Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism

Heath W. Carter, Laura Porter

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467446846
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Storia del cristianesimo

Lucid, authoritative overview of a major movement in American history The history of American evangelicalism is perhaps best understood by examining its turning points —those moments when it took on a new scope, challenge, or influence. The Great Awakening, the rise of fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, the emergence of Billy Graham—all these developments and many more have given shape to one of the most dynamic movements in American religious history. Taken together, these turning points serve as a clear and helpful roadmap for understanding how evangelicalism has become what it is today. Each chapter in this book has been written by one of the world's top experts in American religious history, and together they form a single narrative of evangelicalism's remarkable development. Here is an engaging, balanced, coherent history of American evangelicalism from its origins as a small movement to its status as a central player in the American religious story. Contributors & Topics Harry S. Stout on the Great Awakening
Catherine A. Brekus on the evangelical encounter with the Enlightenment
Jon Butler on disestablishment
Richard Carwardine on antebellum reform
Marguerite Van Die on the rise of the domestic ideal
Luke E. Harlow on the Civil War and conservative American evangelicalism
George M. Marsden on the rise of fundamentalism
Edith Blumhofer on urban Pentecostalism
Dennis C. Dickerson on the Great Migration
Mark Hutchinson on the global turn in American evangelicalism
Grant Wacker on Billy Graham's 1949 Los Angeles revival
Darren Dochuk on American evangelicalism's Latin turn

CHAPTER 1

What Made the Great Awakening Great?

Harry S. Stout

What made the Great Awakening great? It is a question that first pressed upon me after reading my colleague Jon Butler’s brilliant and provocative article “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction.”¹ In that article, Butler argued that nothing novel or revolutionary occurred around 1740 making for a “Great Awakening.” Rather, the “Great Awakening” was a pseudo-event invented by historians. While much of what Butler argued is plausible, I propose that something “great” did indeed happen around 1740, and the chief protagonists were George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. In making the case for a truly great awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century, I do not intend to follow the path of earlier church historians whose explanations focused on theology and church history. Left unexplored in these earlier filiopietistic accounts is the question of religious innovations on the level of rhetoric and communications embodied by Whitefield. Also left out for the most part is the question of overlaps between the Great Awakening and the “New Learning” associated with the Enlightenment, where Edwards is the chief exemplar. In their own ways, each of these luminaries contributed something unique and revolutionary to their inherited faith.

First the Great Awakening as a revolution in rhetoric and communications: on August 14, 1739, the famed itinerant George Whitefield embarked on a preaching tour of colonial America after enjoying a superstar’s success in his native England. Soon Americans would get their first exposure to the open-air preacher, and their churches would never be the same. Audiences numbering in the thousands appeared seemingly out of nowhere to hear the “Grand Itinerant” preach the gospel in new and exciting ways. With Whitefield’s preaching tour, a new pulpit rhetoric emerged that would redefine preaching and lead to the rise of a novel form of Protestantism we identify today with “evangelicalism.” Historian Perry Miller described this new rhetoric as “the rhetoric of sensation.”² While the content of Whitefield’s sermons remained traditionally Calvinist, he revolutionized the “rhetoric” or delivery of his sermons and redefined the social context in which public address took place. In the process, he “awakened” a new religious enthusiasm within the traditional church’s rank and file and inaugurated a new model of social organization and public address—a model that could be applied to a broad range of social, political, and religious contexts.

The first arena, however, in which a revolutionary rhetoric of sensation appeared in America was religion. In time it would spread to politics and inform an egalitarian ideology that challenged traditional assumptions of hierarchy and social deference in the American Revolution. But for that ideology to take root there had to appear new forms of communication that could model a new social order. At some point prior to the popular reception of a revolutionary ideology, a new rhetoric was needed in which familiar terms could be used to mean something different—and this change in the form as distinguished from the content marks the moment of a profound cultural transformation. Any revolution in worldview requires a new rhetoric. The most conspicuous and revolutionary product of the Great Awakening was not to be found in doctrine, in the creation of new ecclesiastical or academic institutions, or competing theological schools of pro-revival “New Lights” and anti-revival “Old Lights.” Evangelicalism’s enduring legacy was a new mode of persuasion that could redefine the norms of social order. Doctrinal differences between New Lights and Old Lights were, in historian Alan Heimert’s words, “of less ultimate significance than the remarkable differences between their oratorical strategies and rhetorical practices.”³

