Within minutes, runners rushed the decision cards to rooms where a Co-Labor Corps of over two hundred volunteers waited to feed them into an elaborate follow-up procedure designed to link them to cooperating pastors and channel them into local congregations. The head of this operation, Dr. Robert L. Maddox, who had served as Jimmy Carter’s liaison to the religious community before becoming executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, admitted that the crusade could not be expected to reshape Greater Washington. “Billy will go home next week and the city will swallow him up and the effects will be gone. But as a matter of fact, in the lives of individuals, it may be absolutely pivotal. I have seen that happen. It won’t rock Washington, D.C., for the Lord, but it might make some congressman struggling with key legislation think a little bit differently. Last night, I watched two or three guys that I know who grew up out here in Virginia and were as segregationist as they could be. They were working right alongside black people without any regard to color at all. When this is over, white churches will still do their thing and black churches will do theirs, and there is not going to be any great crossing of that line. But there will be greater understanding. It could have some impact.”
Back on the sidewalk outside the convention center, the old prophet had retired for the night, but a squad of grim-faced young men in slacks and white shirts and severe long-haired women in ankle-length homemade dresses passed out cheaply printed pamphlets that condemned Graham for his apostate theology, coming down especially hard on his faulty understanding of the purpose and proper mode of baptism. Most people declined their publications and tried to ignore them, but one Graham supporter vociferously responded to their challenge. While they argued, a policeman who had asked a departing counselor for an inquirer’s packet and had, after a brief conversation, “trusted Christ,” held up his hand to stop traffic for one of the last groups to leave the building. He was singing a gospel song.
2
A Great Cloud of Witnesses
The path Billy Graham trod to triumph in the nation’s capital in 1986 stretched backward across 350 years through gigantic stadiums and two-pole tents, brush arbors and open fields, ornate auditoriums and simple meetinghouses, to the waters of Massachusetts Bay, where the leader of four hundred brave and devout souls prepared them for their “errand into the wilderness” not by reading a manifesto but by preaching a sermon. From the day John Winthrop proclaimed to the passengers of the Arbella that God Almighty had dispatched them to New England to establish “a city upon a hill” for all mankind to behold and emulate, Americans have been moved and molded by men and women who assayed to speak for God. Over the centuries, the vectors and vagaries of history have eroded their influence and power, so that no contemporary clergyman enjoys the submissive respect routinely accorded to ministers in the early years of the New England Way, but no one who has paid attention in recent years can doubt that the Word and those who preach it still find a vast audience perpetually open to the prophetic exhortation, “Seek good, and not evil, that you may live.”
When Winthrop and the first wave of English Puritans in the Great Migration set sail from Southampton in search of a land where pure and undefiled religion might flourish, they were seen off by John Cotton, a brillant young Cambridge-trained cleric who warned them that “as soon as God’s Ordinances cease, your Security ceaseth likewise; but if God plants his Ordinances among you, fear not, he will maintain them.” Within five years those settlers formed the core of a thriving social experiment like none the world had ever seen, and John Cotton, whose devotion to Puritan ideals had moved him to join them, was their most prominent spiritual teacher.
Cotton’s sermons were solid food, and those who heard him were expected both to chew and to digest it. Most of his sermons dealt with the topic that dominated the Puritan psyche: eternal salvation. The Reformed (Calvinist) theology espoused by the Puritans held that before the beginning of time, an absolutely sovereign and righteous God had predestined the eternal fate of every person who would ever live. The elect would bask in the sunlight of his glory and rejoice in the company of angels; the damned, in cosmic contrast, would writhe forever in the raging torments of hell. Since the differences in destination were so great and the reservation open-ended, most could not avoid trying to discern whether they might possibly be numbered among the elect. Thus, Cotton’s parishioners did not ask “What must I do to be saved?” but “How can I know I am saved?” The desperate desire for blessed assurance produced a strenuous regimen of Bible study, prayer, meditation, and intense inward searching for sparks of saving grace among the ashes of sinful Adamic nature. It also promoted careful attention to sermons designed to fan these sparks into a reassuring flame.
The first decade of the New England Way was a glorious success. Prosperity, an impressive level of political autonomy, and widespread concern with godly living brought a steady flow of new settlers and led John Cotton to write that both Church and Commonwealth were progressing so well that he could not help but think of the biblical image of “the New Heaven and the New Earth.” But that golden age, like all before and since, soon passed. The satisfactions produced by prosperity led many to pursue even greater prosperity, not always to the benefit of pure motive and behavior. Freedom from oppression by Anglican bishops attracted some, particularly Baptists and Quakers, who wished to be free of Puritan domination as well. And the glowing accounts of political autonomy seemed a bit hollow to those denied access to the levers of self-government because they could not convince themselves or others that God had saved them.
