The Transition From Standing Orders to Voluntary Associations

In your book, you give a history of sorts of the American relationship with institutions. Could you give us a primer on the shift from standing orders to voluntary associations or societies? And what this is meant for churches, paratroach organizations and those going into ministry? Sure. Well, the whole book is structured by a kind of threefold historical narrative, three periods. But here I do offer a kind of rough periodization of a time from the European settlement of North America until roughly the revolution in the early national period.