In the fall of the year 2000, I wrote my master’s thesis
on how the Church Growth Movement of the 80’s, 90’s had contributed not only to
the erosion of biblical authority, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to
the secularization of American Evangelicalism. The focus of that study was not
merely to ascertain the roots of the Church Growth Movement, but also to
provide a prediction of the corrosive effects its methodology would have on the
future character of American Evangelicalism as a whole. Since that time, I have
served as a pastor of 2 different congregations and have been able to observe
the ways in which American Evangelicals and the churches they inhabit have
become more and more secular not only in methodology but in mindset.
Perhaps it would be helpful to provide a definition of
the term secular (and its cognates), as well as what I mean and do not mean
when I use it. “Secular” is simply the belief that human life can be lived
successfully without God. “Secularity” is implicit belief in that; “secularism”
is explicit and, usually, aggressive belief in that. When I suggest that
American Evangelical Christianity has become more and more “secular,” I do not
mean that it has bought into secularism. No evangelical I know embraces
secularism. In fact, most Evangelicals recoil with horror at the very mention
of secularism (e.g. secular humanism). What I do mean is that, to a very large
extent, as I see it, American Evangelical Christianity has bought into
secularity. Secularity is an ethos, an outlook, a mindset, a way of living life
in which the sovereign Self has
become the chief source of authority in one’s religious life, making God at
best a mere Helper and at worse unnecessary.
Of course, this tendency is not unique to American Evangelicalism,
but is part and parcel of mankind’s sinful rebellion against divine authority
first perpetrated in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis (Genesis
3:5-6). The apostle Paul makes it clear that the centering of authority in Self
and the suppression of divine authority is the source of all God-rejecting
idolatry (Romans 1:18-ff). He also warns that in the last days “people will be
lovers of self” rather than lovers of God (2 Timothy 3:2). Again this is not
exclusive to American Christianity or even to American Evangelicalism.
Rather, the thesis I am offering here is that modern
American Evangelicalism, instead of stemming the tide of secularity, has become
an all too willing promoter of it in the modern methods (psychotherapy and
marketing) it has employed and the consumerist narcissist mindset it often unconsciously
encourages. It has been suggested that American Evangelicalism is far more American than it is Evangelical.[1]
What this means is that over the course of its history, from the mid 1700’s to
the present, American Evangelicals, weaned on the breast of American democratic
individualism, have reshaped the nature and character of Christianity in such a
way that it bears little resemblance to historic Christianity.
For example, David F. Wells observed that at the heart of
the American Evangelical mindset are two ideas that are also at
the heart of the practice of
democracy and, as a matter of fact, of capitalism. These ideas are (1) that the
audience is sovereign and (2) that ideas find legitimacy and value only within
the marketplace. That is to say, evangelicals operate on the assumption that
ideas have no intrinsic value, that they receive value when people determine that they are valuable. [2]
These two ideas were virtually absent in historic
Christianity outside of the United States. But sadly such is no longer the case
as armies of missionaries have exported, albeit unwittingly, this new
Americanized form of the faith.
As American Evangelicalism grew in this new soil of democratic
individualism and marketing, a new phenomenon arose: The Mega-Church. These new
churches, armed with a keen awareness of the “evangelical market” exploded with
unprecedented rates of numerical growth, literally starving out smaller
congregations with their constant flood of goods and services for every taste,
desire and fad of evangelical culture. The “faith once and for all delivered to
the saints” had become a marketable commodity that could be shaped, packaged
and even modified to fit the individualistic demands of the evangelical
marketplace. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with understanding and
accommodating to market trends in business, it can have catastrophic effects on
authority-based institutions like the church. Unlike marketing where the consumer is sovereign, the essence of
Christianity is God is sovereign. These
two very different mindsets simply cannot co-exist for long.
A case could be made that over the last several decades
we have been witnessing a not so subtle death of God in American Evangelicalism.
And regardless of all the outward signs of success, material wealth, high-tech
worship services, celebrity pastors, soaring memberships and the constant flood
of “how to” Bible studies, there is a deep soul rot that has infected the
movement at its very core. How is it possible that on one hand, American
Evangelicalism is so “obviously” successful, and yet on the other hand is more
consumerist and narcissistic than any time in its history? Could it be that all
the slick advertising, big-budgets and flash is little more than a smoke screen
to hide an internal deadness? Furthermore, has American Evangelicalism become
so successful in utilizing the methods and mindset of modernity that it no
longer needs God?
In his book The Gay
Science, Friedrich Nietzsche tells the now famous Parable of the Madman that serves as a poignant rebuke of the
American Evangelical church’s accommodation to modernity and its offspring secularity.
Have you not heard of that
madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place,
and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” -- As many
of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked
much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child?
asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage?
emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their
midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?” he cried; “I will tell
you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did
we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away
the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its
sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? . . . Do we hear nothing
of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing of
the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him.
“How shall we comfort ourselves,
the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the
world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this
blood off from us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What
festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the
greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods
simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever
is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher
history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and
looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in
astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into
pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not
yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet
reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the
stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and
heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and
yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that
on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there
struck up his requiem aeternam deo .
. . “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and
sepulchers of God?”[3]
Speaking to a culture that had wholeheartedly embraced secularism,
Nietzsche was not saying that the Being
of God had died. He was an atheist. He was simply saying that due to their embrace of modernity and secularism, their need for God had died.
This study is committed to examining how that has
happened in American Evangelicalism. How American Evangelicals have sown the seeds of secularity into the very
soil of American Evangelicalism, seeds that are leading it to its spiritual demise.
This will be accomplished from an historical, philosophical and theological
perspective, following a linear format. It will provide a critique that is
rooted in the intellectual developments of Western culture generally and
American culture specifically, demonstrating how those developments manifested
themselves within the context of American church life.
The first chapter will examine the decentralization of
traditional institutions of authority in favor of democratic individualism. The
first section of chapter one will be devoted to The Rise of the Sovereign Self which will examine this paradigm
shift from the context of European intellectual history. The second section of
chapter one, The Rebel Consciousness of American
Christianity, will examine the how the Rise
of the Sovereign Self played itself out in the early American nation and
the way in which it shaped the identity and character of American Christianity.
