A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837

“The new reformers did not want to control the inevitable excesses of drunkards and prostitutes and Jacksonian Democrats. They wanted to liberate them from their sins.”

Evangelicals such as Charles Finney differed from past Protestant theologians by arguing that individuals were not innately evil, but instead contained the capacity to embrace Christianity and follow God’s will. Such a belief encouraged temperance advocates and other reformers to attempt to convert alcoholics and sinners to Christianity, rather than simply enact laws that made their actions illegal.

“To put it simply, the middle class became resolutely bourgeois between 1825 and 1835. And at every step, that transformation bore the stamp of evangelical Protestantism.”

Throughout A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson analyzes the Rochester religious revival through the framework of class. Johnson will use church records and other archival documents to determine that religious revivalism appealed most to Rochester’s middle class and elite, as its theological teachings directly corresponded to their values of productivity and discipline.

“These historians [of 19th century religious revivals] have been interested in religion, not in its foundations in the social order. Their causal statements are ague, principally because they are consumers rather than producers of social history, and social historians have given them little with which to work. We have more generalizations and less solid information on society in the years 1815 to 1850 than on any other period in the American past.”

In his introduction, Johnson describes how most historical accounts of the Second Great Awakening have explained its popularity through generalizations about a sense of isolation and social uncertainty. With A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson intends to provide a concrete and specific analysis of which types of individuals were most drawn to religious revivals. Johnson believes that such a close historical account will provide historians with a deeper understanding of religious revivals.