Populist Christianity associates piety with hearth and home, nation and place. The lead singer of the Pilgrim Jubilees, a gospel quartet, told an interviewer: “My brothers and I grew up in a little three-room shack in Houston, Mississippi. We didn’t have much back then, church, but we had a family altar.” This pride in a single place, however humble, and in a pious home, however plain, is typical of populist Christianity.
No prejudice so perfectly unites the American overclass as contempt for morally conservative, religiously revivalist, and politically populist protestants. Every day, it seems, a prestige publication prints a new article describing them as sexist, racist, white-nationalist threats to democracy. Far more than the socialists who see themselves as radicals, backwoods Baptists and TV preachers, holy-rolling faith healers and strip-mall seminarians are hated and feared by our ruling class. No other group of comparable size consistently opposes those who run our society. That is why they are denounced so unsparingly, and why they deserve greater praise.
Populist Christianity took form in the early 19th century during the Second Great Awakening. Methodist circuit riders, Baptist preachers, and Mormon seers remade America’s religious landscape, proclaiming a populist creed that was no less revolutionary than the political transformation that had swept through the country in the decades before. As Nathan Hatch notes in his great book, The Democratization of American Christianity, its leaders were “short on social graces, family connections, and literary education.” They often seemed “untutored” and “irregular,” but this only proved their bona fides. Because they preached a creed that “associated virtue with ordinary people,” their lack of refinement vouchsafed their reliability.