1

Prayer

PROTESTANT CONVERTS AND THE SINNER’S PRAYER

FROM 1826 TO THE end of the nineteenth century, the Presbyterians in the United States weathered their share of changes. They split into two denominations in 1837, then split again during the Civil War, only to be reunited in the 1870s. They were rocked by disputes over slavery, Darwinian evolution, and theological liberalism, but for the most part Presbyterians maintained a remarkable stability thanks to their mode of church governance and their reading of the Bible within the confines of the Westminster Confession.1 Their numbers grew enormously: in 1826, there were 127,440 members of 1,819 Presbyterian churches; in 1900, there were 1,007,689 members of 7,750 Presbyterian churches. But then, there was more of everything in a rapidly growing United States, and the Presbyterians grew from 1.1 percent of the population to only 1.3 percent.2 The most meaningful change for the Presbyterians lay below the surface. It would not have been apparent to a visitor to any particular church, though its effects were recorded in the baptismal registers of every congregation, aggregated in the minutes of the General Assembly, and printed by the denomination’s own publishing house. The change lay in how people came to think of themselves as Presbyterians in the first place. By 1900, members were far less likely to have become Presbyterian through infant baptism.
Baptizing infants expressed in practice the theological idea that the children of Christians could inherit membership in the church through the administration of the sacrament, backed by God’s eternal decree of election. But that doctrine increasingly conflicted with another theological idea, the idea that to be saved all people—regardless of whether they had been baptized as children—had to undergo a conversion experience in which they repented and believed for themselves. Baptists had long resolved the tension by holding that baptism was valid only for believers. The declining rates of infant baptism among Presbyterians were a sign that they too felt the tension between those ideas. There were two main ways that one could become a Presbyterian.3 One could choose to become a member as an adult by having a conversion experience and then being baptized. If someone converted as an adult and had already been baptized as a child, then he or she might be received as a member by examination. In other words, infant baptism was a sign of inherited religion, and adult baptism was a sign of religion as choice.4 The two ideas about religious belonging expressed themselves in two different rituals.
The interplay between inheriting a religion and choosing it can be seen in the sharp dip in the percentage of infant baptisms in 1832–1833 (Figure 1.1). In 1832, more infants were baptized than the year before, but the percentage dropped so rapidly because there were twice as many adult baptisms that year as the year before. It was in 1832 that Charles Finney, a lawyer turned revivalist, moved to New York and introduced revivalism to Manhattan.5 That year, more people became Presbyterians because they were converted and then baptized or transferred membership than became Presbyterians through infant baptism. Such revivals remained “seasons” of grace—unusual, brief, and unpredictable. But the change in how people affiliated themselves with a Protestant denomination eventually became permanent.
The denominational history of Presbyterians provides an insight into the meaning of this trend. In 1837, the Presbyterians split into two denominations: Old School Presbyterians and New School Presbyterians. The reasons for the schism were complex, including divisions over slavery and difficulties in interpreting the 1801 Plan of Union with Congregationalists in what was then the northwest of the United States. Old School ministers such as Charles Hodge, Ashbel Green, and William Buell Sprague held to a more traditionalist understanding of the Westminster Confession, while New School ministers such as Albert Barnes and Lyman Beecher favored the New England theology that was revising the Calvinism.6 But the most significant disagreement was over revivalism. The Old School was suspicious of the revivalists and their techniques; the New School embraced them, and many of the New School ministers were revivalists. The New School Presbyterians had lower levels of infant baptism in every year because they placed more emphasis on a conscious conversion. The Old School Presbyterians, on the other hand, continued to emphasize the inheritance of the faith. In terms of the rate of infant baptism, by the end of the nineteenth century all Presbyterians were like New School Presbyterians in the middle of the nineteenth century.
FIGURE 1.1 Declining rates of infant baptism among Presbyterians, 1826–1926. Data: Herman Carl Weber, Presbyterian Statistics through One Hundred Years, 1826–1926 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1927).
By 1900, then, the significance of religion as an inheritance had declined sharply, and the significance of religion as a choice had been established. These records of baptisms show a deep change in religious identity. This change was not confined to Presbyterians; it had an impact on Methodists, Congregationalists, and evangelical Episcopalians as well. Conversion had always been important for evangelicals, but beginning in the 1830s it began to replace rather than coexist with theological ideas and practices about the inheritance of religion.7 Charles Finney and other revivalists disrupted older patterns of conversion but created new patterns that were codified and distributed in the pamphlets published by the American Tract Society. These tracts then trained generations of Protestants to have a conversion experience according to the norms set in the 1830s.
