The Baptists and Methodists Surge

Energized by the Second Great Awakening, and using revivalism and other methods well suited to geographic expansion, the Baptist and Methodist denominations experienced phenomenal growth, especially in the West, and became by far the new nation’s largest.

The Methodists owed much of their growth to camp meetings in the West and urban revivals in the East, both of which they gradually institutionalized as regular parts of Methodist life. But equally important was the Church’s combination of a tightly centralized national structure with a “circuit” system (operational by the 1790s) that allowed a small number of itinerant ministers to serve the vast spaces of the Western frontier. Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles on horseback, preachers like Peter Cartwright (1785–1872) formed lay-conducted “classes” for worship, prayer, and Bible study and left these in the hands of lay leaders between visits. As Western settlements grew, these groups evolved into congregations, constructing churches and becoming integrated into the national denominational hierarchy as circuits were combined into territorial districts and regional annual conferences under the governance of the national quadrennial General Conference. Methodism also expanded, numerically and geographically, through the proliferation of Sunday schools, mission stations, and such colleges as Asbury in Maryland (1816) and Wesleyan in Connecticut (1831). It expanded ethnically as pietistic German-American converts in Pennsylvania and Maryland founded the United Brethren in Christ in 1800 and the Evangelical Association in 1803, both of which later merged with the Methodist church. Methodism’s growth was hardly smooth—opposition to bishops’ authority sparked the formation of the Republican Methodist Church (1794) and Protestant Methodist Church (1830), African-Americans were driven by discrimination to form separate denominations, and sectional tensions split the church into northern and southern branches in 1844—but its expansion from fewer than 65,000 adherents in 1800 to more than 1 million by 1850 made it twice the size of any other American denomination.

Baptist growth, too, was spectacular.

The expansion of Methodism and Baptism during the early 19th century bears powerful witness to the interplay between geography and religion in the new nation.