Nineteenth century America contained a bewildering array of
Protestant sects and denominations, with different doctrines, practices, and organizational forms. But by the 1830s
almost all of these bodies had a deep evangelical emphasis in
common. Protestantism has always contained an important
evangelical strain, but it was in the nineteenth century that a
particular style of evangelicalism became the dominant form of
spiritual expression. What above all else characterized this
evangelicalism was its dynamism, the pervasive sense of activist
energy it released. As Charles Grandison Finney, the leading
evangelical of mid-nineteenth century America, put it: "religion
is the work of man, it is something for man to do." This
evangelical activism involved an important doctrinal shift away
from the predominately Calvinist orientation that had
characterized much of eighteenth-century American Christianity. Eighteenth-century Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield had
stressed the sinful nature of humans and their utter incapacity
to overcome this nature without the direct action of the grace of
God working through the Holy Spirit. Salvation was purely in
God's hands, something he dispensed as he saw fit for his own
reasons. Nineteenth-century evangelicals like Finney, or Lyman
Beecher, or Francis Asbury, were no less unrelenting in their
emphasis on the terrible sinfulness of humans. But they focused
on sin as human action. For all they preached hellfire and
damnation, they nonetheless harbored an unshakable practical
belief in the capacity of humans for moral action, in
the ability of humans to turn away from sinful
behavior and embrace moral action. Whatever their particular
doctrinal stance, most nineteenth-century evangelicals preached a
kind of practical
Arminianism which emphasized the duty and
ability of sinners to repent and desist from sin.
Conversion
The core of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was the
experience of conversion. Conversion was compelled by a set of
clear ideas about the innate sinfulness of humans after Adam's
fall, the omnipotence of God--his awful power and his mercy--and,
finally, the promise of salvation for fallen humankind
through Christ's death on the cross as the atonement for
human sin. But what students need to understand is that
conversion was an experience. It was not simply something that
people believed--though belief or faith was essential to it--but something that happened to them, a real, intensely emotional
event they went through and experienced as a profound
psychological transformation left them with a fundamentally
altered sense of self, an identity as a new kind of Christian.
As they interpreted it, they had undergone spiritual rebirth, the
death of an old self and the birth of a new one that
fundamentally transformed their sense of their relationship to the world.
Conversion consisted of a sequence of clearly mapped-out
steps, each of which was accompanied by a powerful emotion that led the penitent from the terror of
eternal damnation through redemption to the promise of heavenly
salvation. The process of conversion characteristically began in
a state of "concern" about the state of one's soul and "inquiry"
into what were called the doctrines of salvation propelled by the
question "what can I do to be saved?" This led to a state of
acute spiritual "anxiety," marked by deep fear over the prospect
of eternal damnation, which in turn grew into an unmistakable
sense of "conviction," the heartfelt realization that one stood
justly condemned for one's sins and deserved eternal damnation.
Conviction was the terrifying point of recognition that no matter
how much one might desire it, there was absolutely
nothing one could do to earn salvation. But there was
something the penitent could do, indeed, was bound to do. That
was to fully repent and surrender unconditionally to
God's will to do with as he saw fit and to serve him fully. It
was this act of repentance, surrender, and dedication to serving
his will that Finney meant when in his most famous sermon he
insisted that "sinners [are] bound to change their own hearts."
This moment of renunciation of sin and the abject surrender to
the will to God was the moment of conversion, if it was to come,
the moment at which, through the promise of Christ's atonement
for human sin, a merciful God would bestow his grace upon the
repentant sinner.
Guiding Student Discussion
It is important to stress to your students the importance of the
emotional state that signaled that one had received
divine grace and was a converted Christian. People recognized the
fact of conversion by the power and character of the emotions
that accompanied it, that made it an emotional catharsis, a
heartfelt rebirth. Most characteristically, conversion, often
accompanied by tears, provoked a deep sense of humility and peace
marked by an overwhelming sense of love toward God, a sense that
one had entered a wholly new state of being--defined as a state
of regeneration--that was the utter opposite of the state of
willfulness, torment, and anxiety that had accompanied
unregeneracy. The convert entered a new spiritual state referred
to as regeneracy and sanctification in which the paramount desire
was to do God's will, a desire expressed almost immediately in
active concern for the conversion of family, friends, and even
strangers who remained unconverted. Indeed, the most important
sign of sanctification was the degree of one's willingness to
enlist in the ongoing evangelical campaign to convert the world.
(For further discussion of the evangelical convert's role in the world see under Nineteenth Century, Evangelicalism as a Social Movement.)
Revivalism and the Second Great Awakening
A second distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century
evangelicalism was its approach to religious revivals. The
phrase "religious revival" was originally coined in the
eighteenth century to describe a new phenomenon in which churches experienced an unexpected "awakening" of spiritual concern, occasioned by a special and mysterious
outpouring of God's saving grace, which led to unprecedented
numbers of intense and "surprising conversions" that "revived"
the piety and power of the churches. In the early nineteenth
century, however, as "the revival" became a central instrument
for provoking conversions, it became as much a human as a divine
event. In the terms of Charles Grandison Finney, a revival was
something preachers and communicants did. It was a deliberately orchestrated event that deployed a variety of spiritual practices to provoke conversions
especially among the unconverted "youth" (men and women between
15 and 30) in the community.
