Conservative politically, inured to the new empiricism, and yet the least secularized of the Protestant ideologies, Southern Baptistism was a “guiding light” in the ascendancy of southernness in American education. Its primitivist Christian values—a Christology in which the God of Scripture and the God of Nature were united in the person of Christ (and in the Community of all persons)—tended to reinforce the atavistic, agricultural values of the Old South while blocking the encroachment of avowedly more modern urban-industrial ones. Its appropriation of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century evidentialism added credence to credulity, substituting rational belief for narrow sectarianism. Its ethic of hard work, temperance, and self-sacrifice was bound to the soil and rooted in the southern country and mission school, where agricultural and religious instruction were the traditional mainstays.

The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their violent energies against members of their own Community by banishing, torturing, and killing those Puritans who embraced the Quaker doctrine of the inner light or who were accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. Yet, rarely has a community been so self-conscious about its own violence, so determined to find ultimate meaning in the midst of atrocity. What could it mean, New Englanders persistently asked, that their “city on a hill” was enmeshed in violence? For at least two of the theological traditions that took strongest hold in New England—Puritanism and liberalism—this question was an inescapable preoccupation.

When Mary Marshall Dyer, a vociferous and ambitious convert, departed the Enfield, New Hampshire, Shakers in 1815, the elders breathed a sigh of relief. Since joining the Community two years earlier, Dyer sought her own interpretation of Scripture, repeatedly questioned the eiders, and aggressively campaigned for a leadership position. When Mary left the Enfield Community, the elders felt relief—but it was momentary. Little did they realize that they would soon become embroiled in one of the most public and aggressive disputes to threaten Shakerism in forty years.