Confessional Protest: The Religious Birth of U.S. National Social Movements

Abstract

Western forms of protest were fundamentally altered in the early nineteenth century. Scholars from a “contentious politics” perspective have identified this rupture in protest forms with the emergence of the “national social movement” and explain the rupture as the result of interactions with national states. Scholars from a “life politics” perspective argue that the paradigmatic movements of today have moved beyond the political struggles of the nineteenth century and toward a new form of protest that unfolds within civil society and fuses matters of personal and social change. Protests in the United States in the 1830s, however, raise serious doubts about both of these claims. The first U.S. national social movements were not a heritage of the state and they engaged in a form of life politics. The temperance and antislavery movements emerged in interaction with religious institutions—not state institutions—and pursued goals that mixed personal and social transformation. A cultural mechanism combining the evangelical schemas of public confession and the special sins of the nation launched sustained and interregional protests. The intensive and extensive power of these confessional protests called individual and nation to repent and reform, and mobilized actors and resources within a national infrastructure of religious institutions to challenge drinking and slavery.