Heimert’s recognition of the revolutionary potentialities of the revivals suggests a closer look at evangelical oratory, particularly in relation to the forms of public worship that prevailed before the revivals. Despite differences in style and substance between Puritans and Anglicans, all seventeenth-century churchmen agreed with Boston clergyman Samuel Willard that God did “ordain Orders of Superiority and Inferiority among men.”⁴ This hierarchical worldview presupposed a society of face-to-face personal relationships in which people identified themselves with reference to those around them as superiors, inferiors, or equals. Superiors demanded that their inferiors defer to them and govern their actions according to their rank in the community. Forms of attire, patterns of speech, or where one was “seated” in the meetinghouse were among the more conspicuous indications of a pervasive social stratification that separated the leaders from “ordinary people.” As social superiors, college-educated ministers assumed their congregants would be properly subordinate. Any acting out of “place” would be met with severe punishment.

Before Whitefield’s transatlantic itineraries, all churches were designed to sustain a deferential perception of proper social organization. In this traditional social ethic, itinerancy was inconceivable because, in the Puritan minister Increase Mather’s words, “to say that a Wandering Levite who has no flock is a pastor, is as good sense as to say, that he that has no children is a Father.”⁵ What made a pastor was not simply the preaching of the Word but also a direct, authoritarian identification with a specific flock. To ignore the personal and deferential relationship of a minister with his congregation would be to threaten the organic, hierarchical principles upon which both family and social order rested. In terms of communications, this meant that speaker and audience were steadily reminded of their personal place in the community; in no context were they strangers to one another, for no public gatherings took place outside of traditional associations based upon personal acquaintance and social rank.

As Whitefield and a growing band of homegrown imitators began holding forth in new settings, established, college-educated ministers realized that something dramatically different was appearing in the revivalists’ preaching performances. The problem raised by the revivals was not their message of the New Birth. Indeed, it was the familiar message of regeneration that lulled leaders into an early acceptance and even endorsement of the revivals. The problem, it soon became clear, was the revolutionary setting in which the good news was proclaimed. The secret of Whitefield’s success and that of other evangelists was not simply a booming voice or a charismatic presence. It was a new style: a rhetoric of persuasion that was strange to the American ear. The revivalists sought to transcend both the hyper-rational manner of “polite” Liberal preaching and the “plain style” of orthodox Puritan preaching in order to speak directly to the people at large.⁶ Their technique of mass address to a voluntary audience of strangers forced a dialogue between speaker and hearer that disregarded social position and local setting.

To attract ordinary people to leave their homes and neighborhoods and travel to gather with strangers and hear a stranger speak required a new rhetoric. This is precisely what Whitefield offered. Whitefield was no theoretician and evidenced no close reading of Lockean “sensationalism.” But he intuitively understood the rhetoric of sensation and practiced it on an international stage of Anglo-American revivals that were, in fact, sensational. Taking his rhetorical cues from the theater rather than the university lectern, Whitefield shaped his sermon rhetoric to create an emotional catharsis that would precipitate a New Birth or, what was the same, a new sense of the heart. Before Whitefield, everybody knew the difference between preaching and acting. With Whitefield’s preaching, the distinction blurred between church and theater. More than any of his peers or predecessors, he turned his back on the academy and traditional homiletical manuals and adopted the assumptions and poses of the actor. Passion would be the key to his preaching, and his body would be enlisted in raising passions in his audience to embrace traditional Protestant truths. He would literally embody a fundamental turning point in defining what constituted acceptable preaching.

Whitefield was not content simply to talk about the New Birth; he had to sell it with all the dramatic artifice of a huckster. Any churchgoer could understand the theological status of a new creation, but to see a preacher travailing in labor as the new birth took place was to encounter an unprecedented and shocking demonstration. Whitefield not only asserted that the new creation was more than mere metaphor; he enacted and embodied it.

