"Schweiger provides 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. Tracing the lives and careers of 800 clergy both before and after the Civil War, she shows that pastors and their congregations built religious institutions that educated, ordered, and evangelized the nineteenth-century South.

By the end of the century, Schweiger demonstrates, pastors had transformed themselves from self-educated stump-speaking revivalists into professionals who valued seminary degrees and polished pulpits. Their love-affair with education redefined the meaning of revivals, shifting the focus of religious experience from the camp meeting to the classroom. Schweiger describes the pastors' efforts to rope in new members, fatten denominational coffers, organize scores of committees, and raise elegant brick churches and colleges. She looks at the role of the clergy in the Civil War, examining their response to the loss of the war as well as their subsequent efforts to create social consensus in the postwar South.

Finally, she considers the postwar loss of clerical authority and the corresponding gains in lay voluntarism, and in the growth of women's influence in the churches."--BOOK JACKET.