By surveying the religiously pluralistic setting of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Shenandoah Valley, Longenecker reveals how the fabric of American pluralism was woven. Calling worldliness the "mainstream" and otherworldliness, "outsidernesss," Shenandoah Religion describes the transition certain denominations made in becoming mainstream and the resistance of others in maintaining distinctive dress, manners, social relations, economics, and apolitical viewpoints.
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction
The Valley The American Revolution The Methodist Revolution The Market Revolution The South's Revolution, I: The Slavery Debate The South's Revolution, II: The Civil War Conclusions
Notes Selected Bibliography Index
STEPHEN L. LONGENECKER is Professor of History at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Virginia. A graduate of John Hopkins University (M.A. and Ph.D.), Longenecker is the author of Selma's Peacemaker: Ralph E. Smeltzer and Civil Rights Mediation (1987) and Piety and Tolerance: Pennsylvania German Religion, 1700-1850 (1994).
[This work] will confirm Longenecker's standing as the foremost religious historian of the Virginia backcountry.
~Robert M. Calhoon, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Informative and well written, this book analyzes 'outsiderness' as a theologically justified position among a handful of Protestant traditions in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.... Recommended. General readers, undergraduates, and graduate students.