One favorite sermon of Whitefield’s that illustrates his theatrical delivery centered on “Abraham Offering His Son.” In this sermon Whitefield created a series of dramatic scenes. The first scene opened with the “good old man walking with his dear child . . . now and then looking upon him, loving him, and then turning aside to weep.” At this point in the sermon Whitefield himself may well have wept and momentarily halted the discourse, allowing the pathos to sink in. Then followed a second scene at the altar where Abraham was barely prevented from taking his beloved son’s life in a profound moment of faith and obedience. By now the audience would be locked into Whitefield’s performance, and they would see with Abraham’s eyes what Whitefield wanted them to see: “Fancy that you saw the aged parent standing by weeping. Methinks I see the tears trickle down the patriarch Abraham’s cheeks . . . adieu, my Isaac, my only Son, whom I love as my own soul; adieu, adieu.” In the third and climactic scene, Whitefield bridged the gap separating Abraham from Christ through the passions:

Did you weep just now when I bid you fancy that you saw the altar? Look up by faith, behold the blessed Jesus, our all-glorious Immanuel, not bound, but nailed on an accursed tree: see how he hangs crowned with thorns, and had in derision of all that are round about him: see how the thorns pierce him, and how the blood in purple streams trickles down his sacred temples! Hark! And now where are all your tears? Shall I refrain your voice from weeping? No, rather let me exhort you to look to him whom you have pierced, and mourn, as a woman mourneth for her first born.⁷

Whitefield’s demonstrative preaching rendered him one of the best-known persons in Anglo-America, perhaps second only to King George III. He was, to borrow a modern phrase, a celebrity. Before Whitefield, no one had fully tested the ability of public opinion to build a movement that was intercolonial and even international in scope. No one before Whitefield had sufficient popularity to found an international movement. In a circular logic that would in time come to define modern America, appeals to public opinion required public access, and public access depended on popularity. As the first intercolonial religious celebrity, Whitefield paved the way for extra-institutional movements that would reverse traditional order and travel from the bottom up. This turning point was fundamental to what made the Great Awakening great.

Whitefield’s transatlantic revivals involving tens of thousands of rapt listeners taught him the invaluable lesson that churches with visions of national hegemony, such as the Anglicans or Puritans, could be a thing of the past: they could be made old history—the history of a traditional, localistic, and coercive culture. His revivals therefore marked a transition not just in his rhetoric of sensation, but also in his new conception of evangelical association based on individual choices that transcended ecclesiastical institutions. His revivals were, in short, interdenominational and market-responsive. A new history would be transdenominational and experience centered. In this emergent, enlightened world, existing churches would not be supplanted so much as sidestepped in the interest of creating larger, translocal associations grounded in sensational revivals. These associations would be purely voluntary and would allow people to remain in their favorite denomination even as they bound themselves to larger networks with international significance. Like other market-related products, the new forms would succeed or fail in direct relation to their ability to attract religious consumers.

Whitefield’s market-driven vision was profound not in its theological depth but in its very popularity. His revivals were not really a church, nor were they connected to local communities and congregations. He received no financial support from his national church or the state and instead depended on voluntary offerings. The appearance of Whitefield’s audiences as religious congregations defied the traditional sense of the term. The audiences changed with every meeting, evidencing no permanent structure or leadership aside from Whitefield’s own charismatic ministry. In reality, Whitefield’s audience and loyal supporters represented what we would call powerful new “parachurches”—voluntary religious associations based on a marketplace organization and destined to characterize pan-Protestant “evangelical” organizations in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. These parachurches represented a force entirely new and one that defined the future for much of modern American Protestantism.

In an ironic process that Whitefield could not have foreseen and probably did not recognize, his revivals became, in effect, an institution. He brought new meaning to the term “revival” and, in so doing, eventually achieved an unanticipated social respectability among religious elites.

Although Whitefield was no theologian, his new rhetoric of sensation was profoundly theological. He avoided denominational creeds and denominations in his revivals, but at the same time presented a new theological perspective contained less in his own Calvinist convictions than in the radical new significance ascribed to religious experience and spiritual legitimacy. In answer to the question of what makes for membership in the true church of Christ, Whitefield implicitly set forth an alternative model that fit with the modern circumstances of his transatlantic revivals.

In the evangelical parachurch that Whitefield created (and Jonathan Edwards would defend), individual experience became the ultimate arbiter of authentic religious faith. Experience—or, in Locke’s terms, “sensation”—came to be the legitimating mark of religion over and against family, communal covenants, traditional memberships, baptisms, or sacraments. As sensation represented the only avenue for...