All these developments affected the church. Piety declined, dissent increased, and when a dwindling migration cut off the flow of new saints from England during the 1640s, membership rolls began to shrink, despite a rapidly growing population. By 1660 less than half of New England’s inhabitants were church members, and ministers began to lower the standards of membership to avoid further losses. When Solomon Stoddard came to the frontier parish of Northampton in 1669, the church had fourteen adult members and attendance was meager. He decided it was time for change. John Cotton had preached to people already on the road to regeneration; Stoddard stirred their interest in the journey. Though a graduate of Harvard, he aimed for the heart more often than the head, pioneering a homiletic strategy that would become the staple of evangelistic preaching. Preaching without notes and using plain speech, familiar examples, graphic imagery, and fervent emotion, he terrified his listeners with vivid descriptions of hellfire and its horrors. Then, when fear had done its work, he held out the hope of new life in Christ, life filled with joy rather than despair, with light rather than darkness, life crowned at the end with eternal bliss. What he described was the “New Birth.” His predecessors had viewed regeneration as a lifelong process; Stoddard pressed for a more immediate and dramatic response, a relatively brief episode a person could identify as the time he or she had been “born again.” He still believed that God alone selected those on whom his regenerating Spirit would fall, but he did what he could to make sure hearts were open when the Spirit was in the neighborhood. In a real sense, Solomon Stoddard was the father of evangelism in America, and his critics, put off by his transparent enjoyment of fame and ecclesiastical power, found their barbs deflected by the same shield that would protect his successors in later generations: “He gets results.”
Stoddard was succeeded at Northampton by his grandson, Jonathan Edwards, who presided over the first manifestations in New England of what historians have called the Great Awakening, a revival that began in rural New Jersey and rapidly swept through the Colonies. During 1734 and 1735 Edward’s earnest preaching resulted in the conversion of several people, including a young woman known to be “one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town.” Her example led to other conversions, and soon the whole town was astir, marveling at what the Spirit was doing in their midst. Worship became a vital experience, with attentive hearers frequently breaking into tears, some with joy and lov
e, others with sorrow and distress over the state of their own souls or those of their neighbors.
In the course of six months, Edwards recorded approximately three hundred conversions, and people came from all over New England to hear him preach. Toward the end of 1735, there began to be signs of a withdrawal of the Spirit, and by 1737 the revival was “very much at a stop.” Its effects, however, did not quickly pass away, and some time later Edwards was able to report, “I know of no one young person in the town who has returned to former ways of looseness and extravagance in any respect. . . . God has evidently made us a new people.” Similar showers of blessings fell on more than thirty towns in the region, creating a sense of contagion and community, as well as readiness for the torrent soon to follow.
Local pastors stirred these early revivals. In 1740 this pattern suddenly and permanently changed with the coming of “the Grand Itinerant,” George Whitefield, a twenty-six-year-old free-lance evangelist who quickly became a celebrity from Georgia to New England. The fiery young Oxford-trained Anglican had created a sensation in England by preaching in open fields in an attempt to reach working people who would not come to the churches. In 1739 he toured the southern and middle Colonies, in part to raise money for an orphanage he had established near Savannah. Wherever he went, great crowds gathered to hear him, even without formal publicity. Months before he invaded New England, Boston newspapers reported his activities and printed testimonies to his piety and character, so that when he arrived in September 1740, he preached several times daily to crowds so large and tumultuous—on one occasion, five people leapt to their death from the balcony—that he was forced to move into open fields to accommodate gatherings of more than 5,000 anxious souls. As a climax to his Boston meetings, he enthralled more than 20,000 people on the Common in the largest assembly ever gathered on American soil to that point. In the course of 45 days, Whitefield preached more than 175 sermons, and most New Englanders heard him at least once. Not everyone liked his preaching, but no one forgot it. Equipped with a silver tongue, galvanized tonsils, and lungs of the finest-grain cowhide, he spoke in a loud and clear voice, articulated perfectly, and used such crowd-pleasing techniques as telling Bible stories by taking all the roles himself, a skill enhanced by childhood experience on the stage. Despite evidence of memorization and practice, Whitefield conveyed an impression of spontaneity and immediacy. He spoke without manuscript or notes and contended that any man who had not lost “the old Spirit of Preaching” would do the same. And however much he prepared, he had a powerful gift for extemporaneous communication and great skill at seizing an immediate stimulus, such as a thunderclap or a rainbow or an incident in the congregation, and turning it to dramatic advantage. In contrast to the ponderous scriptural exposition, elaborate theological reflection, and grave ethical instruction favored by local pastors concerned to transmit “the whole counsel of God,” Whitefield based his sermons on catchy biblical snippets that served less as a text to be explained than as a teaser to be exploited, usually as a springboard to a sermon on the New Birth, the chief matter of all his preaching. It was not enough to feed a flock for a lifetime, but for the moment it made a delicious plateful.
