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Paul E. JohnsonA Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 6 - AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Christian Soldiers”
In Chapter 6, Johnson describes the different strategies Finney’s newly converted followers used to persuade workingmen to join the church. At the same time that Finney’s congregants aggressively stamped out alcoholism, they also sought to establish a number of Christian institutions aimed at the betterment of the working class, using “their wealth and social position to help poor but deserving brethren” (116).
The primary means through which these wealthy evangelicals reached out to Rochester’s working class was through the establishment of missions. These churches were nicknamed “free” churches as they did not require their congregants to pay fees in order to attend services (116). Such free churches’ services were often attended both by Rochester’s working- and upper-class residents. At the same time, Rochester’s wealthy evangelicals would also donate funds to assist struggling working-class churches. In one instance, donations helped to rebuild the First Methodist church after it had been destroyed by a fire. Many of these missions also served as schools that taught “reading, writing, and proper thoughts to poor children” (118). Some wealthy Rochesterians also founded the Rochester Savings Bank in 1831, hoping to encourage workingmen to practice better spending habits.
These evangelical Rochesterians’ efforts were by-and-large successful, and spurred a series of revivals in the 1830s which “dwarfed Finney’s earlier triumph” (119). Many of Finney’s converts were excited by Rochester’s growing church presence, and believed that their work was helping to usher in the new millennium. However, Johnson argues that many workingmen joined the church less due their own volition than due to “coercive” behavior on the part of their bosses (121). Finney’s revival successfully converted much of Rochester’s merchants and shopkeepers to the evangelical faith. Following their conversion, most of these businessmen required their employees to be churchgoing men. Job advertisements would include lines saying that “none but temperate men need apply” (122). Those workingmen who refused to join church often failed to find secure employment, and were often forced to leave Rochester to seek jobs in other towns. In contrast, workingmen who did join a church often settled permanently in Rochester, and were often given opportunities to ascend the social ladder and become business owners themselves. Johnson describes the stories of several such workingmen, such as Alvah Strong and Lewis Selye, whose “friendship [with] rich evangelicals” allowed them to better their social status and join Rochester’s elite (126).
Johnson closes the chapter by discussing how Finney’s revival shaped Rochester’s political life in the 1830s. In 1834, a group of elite Rochester evangelicals decided to join forces and found the Whig Party, led by the Antimasonic Alvah Strong. The Whig Party emphasized a politics based on evangelical faith. Though most Whigs stemmed from the Antimasonic party, it also drew evangelical members of the Antimasons rivals, the Masons and the Bucktail Republicans. Following the Whig’s founding, Rochester’s politics became divided into two parties that largely followed religious lines, the Whigs as the “the party of Protestant Christians,” and the Democrats as the party of non-religious workingmen (129). In the following years’ elections, temperance became a key issue, with Whigs uniting their religious electorate through the promise to finally enforce laws against drinking.
Afterword Summary: “On Cities, Revivals, and Social Control”
In the Afterword, Johnson provides an analysis on how religious movements can serve social functions. A key idea throughout Johnson’s book has been that religion cannot be understood as a phenomenon isolated from society. Rather, certain forms of religion become popular due to serving necessary social functions for a certain historical moment. In early 19th-century America, the function served by revival religion was one of “social control,” providing America’s new bourgeois class with tools to discipline an unruly working class (136).
Johnson illustrates this function of religion by describing an anecdote about Tocqueville, the French diplomat who underwent a year-long journey through America in 1831. Tocqueville was surprised by the prevalence of religion in America, and surmised that religion “was necessary because Americans were free” (116). Tocqueville believed that religion played the role that had formerly been played by kings and rulers, providing individuals with clear rules and guidelines for how to live. While Johnson largely agrees with Tocqueville’s argument, he species that revival religions served the needs of a specific social class: “entrepreneurs who employed wage labor” (137). At the same time that capitalism and industrialization increased the power and wealth of this entrepreneurial class, the working class grew increasingly distinct and antagonistic toward them. Finney’s revival religion appealed to these businessmen as it “was order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois” (138). By emphasizing individualism, it aligned with capitalistic ideals of “discipline,” and discouraged a reliance on “human interdependence” (138).
However, Johnson also argues that one cannot conclude that the religious revival movement was intentionally “fabricated” to fulfill the middle classes’ “economic and social needs” (139). Johnson instead argues that the middle class, in particular male shop owners and entrepreneurs, experienced the 1820s social disorder as a crisis of religion and identity. Workingmen’s disobedience of their bosses’ orders directly subverted businessmen’s authority. As a result, masters turned to religion, which promised them the ability to regain control both of themselves and of their insubordinate workers. Thus, while religious revivalism was not a “capitalist plot,” it played a core role in the transformation of class divisions under capitalism (141).
Chapter 6 - Afterword Analysis
In this final section of A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson describes the effects of Finney’s revival on Rochester’s society in the 1830s. Johnson’s analysis of the religious revival focuses on its connection with “specific social processes” at work in Rochester—namely, the transformation of class relationships during the early 19th century (136). If the transformation of work under capitalism had seemed to dissolve the middle classes’ authority over the working class, evangelical religion provided a new tool for entrepreneurs to assert their authority over their employees.
One of the religious revival’s central effects was to unify Rochester’s previously fractured middle class. Evangelical faith appealed to Rochesterians across religious denominations and ideological divides. The newly-founded Whig Party insisted on the necessity for evangelical politics, uniting members from the Antimasons, the Bucktail Republicans, the Masons, and the Clintonians. Religion became the core dividing line in Rochester, as “society split starkly between those who loved Jesus and those who did not” (128). For such passionate evangelicals, it was not enough to simply attend church and live a Christly life. Evangelism infiltrated every aspect of social life in Rochester. Town merchants refused to hire employees who did not belong to the evangelical faith, and Whig Party candidates ran on platforms advocating for the forceful implementation of temperance. Evangelism quickly became an important means for what Johnson deems “social control”—a tool through which Rochester’s ruling class could enforce how the rest of society behaved (136).
Johnson describes several groups of people who resisted the assertive tactics of evangelicals. While most evangelicals believed non-Christian workingmen to be sinful alcoholics, a number of Rochester’s workingman lived temperate lives at the same time that they “rejected the middle class and its religion” (120). Such workingmen were educated advocates for reason and rationality, believing that “self-improvement” could be obtained without joining church (121). The Democratic Party also opposed the evangelical Whig’s embrace of aggressive political strategies. Though most Democrats also believed in temperance, they believed that attempts to explicitly prohibit drinking would only lead to further class antagonism: “Whatever shall be done to stay the tide of intemperance, and roll back its destroying wave, must be done by [per]suasive appeals to the reason, the interest, or the pride of men; but not by force” (132). These Democrats were advocates of individual liberty, believing that the Whig’s and other evangelical’s forceful measures were nothing less than “a war of extermination against Barber poles and tavern signs” (131). However, the passion of evangelicals would prove too strong a force for these critics, and Protestant religion would continue to occupy an important place in American political conversations for decades after.
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