By Joel Brown
Democracy or Rule?
If you were to ask those familiar with our history to choose between two sets of terms—(A) democracy, freedom, and equality or (B) rule, control, and hierarchy—to describe the early Stone-Campbell movement, most would overwhelmingly choose “A,” right? From its inception, our movement has been told as a story of rejecting creeds, clerics, and established church hierarchies—a bold experiment in religious liberty shaped by the ideals of the early American republic. It is a narrative of egalitarianism and a conviction that ordinary people could return to the simple Christianity of the New Testament, free from institutional constraints.
Yet, hierarchies and the impulse to exert control over others have always been present—sometimes explicitly, often implicitly—in shaping the movement’s trajectory. While we have rightly emphasized its democratic impulses, we have often overlooked or downplayed how a ruling tendency continued to exert influence. By following the broader historiographical trend that frames 19th-century evangelicalism as a movement of freedom and democratization, we have, perhaps unintentionally, obscured the tensions embedded in our own history—the friction between freedom and control, between democracy and rule.
In what follows, I want to interrogate this tension. By revisiting the historiography that has shaped our understanding of early evangelicalism, I hope to show that while the Stone-Campbell movement was indeed driven by a powerful vision of liberty and equality, it was also shaped by competing forces of coercion and control—whether in church governance, the rhetoric of its leaders, or the social and racial hierarchies of its time. My goal is not to dismantle the traditional narrative but to complicate it, recognizing both the liberating and limiting forces that have defined our movement from the beginning.
Democratic Convictions
Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) presented the most influential argument for democracy’s role in shaping early-19th-century American evangelicalism. He contends that the young nation’s obsession with democracy and distrust of aristocratic rule extended to the church, fueling popular religious movements that “sprang from an intensely egalitarian reading of the New Testament” (45). Hatch challenges the traditional revivalist interpretation of the Second Great Awakening, instead portraying it as a break from the established church toward a more democratized Christianity. Popular leaders, who were often of the very people to whom they appealed, led these movements—including the Stone and Campbell churches—and embraced anti-authoritarian and anticlerical ideals. At its core, Hatch’s thesis argues that evangelicalism thrived in antebellum America not because of “the quality of its organization, the status of its clergy, or the power of its intellectual life” but its “democratic or populist orientation” (213).
Hatch’s framing of early-19th-century evangelicalism contributed to what historian Matthew Avery Sutton has recently termed the “evangelical consensus historiography,” which dominated in the late 20th century (“Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right,” JAAR 92.1 [2024]). This consensus traced evangelicalism’s origins to 17th-century Puritanism while distancing it from issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Leading scholars of American religion, including Hatch, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Randall Balmer, Harry Stout, and Grant Wacker, helped shape this perspective.
The evangelical consensus has provided the dominant framework for understanding the early history of the Stone-Campbell movement over the past half-century. Disciples history is often told as a story shaped by the ideals of the early republic—freedom, equality, and democracy. Like other movements of the era, Stone, Campbell, and their followers sought to break from tradition and ecclesiastical authority, proclaiming newfound freedom to restore what they considered pure, New Testament Christianity. Their restorationist spirit was deeply rooted in the optimism of the young nation, where the experiment in democracy appeared to embody the very form of government God had intended from the moment of creation.
A key appeal of the movement was its promise of independence from the established European church structures. The American Revolution had freed citizens from political rule, yet many believers still felt bound by inherited religious traditions, enforced by clerics and creeds. The message of Christian unity and restorationism, as espoused by Campbell and Stone, resonated with the democratic ethos of the early republic and antebellum America. Thousands of American Christians renounced religious hierarchies and traditions, claiming to recognize no jurisdiction but the Bible and the primitive church. In this way, they saw themselves as free to interpret scripture apart from denominational orthodoxy—though, in reality, this freedom often coexisted with new forms of imposed control within the movement itself.
The consensus narrative captures much of what motivated 19th-century evangelicals, including Stone-Campbellites, in their religious reform efforts. Hatch and other scholars of the “evangelical consensus” recognized that these movements embraced and promoted democratic ideals as central to their identity and reform efforts. This largely positive framework makes sense when interpreting such movements theologically—focusing almost exclusively on their beliefs and claims. It becomes more complicated when you factor in religious practice.
