The Christian Movement.

As the new nation ventured into the unknown territory of religious pluralism, many Protestant leaders decried the appearance of sectarian rivalry, which they saw as counterproductive to larger evangelical goals and as contrary to the ecumenical ideal of the apostolic church. The "Christian" movement answered sectarianism with a call to unity, to be achieved by shedding denominational tags and restoring the church on primitive, New Testament grounds. Christian groups emerged in New England and in the Southern backcountry, but the movement's appeal was particularly concentrated in the Trans-Appalachian West

Barton Stone.

Shortly after the Cane Ridge camp meeting, Barton Stone and other Kentucky revivalists began to chafe under the rigidity of Presbyterian doctrine and polity, so they devised an alternative system that was radically congregational in form and decidedly Arminian in theology. In 1803 they organized into a...