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The short answer is that the Burnt-over District probably wasn't actually all that remarkable in the context of the wider United States, and that its uniqueness in the landscape of American religion in the 19th century has probably been distorted chiefly because the region produced the founders of two lasting Christian denominations that endure meaningfully to this day - Mormonism(s) and Adventism(s). But the region was probably not all that extraordinary or unique. Indeed, both Latter Day Saintism and Adventism quite rapidly became transatlantic religious movements, though the Mormons were more successful in becoming a global faith rapidly.

The idea of the burnt-over district was coined in historiography by Whitney Cross in his 1950 book The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York (Cross sadly died a few years after publication, so it remains his enduring contribution in what could have otherwise been a much more significant career). The actual term was borrowed from a Presbyterian minister in the late 19th century who used it to describe the same areas as hotbeds of hostility to religion, which he attributed to exhaustion and disappointment from the intense religious fervor of the earlier half of the century - it was burnt over in the sense that it was all out of metaphorical fuel and the fire of religion had been extinguished.

Cross argued that the burnt-over district was demographically exception in that it was primarily rural with an agricultural-based economy, with well-rooted and economically stable communities of native-born New Englanders who had a strong popular literary culture based on widespread education, high levels of literacy and a diverse, vibrant newspaper tradition. In other words Cross seems to have understood the area as being unique because it was - in his words - 'mature' in an economic and social sense; without the pressures of establishing new towns and communities, and with their strong cultural attachment to education and reading, the residents of the burnt over district had more time to devote to matters of religion and philosophy, as well as the means to advance their ideas communally. It is much easier to spend your time studying the Bible and musing on what it means if you live in relative security and stability and aren't worried about if your town is likely to survive the next five years, and if it is much easier to share these ideas in socially stable communities where many people can read literature you produce.

But Cross' methodology was quite flawed. He was inconsistent in explaining exactly why this area was more 'mature' than other parts of the United States and he relied on aggregate, county-level data to analyse the phenomenon of religious revival without considering whether or not the individual communities in which these revivals took hold matched their county profiles or if they were outliers. Different counties are judged to be mature for different reasons - some for population size, some for agricultural prosperity. Others are described inaccurately or using shifting boundaries. There is no obvious unified thesis in Cross' work for identifying what it was that made the burnt-over district unique or exceptional; his argument changes to suit the needs of the area he is talking about, and he assumes areas are uniform across large population and geographical units.

He also doesn't spend very much time at all considering what these new religious movements had in common and what set them apart from each other; some of the religious movements he included did not begin in or near the district. The Shaker movement had begun in late 18th century England as an off-shoot of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers) and in the period Cross is writing about, was experiencing growth across the United States outside of its New England heartland. Latter Day Saintism was founded in the district but New York played a very small role in the movement's history - a year after publishing the Book of Mormon, its leader and founder Joseph Smith Jr relocated the Church of Christ (as it was then known) to Kirtland, Ohio, and it was there that Mormonism grew from a few hundred to nearly twenty thousand adherents and the first Mormon Temple was constructed. Early 19th century Latter Day Saintism was in fact a transatlantic faith: by 1844 around one-third of the Saints in the Church's then-headquarter city of Nauvoo, Illinois were immigrants from Britain and by 1846 more than half of all baptised Mormons lived in the United Kingdom. Within the traditional Latter Day Saint understanding of sacred geography Independence, Missouri has always been the predominant historic sacred space; the early Saints intended Kirtland to be a stepping stone on the way to Independence, which in June 1831 Smith - in a text Mormons today consider sacred scripture - said God had declared the sacred land of the Church (Doctrine & Covenants 52). Although Adventism did remain more rooted in New York and did begin there it also attracted a significant following in the surrounding states, and some following in Canada and other parts of the world through missionary efforts.

Cross' work also fails to account for the significant theological differences between all of these movements. There are arguably Quaker influences on Mormonism (the Smith family were well acquainted with the Quakers) and thus with the Shakers but they are not particularly sharp. The main similarities are a shared commitment to communalism and a very firm, radical take on what it means to have a 'priesthood of all believers'. But the Shakers were celibate, gender egalitarian and regarded their core figure Ann Lee as a messianic figure - in some cases the literal Second Coming of Christ (though Ann in her lifetime preached about an imminent Second Coming). Early Mormonism in contrast could be better described as democratic rather than egalitarian and very early on, Joseph asserted himself as the possessor of special gifts of ministry and an extraordinary call to leadership that gave him prominence over other Church leaders and although early Latter Day Saintism was in some ways progressive in its view of gender for the standards of the era, it also strongly affirmed gender roles. As a tradition Mormonism is usually more closely linked to the Campbellite Restorationists of Pennsylvania. In contrast to both Adventism in this period had not yet really sprung into existence. Instead, the predecessor to Adventism were Christians in a variety of denominations who believed William Miller's prediction that the Second Coming of Christ would happen in 1844 and bring with it the Last Judgement; it was only after 1844, when Miller's prophecy appeared to be unfulfilled, that the movement splintered into theologically and philosophically distinct churches who reinterpreted the meaning of the prophecy. Latter Day Saint scripture from the period condemns the beliefs of both other sects, teaching that marriage is a sacred gift and that no one on Earth can know when Christ will return (Doctrine & Covenants 49). Leman Copley was a Shaker convert to Latter Day Saintism who Joseph Smith Jr sent to try and convert other Shakers to their faith without much success - but Copley was an Ohio Shaker, not a New York Shaker.

Historians have picked Cross' thesis apart over the years and advanced different alternatives, some affirming the burnt-over district as being somewhat unique but for different reasons, and others disregarding the idea altogether. There is a general consensus that Cross tried too hard to make the geography bend to his conceptualisation of the area and not did not do enough to consider the specifics of individual communities or understand why these denominations were attractive to individuals. His work was meaningful in that he tried to honestly, seriously and respectfully treat these denominations of Christianity as legitimate religious groups worth understanding and engaging with the history of but his characterisation of their birth in a 'burnt-over district' of unique religious fervor is probably not quite right, although it may not be wholly wrong. Some scholars of Mormonism have for example suggested that it began as a religion fundamentally of young, religiously anxious, often in some way marginalised men seeking a purpose and a destiny in the world and reacting against what they saw as the rigidity and lifelessness of mainstream churches. Others have argued - perhaps not unrelatedly - that industrialisation may have been a factor in explaining why some areas seemed to 'catch' revivalism more than others. Certainly in the UK, there was a trend of Mormonism being disproportionately popular with the working class in northern England's industrial cities and towns, and much less popular in the more affluent south.

The truth is that writing histories of religious origin and conversion is very difficult because for most people, conversion involves a deeply subjective personal experience that the historian can neither validate or invalidate. There are many, many different factors at play when someone makes the decision to change their religion - and the conversion journey does not play out the same way for everyone. Mormon and Adventist historians do not need to explain non-spiritual reasons for why people found the infant forms of their faiths compelling. Consider for example the case of the early convert Rhoda Greene, who was described by her husband as bursting spontaneously into tears and descending immediately into prayer when she first encountered the Book of Mormon, or William Phelps who reported absolute conviction that the Book must be true from the very first read through of it. How do we contextualise and parse stories of conversion like that? The individual experience of the convert is rooted in the spiritual and the untestable.