The Democratization of American Christianity

Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity is a widely cited scholarly history of the populist, anti elitist religious movements, Methodists, Baptists, and various new sects, that reshaped American Protestantism in the decades following the Revolution, published by Yale University Press. Hatch is a recognized historian of American religion and the book won significant scholarly recognition on publication and has remained a standard reference in the field since. Its authority rests on close engagement with the period's own popular religious print culture, sermons, hymns and pamphlets, rather than only the institutional records of established denominations. Its limit is period and national scope, the early American republic specifically, so a claim about a later period of American religious history or about a movement outside that specific populist current needs a different dedicated source.