Religion and Approaches to Reform: Boston Unitarians Versus Evangelicals in the context of the 1820s and 1830s

The historical literature on middle class antebellum reform has stressed the centrality of the evangelical religious impulse in shaping American reform ideas and practices. In emphasizing both an anti?institutional cast to reform and the later development of bureaucratization and professionalism the conventional view, this essay suggests, simplifies the models of reform available to Americans especially up to the end of the 1830s. To make the argument Boston Unitarian reformers are contrasted with their evangelical rivals in the city in the 1820s and 1830s. Their different religious approaches are analysed through their distinct conceptions of human integrity underpinning their divergent views, both of the objectives of reform and especially of the most effective processes to secure permanence in individual moral and community social improvement. The especial focus on Unitarians’ dealings with the children and adolescents of the urban poor draws out their distinctive interweaving of intellectual and moral analysis with both individualistic and institutional implications in a “mixed economy” of reform.