Dr Gwion Wyn Jones

I am a historian of religion and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. Broadly, I am interested in the role religion (especially evangelical Protestantism) played in the century's major political and economic developments, including the sectional crisis, territorial expansion, secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and postbellum industrialisation.

My doctoral thesis - 'Home Missions and the Religious Reconstruction of the United States, 1865-1900' - provided the first ever interdenominational account of the Northern Protestant home mission movement after the Civil War. Unlike their foreign counterparts who preached abroad, home missionaries evangelised within the borders of the United States among frontier settlers, Freedmen, Indigenous Americans, and immigrants. After the Civil War, the home mission efforts of the five greatest Protestant denominations in the North - Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopalian - sought to reunite and consolidate the continent under a homogenous Yankee culture and Protestant faith, an ambition I describe as a 'Greater Religious Reconstruction'.

While most histories of missionaries look at the frontline activities of the evangelists themselves, my thesis focused on the thousands of ordinary Northern men, women, and children who supported them with their hard-won cash, devoting tens of millions of dollars to subsidise the endeavour. I argued that Northern Protestants believed that the money they gave to support missions constituted a uniquely valuable sort of currency - what I call 'moral capital' - that conferred upon benefactors spiritual benefits. In the postbellum era, Northern Protestants invested millions of dollars worth of moral capital in domestic missionary ventures, forming a 'spiritual economy' that they believed would bind the nation together more tightly than ever before. I am currently revising my dissertation into a book manuscript for publication.

As a Leverhulme Research Fellow, I work with Professor Adam Smith on the Leverhulme Trust project, 'Conservatisms in the Age of Revolutions, 1830-1880', which analyses the many ways ordinary Americans in the mid-nineteenth century used the term ‘conservative’ to describe a range of political beliefs and policies. In this capacity, I am currently researching the role of conservatism in Radical Republican rhetoric during Reconstruction, as well as ideas of social progress and regress among antebellum evangelicals who opposed benevolent reform movements.