This week in history takes a look at Christianity in America and the protestant revivals that sparked a Great Awakening.
Aug. 6, 1801: Christianity in America today
Every Sunday millions of American Christians file into the pews of their local church, joining together in a millennia-long tradition of communal worship. It is a time-honored tradition; Sunday is for Football and God.
Or at least, it used to be.
According to a two-year long study conducted by the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, only some 20 percent of Americans actually attend Church every week, although another 20 percent say they do but actually stay home.
What on earth (or in heaven) is going on here?
I have no idea. I suggest you ask your local minister or priest for the answer (if you can remember his name).
At any rate, it appears that Americans are falling out of love with organized religion, or at least have become too lazy to pull themselves out of bed on Sunday morning. Each year an estimated 4,000 to 7,000 churches close up shop, their ministers growing tired of preaching to empty pews.
As we ride down, down, down the parabolic graph of church-going in this country, it might sooth our aching hearts to remember a time when religion mattered, a time when God’s Word washed forth from the fiery lips of traveling preachers and people flocked to hear its joy.
For that, we have to go to the beginning – not all the way to the Word, only to the settling of America.
The Enlightenment
As we know from our school lessons, Puritans, Quakers and other religious minorities seeking asylum from persecution in England and Europe flocked to America in the 16th and 17th centuries. These early Americans brought with them, alongside their children and luggage, their faith in God. Of course, each one of them had a particular notion of how that faith ought to be organized. In an irony as old as religion itself, these formerly persecuted refugees were quick to themselves become the persecutors. This was the age of witch trials and pernicious religious police.
The new century, the 18th century, found America (and all of Europe) struggling against a torrent of subversive ideas.
The Age of the Enlightenment had arrived and men like Isaac Newton, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire began to systematically chip away at the foundation of society.
All that was established sat precariously on its now unsteady base. The Old could either cling to its entrenched ideas and fight like a cornered animal against the New, or it could readjust to a new equilibrium, one that worked with the New rather than against it.
The revolutions and the schisms of the next century were the fruits born of this struggle.
Having just clawed its way through a century of bloody civil strife, one that saw the birth of Protestantism and its many branches, Christianity found itself once more in the crosshairs. This time, the Protestants stood alongside the Catholics on the chopping block.
The Great Awakening
By the 1730s most American colonists identified with some branch of Protestantism – Calvinist, Congregationalist (former Puritans), Anglican take your pick.
Although adamantly separated from the Catholic Church, these branches still clung to the same pomp and ritual that characterized Catholic worship.
Sure, among the Protestants, the power to commune with God now lay with the individual, rather than an intermediary like a priest, but this was largely a theological distinction.
For the average congregant, worshipping in a Protestant church in 1730s America had all the emotional and religious intimacy as a court proceeding has today.
To rescue the individual from the hoary traditions of religion and bring a sense of personal guilt and need for salvation through Christ – these would be the goals of what would become known as the First Great Awakening.
Leading this crusade were protestant ministers like Solomon Stoddard and George Whitefield, men whose dynamic and impassioned styles of preaching ignited the fear and love of God in all who listened.
For the next decade and a half, wandering preachers in the Stoddard-Whitefield vein blazed holy trails through Europe and England. When they reached the American wilderness, they evangelized Indian, colonist and slave alike.
The fiery blast of religious fervor that announced the awakening’s arrival gave way to a slow simmer that lasted for the rest of the century.
The Second Great Awakening
With the creation of America following the Revolution came a clear separation of religion from the affairs of state.
This decisive delineation between earthly and heavenly powers had the effect of splitting adherents’ loyalties; on the one hand lay God and spiritual devotion and on the other money, earthly goods and social success. Some Americans, especially the educated elite, compromised between the two and argued that leading a moral life on earth, not church attendance, guaranteed salvation in the hereafter.
Meanwhile, population in the new country reached epic proportions, rising from one million in 1750 to nearly four million in 1790. These new people stretched the limits of the original 13 colonies and began the era of western migration that would characterize American life in the 19th century.
Amid this crisis of faith and demographic shift, the embers of the First Great Awakening glowed red, found fresh fuel and on this day in 1801 roared to life under the canvas tents dotting the fields of Cane Ridge, Kentucky.
The Second Great Awakening began just as furiously as the first, but spread farther afield. From the muggy magnolia groves of Georgia to the thickets of Kentucky poplar, revival tents rang with the voices of the saved. American Protestants exulted in their newfound faith, revived and reinvigorated with the knowledge of their dependence on God.
This first, massive revival event in Kentucky in 1801 attracted an estimated 20,000 men, women and children. At the pulpit stood seven or more ministers at once, preaching simultaneously to the seething crowds of worshippers. Those who experienced this unique, emotionally-charged form of worship would never forget it.
This new wave of religiosity in America had more staying power than the first, and carried the nation through half of the 19th century.
Membership to Methodist, Baptist and other evangelical churches rose steadily, looking to outpace the staid Congregationalists of the previous century in no time.
Antone Pierucci is a Sacramento-based public historian and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.
This Week in History: Protestant revivals and the Great Awakening
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
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