Davy Crockett, camp meetings, and frontier religious ideology

Accounting-History

Albanese, Catherine L. "Savage, Sinner, and Saved: Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings, and the Wild Frontier." American Quarterly 33.5 (Wint 1981): 482-501.

The historian Catherine Albanese attempts to provide some sobering theological clarification to the intoxicating ideal of the wild American West, as embodied in the ideology of 'David Crockett.' Her essay "Savage, Sinner, and Saved: Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings and the Wild Frontier" demonstrates how racial ideology became fused to religious ideology during the expanding of the American frontier. Albanese puts forth the provocative thesis that the West was colonized, not simply in material terms, but also by a religious ideology that subsumed Native American culture into the rhetoric of savagery.

One of the key mediums by which this was accomplished was through the camp meeting. The camp meeting provided a locus for the often lonely and disparate settlers who made up the West to engage in acts of religious exchange. However, this stress upon religious identity also meant that quite often those whom were defined as alien or 'other,' namely those individuals, whom were Native American, became constructed as savages because they were not Christian. The physical, military difficulty of establishing control over the frontier took on theological tones in the context of these meetings and became justified in Christian terms.