My scholarship focuses on how early Americans experienced religion, not just in institutions, but also in their daily lives and familiar relationships. My 2014 book, Rally the Scattered Believers, examines how northern New Englanders laid out new kinds of religious communities in challenging physical spaces, and how these spaces in turn shaped people's religious identities. I am at work on a second book, tentatively entitled "Family Religion: The Politics of Practice in Early America," which will consider the culture household worship and the ways domestic religion shaped social and political relationships in the home and beyond during the colonial period and early republic. I am also co-editing a documentary edition, "Occupied: The First Moravian Church of New York in the American Revolution," which will make available previously inaccessible documents that shed light on once of the most pluralistic congregations in colonial America.
Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England's Religious Geography (Religion in North America, Indiana University Press, 2014)
ISBN 978-0-253-01210-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01213-5 (e-book)
Winner, 2014 Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award
Overview: Northern New England, a rugged landscape dotted with transient settlements, posed challenges to the traditional town church in the wake of the American Revolution. Using the methods of spatial geography, Shelby M. Balik examines how migrants adapted their understanding of religious community and spiritual space to survive in the harsh physical surroundings of the region. The notions of boundaries, place, and identity they developed became the basis for spreading New England's deeply rooted spiritual culture, even as it opened the way to a new evangelical age.
"In this beautifully written and richly researched work, Shelby Balik shows how the travels of early nineteenth century Methodists, Universalists and freewill Baptist itinerant missionaries and congregations recreated the geography of New England Protestantism, setting in motion (literally) a tension between religious rootedness and religious uprootedness, center and periphery, that endures to today. Early American religious history in Balik’s retelling of it is one of bodies in constant movement in and out and around the city on the hill. The delight Balik takes in maps and journeys is infectious. This is a wonderful addition to American religious historiography." -- Robert Orsi, Northwestern University
"[E]xhaustively researched ... richly textured ... In sum, this is a major work of extraordinary scholarship." --Church History
"Balik has written an engaging, ground-level religious history with larger implications ... A region typically neglected by scholars emerges in Balik's able hands as a spiritual microcosm of the sprawling, migratory early republic." --Journal of the Early Republic
"[R]eading Rally the Scattered Believers helped me to consider anew the centrality of place-- and the differing ways that religious organizations organize space--in understanding religious history." --Religion in American History
"Balik’s attention to the practical effects of landscape is wonderful, opening up her analysis to insights obscured in discussions of itineracy and church-founding abstracted from actual landscapes...[She] is at her best when she's talking about the practicalities of her characters' religious lives, topographical and otherwise." --The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History
"Rally the Scattered Believers is an important new interpretation of how religious change shaped American cultural identity in the early republic." --Journal of American History
"Shelby Balik’s deeply researched Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography offers a finely grained picture of that era of burgeoning development. ... Balik’s book delivers one of the best histories of precisely what the 'Second Great Awakening' amounted to in northern New England." -- American Historical Review
"I strongly recommend Balik’s book for those studying colonial religious landscapes and heritages not only in New England, but in the nineteenth-century religious diasporas that swept the continent with varying mixes of European colonials and also African and Asian heritages." -- The Geographical Review
"A valuable book ... This is not just a story about Northern New England or the early nineteenth century; it is about the fundamental rootlessness of the evangelical faith itself." -- The Journal of Religion
ISBN 978-0-253-01210-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01213-5 (e-book)
Winner, 2014 Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award
Overview: Northern New England, a rugged landscape dotted with transient settlements, posed challenges to the traditional town church in the wake of the American Revolution. Using the methods of spatial geography, Shelby M. Balik examines how migrants adapted their understanding of religious community and spiritual space to survive in the harsh physical surroundings of the region. The notions of boundaries, place, and identity they developed became the basis for spreading New England's deeply rooted spiritual culture, even as it opened the way to a new evangelical age.
"In this beautifully written and richly researched work, Shelby Balik shows how the travels of early nineteenth century Methodists, Universalists and freewill Baptist itinerant missionaries and congregations recreated the geography of New England Protestantism, setting in motion (literally) a tension between religious rootedness and religious uprootedness, center and periphery, that endures to today. Early American religious history in Balik’s retelling of it is one of bodies in constant movement in and out and around the city on the hill. The delight Balik takes in maps and journeys is infectious. This is a wonderful addition to American religious historiography." -- Robert Orsi, Northwestern University
"[E]xhaustively researched ... richly textured ... In sum, this is a major work of extraordinary scholarship." --Church History
"Balik has written an engaging, ground-level religious history with larger implications ... A region typically neglected by scholars emerges in Balik's able hands as a spiritual microcosm of the sprawling, migratory early republic." --Journal of the Early Republic
"[R]eading Rally the Scattered Believers helped me to consider anew the centrality of place-- and the differing ways that religious organizations organize space--in understanding religious history." --Religion in American History
"Balik’s attention to the practical effects of landscape is wonderful, opening up her analysis to insights obscured in discussions of itineracy and church-founding abstracted from actual landscapes...[She] is at her best when she's talking about the practicalities of her characters' religious lives, topographical and otherwise." --The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History
"Rally the Scattered Believers is an important new interpretation of how religious change shaped American cultural identity in the early republic." --Journal of American History
"Shelby Balik’s deeply researched Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography offers a finely grained picture of that era of burgeoning development. ... Balik’s book delivers one of the best histories of precisely what the 'Second Great Awakening' amounted to in northern New England." -- American Historical Review
"I strongly recommend Balik’s book for those studying colonial religious landscapes and heritages not only in New England, but in the nineteenth-century religious diasporas that swept the continent with varying mixes of European colonials and also African and Asian heritages." -- The Geographical Review
"A valuable book ... This is not just a story about Northern New England or the early nineteenth century; it is about the fundamental rootlessness of the evangelical faith itself." -- The Journal of Religion