To cut to the chase, I hope to show that the consensus history of evangelicalism—which has significantly shaped how we understand our movement—is true but incomplete. It captures the ideals and motivations toward freedom and equality in the minds and hearts of the earliest Disciples. However, it sometimes overlooks and even obscures the complexities and contradictions between the ideals and beliefs espoused by the founding generation and their actions.
Ruling Tendencies
It is not at all an accident that challenges to the evangelical consensus historiography coincided with the rise of the study of lived religion in the field of American religious history in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. By paying attention to the different spheres in which religious actors move—sacred, secular, and religiously neutral ones—scholarly studies of lived religion emphasized the activities, contexts, and practices of individuals rather than trying to interpret them through pre-defined understandings of religion. Scholars increasingly examined how faith was woven into daily life, recognizing that religion is not just about belief or ideology but also about lived experience. And, as any keen observer of humans knows, people’s actions don’t always align with their professed beliefs.
One of the earliest and most significant challenges to the evangelical consensus, and to Hatch’s study in particular, came from Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990). Focusing on Christian practices from the colonial to antebellum eras, Butler rejected the decline-revivalist narrative, arguing that Christianity in America was marked by continual contestation and ascension rather than cycles of decline and renewal as Americans learned to be Christian. This ascension culminated in what he termed the “spiritual hothouse” of antebellum America. He downplayed what previous historians had described as the 18th-century “Great Awakening,” showing that religious dissenters in the new republic did not succeed because of the sudden embrace of democratic ideals, as Hatch suggested, but through strong leadership and innovative practices that fused popular supernaturalism with substantive Christianity. For Butler, coercion and control—not freedom—drove the antebellum expansion of new religious movements. While state-backed religion receded, it was replaced by denominational authority and other hierarchical structures.
Butler’s focus on Southern history and the politics of race, gender, and class corrected key oversights in the evangelical consensus. He argued that the “spiritual holocaust” of the slave trade and the forced Christianization of African American slaves demonstrated the role of coercion in shaping American Christianity. Building on Albert Raboteau’s work on “slave religion,” Butler highlighted the tension between evangelicalism’s egalitarian ideals and its coercive force. While early-19th-century evangelicalism provided slaves with a spiritual framework for resistance in the brush arbors (“hush harbors”) of the invisible institution, it was also so anti-syncretic that it “killed the gods of Africa,” to quote Raboteau. Unlike Catholicism in the Caribbean and South America, which allowed African spiritualities to coexist, evangelical Christianity demanded their complete eradication. By centering the experience of enslaved people, Butler exposed the gaps in the evangelical consensus, showing that while some converted freely, many—enslaved and otherwise—were coerced into Christianity by religious and social authorities.
Butler’s framework—showing how evangelicals who championed democracy and freedom still upheld racial, class, and gender hierarchies—helps explain why the proliferation of new religious movements coincided with the rise of proslavery Christianity in the antebellum period. Proslavery Christianity, or what Raboteau termed the “Rule of Gospel Order,” describes a form of biblical interpretation that not only condoned slavery but promoted it as a positive good, essential for the Republic’s stability and the salvation of enslaved people. This theology fused evangelistic concern with what historian Eugene Genovese called “slaveholding paternalism”—a racialized hierarchy that cast White slaveholders as benevolent caretakers of Black slaves, presumed incapable of survival or participation in civilized society. As tensions escalated before the Civil War, proslavery preaching surged in the South, reinforcing the master-slave relationship on which the American system of slavery depended.
Butler’s counternarrative to Hatch does not reject the role of democratic ideals in early 19th-century religious reform but complicates it. While movements like ours were genuinely driven by beliefs in freedom and equality, these ideals did not erase hierarchical structures or ruling tendencies. Rather than a simple shift from religious authority to religious freedom, this period and the movements born from it reflect an ongoing tension between the two.