The new, self-consciously wrought revivals took several
forms. They first emerged at the turn of the
eighteenth century with the invention of the camp meeting in
western Virginia and North Carolina and on the Kentucky and Ohio
frontier by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists. At these
meetings, the most famous (or notorious) of which took place at
Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people would gather from miles around in a
wilderness encampment for four days to a week. There they
engaged in an unrelenting series of intense spiritual exercises,
punctuated with cries of religious agony and ecstasy, all
designed to promote religious fervor and conversions. These
exercises ranged from the singing of hymns addressed to each of
the spiritual stages that marked the journey to conversion,
public confessions and renunciations of sin and personal witness
to the workings of the spirit, collective prayer, all of which
were surrounded by sermons delivered by clergymen especially
noted for their powerful "plain-speaking" preaching. The
second, major variant of the new revivalism consisted of the
"protracted meetings" most often associated with the "new
measures" revivalism of Finney but which by the late l820s had
become the characteristic form of most northern and western
revivalism. "Protracted meetings," ordinarily conducted once a
year at a time when they would be less disruptive of ordinary
life, usually lasted two to three weeks, during which time there
would be preaching two or three times each day, addressed
especially to the anxious penitents who would gather on an "anxious
bench" at the front of the church to be prayed for by the
congregation, and prayer and counseling visits by newly
converted Christians to the concerned and anxious. Once a person
had gone through the experience of conversion and rebirth, he or
she would join the ranks of visitors and exhorters, themselves
becoming evangelists for the still unconverted around them.
One important result of the new revivalism was a further
erosion of older Calvinist beliefs, especially the doctrine of
predestination. (For information on Calvinism and predestination
see under Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Puritanism and Predestination.) Although some evangelical clergymen did not
abandon the idea of predestination entirely (the idea that God
had preordained who would be saved and who would not was, after
all, a logical extension of the conception of God as an eternal,
omniscient, and omnipotent being), in practical terms they held out
what amounted to an idea of universal salvation. Most Methodist
clergymen came pretty close to embracing the idea of universalism
which held that Christ's atonement was potentially universal,
available without restriction to all who would repent and
surrender to God. Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Church
of Christ, made universalism the hallmark of his doctrinal
system.
This new style of evangelicalism consisted of more than a
doctrinal and devotional emphasis and a set of proselytizing
strategies. It has to be understood as a vast and powerful
religious movement. By the l820s evangelicalism had become one
of the most dynamic and important cultural forces in American
life. It is here that another important term comes
into play--the Second Great Awakening--the term evangelical
leaders adopted to talk of the revivalism and evangelical fervor
they found themselves in the midst of. The label sought to
describe a broad religious phenomenon that transcended sectarian and denominational boundaries. Most
clergymen (and communicants as well) had specific denominational
affiliations. But just as the seventeenth-century Puritans
saw their Massachusetts Bay experiment as the spearhead of a
broader movement to reform Protestantism itself, so too did nineteenth-century evangelicals consider themselves participants in a much broader spiritual movement to
evangelize the nation and world. Secondly, they used the idea of
a Second Great Awakening to signify their participation in an extraordinary religious phenomenon. The label linked them directly to a special heroic history, namely the great
eighteenth-century spiritual outpouring (which they themselves
first designated the original or First Great Awakening)
associated with such figures as Jonathan Edwards, George
Whitefield, and the Tennants. Theirs, too, seemed a period marked
by a special and extraordinary outpouring of God's Saving Grace,
a period that placed a special burden of responsibility on
ministers of God and saved Christians alike to enlist themselves
wholeheartedly in the work of extending God's Kingdom. Finally,
this sense of participation in and responsibility for the vast outpouring of Saving Grace promoted a sense of
direct connection to the ultimate teleological goal of Christian
history, namely, the millennium. They came to believe that it
was given to them and their generation of evangelical Americans
to prepare the way for Christ's Second Coming (which Jonathan
Edwards had predicted would take place in the New World) by
working unrelentingly to bring about the thousand-year reign of righteousness that would precede his return to earth. More specifically, what this meant was that they and
their communicants were to enlist themselves in a broad set of
campaigns to reform American society. (For more on
the importance of millennialism in nineteenth-century religion
see under Nineteenth Century, Mormonism and the American Mainstream, African-American
Religion in the Nineteenth Century.)
Donald Scott was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1985-86.
He has taught at the University of Chicago, North Carolina State
University, Brown University, the New School, and is currently Dean of
Social Science and Professor of
History at Queens College / City University of New York. He is the
author of From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850
(1978), America's Families: A Documentary History (1982, with Bernard
Wishy), The Pursuit of Liberty (1996, with R. J. Wilson, et al.); and he
is the co-editor of The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and
American Culture (1993). He is currently at work on a book entitled
Theatres of the Mind:
Knowledge and Democracy in 19th-Century America.
Address comments or questions to Professor Scott through TeacherServe "Comments and Questions."