As he basked in his success and gained confidence in his standing with the people, Whitefield sounded a note that would become characteristic of itinerant evangelists. Local pastors had never seen such results, he observed, because they spoke of “an unknown, unfelt Christ.” They were “unconverted dead men who did not experimentally know Christ” and who preached “almost universally by note,” which practice was itself “a symptom of the decay of religion.” “The reason why congregations have been dead,” he concluded, “is because they have dead men preaching to them. . . . How can dead men beget living children?” The “unconverted” ministers of New England unleashed a bitter and sustained attack against Whitefield and his methods, but “the Word ran like lightning,” and according to one chronicler of the revival, not since the earthquake of 1727 had the multitudes shown such concern for their souls.
Lesser lights than Whitefield carried the revival to every corner of New England, and many settled ministers adopted revivalistic techniques as well. Young people flooded into the churches, religious societies sprang up to supplement regular church services with special gatherings for prayer and discussion of devotional literature, and Bostonian Thomas Prince founded The Christian History, America’s first religious magazine, to report glad tidings of revival in the Colonies. The effects seem to have been greatest where roots ran shallow—in newer towns and more unstable urban areas, for example—but the awakening was much as numerous observers described it: “great and general.” Jonathan Edwards declared that the world could not be far away from “the dawn of that glorious day” when the millennium would begin and New England would take its place as the center of “a kind of heaven upon earth.”
Despite its momentum, revival gave way to revolution as the leading item on the American agenda during the latter half of the eighteenth century. When George Whitefield returned to New England in 1744, he found many churches closed to him and was unable to rekindle the fires he had started just four years earlier. But the changes he and his colleagues had wrought in that brief, glorious period endured. Though the size of the Christian community did not change dramatically as a result of the revival, life within it did. In revivalistic churches, power passed from the clergy to the laity. Instead of formal training and theological acumen, the test of leadership became the ability to appeal to the heart, to rouse men and women to seek and find the New Birth. Preachers attained authority and power in direct democratic fashion from the people who heard them preach and chose to accept or reject what they heard. American religion and culture would never be the same again.
During the decades following the Revolution, many thoughtful observers concluded that American religion had seen its brightest day. In New England, neither the liberal rationalists nor the more orthodox Congregationalists wanted a revival. The spiritual descendants of Jonathan Edwards professed to want one, but could not produce it. In the South, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists continued to chip away at the flinty frontier heart, with discouraging results. On the southern and western frontiers, life was hard and rough and almost wholly lacking in the spiritual and cultural influences present in the East. Sparse population, scattered settlements, and limited transportation left settlers in a state of isolation unlike that experienced by farm people anywhere else in the world. Occasional spurts of revival lifted spirits here and there, but the mood within the churches was gloomy to the point of desperation. Chief Justice John Marshall, of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote that the church in Virginia was “too far gone ever to be redeemed,” and Voltaire and Tom Paine gloated over the prospect that “Christianity will be forgotten in thirty years.”
Surprisingly, some began to interpret this season of barrenness as God’s chastening, a cleansing preparation for a coming mighty work. In response, frontier preachers began to speak expectantly of revival, and small groups of struggling Christians joined together in intense sessions of prayer and fasting, calling upon the Lord to send refreshing showers of spiritual blessing. When the new century arrived, no harvest seemed in sight, but the ground was ready, so that when the heavenly rains fell, America experienced its second Great Awakening, or more simply, the Great Revival. The first phase of this revival, the southern and western camp meetings, turned the American South into one of the most distinctively and self-consciously religious regions in Christendom. The second, symbolized by the urban revivals of Charles Grandison Finney, came remarkably close to achieving the Evangelical dream of making America a Christian nation.
The primary catalyst for the frontier awakening was a Presbyterian minister named James McGready. Though described by his contemporaries as ugly and uncouth, McGready preached with compelling power. Like increasing numbers of revivalist Presbyterians, he gave the doctrine of election a polite nod, then proceeded to ignore it, stressing the need and abi
lity of all alike to offer themselves in conscious obedience to God’s saving grace. In sermons evoking the odor of flaming sulfur and summoning the strains of heavenly harps, he called on people to experience a New Birth so dramatic and glorious that they would forever be able to identify and relate the exact time and circumstances of its occurrence. His preaching often stimulated uncommon emotional displays, including copious crying, screaming, and an exercise in which persons “slain in the spirit” fell to the ground, where they lay still as corpses or writhed in apparent agony while groaning, praying, and crying out for mercy. Such irregularities, coupled with his pointed attacks on immorality and materialism, made McGready a controversial figure in many quarters, but it won him the adulation of scores of young men who entered the ministry with a conscious intent to emulate him.
In the summer of 1800, McGready sent out broadsides announcing a continuous outdoor service to be held at the Gasper River Church, one of several he served in Logan County, Kentucky. By encouraging people to camp out on the grounds for the duration of the services, McGready not only organized what was probably the first planned camp meeting held in America but inaugurated one of the most successful revival techniques ever developed. The harvest at Gasper River was great and other successful camp meetings followed, but none would match the historic gathering at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801.
A Prophet with Honor Page 4