Caught in the Tension: Alexander Campbell
We don’t have to look any further than one of our movement’s most influential founders to see how this tension between freedom and control shaped the early formation of the Stone-Campbell movement. Like many of his contemporaries, Alexander Campbell enthusiastically embraced the American ideals of liberty and equality and rejected aristocratic rule and hierarchy. In a December 1815 letter to his uncle Archibald in Ireland, Campbell exclaimed: “I cannot speak too highly of the advantages that the people in this country enjoy in being delivered from a proud and lordly aristocracy; and here it becomes very easy to trace the common national evils of all European countries to their proper source, and chiefly to that first germ of oppression, of civil and religious tyranny. I have had my horse shod by a legislator, my horse saddled, my boots cleaned, my stirrup held by a senator. Here is no nobility but virtue; here there is no ascendance save that of genius, virtue and knowledge. The farmer here is lord of the soil, and the most independent man on earth. No consideration that I can conceive of would induce me to exchange all that I enjoy in this country, climate, soil and government, for any situation which your country can afford. I would not exchange the honor and privilege of being an American citizen for the position of your king.” Campbell’s rejection of European aristocracy also shaped his critique of American chattel slavery—not of slavery itself, but of its hierarchical, European-style dominance. His embrace of American ideals aligns with Hatch’s thesis on the democratization of American Christianity, and Hatch cites Campbell as a key example in his argument.
And yet, as much as Campbell embraced the democratic ideals that shaped the young nation, he operated with a limited understanding of “freedom” when it came to leading his own movement for religious reform. As Campbell’s biographer Douglas Foster explains, “Despite his participation in the antiaristocratic rhetoric of the early republic, Campbell never embraced its democratized notion of equality. Campbell believed that the masses of people should defer to the people who were most gifted to lead—the educated, far-sighted ‘natural aristocrats’—such as himself. … Campbell lived in the tension between his belief that many Americans were ignorant, crude, and incapable of leadership and the unavoidable need to appeal to ordinary people to support his reform” (A Life of Alexander Campbell, 54-57). This reveals the contradiction between Campbell’s ideals and his practice. As Greg Sterling has recently suggested, Campbell saw himself as a populist but often operated as an elite (“Alexander Campbell as a Paradox,” Journal of Discipliana 77.5 [2024]). He believed in the promise of democracy, but he sometimes resorted to hierarchical structures and exerted control in his religious leadership.
This tension within Campbell is perhaps most clearly observed in his public rhetoric about slavery. Campbell addressed slavery in the first issues of the Millennial Harbinger (1830–1832), articulating an antislavery stance promoting gradual, rather than immediate, abolition. To be clear, Campbell was opposed to the American form of chattel slavery. By 1835, however, he began shifting toward a more moderate position, prioritizing unity of the movement over direct opposition to slavery, masking and sometimes even contradicting his personal antislavery beliefs as he sought to hold together a movement that included slaveholders and abolitionists. This trend continued through 1840, with little further engagement on the issue until the middle of the decade. His most extensive treatment came in 1845 with an eight-part series, “Our Position to American Slavery,” followed by additional articles under “American Slavery,” reinforcing his more moderate antiabolitionist stance. Yet in 1849, Campbell published a strong critique of slavery as it had come to be practiced in America, which echoed the antislavery position he’d articulated two decades prior.
After 1849, Campbell never again publicly critiqued slavery so strongly, likely fearing it would divide his churches. As Jess O. Hale has argued, Campbell saw slavery as a “moral powder keg” that could destabilize and even explode the movement if not carefully handled (“Ecclesiastical Politics on a Moral Powder Keg,” Restoration Quarterly 39.2 [1997]). To maintain unity, Campbell sought to control the conversation among Disciples churches, and his moderation in the decades before the Civil War ultimately shifted many within the movement away from abolitionism—though some exceptions remained.
Despite his professed commitment to equality and liberty, which I believe was authentic, Campbell nonetheless set limits on these ideals to protect his religious movement from division. To counter radical abolitionists and appease those who defended slavery, he proposed a “biblical ideal” of slavery. In his 1840 “Morality of Christians” series, he argued that if slavery were inherently sinful, the Bible would have explicitly condemned it. Instead, both the Old and New Testaments regulated, rather than abolished, the master-slave relationship. However, Campbell distinguished this biblical model from American slavery, which, as codified in law, deviated significantly from scripture. For him, it was not slavery itself but its corrupted American form that justified abolition.