Chapter 2 will follow the same historical flow with an
examination of the transition to Romanticism and its bi-product, cultural
narcissism. Section one will be devoted to The
Rise of the Therapeutic Culture, which manifested itself in cultural and
theological shift away from thinking of divine authority in terms of absolute
truth and morally binding propositions, to thinking about it merely as a source
of psychological well-being with no regard to questions of truth or authority.
It will also examine the way in which the church capitulated to that trend. The
second section will assess the consequence of the “Therapeutic Culture” in the
phenomenon of Consumerism as a Cultural
Characteristic. Once cultural narcissism is normalized and notions of
absolute truth and morally binding authority is debunked, biblical propositions
become a marketable commodity that can modified and shaped according to the
desires of a fickle marketplace.
The final chapter will examine the pitfalls that church
must avoid as it lives and fulfills its mission in an age of consumption and
cultural narcissism.
The Centering of the Individual and the Privatization of
Authority
One of the most important things to understand about
American Evangelicalism is its revolt against absolutist pre-modern
Christianity, enshrined in divine authority, in favor of democratic
individualism—the defining characteristic of American culture. While this
epochal event is not as distinctively American
as it is Western, or more precisely modern, Americans, perhaps more than any
other society, have proved more tenacious in turning from traditional
authorities to self-justification in virtually every detail of their lives.
While such a trait is not always undesirable, its application in authority-based
communities promise detrimental long term effects that far outweigh any
short-term benefits.
There will also be a considerable attention paid to the
Revolutionary War and the ‘revolutionary revival’ of the mid 1700’s to the
early 1800’s that contributed in no small way to the democratization not only
of American politics, but American Christianity as well. It will be shown that
the anti-authoritarian sentiments of Americans against the injustices of the
English monarchy would be directed toward English ecclesiastical authorities,
and ultimately toward divine authority as the ultimate guide for doctrine,
practice and life.
The Rise of the Sovereign Self
During the Middle Ages and up through the Renaissance the
relationship between philosophy and theology was one of qualified alliance, a strained friendship preserved only through
the church’s control over government and educational institutions. Yet with the
dawn of the Enlightenment, the alliance was fractured and all-out war ensued.[4]
The autonomy of the reason as exercised by the individual in the Greek philosophic
tradition and the objective authority of the Scriptures in the Christian
theological tradition made the philosophy/theology synthesis difficult to
maintain from the beginning. For one thing, there were serious questions about
the compatibility, for example of Aristotle’s nontheistic philosophy and the
belief in a personal God espoused by Christianity. Furthermore, there is not
rational basis for giving theology authority over philosophy and reason. The
conflict between the two was an inevitability that stood over the whole of the medieval
intellectual tradition.
A Prelude to War
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas published his
magnum opus, Summa Theologiae. Though
not popular at the time, the Summa
soon became the benchmark of all Roman Catholic theology. Up to this point the
Middle Ages had seen the task of philosophy as one of ‘handmaid’ to theology.
As a result, philosophy as a discipline lost its autonomy. Aquinas, however,
would make huge strides in giving back to philosophy much of its former
dignity. Unfortunately, Aquinas would also create the battlefield on which
these two proud disciplines would wage combat. Regardless of his intentions, it
is clear from the Summa that the
medieval synthesis had reached a point ill-suited for theology, and perhaps
ill-suited for philosophy as well. For the first time a truly philosophical
basis was given to Christian belief. Aquinas contended that the existence of
God could and should be established
upon rational argument as a ‘vestibule of faith.’ This stems, of course, from
his belief that all knowledge begins with experience of sense objects, whether
that object is of the natural world or God. This constituted a decisive break
with Anselm’s approach that began with the idea
of a perfect Being “than which no greater can be conceived,”[5]
and moved to the existence of that Being inasmuch as the actual existence is greater than the mere idea of it.[6]
It did not seem to matter to Aquinas that the ‘god’
established by his ‘five proofs’, the ‘Prime Mover’ or ‘Great Designer,’ had no
necessary correlation to the personal God of Christianity. Once more, as
Immanuel Kant would later point out: within Aquinas’ essentially causal arguments the Ontological
Argument is assumed, making the purely rational basis for belief in God
implausible.[7]
Ironically the philosophical foundation laid by Aquinas would be utilized by later
Enlightenment thinkers to undermine not only belief in God, but also the very
possibility of special revelation, effectively moving the center from the
authority of the Scriptures to the knowing individual. The Enlightenment
critique, however, would have to wait for the critique rising from within the
church: the Reformation.
Though the Reformers aggressively challenged the place of
philosophy in theology, it does not mean that they rejected reason all together
or even philosophy for that matter. Both Luther and Calvin maintained that
reason and philosophy was useful as far as it went. When one spoke of the
existence of the personal God of Christianity, Scripture provided the only
valid basis for belief.[8]
For the Reformers reason and philosophy were valuable tools for understanding
the world and the sense of Scripture, but it was never allowed to become a
source for theology or a criterion for truth. This was a significant departure
from Aquinas’ and a return to the “faith seeking understanding” of Augustine
and Anselm. This departure is perhaps the most telling difference between the
theology of the Middle Ages and that which is found in the Reformation.
Francis Schaeffer, has rightly contended that had the
delicate balance between reason and revelation, found during the Reformation,
been maintained, reason would have received its highest dignity as would
revelation as absolute authority.[9]
While such an assessment is satisfactory to a Christian understanding of
history, it places the authority of the Scripture at the center, and if
philosophy had any function to perform at all, it would again be relegated to
the role of handmaid. For a new breed of thinkers freed form the constraints of
church dogma, such an arrangement was increasingly unattractive.
