Confessionalists and Pietists
When I was in seminary way back when, I read Donald Dayton’s Discoveing an Evangelical Heritage . Dayton reminded evangelicals that their 19th century forebears were social activists that supported the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, labor reform and other causes now deemed “liberal” or “progressive”. Dayton’s thesis was that what became the “social gospel” movement was rooted firmly in an earlier form of evangelical piety. I recently read D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism which makes a similar argument: the progressive liberalism of mainstream Christianity and the social conservatism of evangelicalism are both children of what he calls Anglo-American revivalism that began with the Great Awakenings. Revivalism itself was the child of continental pietism. The sort of religion heralded by the revivals of the First Great Awakening is chiefly responsible for the triumph of a utilitarian view of faith. The itinerant evangelists of these revivals, as well as...