The characteristic ritual of the new pattern of Protestant conversion, as in the conversion of Samuel Hill, was the sinner’s prayer, and its characteristic meaning was conversion away from infidelity, or “nominal Christianity.”8 Protestants usually experienced conversion as an intensification of, rather than the switching of, affiliation; in other words, rather than changing from one religion to another, they usually moved from a weak connection with a religious group to a firmer, fuller commitment with the same group. But theologically speaking, evangelicals increasingly thought of their conversions not as fulfilling an earlier commitment but as a renunciation of infidelity. Because of the theological demand that everyone experience heart conversion, regardless of whether they had been baptized or were members of the church, Christianity could not be meaningfully inherited. Children of Christian parents proved to be a difficult case. But over time evangelical parents came to think of their children as needing evangelism as much as catechesis.
And if religion could not be inherited, how could one know whether he or she was saved? Sometimes the sky was rent and the world shaken in ecstatic conversion experiences, but only the most extreme would insist that such experiences were necessary for all.
What was needed was a more accessible ritual. Since Protestants were generally suspicious of formalism, the antithesis of heart religion, that ritual needed to be informal and individual. And so the nineteenth century saw the modification of the Puritan conversion narrative into the sinner’s prayer. The sinner’s prayer was a way of acknowledging sin and asking for God’s mercy in a formulaic, yet spontaneous, prayer. Puritan or early evangelical conversions tended to be gradual: their success was determined by the judgment of the congregation, and their results were found in moving from the promise of the sacrament of baptism to the fullness of participation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Table. The nineteenth-century ritual was more immediate, at least in theory: its success was determined by the individual convert, and its customary form was not sacramental but experiential. By the time the sinner’s prayer had fully developed, Protestant conversions were matters of choice and individual initiative; being defined against unbelief or irreligion, they were a kind of conversion between religions.
Evangelical Protestants did not fall into this pattern of conversion spontaneously. The form developed gradually, thanks to the preaching of revivalists and the distribution of millions of tracts that explained how to have a heart conversion. This change came about because evangelicals developed a system focused on conversion. And the most controversial of the system builders was a lawyer turned revivalist, with a prominent pulpit in New York.
In the fall and winter of 1834, a congregation gathered at Chatham Street Chapel in New York City to hear a series of lectures by their pastor, Charles Grandison Finney. Tall and gaunt, with sunken cheeks but an imposing brow, his body still recovering from cholera and general ill health, Finney nevertheless held his audiences captive as he explained the system behind his revivals.9
No preacher believed in the power of a system to convert sinners as much as Finney did. He had been practicing his technique since his own conversion experience in 1821, when he gave up his law practice to fulfill his “retainer for Jesus Christ” as a Presbyterian minister.10 Finney continued in the ministry for over fifty years, but even by 1834 the greatest movings of the Spirit were behind him. By then Finney had preached scores of revivals in the “burned over district” of Western New York, most successfully in Rochester in 1830–1831, but also throughout New England, Pennsylvania, and New York.11 The wealthy merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan set up Finney in the Chatham Street Chapel in New York City, where Finney became the pastor. New York at that time was in the midst of a great expansion in evangelicalism. A historian of evangelicals in New York conservatively estimates that “the percentage of New Yorkers who had a conversion experience and joined an evangelical church increased steadily from 4 percent of the city’s adult population in 1790 to 15 percent in 1855,” not counting people who experienced an evangelical conversion but did not affiliate with an identifiably evangelical church.12 The kind of conversion experience that Finney encouraged was thus touching the lives of many more people in New York, even though Finney himself remained in the city for only a year, soon moving on to Ohio to teach at the abolitionist Oberlin College.
The task before him in giving his 1834 lectures on revivals of religion was to define and defend a system of revivalism. These lectures were not revival preaching; they were a discourse about revival preaching. With a theological mind trained by experience rather than education, Finney was offering a systematization of his life’s work. Finney’s great change—like all great changes, a long time in coming and a long time in working out its effects—had already been brought about by his preaching and the preaching of scores of other ministers, not to mention the conversions of thousands through his kind of evangelical experience of the new birth.
Before Finney built his own system, he announced the demolition of another. Finney did not regard his “new measures” as being entirely new, but he did see them as a radical modification of what had come before. In his lectures, he often cited Jonathan Edwards’s 1742 book, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England. Nevertheless, Finney aimed his lectures directly at established patterns of conversion experience, and the means that previous generations had used to bring them about. In the lecture teaching other people how to bring sinners to conversion, he told his audience that sinners would never be converted in the way that they expected: “Sinners often lay out a plan of the way they expect to feel, and how they expect to be converted, and in fact lay out the work for God, determined that they will go in that path or not at all. Tell them this is all wrong, they must not lay out any such path beforehand, but let God lead them as he sees to be best.”13
The sinners who were being converted in Finney’s revivals were not blank slates but, as Finney well knew, people who had been trained to have definite ideas about how they should be converted in a particular set of steps. They anticipated that conversi...