The Liberation of Reason
Like theology, philosophy also went through a
‘reformation’ of sorts. Somewhat like Luther who desired certainty of his salvation,
Rene Descartes (d. 1650) desired certainty of knowledge. Though generally
appreciative of his Jesuit education at La Fleche, he grew dissatisfied with
traditional knowledge. Only mathematics pleased him, because in it was the
quality of certainty, lacking in other studies.[10]
It was this dissatisfaction with traditional knowledge that would cause
Descartes to develop a t=method by which the whole of human knowledge could
attain the degree of certainty found in mathematics. Descartes set out to
develop a method based upon pure cognition without resorting to authorities of
any kind, whether that authority be Aristotle, Aquinas or even the apostle
Paul. He became convinced that he had “accepted many false opinions for true”
and had consequently formed many conclusions on doubtful principles. Descartes
endeavored to rid himself “of all the opinions I had adopted, and commencing
anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm
and abiding superstructure in the sciences.”[11]
For Descartes, therefore, universal doubt and the
sufficiency of unaided reason became the starting point for the discovery of
certain knowledge. This constituted a fresh start for philosophy, disentangling
itself from centuries of unfounded claims of authority. Descartes has been
called the father of modern philosophy, because it was he who sought to
reassert philosophy as an autonomous discipline. It could be argued, however,
that he had not really created a new foundation for philosophy at all, but what
was significant at this point is that he and his flowers believed that he had.
Like Copernicus who smashed the old cosmological paradigm of the Ptolemaic
system of Astronomy, Descartes initiated a ‘Copernican’ turn of his own: The
power of the autonomous Self to discover true and certain knowledge without
recourse to authoritative claims to truth.
From the premise of universal doubt in everything
including his own existence, Descartes came to the conclusion that his doubt
was evidence of cognition, and therefore, at some level he must exist. It was
from this conclusion that he drew his celebrated axiom: Cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am.[12]
From this axiom of personal existence and the existence of doubt, Descartes
reasoned, “I clearly saw that it was a greater perfection to know than to doubt.”[13]
He, therefore, concluded, that if the idea
of perfection existed in the mind at all, then it stands to reason that the idea of perfection must correlate to the
actual existence of perfection, and
if perfection actually exists, then God exists as the only perfect Being able
to create other beings. One can almost hear Anselm’s Ontological Argument, not
to mention Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument, echoing throughout Descartes
musings.
It is clear that regardless of Descartes’ intent, he was
never able to break free from the intellectual legacy of the Middle Ages or
even the ancients for that matter. All that he actually accomplished was simply
refurbishing the Medieval proofs for the existence of God.[14]
It has been argued, and rightly it seems, that Descartes contributed nothing
significant to intellectual history that was not thoroughly expounded during the
Middle Ages.[15]
But again from the standpoint of intellectual history the actual contribution was not as important as the perceived contribution. A generation of
philosophers would follow Descartes in a conscious attempt to think
independently of tradition and authority, the defining characteristic of
modernity. And unfortunately many would be far more successful than their predecessor.
Though Descartes may have contributed nothing
intellectually significant, particularly in regard to rational certainty for
the existence of God,
There is a sense in which Descartes represents a new departure. Descartes was interested in God not for His own sake, but for the world’s. God is invoked as a kind of deus ex machina to guarantee the validity of our thoughts about the world. Apart from that He remains eternally standing in the wings. It is not surprising that when later philosophers came along who shared Descartes’ assumptions but not his methods, they could dispose entirely of this unwanted prop.[16]
This evidences one the most telling characteristics not
only of the method of Descartes, but all methods of modernity: The dispensability of God. This
‘Copernican’ turn toward the Self, initiated by Descartes and coming to
fruition during the Enlightenment, epitomized Kant’s definition of
Enlightenment as: “Man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.” Immaturity he
said in 1784, “is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance
of another . . . Sapere Aude! ‘Have
the courage to use your own intelligence!’ is therefore the motto of the
Enlightenment.”[17]
Out of this new aggressive agenda, a whole new school of
thought would emerge, applying the new Cartesian philosophy to every segment of
human and divine learning. Benedict Spinoza (d. 1677) would apply it to
biblical interpretation and ethics, the disastrous effects of which would only
later be fully realized. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (d. 1716) would reapply
it to arguments for the existence of God resulting not in the traditional God
of Christian theism, but rather a monistic pantheistic impersonal god. Building
upon Descartes’ philosophical paradigm as well as the scientific paradigms of
Galileo and Bacon, Isaac Newton (d. 1727) would propound a system of physics
which would reduce the universe to a ‘closed system’ of mechanistic cause and effect
that excluded the very necessity of
God.[18]
Each advancement in the seventeenth century intellectual
agenda was among the first birth pangs of the exaltation of the autonomous
Self, the death of authority and eventually the death of God Himself. Though
historically removed from the Enlightenment by three hundred years, the modern
American Evangelical church has uncritically accepted much of this forbidden
fruit. Even while attempting to forge new approaches to counter the onslaught
of modernity’s attack on biblical authority and to appeal to the democratic
individualism of modern Americans, an entire generation of pastors and church
planters utilizing pragmatic marketing strategies have increasingly adopted the
assumptions of modernity, undermining the very biblical authority they had
originally sought to defend.[19]
As Michael Horton has observed, “The problem is, evangelical theology has
become less evangelical and more modern.”[20]
The reigning question asked by a multitude of professional church planters and
pastors has shifted from ‘What does God want?’ to ‘What do people want?’[21]
or ‘how can we make the message relevant to a fickle religious marketplace?’[22]
Such questions, of course, are fueled by a sincere desire
for church growth and reaching those in need of God, but what practical
importance does divine authority have when ‘what people want’ or ‘felt needs’
are given the priority? Furthermore, is God really needed at all or has He
simply been reduced to Descartes’ deus ex
machina that may be discarded when his services are no longer needed? Such
was the course of theological liberalism of the latter half of the nineteenth
century and first half of the twentieth, and sadly, the American Evangelical
church with its uncritical accommodation to modernity is traversing that same
course.[23]
The Rebel Consciousness of American Christianity
The Modern Impulse
When delivering the Gifford Lectures of 1923-33,
Archbishop William Temple indicated that the most disastrous day in European
history, if not Western history was the day that Rene Descartes locked himself
up in front of his stove, musing over what would become his Meditations.[24]
Temple of course, was speaking of Descartes’ agenda to develop a method that
would enable the autonomous Self to establish epistemological certainty
independent of any external authorities. This, he rightly contended, started a
whole new trend in European history toward individual self-consciousness as the
only sure starting point in philosophy. Temple went on, however, to lump Luther
together with Descartes as his spiritual counterpart. As many have pointed out
before, this equation of Luther and Descartes showed how little the Archbishop
understood Luther and the Reformers.[25]
When Luther was confronted by corrupt ecclesiastical authorities he took his
celebrated stand upon his individual conscience as it was held captive to the
Word of God. For Luther his individual conscience was not his authority. Rather
his authority was in the Scriptures.
