The Age of Democratic Revolution, which spanned the period between the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 and the middle of the nineteenth century, altered forever the terms upon which governments governed and the ways in which religious institutions shaped the morals and spiritual beliefs of the societies that surrounded them. Established churches and unrepresentative governments, whose vitality and legitimacy had already been undermined in many nations for a generation or more, suddenly confronted ideals and social conditions that they were ill-prepared to meet. Belief in equality, democracy, and religious dissent spread, at times lessening the willingness of whole peoples to accept established authority. Population pressure and economic change altered social arrangements and expectations that had provided the foundation for old religious and political institutions.

These changes in belief and society produced a dramatic transformation of religion, morality, and politics on the revolutionary frontier of the United States, especially on the northern edge of that frontier, which extended some 600 miles from the upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire to the Western Reserve of Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie. This region was settled primarily by New Englanders in the years immediately before and after the American Revolution. Here a society arose that was truly the child of the revolutionary age: a society that was formally committed to the ideals of democracy, equality, and religious freedom and that rejected slavery, monarchy, established churches, and imperial domination.