Piety in Providence: The class dimensions of religious experience in Providence, Rhode Island, 1790-1860

This dissertation explores the relationship between Christianity and capitalism in antebellum Providence, Rhode Island. It argues that religious culture both reflected and shaped the emergence of social class between 1790 and 1860.;Chapter One examines the religious and social configuration of the town between 1790 and 1820. In this period, religious culture proved to be both inclusive and hierarchical. While churches included a wide variety of residents, the meeting-houses also demonstrated the power of the city's merchant and manufacturing elite. The next two chapters trace the increasing fragmentation of Rhode Island's religious culture. Chapter Two probes religious life in the mill villages surrounding Providence and underscores the initiatives taken by domestic missionaries and factory operatives to establish churches and Sunday schools. Chapter Three investigates the great revival of 1820 within the city itself. As they did in the countryside, plebeian residents sought to establish their own religious terrain. This chapter focuses tightly on the creation of Free-will Baptist, Methodist, Universalist, and African churches as manifestations of plebeian religious culture.;Chapters Four and Five examine two distinctive styles of piety that coalesced in the decades following the revival. Chapter Four illuminates a bourgeois religious style, characterized by devotion to self-control and civic order. It highlights the views of Brown University President Francis Wayland as the apotheosis of respectable bourgeois culture. Chapter Five, by contrast, presents those who dissented from bourgeois Protestantism. It explores the thought of labor activist and street preacher Seth Luther as a counterpoint to the orderly ethic advanced by Francis Wayland.;Chapter Six shows how these two religious perspectives clashed in the Dorr Rebellion of 1842. This fight for suffrage reform also resulted in the triumph of bourgeois Protestant culture. But even in victory, respectable Protestants faced a spiritual and social crisis. In the decades before the Civil War, they came to grips with problems created by their prosperity. Chapter Seven explores how with the formation of "free churches," bourgeois Protestants sought to reforge an inclusive religious community. By 1860, Providence citizens had still not comfortably reconciled the pursuit of profit and the practice of piety.