As erroneous as William Temple’s assessment may be in the
context of European history, these two streams of thought, protestant
individualism and self-conscious rationalism, crossed paths and merged together
more than once on the American continent. In fact, it would not be an over
generalization to say that the whole of American intellectual and religious
thought is a less than orderly orchestration of these two similar but diverse
streams, even though few Americans are conscious of it.
One of the most insightful outside observers of the new
American nation was a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville. He visited the United
States in 1831 and afterward published a two volume account of his observations
entitled, Democracy in America, the
first in 1835 and the second in 1840. There were others who published similar
works—Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of
the Americans (1832) and Charles Dickens’ American Notes (1842)—describing their observations of the
fledgling republic, but neither did so with the wit and even prophetic
character of that found in Tocqueville.[26]
While writing on a wide range of his observations of American
culture, Tocqueville was particularly intrigued by the intellectual life, or in
some cases lack thereof, of Americans and spent a considerable amount of time
reflecting upon it. Commenting on the philosophical approach of the Americans,
he wrote, “Of all the countries of the world America is one in which the
precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.”[27]
The American nation, in spite of all of its diverse religious institutions, is first
and foremost a nation of the Enlightenment. But unlike Europe, early Americans
had little time to reflect on and engage the intellectual movements of the day,
spending the majority of their time literally hacking out an existence in the
new wild and untamed land. This is not to say that early Americans were unintelligent
or uneducated as Tocqueville himself recognized, “If he [observer] singles out
the learned, he will be astonished to find how few there are; but if he counts
the ignorant, the American people will appear to be the most enlightened in the
world.”[28]
Notwithstanding, the war for independence as well as unique social and economic
challenges drove the early Americans to non-traditional methods to solve the
problems they faced. This need for non-traditional methods would make Baconian
empiricism as well as Cartesianism important factors in American intellectual
life; traditional authorities provided little help in the face of the unique
challenges faced by early Americans. Describing Tocqueville’s assessment of
American attitudes towards traditional authorities, Roger Lundin writes,
According to Tocqueville,
citizens of a democracy distrust the past because their own relentless activity
breaks the links between generations and causes each new generation to lose
interest in the beliefs of its predecessors. As a result, the influence of “one
man’s mind over another’s” is severely limited in America, where citizens “do
not recognize any signs of incontestable greatness or superiority in any of
their fellows.” Unable to defer to the authority of others, Americans are
continually brought back to their own judgment as the most apparent and
accessible test of truth. Unwilling to accept anyone’s word as proof of
anything, each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis makes
the pretention to judge the world.[29]
In many ways this skepticism toward traditional
authorities, observed by Tocqueville, among early Americans can be traced in no
small part to the profound influence of the War for Independence. From the mid
1700’s to the 1830’s, the time frame in which Tocqueville did his observations,
Americans had fought two wars against the British, seeking to win their
political independence from what they saw as an abuse of authority in their
subjugation to England’s King George.
It would be inaccurate to conclude, however, that early
Americans were indifferent or hostile to all
authority. Most were deeply religious people with a profound devotion to the
Bible, as even Tocqueville recognized. It is important to remember, as Merle
Curti has pointed out, that in America, “the Christian tradition . . . was the
chief foundation stone of American intellectual development.”[30]
The Christian tradition occupied a place of special importance, not found in
other enlightened European countries, like France, because it alone served as
the unifying force amid the different classes, regions and ethnic groups that
inhabited the new world. Though many diverse religious groups with significant
doctrinal differences resided there, they all, with certain notable exceptions,
“shared a common Christian conception of human nature, of social relationships,
and of the nature of knowledge and beauty; all were substantially agreed on the
supernatural origin and destiny of man and the supernatural basis of the
universe itself.” For most Americans, “the Bible was their final authority on
matters of doctrine and the ultimate source of God’s revelation.”[31]
Notwithstanding, even before the revolution, cracks were
already forming in this foundation stone of American intellectualism. In an appeal
for universal tolerance for other religious groups, Roger Williams (d. 1683)
would advocate individual freedom in regard to religious belief. Williams,
himself a true Puritan, would argue that freedom of religious worship was a
human right and should not be infringed upon by other religious or state
institutions.[32]
This principle would be placed into practice in the colony of Rhode Island,
where the first expression of ‘Separation of Church and State’ was found in
pre-revolutionary America. In many ways Rhode Island would become a proto-type
of the United States. But another phenomenon that this arrangement inaugurated,
and perhaps more relevant for the present purpose, was the practice of
religious competition.[33]
It could be argued that the very principle of religious tolerance amid diverse
religious groups could only logically lead to religious competition. Of course,
with the arrival of the Quakers even Williams himself was tempted to break with
his former convictions.[34]
This move by Williams was not bad in itself. It was a
necessary development if the America experiment was ever to be successful, not
only in its religious institutions, but in its political institutions as well.
