“The character of the place on which one Stands is the fundamental symbolic and social question,” Claims historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith. From this sense of place, there follows a “whole language of Symbols and social structures.” Studies of Methodist history have also considered sensitivity to Methodism's distinctive sense of place essential to their subject. It is now commonplace to observe that Methodism shattered the geographic bounds of church and parish in order to situate religion for activity across an open, unbounded terrain. This proved one of the most offending characteristics of its ministers, whose itineracy commonly violated civil laws intended to locate spatially religion. Within some traditions, the receipt of a “location” meant a minister received a church and thereby became a minister. Within Methodist discourse, granting a “location” has held quite the opposite meaning: it has meant a departure from the ministry.

In looking at the politics of the opening decades of the nineteenth Century, scholarly attention has been drawn to the self-destruction of the Federalists, the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Republicans, or the emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats. What gets lost in the way scholars view this political drama is the coalescence of an American Whig identity, forged in the decade of the 1820's. At least part of this inattention can be explained by scholarly appraisals of the Whig party as intellectually incoherent, politically cynical, and, ultimately, unsuccessful.

The Whig position was, indeed, a curious one: the Whigs heralded the growth of the modern capitalist market that would unleash the forces of entrepreneurial individualism, yet they decried the loss of the precommercial values of deference, virtue, and hierarchical Community; they embraced the prosperity brought about by commerce, yet they feared the corruption of virtue that resulted from the pursuit of interest; and they looked forward to a capitalist economy while glancing back at an antidemocratic Federalism and Puritan moralism.

The story is a familiar one, found in nearly every narrative text of American religious history In the summer of 1806, five Williams College students met in a grove of trees to pray for divine guidance and to discuss their religious faith and calling. While seeking refuge from a summer rainstorm under a haystack, Samuel J. Mills, Jr., and the other four students consecrated their lives to overseas missions. This incident, later publicized as the Haystack Prayer Meeting, became the pivotal event in the launching of American Protestantism's foreign missionary movement. Mills and several comrades carried their vision from Williams to Andover Theological Seminary, where they created a more formal organization that eventually led to the establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. In the hagiography of missions, Mills is revered as the “father” of American foreign missions and Williams as the birthplace. Subsequently, Mills's “sons”—the alumni of Williams—followed precedent: from 1810 to 1840, Williams provided more missionaries to the ABCFM than any other American College.

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.