Organized, advertised, and overseen by Barton W. Stone, a Presbyterian converted by McGready, the Cane Ridge camp meeting was perhaps the most electrifying, exhilarating, sensuous, unforgettable communal event in the history of American religion. Over a week-long span, crowds variously estimated at between 10,000 and 25,000 people (the latter is probably an exaggerated figure, given the population of the region at the time) gathered in a forest clearing for a nonstop assault on their senses and their souls. At the central log meetinghouse and across a gently sloping hillside crowded with tents and wagons and horses and people, dozens of preachers held forth for hours at a time from platforms, wagon beds, and tree stumps, threatening whatever crowds they could gather with “liquid boiling waves” and the fiery darkness of “the deepest caverns in the flaming abyss,” and promising redemption to those who would repent of their sin-soaked habits, experience the New Birth, and embark on a life of pure and undefiled religion. As this message pierced vulnerable hearts and occasionally broke through the proud armor of sightseers and scoffers, the wounded engaged in remarkable demonstrations of “acrobatic Christianity.” At times, the “slain in the spirit” numbered into the hundreds and had to be dragged aside and laid in neat rows to prevent their being trodden under foot by ecstatic multitudes. Some lay motionless so long that doctors bled them to revive them, with the result that “the ground was crowded with bleeding bodies like a battlefield.” Others experienced violent spasms in which they jerked their heads rapidly from side to side or whipped their bodies forward and backward with such force that kerchiefs and hairpins flew from the heads of the women. Still others danced or ran or rolled or erupted in fits of laughing and barking and ecstatic moaning. Each sign of the Spirit’s work prompted outbursts of joy or longing from those already saved and those afraid they might not be until the din reached such a level that “the noise was like the roar of Niagara.”
No revivals in American history have matched the results of the second Great Awakening in the South. Though it broke no new theological ground, the Great Revival deepened the furrows and set the boundaries within which southern Evangelical religion would subsequently flourish. At its heart was total acceptance of the Bible as the literal, true, and completely dependable Word of God. Since the frontier attracted few Deists or New England–style “supernatural rationalists,” southern preachers faced little skepticism on this issue. The question was not whether the Bible was trustworthy, but what it said. Disagreement existed over details, but its central message was crystal clear: All humans are sinners and will spend eternity in hell unless their sins are forgiven; forgiveness is possible because Jesus Christ died on the cross. Evangelicals differed on the source and nature of human sin, the precise process by which Christ’s merit was transferred into human accounts, and the ability of individual humans to draw on those accounts, but predestination was clearly losing ground. Though Presbyterians and many Baptists continued to subscribe to some form of election, the manner and content of their preaching presupposed that humans could and should respond to God’s gracious offer of salvation through Christ. Neither they nor the Methodists, who did not subscribe to the doctrine of election, imagined for a moment that salvation was possible apart from God’s grace, but for men and women who had traveled beyond the rivers of the East to claim a part of America for their own, any religion that did not offer an equal chance to stake out a homestead in the promised land of paradise held little appeal. The revivals also made an uneducated ministry acceptable, as the proper test of a minister came to be his ability as a soul winner, not whether he had been to seminary. So thoroughly did this belief take root in Evangelical Christian thinking that from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present an extraordinarily small proportion of popular evangelists in America have possessed standard educational credentials.
On an everyday level, the revival’s more immediately important theological product was a vigorous emphasis on “sanctification,” often called “perfectionism.” The belief that Christians should live sinless lives was promoted most strongly by the Methodists but soon became a central preoccupation of all Evangelical Christians. In its individualistic concern for personal piety and opposition to common frontier vices such as alcohol, gambling, fornication, profanity, and dishonesty, it could exempt devout believers from feeling responsible for political decisions, economic policies, or such egregious social ills as slavery. It could also produce a narrow and unlovely legalism and a nearsighted hypocrisy. Still, the pervasive (sometimes obsessive) concern for purity helped civilize the frontier, encouraging the pioneers to live more sober and decent lives.
The Great Revival had peaked in the South by 1805, but Baptist farmer-preachers, Methodist circuit riders, and a fresh crop of itinerant evangelists inspired by the camp meetings kept it going at a less feverish pitch for several more decades. In New England Yale University became the focus and fomenter of revivalist thought and action. The primary catalyst for Yale’s activity was Jonathan Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight, who became its president in 1795. Dwight held to a conservative ideal of society, with the church as its bedrock institution, and he sought to enlist Yale in the service of that ideal. When he ascended to the presidency, almost none of the college’s 110 students were professing Christians. Dwight stormed this bastille of unbelief with a four-year series of weekly sermons that when finished, he began anew. In 1801, after seven lean years of unflagging effort, Yale experienced a dramatic revival that brought the conversion of fully half its students, many of whom eventually entered the ministry.