It must be remembered that pluralism is not a distinctively new phenomenon, nor
is it essentially undesirable. It was a reality experienced by Americans in the
earliest days of the budding republic. It also gave Americans a religious
freedom unheard of in any country in Europe, a freedom that many of their
forefathers sought when they first lest the old world. But more importantly, it
was the reality that found its theological expression in the Protestant
Reformation. Although Luther would have never followed Williams’ call for
religious freedom, it was an idea that grew out of the Reformer’s own
teachings. This Protestant Individualism, however, growing in the enlightened
soil of America would evolve in ways unrecognizable to the Reformers. The
transition from conscience being bound by the Word of God, to conscience being
bound by one’s own reason, while not explicitly articulated by Roger himself,
would in fact become a hallmark of American religious expression.[35]
Yet in the strangest of ironies, the church in America, living in the midst of
the fervor of political revolution, would be a willing participant in this
epochal transition.
The Antiestablishment Impulse
It has been a popular interpretation of historians to
view the period of the American Revolution as the “most irreligious period in
American history.” The majority of nineteenth and twentieth century historians
became thoroughly convinced that the Revolution saw the “lowest low-water mark
of the lowest ebb-tide of spiritual life in the history of the American
church.” These historians assert that after the Great Awakening of the
mid-eighteenth century, the vast majority of Americans simply lost interest in
religion only to be reawakened a few decades later in the second Great
Awakening.[36]
It is not impossible to make such a case, when once sees
the great decline in religious writing and the profusion of political rhetoric
during this time. It is also not unreasonable to assume that Americans, caught
up in the fervor of revolutionary passions, would turn their religious
fanaticism toward a common enemy the English crown. With the writings of such
notable enlightened individuals like Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen and Comte de
Volney, making Christianity the butt of dinner jokes, it is not at all
impossible to conclude that at least for the moment, the Enlightenment had
suppressed the religious passions of the American people. There was no end to
writings reaching out to popular audiences teaching the sufficiency of reason
and nature over and against revelation and the supernatural.
Yet the notion that Americans had suffered from religious
and spiritual recession during the period of the revolution is what Gordon Wood
calls “an optical illusion,” a consequence of historians “looking for religion
in all the wrong places.”[37]
One of the great blind sides of nineteenth and twentieth century historical
analysis of American religion during the Revolution is a failure to realize
that the decline in one form of religious expression may be paralleled by a
significant increase in another.
Nathan Hatch has pointed out that most conventional
contemporary religious histories “retain a bias toward elite churches.”
Institutions that were as or near the center of culture have been focused on to
the detriment of movements on the fringe of culture. This has caused “the most
dynamic and characteristic elements of Christianity during the time” to be
completely overlooked. As a result, this oversight has made generations of
historians unable to explain the decline of the traditional churches in the
early eighteenth century and the rise of the non-traditional churches in the
early nineteenth.[38]
In fact, even the designations first
and second Great Awakenings is
perhaps an evidence of this shortsightedness. Was there religious revival in
the mid-eighteenth century followed by a suppression of religious devotion,
only to be followed by a second revival in the early nineteenth century? It
seems that this may prove to be an inaccurate interpretation of American
religious history. While many of the original colonial churches experienced
significant declines during the years 1760 and 1790 (which helps explain the
popular notion that religious devotion had declined during this period), the
Baptists and Methodists saw a huge surge in the number of congregations during
the same period.
The Baptists grew from 94 congregations in 1760 to more
than 850 in 1790 and 1, 152 by 1795, becoming the single largest denomination
in America.[39]
The Methodists grew at the same time from no congregations in 1760 to over 700
by 1790, making them a strong rival to the older Congregational and
Presbyterian bodies.[40]
This mushroom of growth among non-traditional churches during the Revolutionary
period has led Stephan Marini to conclude that the period between 1760 and 1790
is “unquestionably the most important single religious development of what he
calls “the Revolutionary Revival.”[41]
Therefore, in the final analysis it may be more accurate to refer not to two
Great Awakenings, but one continuous revival beginning in the mid-eighteenth
century and lasting until the early nineteenth.
A relevant question that must be broached at this
juncture is: In what way are the religious revivals of the mid-eighteenth to
early nineteenth centuries related to the American Revolution? And more
importantly: In what way did this relationship contribute to the shift from
authority to the individual as the center of American religious expression?
Wood provides a general overview of some of the histories
that have attempted to find the links between the Great Awakening and the
American Revolution. In 1966 Alan Heimert contended that the mid-eighteenth
century “effusions of evangelical Christianity” would give rise to Jeffersonian
Democracy and American Nationalism. According to Heimert, the populist
evangelical preachers were the real force behind the American Revolution.[42]
Patricia Bonomi, in her book Under the Cope of Heaven, argued that in a world
where “religious orthodoxy and establishment were taken for granted, the
challenge of American dissenting Protestantism to the Anglican monarchy had to
be as much political as religious.”[43]
J.C.D. Clark offered an essentially religious interpretation of the American
Revolution in his book, The Language of
Liberty, 1660-1832. The unity of the early American colonists, according to
Clark, sprang from their common dissent against the Anglican monarchical
establishment, not by notions of mere political import.[44]
The majority of the partisan politics and trivial rebellions of the eighteenth
century were rooted in religious differences, making even the Revolution “the
last great war of religion in the western world.”[45]
Regardless of the relative merits or demerits of these
seminal works, they each evidence the growing interest in finding the
intellectual links between the religious revivals of the eighteenth century and
the American Revolution. Nathan hatch has observed that from the 1960’s to the
1990’s, “no single issue has attracted more talent than that of linking the
Great Awakening and the Revolution.”[46]
This acute, and at times imaginative, fascination with early colonial political
and religious history has led more than a few historians to find America’s
future identity more in the eighteenth century revivals than any other single
source.[47]
It is, therefore, important to ascertain as clearly as
possible the influence that the Great Awakening had on the American Revolution
as well as the effects of the Revolution on the unique character of American
Christianity. It seems that the contention held by some that the Great
Awakening caused the Revolution is at
best an overstatement and at worse creative history. On the other hand,
however, to deny that there is a relationship is to ignore important religious
developments in colonial history. To a people experiencing expanding trade,
surging populations, as well as significant changes in social relationships,
religion would be an important source of higher meaning and social connection.
The same factors would also contribute to the unsettling
of traditional hierarchies, like the Anglican, Congregational and Presbyterian churches.
