dle classes, became manifest in temperance crusades and the antislavery movement, as well as in more general campaigns for social and moral reform. Clergymen and others became concerned that the new republic's freedom was dangerous and destabilizing; Moore cites "nineteenth-century Protestant attacks on the imagination" (p. 38) in that regard. The Washingtonian Movement, a precursor of Alcoholics Anonymous, was involved not only in temperance advocacy but in antislavery and other reforms as well (Moore, 1994).
Revolutionary as the Constitution was, it was not perfect, being marred by the republic's acquiescence in slavery and the slave trade. The illogic and "doublethink" of an ethos of freedom while enslaving and otherwise dehumanizing African slaves is undeniable. Yet a slaveholding community desirous of government sanction for slavery used numerous biblical rationales for the practice and belief in excluding blacks from human status (Oates, 1973), only to be challenged by abolitionists who used biblical justification for abolitionism, as well as by a slave called Nat Turner, whose biblical study led to his rebellion, recruiting fellow slaves in a fiercely murderous though short-lived attempt to escape slavery by killing masters. To the degree the Revolution can be seen as a successful attempt to rewrite history, it influences certain religiously motivated behavior. McDannell (1998, p. 90) cites the expungement from family-bible records of family members who have been disowned on religious grounds, as well as the practice at the otherwise egalitarian Laurel Hill Cemetery of excluding burials of Catholics, laborers, blacks, and the poor (p. 104).
Essay #2. Religion and popular culture occupied similar locations in the cultural marketplace of the 19th century mainly because they were competing for attention from precisely the same demographic and because most members of that demographic appear to have felt that they were stakehold...