Whither Revivalism and Reform.

At the same time, Bourne's theological conservatism propelled him in a radical abolitionist direction, a move that McIlhenny details in Chapters Two, Three, and Five. Whereas McIlhenny unifies the ostensibly divergent strands of Calvinistic Bourne's freedom-centric thoughts, Wright's work charts how a paramount spiritual concern - saving individual souls - ultimately contributed to an ideological fault line among the major Protestant denominations in the United States (Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, in particular). Unlike Bible-alone contemporaries Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell, prominent revivalists who discarded conventional creeds while striving to restore primitive Christianity, McIlhenny's Bourne made Holy Writ into a primary arsenal as he waged verbal warfare against "the supreme enemies of pure religion and a liberal republic" (p. 17). In 1976, historian Ronald G. Walters opened a chapter-length analysis of religion and the reformist ethos by contending that crusading abolitionism in the United States "could not... have been what it was after 1830 if there had not been an evangelical Protestant tradition behind it and if there had not been evangelical Protestants in it from beginning to end.". [Extracted from the article]