The exploding population and changing market relationships in Chesapeake, for
instance, were clearly related to the religious revivals that took place there.
Growing numbers of ethnically and religiously diverse merchants and artisans
found themselves increasingly separated from traditional paternal and patronage
connections. As early as 1750, a pluralistic society was in full development
that would eventually threaten traditional established churches. Many would
leave the Church of England, with its high style, luxurious living and
preoccupation with rank and class, and form new evangelical communities with
populist appeal. In the decades after the 1740’s New Light Presbyterians,
Separate Baptists, and finally Methodist would win vast numbers of converts
from the common people of Chesapeake.[48]
Between the years 1769 and 1774 Baptist congregations in Virginia increased
from seven to fifty-four.[49]
The events taking place in Virginia were representative of
what was taking place throughout the colonies. The Revolutionary years were far
from irreligious. It could be argued that religious devotion was stronger
during the revolutionary period than ever before. In fact, the number of
congregations from 1770 to 1790 more than doubled and even surpassed the
overall growth of the population. Yet the religious affections of the American
people were no longer attached to the traditional European churches of their
homelands, but to the new populist evangelical churches.
In spite of that, as vibrant as Christian belief may have
been a paramount shift had taken place. The evangelists of the mid-eighteenth
century, calling for the necessity of a ‘new birth,’ a personal experience of
salvation over and against mere ecclesiastical affirmations and a vigorous
egalitarianism would be the chief factors in undermining the social and
ecclesiastical orders of the day. By challenging these unifying orders,
revivalists destroyed the traditional confessional churches and increasingly
cut the people off from traditional religious bonds. As time went on, the
evangelical revivalists would become more independent, more localized and more
populist. Formally, trained clergy would become more and more irrelevant as
lay-preachers armed with only the gospel, would thunder out their message in categories
and idioms that were experiential rather than theological. Their audiences were
often encouraged to trust only in “self-examination” and private judgments and
the “absolute necessity for every person to act singly . . . as if there was
not another creature upon the Earth.”[50]
The full weight of the people’s religious attachments now rested clearly on themselves and their individual decisions.[51]
Hatch has observed that “the democratic orientation of American Christianity,
audience centered, intellectually open to all, organizationally fragmented, and
popularly led, meant that the church prospered in this vast expanse of land”
and with “exuberance and novelty, in word and song, they reshaped
Christianity’s solemn message in idioms that people cherished as their own.”[52]
The Antiauthoritarian Impulse
For whatever positive effects the religious revivals of
the eighteenth century may have had on the spiritual lives of early Americans,
it is clear that it also constituted a massive rebellion against traditional
authority and eventually to all authority. The twin streams of Cartesian
self-consciousness and Protestant individualism had not only crossed streams in
revolutionary era Christianity, but had, in fact merged, giving birth to a new modern form of Christianity. This
wholesale challenge to established ecclesiastical authorities would prepare
Americans for the subsequent political challenge that would become the American
Revolution. In a sense Whig political ideology in Revolutionary America was as
much religious as it was political. The people’s hostility toward the Anglican
monarchy was easily transferred to the English monarchy with even preachers
becoming powerful rhetorical forces in the cause of political freedom.
By the end of the Revolution, decades of revivalist
preaching would not only change the way people saw ecclesiastical authority,
but it would increasingly reshape the theological character of American
Christianity. While Whig ideology was as religious as it was political,
American religious beliefs would become guided more by political and social
realities, than be established religious truths. Preachers from the New
Divinity movement. For the most part pristine Edwardsean Calvinists, would
gradually modify their Calvinism in accord with the political principles of the
American Revolution. Calvinism, as embodied in the ‘five points’ did not sit
well with Americans newly freed from external political and ecclesiastical
tyrannies. They had a particular animosity toward the doctrine of ‘unconditional
election’ as an outright assault on the American conviction that “each man had
the inalienable right to secure happiness as a result of his own efforts.”[53]
And the antidemocratic nature of the doctrine of ‘limited atonement’ was hated
greater still. If all men were created equal, it became difficult for Americans
to believe that God would restrict the merits of Christ’s death to only a
select group. “The egalitarian strain emerging from the Revolution,” writes
Noll, “could make no sense of such a wanton infringement upon natural rights.”[54]
Whether it be the doctrines of Total Depravity,
Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, or Perseverance
of the Saints; the God of Calvinism looked far too much like the irresponsible
power against which the colonies revolted. “Americans,” wrote Tocqueville, have
a tendency to “see authority as it has been, rather than what is could become.”[55]
As a result, the sovereignty of God in Calvinism was increasingly displaced by
the individual liberty of Whig political ideology. In the minds of Americans,
Calvinism simply did not fit with their social and political experiences. This
dissatisfaction with traditional Calvinism would make theological Arminianism
as far more appealing alternative.
It is important to remember that Arminianism was not
simply adopted overnight. It had been alive and well throughout the Great
Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, being the theology of choice among
Anglicans, some Baptists and the majority of John Wesley’s lay-evangelists.
However, it would be inaccurate to conclude that Arminianism won the favor of
the American people because it made better sense out of the biblical teaching
on salvation and evangelism. Rather, Arminianism won the day primarily because
it more readily fit the demands of the Whig
idea of liberty.[56]
That coupled with the Jacksonian democracy of the early half of the nineteenth
century, would impart to American Christianity a populist impulse unseen as any
other time or place in the history of Christianity. Yet it is equally important
to note that the Arminianism embraced by Americans was far from the Arminianism
espoused by the Wesley’s or even Arminius himself. This new form was decidedly
modern in orientation, bearing characteristics more in accord with the
Enlightenment and its autonomy of Self, than traditional Arminianism per se.
