Popular Democracy and Revivalism
1. Popular Politics in the Revolutionary Period
Lorenzo Dow, Methodist itinerant preacher.
2. Popular Christianity and the Language of Democracy
i) The Challenge to the Professionals
Samuel Thompson, practitioner of "botanical medicine" and critic of medical establishment.
Elias Smith, Independent preacher, revivalist, and critic of medical profession.
Joseph Smith (1805-44), translator of the Book of Mormon and founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
Brigham Young (1801-1877), second president of the Church of Latter Day Saints, responsible for Mormonism's western migration.
ii) Responsibility and the Individual Conscience
John Leland (1754-1841), Baptist leader and preacher, critic of religious establishment in Virginia and Massachusetts. Promotor of anti-slavery resolution.
"Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," Virginia, 1796.
iii) Utopianism and Frustrated Hope
Herman Husband, Pennsylvania preacher and spokesman for rural poor.
Samuel Ely, itinerant preacher, defender of rural "squatters" in Maine.
Charles Finney and Middle-Class Revivalism
1. Charles Finney and the Second Great Awakening
Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), revivalist preacher and author. Trained as a lawyer, Finney abandoned his legal practice after his conversion in 1821. After ordination into the Presbyterian church in 1824, Finney led missions in western NY state. Between 1826 and 1831, Finney led successful revivals in Wilmington, Delaware, Philadelphia, New York, and Rochester in 1830- 31. He became pastor at the Second Free Presbyterian Church in New York city in 1832. Finney became a professor of theology at Oberlin College, Ohio in 1835, pastor of Oberlin's First Congregational Church from 1837-72, and president of Oberlin College between 1851 and 1866. Important writings include, Lectures on Revivals in Religion (1835); Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846); Memoirs (1876).
The "Second Great Awakening" - widespread series of revivals and renewals of religious enthusiasm between 1790 and 1830.
2. The "New Measures"
The anxious seat a bench up at the front of the revival meeting for on the verge of conviction. The sinners would be surrounded by well-wishers "praying them through."
The protracted meeting.
Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), highly respected and influential minister of both Congregational and Presbyterian denominations. Initially, a bitter opponent of Finney, later reconciled to him and influenced by his theology. Pastor of the Hanover Street Congregational Church in Boston from 1827; president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, 1835- 1850. His move away from traditional Calvinist orthodoxy toward a theology that stressed human progress, precipitated unsuccessful charges of heresy in 1835.
3. The Urbanization of Revival
1830-33: Presbyterian numbers increased by 60,000.
4. The Theory and Theology of Revival
Bibliographical note: for a fascinating account of popular Christianity in the post-Revolutionary period, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.
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During the last two decades of the C18th, the prospects of the small farmer proved precarious. The hopes, generated and sustained by land availability and by the rhetoric of revolution, began to falter. New oppositions emerged, oppositions that many farmers and their representatives saw as the return of aristocracy in new dress. The foci of protests were higher taxes, lower agricultural prices, legal fees, lack of representation, huge land grants to and purchases by wealthy - and often absentee - landlords, and the prosecution of small farmers as squatters. In 1793, 151 Maine farmers presented a petition to the Massachusetts General Court, "What," they said, "ought to entitle General Knox [then Washington's secretary of the treasury] to a grant [of] a tract of Land superior in extent to any Lord in Europe or America, has he done more for his Country than hundreds of us, no verily."
Among those who articulated the rural unrest, were the revivalist preachers, harnessing again the language of bible and republic. Herman Husband condemned the makers of the Constitution as crypto-nobility, "the old forms of a beast's head." His hope was for a religious paradise and renewal in a New Jerusalem, established in the backcountry of the West. Samuel Ely - a graduate from Yale - took up the cause of those prosecuted as squatters in Maine. Revolution, he declared, has turned into oppression. "We fought for liberty but despots took it, whose little finger is thicker than George's loins; the cry of violence and wrong; O than George held the claim still! For, before the war, it was better with us than now."
During the period after the American Revolution, theological and ecclesiastical re-orientation coincided with significant intellectual and social change. In such circumstances, new possibilities arise for the relationship between Christianity and culture: for the relationship of extraordinary and ordinary religion along, as it were, the boundary of our language about the transcendent and our speech concerning the here and now. After the Revolution, popular Christianity emerged as a religious foundation for egalitarianism and democratic culture.