A major key to the resurgence of revivalism at Yale and, indeed, to the subsequent astonishing growth of Evangelical religion throughout America, was a Scottish philosophical import known as commonsense realism. To advocates of this view, developed in the universities at Edinburgh and Aberdeen and championed at Yale for a time, the observations and intuitions of common sense are dependable, the world is much as it appears to be, and attention to the moral laws imprinted on one’s conscience will lead to appropriate behavior. Obviously, such an optimistic view of human nature fit marvelously with democratic values. If every person could discern dependable truth, it was safe to take power from the hands of kings and bishops and put it into the hands of ordinary people who could use their innate common sense to figure out what to do with it. After a brief period of popularity, commonsense realism faded from the European intellectual scene by the end of the eighteenth century, but in America it became almost a national philosophy during the first half of the nineteenth century, quite apart from whether its adherents had ever heard of Edinburgh or Aberdeen. Nowhere did it have greater impact than within Evangelical Christianity, where its principles still hold dominion, though most of its practitioners are unaware of its influence on their lives.
Applied to religion, commonsense philosophy decreed that the Bible was not a volume filled with dark mysteries and knotty conundrums but a straightforward book easily accessible to straightforward people without assistance from learned philosophes and theologues. In the words of a phrase still repeated in Bible classes throughout Evangelical America, “It means what it says and says what it means.” Since no tenet of Calvinism, still the dominant form of Protestant orthodoxy in America, offended common sense more than the doctrine of original sin, which held that all people not only share the guilt incurred by Adam’s fall but have inherited a totally depraved nature, commonsense theologians concluded that Calvin must have been wrong. Sin, they insisted, is in the sinning, not the nature. Whatever guilt humans bear derives from sins they have committed, not from sins committed by Adam. Further, since a loving and reasonable God would not hold anyone guilty for sins not committed, he would not predetermine who should be saved and who damned but would offer salvation to everyone and give it to those who accepted the offer. Thus, election and predestination cannot be what the Bible teaches, or revival preaching would make no sense, and anyone could see the positive effects of revival preaching. What the Bible teaches,
therefore, is that all persons are able to repent, accept God’s grace, experience regeneration, and receive salvation. Commonsense theology gave revivalism what it needed: a clear mandate to confront sinners with what they must do to be saved and persuade them to do it. It was ideally suited for the Jacksonian popular democracy about to sweep the young nation and would provide a powerful warrant for evangelists to justify their methods by the results they achieved.
The key figure of the northern revival was a young maverick named Charles Grandison Finney. A former teacher and lawyer converted to Christ at age twenty-nine, Finney launched his preaching career with a series of strikingly successful revivals in upstate New York. Wherever he preached, his straightforward insistence that people were responsible for their own sinfulness and possessed the freedom and ability to lay hold of salvation roused dozens, sometimes hundreds, from their lethargy. But more than theology was at work. Using to the fullest his clear, theatrical voice, his hypnotic gaze, and dramatic skills polished in the courtroom, he presented his case less like a traditional preacher than like an attorney addressing a jury. He also served as prosecutor and judge, denouncing accused as heinous offenders whose guilt could not be doubted. In strong, vituperative, even coarse language, he blistered them for their hard-hearted sinfulness, telling them they deserved to spend eternity in a hell prepared for them by a wrathful God. The effect was shattering, “like cannonballs through a basket of eggs.”
Within three years, Finney’s phenomenal success attracted national attention and a flood of invitations to preach. He also attracted widespread criticism for his theology, his harsh preaching, and his increasing reliance on “new measures.” Even his supporters acknowledged that his pulpit style was “somewhat dictatorial,” and he began to take pains to limit the grosser displays of emotion, even noting that “weepers seldom receive any lasting good.” He did, however, employ new measures. In one of the first known accounts of the now-familiar invitation, he challenged people to stand or come to the front of the assembly, indicating their readiness to accept Christ. Finney believed conversion could be instantaneous and did not hesitate to use social pressure, such as praying for reluctant sinners by name, to bring it about.
As Finney’s reputation grew, he moved inevitably from the towns and villages of New York to the major population centers of the eastern seaboard. In the fall of 1829, he came to New York City to help write a new and vital chapter in Evangelical history. During the first half of the nineteenth century, optimistic Americans were joining together to establish an incredible array of voluntary associations aimed at accomplishing the reforms and improvements they felt would generate a perfect society. Though some were secular in origin, most of these vessels rode a booming tide of millennial expectations set in motion during the first Great Awakening. Evangelistic Christians were consumed with the conviction that their efforts could ring in the millennium, a literal thousand years of peace and prosperity that would culminate in the glorious second advent of Christ. This potent belief produced a campaign of social reform so massive and multifaceted that it came to be known as the Benevolent Empire and the Evangelical United Front. No problem seemed too great to tackle, and few were deemed so minor as to require no attention. Reform-minded Christians threw themselves into fervent campaigns to eradicate war, drunkenness, slavery, subjugation of women, poverty, prostitution, Sabbath breaking, dueling, profanity, card playing, use of fermented wine in the Communion, and poor eating habits.
