Claim. Historian Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) defines the post-Revolutionary American Christian transformation as the recognition of three principles: (1) the religious authenticity of each person’s experience; (2) the allowance for common people to define their own faith; and (3) the use of Christianity as a force for liberation and popular sovereignty.
Elaboration. From historical-background: Hendricks brings this concept into UC discourse with the caveat that “democratization” is a hot-button word for Unificationists. Hatch is not talking about majority-rule voting on doctrine; he is describing a structural shift in whose religious experience is authoritative and who shapes the church.
The American Revolution’s effect on church polity was profound: “Respect for authority, tradition, station, and education eroded. …To be an American citizen was by definition to be a republican, the inheritor of a revolutionary legacy in a world ruled by aristocrats and kings. …This left an indelible imprint upon the structures of American Christianity.” (Hatch, p. 6.)
The result, per Hatch: “Increasingly assertive common people wanted their leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and singable, and their churches in local hands.” This shift created an “explosive combination of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty” that has sustained American religious expansion ever since.
For Hendricks’s argument, this matters because the principles map directly onto the populist church form Sun Myung Moon founded UC on — UC’s instincts are not alien to American religion but native to its strongest growth pattern.
See also. populist-church