Furthermore, American Christianity would increasingly
view the nature of conversion mechanistically, as a ‘closed system’ of
techniques designed to evoke particular religious responses. As a result, by
the early nineteenth century evangelists would become more preoccupied with
methodology than authority. One needs look no further than the nineteenth
century evangelist Charles Finney to find evidence for this. Finney, embracing
a mechanistic view of conversion, employed psychologically manipulative tricks
and techniques to illicit a positive response to his evangelistic appeals. In
fact, Finney himself rejected not only Calvinistic understandings of
conversion, but much of Arminian understandings as well. Much of the theology
of post-Finney evangelicalism said little or nothing of original sin,
substitutionary atonement, the sovereignty of God, or even prevenient grace.[57]
By the end of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth century, American
Christianity, and particularly American Evangelicalism would become marked by a
conscious preoccupation with methodology and techniques designed to elicit
religious sentiments without clear theological understandings of the nature of
conversion or its supernatural origins, being, in the final analysis, clearly
modern and secular.
To early Americans of the Revolutionary generation and
the generations that followed, salvation—traditionally thought of as a work of
God alone—came to be viewed primarily in terms of individual decision and
freedom from external coercion. The logic of the Protestant individualism of
Luther and the Reformers, always maintaining a tension between divine
sovereignty and human responsibility, was drawn out further in America than
ever before. The power and self-determination of the individual, spurred on by
an army of evangelists, had become democratized. The result of these new
emphases gives rise not only to a democratized understanding of truth, but also
to a privatization of authority
itself. In the new American nation the stage was set for the important
transition into romanticism; the rise of the new therapeutic culture and the marketability of religion.
Summary of Chapter One
As has been demonstrated above, the ‘Turn Toward the
Sovereign Self’ coupled with the antiauthoritarian mindset of Revolutionary era
Americans produced an intellectual environment in early America that spawned an
entirely new conception of the role of divine authority in the life of the
American church. As early as the 1820’s this was clearly evident to a host of
outside observers, the most notable of which was the French philosopher Alexis
de Tocqueville. With the role of authority diminished, new indigenous
congregations were able to peel away vast numbers of members from the older
established congregations with the often undefined mantra “you must be born
again.” As the older established churches declined, the indigenous churches
multiplied at a staggering rate. This in turn would result in religious
competition among the new churches which would lead to further diminishing the
role of biblical authority in matters of both faith and practice, and an
increasing preoccupation with measureable results as ends in themselves. With the
rise of post-revivalist developments like the New Divinity Movement of the
mid-nineteenth century and the incursion of German historical-criticism,
biblical authority came to occupy a place of little importance in nineteenth
century American Christianity. Thus the die was cast for the wholesale
rejection of biblical authority and the popularization of American theological
liberalism.
Though modern American Evangelicalism has no direct
relationship with theological liberalism, the conceptual paradigm it has
historically utilized, as it relates to the role of biblical authority, is
strikingly similar. Both as a matter of practice, often place priority on the
perceived needs and desires of the individual as the key determinant for the
mission of the church. Thus biblical authority is decentralized both
theologically and practically, and the individual—his needs, desires or
tastes—becomes the new locus of authority. In the following chapters, this
conclusion will be further demonstrated.
[1]
Michael Scott Horton, Made in America:
The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism (Eugene: Wipf & Stock
Publishers, 1998). Nathan O. Hatch, The
Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989). George Marsden, Fundamentalism and
American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Mark Noll, David Bebbington and George
Rawlyk eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative
Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and
Beyond, 1770-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). John
Woodbridge, Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, The
Gospel in America: Themes in the Story of America’s Evangelicals (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1979). David F. Wells, No
Place for Truth; or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1992).
[2]
David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The
Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1994), 67.
[3] Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882,
1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-82.
[4] It
could be argued, however, that the ‘war’ actually began with Duns Scotus and
William of Ockham, reasserting that religion was first and foremost a matter of
faith and not reason. Though it seems that Luther ultimately rejected the
Nominalism of Ockham, it no doubt constributed to his rejection of the Thomism
prevalent at the time (See Steven Ozment's The
Age of Reform 1250-1550: An intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval
and Reformation Europe [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980], 235-39).
[5]
Anselm, “Proslogion,” A Scholastic
Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, ed. Eugene R. Fairweather (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1956), 73-74.
[6]
Samuel E. Stumpf, Philosophy: History and
Problems. 2nd Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 188.
[7]
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 335-41.
[8]
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion Book 2, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989),
238-47.
[9]
Francis A. Schaeffer, “Escape from Reason” in The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990),
207-74.
[10]
Ronald N. Stromberg, An Intellectual
History of Modern Europe. 2nd Edition (New Jersey: Prentice
Hall, 1975), 50.
[11]
Rene Descartes, “Discourses on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and
Seeking Truth in the Sciences” in The
Rationalists (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 112.
[12]
Ibid. 63. It should be noted, however, that Descartes was by no means the first
post-Renaissance thinker to advocate universal skepticism as a starting point
to epistemological certainty. This was being advocated in one form or another
prior to Descartes’ Meditations.
Approximately 60 years before, Michel de Montaigne published the first
full-fledged humanist philosophy entitled the Essais. In his essay, the Apology
of Raimond Sebond, Montaigne makes a persuasive case for the merits of
classical skepticism as a way to escape the throes of presumptuous dogmatism
(see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The
Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: Univerity of Chicago Press, 1990),
36-42.
[13]
Ibid. 64.
[14]
Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian
Faith: An Introduction to the Main Thinkers and Schools of Thought from the
Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Tyndale Press, 1969), 52.
[15]
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 589.
[16]
Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith,
52.
[17]
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” trans. Carl J. Friedrich, in The Philosophy of Kant, ed. Carl J. Friedrich
(New York: Modern Library, 1949), 132, 137.
[18]
It is important to note that this was not Newton’s intent. He himself was a
Christian man well known for his piety and orthodoxy. In fact, he had come
under intense criticism later in life, because of his religious devotion and
interests.
[19]
John Hannah, “Evangelicalism, Conversion, and the Gospel: Have We Sold Our
Heritage for Relevance?” in The Coming
Evangelical Crisis (Chicago: Moody Press, 1996), 155. Pragmatism has been variously defined, but essentially it is
contends that practical consequences constitute
the essential criterion in determining meaning, truth, or value. Therefore,
pragmatic methods are thoroughly modern and secular. Once pragmatism is
embraced, questions of divine authority or even God for that matter become
useless. Pragmatism has had an enormously negative impact on preaching. “If a
given text does not have an immediate practical application, it is not
relevant” says a generation of pastors and church planters.
