religious enthusiasm and social connections, and church bells marked time, offered warnings, and announced celebrations. Through Articles of Faith and Rules of Decorum, local congregations shaped communities’ moral behavior and dispensed justice before the permanent establishment of civil courts. And church-sponsored benevolent societies and reform movements promoted social welfare and advocated for temperance and the prohibition of slavery. The narrative Kissel recounts is not uniformly positive, however. Most of the region’s churches, revivals, and religiously sponsored schools were segregated, excluding Native Americans and Blacks. Although slavery was illegal in the Northwest Territory, antiabolitionist sentiment was strong and sometimes violent, with the notable exception of Quakers. Anti-Catholic tracts fueled prejudice, and Protestant hymns and prayers in the emerging public or “common” schools led Catholics to establish schools of their own. The religiously exclusive utopian communities of Rappities, Shakers, and Mormons were perceived by outsiders as rude and self-righteous, contributing to a hostile climate that would lead the Rappites and Mormons to vacate the region by the era’s end. The net effect of these dynamics at this religious crossroads, Kissel concludes, was to “cultivate a regional Midwestern character that was largely rooted in rural middling-class and Christian values- characteristics that in many ways continue to define the region today” (147). Kissel makes clear that these Christian values are also his own. Each chapter is prefaced by an illustrative Bible verse. He speaks of being personally inspired by the legacy of the region’s circuit-riding preachers, and the book itself is dedicated to his parents who instilled in him “a deep and abiding faith.” At times, Kissel’s writer’s voice sounds slightly more apologetic than academic. His book, it would seem, was as much a labor of love as it is a scholarly treatise. Although he now teaches at a Baptist university, Kissel earned his doctorate at St. Louis University—a Jesuit, Catholic...