Home missions and the religious reconstruction of the United States, 1865-1900

Thesis

In the three and a half decades following the American Civil War, the Northern Protestant home mission movement reached unprecedented heights of cultural, financial, and political power. Home missionaries, who evangelised mainly within the United States as opposed to their foreign counterparts abroad, were committed to the republic’s religious reconstruction. They imagined a newly-reunited nation consolidated under a homogenous Protestant faith and the extension of Yankee cultural and social values to a range of Americans they deemed a danger to this cultural uniformity, among them Freedmen, immigrants, unchurched frontier settlers, Natives, Mormons, and Hispanic Catholics.

Thousands of Protestants across the Northern states – Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians – supported this effort to remake the country into a Protestant commonwealth, and continued to do so long after congressional support for Reconstruction had ended. While most studies of postbellum home missions focus on the missionaries themselves, this dissertation prioritises those predominantly middle-class Northern benefactors on the home front who bankrolled them, charting how their own spiritual and civic identities were in turn shaped by their financial support.

Home mission benefactors understood the money they gave as an especially sacred sort of currency, a kind of ‘moral capital’ that not only subsidised the soul-saving of others, but also possessed the power to save their own, a reflex phenomenon the dissertation calls ‘respiritualisation’. After the Civil War, moral capital criss-crossed the continent, binding respiritualised benefactors and beneficiaries in a ‘spiritual economy’ that Northern Protestants envisioned as an instrument of national consolidation. Understanding home mission benevolence in this way provides a new perspective on the role of religion in Reconstruction, the changing relationship between Christianity and capitalism during the Gilded Age, and the ways in which Northern Protestants used charitable giving to exert some control over a tumultuous era in American history.

Authors: Jones, GW

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-doaknoy5b
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: evangelicalism; Gilded Age; Christianity; missionaries; reconstruction; philanthropy; American Civil War; home missionaries; evangelisation; domestic missionaries; home missions; United States; benevolence; religion
• Subjects: Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877); Christianity; Religious history; United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865; Missionaries