The Gospel Working Up Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia [Hardcover]

The Gospel Working Upoffers a history of three generations of Baptist and Methodist clergymen in nineteenth-century Virginia, and through them of the congregations and communities in which they lived and worked. Schweiger examines the religious experience both before and after the Civil War, showing how Southern Protestantism became an instrument of spiritual, moral, material, and cultural progress.

Schweiger's book is an excellent addition to a growing body of work by a number of recent historians which is breathing new life into the once sclerotic genre of denominational history and relating our understanding of religious movements and institutions to the complex movement of southern history in a more sophisticated way. --Journal of the Early Republic