[20] Michael
Horton, Beyond Culture Wars (Chicago:
Moody Press, 1994), 214.
[22]
George Barna, Marketing the Church: What
They Never Told You about Church Growth (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1988),
26.
[23]
David F. Wells, No Place for Truth,
301.
[24]
William Temple, Nature, Man and God
(London: Macmillian, 1934), 57.
[25]
Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith,
52-53.
[26]
Daniel J. Boorstin, “Introduction to the Vintage Classics Edition,” in Democracy in America (New York: Vintage
Classics, 1990), vii.
[27]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, vol. 2, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1969), 429.
[28]
Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
315.
[29]
Roger Lundin, The Culture of
Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1993), 105.
[30]
Merle Curti, The Growth of American
Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 3.
[31]
Ibid. 4.
[32]
Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity
in the United States (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 60. It should be
pointed out that Roger Williams did not argue for religious tolerance for its
own sake. Nor was he attempting to guard the free exercise of government
without the coercion from religion. Roger Williams was first and foremost a
Puritan with an overwhelming desire for a pure church. He believed that no true
church should have formal association with the unregenerate. He had become
disillusioned by the corruption of the church by the state and advocated their
separation. Notwithstanding, this does not mean that he had no opinions about
government. The charter he drafted for the colony of Rhode Island clearly
delineated government by the consent of the governed. (See George Brown
Tindall’s America: A Narrative History
[New York: W. W. Norton & Company, q984], 64-65 and Mark Noll’s Christians in the American Revolution
[Washington DC: Christian University Press, 1977], 56.).
[33]
Paul Johnson, A History of the American
People (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 50.
[34] Ibid.
[35]
Roger Williams, however, was not the only freethinker to challenge the status
quo of Massachusetts. Anne Hutchinson would challenge the leaders of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in what would become known as the Antinomian
Controversy. In her home, she argued that the mere fact of obedience to the law
of Moses (as well as that of Massachusetts) was no real indicator that a person
was really a Christian. She argued that because a true believer possessed the
Holy Spirit, he was not bound to the demands of the law. While Mrs.
Hutchinson’s views were subversive to the social structure of Puritan
Massachusetts, they were not unbiblical. She was simply repeating what her
pastor, John Cotton, had taught her about the gift of free grace, not to
mention the teachings of the Apostle Paul. Her fatal mistake, however, would be
her insistence that the Holy Spirit had communicated with her directly. This
unwise move would lead to her eventual banishment from Massachusetts. A
generation later the New Light turned Baptist preacher, Isaac Backus, would
draw heavily from Roger Williams’ notion of religious freedom from civic
government control in his tract, An
Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty against the Oppression of the
Present Day (1773). In it he set out the principles dividing civic and
religious spheres: “God has appointed two kinds of government in the world
which are distinct in their nature and ought never be confounded together, one
of which is his sole prerogative to determine by his own laws what his worship
shall be, who shall minister it, and how they shall be supported, so it is
evident that this prerogative has been, and still is, encroached upon our
land.” In William G. McLoughlin, ed., Isaac
Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1968), 312, 317.
[36]
John W. Chandler, “The Communitarian Quest for Perfection,” in A Miscellany of American Christianity,
ed. Stuart C. Henry (Durham, N.C., 1963), 58; Douglas H. Sweet, “Church
Vitality and the American Revolution: Historiographical Consensus and Thoughts
Toward a New Perspective,” Church History,
45 91976), 342, 344.
[37]
Gordon S. Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout
and D.G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 177.
[38]
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of
American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 221-22.
[39]
O.K. Armstrong, The Baptists in America
(New York: Doubleday, 1979), 119.
[40]
See Frank Baker, From Wesley to Asbury:
Studies in Early American Methodism (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press,
1976).
[41]
Stephan A. Marini, The Revolutionary
Revival in America (unpublished paper), cited by Wood in “Religion and the
American Revolution,” 188.
[42]
Alan Heimert, Religion and the American
Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1966).
[43]
Patricia U. Monomi, Under the Cope of
Heaven: Religion, Society, and politics in Colonial America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), cited in Wood’s “Religion and the American
Revolution,” 178.
[44]
J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty,
1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo- American World
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[45] Ibid.
305.
[46]
Hatch, The Democratization of American
Christianity, 221.
[47] Ibid.
Hatch lists examples of American characteristics rooted in the Great Awakening
found by recent scholarship: American exceptionalism, nationalism, and
individualism; the language, style, and organizational form of lower-class
yearning and protest; and, most decidedly, the advent of American democracy.
[48]
Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” 181.
[49]
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross:
The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997), 13.
[50]
Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven,
158-160.
[51]
Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” 182.
[52]
Hatch, The Democratization of American
Christianity, 209.
[53]
Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American
Revolution (Washington DC: Christian University Press, 1977), 171.
[54]
Ibid., 172.
[55]
Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
413.
[56]
Noll, Christians in the American
Revolution, 172-173. Noll provides a helpful explanation of how Whig
ideology contributed to the demise of Calvinism: “The attention which the
Revolution had called to the concept of freedom altered the definition of this
idea that had prevailed in the largely Calvinistic colonies. Freedom in the
Revolutionary generation came to mean primarily freedom from something—from tyranny, oppression, and the arbitrary exercise
of power. Freedom in the earlier Calvinistic sense of the word had implied
freedom for something—for fulfillment
and hope, found only in being overmastered by God. The change was subtle, and
it was obscured due to the fact that the single word ‘freedom’ was used to express
two related, but also contrasting ideas. The crisis atmosphere of the
revolutionary period further obscured the two senses of ‘freedom’ and greatly
facilitated the process in the American churches by which the Whig idea of
liberty came to replace the Calvinistic concept.”
[57] J. E.
Smith, “The Theology of Charles Finney: A System of Self-Reformation,” Trin J 13 (1992): 75-77.
No comments:
Post a Comment