ABSTRACT
Historians such as Harry Stout have argued that evangelicals were uniquely adapted to the emerging consumer culture in the eighteenth century, and that they effectively hawked the gospel as a commodity in the marketplace and addressed people as religious consumers – all of this in contrast to the traditional monopoly over religion presumed to exist in the church as established by law and custom.35 On this reading, evangelicals were profoundly individualist. And yet, if we look closely at the stories told by Martha Claggett and others, we find a surprisingly strong countervailing emphasis upon the community of faith, a community that was as much discovered as it was constructed by human agency. If the evangelical laypeople who wrote autobiographies were individualists of a sort, it should be stressed that they were also communitarians of a sort. The evangelical self-identity owed much to the rise of individualism, but differed markedly from the solipsism of the secular, modern version of the self. Theirs was an important alternative version of Enlightenment individualism.