In the vanguard of this phalanx of millennial harbingers marched a cadre of wealthy New York entrepreneurs and bankers calling themselves the Association of Gentlemen. Frustrated by the lack of a dynamic preacher to represent their position in the city’s Presbyterian pulpits, the association, led by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, persuaded Finney to join their cause. When Finney entered their circle, he became part of a progressive Evangelical network whose members would interact and depend on one another’s counsel and collaboration to a degree that was remarkable, given the state of travel and communication at the time. This pattern, in which a small number of key actors assume leading roles in a linked chain of major ventures—a kind of pious power elite—would also come to characterize Evangelical Christianity.
In 1834, in an effort to rescue a floundering publication established to promote his revivals, Finney delivered a series of lectures on the techniques of revival and allowed the journal to reprint them, first as a series of articles and then as a book. The result was an Evangelical classic. The Lectures on Revivals of Religion, a detailed manual of new measures, sold 12,000 copies on the day it hit bookstores in America, became a sensation in Great Britain (one publisher alone printed 80,000 copies), and was still in print 150 years later. In the Lectures, Finney expressly denied there was anything supernatural about revival. “It is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense,” he insisted. “It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.” Jonathan Edwards felt revivals had to be “prayed down”; Charles Finney believed they could be “worked up” and developed a clear-cut system for doing so.
To Finney, the primary object of effective preaching is to cause one’s hearers to make a decision for Christ, and to that end, any device within the bounds of common decency is not only acceptable but recommended. A successful revivalist, according to Finney, would give attention not just to content and organization but to style as well, and seminary training would not help much on this score. It is, he declared, “a SOLEMN FACT that the great mass of young ministers who are educated accomplish very little. When young men come out from the seminaries, are they fit to go into a revival? . . . Seldom.” The most effective sort of preacher, he reckoned, would resemble the self-educated Charles Finney. He would speak without notes in a conversational and colloquial manner—much as an attorney might speak to a jury. He would use “the language of common life” because “that is the way Jesus Christ preached. And it is the only way to preach.” When possible, his illustrations would come from everyday life. A good preacher would also pay attention to the faces of his auditors, and if he sensed they had not understood a point, he would repeat it until they did. And finally, an effective preacher would not hesitate to use theatrics if they helped him communicate his message. The calculation implicit in Finney’s lectures and reflections struck some as undignified and out of keeping with the spirit of the gospel. Finney’s response was characteristic: “When the blessing evidently follows the introduction of the measure itself, the proof is unanswerable but the measure is wise.” And the measure of wisdom, he said, “is to be decided, ‘other things being equal,’ by the number of cases in which [the evangelist] is successful in converting sinners.”
The Lectures also made the link between revival and reform unmistakably explicit. In keeping with his conviction that “the great business of the church is to reform the world—to put away every kind of sin,” and that true Christians must be “useful in the highest degree possible,” Finney asserted that new converts should set about immediately to improve their society and, in the process, to bring in the millennium. In a famous burst of optimism, he estimated that, if the church would only do her duty, “the millennium may come in this country in three years. . . . If the whole church as a body had gone to work ten years ago, the millennium would have fully come in the United States before this day.” To his credit, he did not shrink from addressing the volatile issue of slavery. Revivals are hindered, he said, when ministers take the wrong stand on questions involving human rights. “The church cannot turn away from this question,” he insisted. “[T]he silence of Christians upon the subject is virtually saying that they do not consider slavery a sin.” As various historians have noted, Finney’s converts became active participants in most of the progressive social movements of their era. Wherever he preached Christians turned their hands to reform.
At about this same time, an ardent admirer of Finney’s established an u
ndergraduate college in the rural community of Oberlin, Ohio, where students who paid for their education by manual labor could receive a wholesome Christian education free from the amusements and temptations of the Babylonish cities of the East. The Tappans quickly offered their support, with the stipulation that Charles Finney become its first professor of theology. Finney hesitated to take the assignment, but Arthur Tappan pushed him to accept. Under Finney’s influence, Oberlin became the western center of social radicalism. Students and faculty alike enjoyed complete freedom of speech on all reform issues, and the school was involved in both the feminist and the antislavery movements. It was, in fact, the first co-educational college in the world and produced the first American woman to be ordained in the ministry. Black students were also fully integrated from the beginning, and the college soon gained notoriety as a major station on the Underground Railway that spirited fugitive slaves to freedom.
By the midnineteenth century, America had become, more fully than ever before or again, a Christian republic, and the dominant expression of that Christianity was Protestant, Evangelical, and revivalistic. Church membership vaulted to the highest levels in American experience, and virtually all the new growth occurred in Evangelical ranks. Individuals and churches exposed to revival preaching and thought were energized with new hopes, new drives, a sense of community with others of like belief, and a conviction that they were engaged in a grand effort to save the republic and with it the world. Driven by millennial hopes and pulled by perfectionist goals, they further democratized their churches and pioneered in the development of voluntary associations whose focused attention to single issues made them highly efficient instruments of reform and, in the process, provided models that were soon reflected in business and political organizations and would still be a prominent feature of Evangelicalism nearly 150 years later.
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