Campbell’s attempt to frame an idealized, just form of slavery was a strategic effort to control the debate and maintain unity. However, it also provided a theological framework that some used to justify a more entrenched proslavery Christianity, portraying chattel slavery as a positive good. His moderation opened the door for a racialized social hierarchy to persist within the movement, particularly in southern congregations, ultimately contributing to the postbellum division that would occur between Disciples and Churches of Christ. The tension that Campbell experienced between unity and justice—between accommodation and conviction—reflects the broader struggle between freedom and control that has shaped our movement from the beginning.
Lessons for Today
What can we—as students of history, as Disciples, and as citizens—learn from this reflection on the tension between freedom and control in our movement’s founding?
The first and perhaps most obvious lesson is the need for critical reflection on how we narrate our history, recognizing our blind spots and biases that, in turn, shape our sacred memory. As interpreters of the Stone-Campbell movement, we sometimes read our early history through the best intentions and aspirations of the young nation without exploring the complexity and contradictions therein. We must, for instance, interrogate how the politics of race, class, and gender shaped the movement’s early thought and practice—just as they do today. Because, if left unexamined, we risk promoting a historical narrative that perpetuates Christian nationalism.
Relatedly, this history teaches us to examine beliefs and practices when studying religious history. The tension between freedom and control in this period is most evident in the contradictions between professed ideals and lived realities. Studying praxis—how faith is enacted—must inform intellectual and social histories, just as theological and ideological commitments shape religious practice.
Second, Campbell’s struggle with American slavery—the defining issue of his time—offers a valuable lesson for contemporary Disciples as we wrestle with how to address pressing issues today. His response to the looming civil war and religious division was shaped by deep-seated fears rooted in his past. As a young man, he emigrated from Ireland, a land scarred by centuries of religious and political strife. Having witnessed firsthand the destructive power of sectarian conflict, he devoted his life to preserving unity within his reform movement and promoting Christian unity more broadly. The prospect of division along pro- and antislavery lines deeply troubled Campbell, especially as Baptists and Methodists split into Northern and Southern factions before the Civil War. He feared the same fate for his own movement. His attempt to safeguard the movement against schism by tempering his speech about slavery ultimately proved futile. The divisions that led to the split between Disciples and Churches of Christ were driven as much by the slavery debate as by sectional and social factors. Though he did not live to see the formal break, Campbell witnessed the movement’s initial fractures over the issue.
As a movement deeply committed to the pursuit of Christian unity and wholeness, we, too, sometimes hesitate to speak prophetically on issues of justice—religious, social, or political—out of fear that it may create tension or division. Campbell’s struggle is our struggle. We cannot resolve or escape the tension between unity and justice—it will always be with us, a challenge we must carry. I won’t offer an easy answer because there isn’t one. But as someone who deeply admires Campbell, I wish he had spoken with greater force on the issue of slavery, and I wonder what it would mean for us if he had.
Finally, for citizens of any democratic nation, this history offers more than a lesson—it serves as a warning. The gap between political rhetoric and political action is often wider than we recognize. Even those who champion democracy, branding themselves with words like liberty, freedom, and equality, are not immune to the pull of coercive and authoritarian movements that undermine the very values they profess. This is rarely the result of an overt deception; as history shows, people who sincerely believe in democratic ideals can be drawn—often unknowingly—toward figures and systems that promise to restore those ideals but, in doing so, betray them.
The same tension Campbell faced, the same struggle that shaped early evangelicals and our movement—between commitments to liberty, equality, and justice on the one hand and the impulse toward hierarchy and control on the other—this tension lives within us as well. And if we are not vigilant, this tension can be manipulated to serve purposes that ultimately compromise the very ideals we claim to hold.
We must be especially wary of efforts to exploit the fear that drives our need for control, leading us to exert unjust control over others. Nostalgia—the enemy of critical historical study—is a timeworn political tool used to do just that. It seduces us with a myth of a past that was purer and better than the present, tempting us to do whatever it takes to reclaim it. And in that pursuit, it can convince us to adopt means that destroy the very ideals we seek to recover. As Robert P. Jones warns, “Nostalgia is not only unfaithful to the past; it also threatens the integrity of the present.”
As this dynamic unfolds in democratic nations across the globe, we must learn to judge political actors and movements not by their words or professed beliefs, but by their actions. Watch what they do, not what they say.