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4. THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC GETS UP AND RUNNING

AMERICA'S ONGOING SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

CONTENTS

America "wanders" again spiritually (early 1800s)

The rekindling of America's Christian fires

Some spiritual innovations

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 128-135.
AMERICA "WANDERS" AGAIN SPIRITUALLY (EARLY 1800s)

For a number of Americans – located especially in the American East – a comfortable small-town life (dependent on an economy other than just agriculture) seemed to have a natural peace and prosperity to it.  Not surprisingly, life took on a more "rational" character – stepping the people back from their previous Christian spirituality.  Americans, especially among the more leisured classes, found themselves less interested in what God might do in their lives and more interested in what they might achieve for themselves under this more rational social realm clearly emerging around them.

They did not abandon Christianity – because being Christian was understood to be the same as being "civilized."  But the authentic faith component was once again disappearing.  Its place was being taken by a rational morality – a key part of Enlightenment Humanism – that was sweeping intellectual circles once again, in America as well as in Europe.  Such Humanism usually claimed the moral teachings of Scripture, especially the teachings of Jesus, as its Christian foundation.  But in the end no such connection was absolutely necessary, for these were self-evident truths that presumably any rational person would understand as the foundation of any life well lived (French revolutionaries had gone so far as to disdain even this slender Christian connection with their utopian Idealism).

Once again (as in the late 1600s and early 1700s) "Enlightened" Americans of the early 1800s were convinced that Human Reason was vastly superior to the pre-scientific superstitions about life held by Americans who were intellectually unable to shake off the silly old beliefs about people walking on water and raising the dead back to life.  Consequently, they were deeply disdainful of those who clung to a religion drawn from a supposedly darker past.

They failed to notice that their new Rational Humanism as a substitute religion was no newer than the story of Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden, or the long Biblical narrative about the repeated wandering of ancient Israel away from the counsel and discipline of God – and its tragic results.  And America itself had already evidenced this same occurrence a century earlier.  But they had learned nothing from such historical experience.

Christian Unitarians.  Among those moving in this Unitarian (or even Deist) direction were a number of Congregationalist pastors – concentrated heavily in the Boston area.   In 1825 over a hundred of these pastors – mostly from New England – came together to form the American Unitarian Association – in part to undo the Calvinism that had earlier formed the foundations of the Congregationalist Churches of the region.  Their goal was to bring Christianity more in line with the recent discoveries of science – and with simple Humanist logic that found much of the traditional Biblical claims of Christianity and its miraculous powers to be completely unbelievable.

Once again (again as in the late 1600s/early 1700s) the "more-enlightened" Christians were certain that in making these adjustments, they were strengthening the foundations of the Christian religion that underlay a fast-developing American society and culture.

Jefferson's Unitarianism.   An individual to figure big in this rising Humanism/Unitarianism was former President Thomas Jefferson.  In 1822 Jefferson wrote his friend Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse attacking the foundations of traditional Christianity, pointing out in particular the ancient apologist Athanasius and the more recent Calvin as "false shepherds" and "usurpers of the Christian name"

teaching a counter religion made up of the deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet. Their blasphemies have driven thinking men into infidelity.

In that same letter Jefferson (who had compiled an updated Bible eliminating all the miracle stories and focusing only on the moral teachings of Scripture) professed that the simple doctrines of Jesus (to love the only God with all one's heart and one's neighbor as oneself) had been perverted by adding Platonizing doctrine (Jefferson did not like Plato very much either) which he claimed – quite incorrectly – was most evident in Calvinist dogma.  But he was confident that such dark days of primitive Christianity were becoming a thing only of the past.  Thus he states:

I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.

For those living in the comfort of a secure existence, such enlightened Humanism seemed to be beyond all serious question as the true path to knowledge and happiness.  This was the true religion of any enlightened person after all.

The Transcendentalists.   Another, somewhat later (1840s), example of this development was that of the Transcendentalists – who pursued the quest for God – not through the way of Christ, but rather as a higher order of "pure thought."  They sought, through mental discipline, to be broad in their intellectual reach, encompassing a variety of refined efforts to embrace God both in a oneness with nature and a sense of reaching beyond even the natural.  They sought to be as fully human as possible, so as to find God as fully as possible.  They too tended toward lofty communalism in the hope of reaching beyond the coarse nature of selfishness and sin, to find a more perfect human harmony.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Amos Bronson Alcott (father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) were neighbors in Concord Massachusetts who set the pace of Transcendentalism.  Thoreau attempted to find serenity in two years (1845-1847) of relative isolation in the woods at Walden Pond, Alcott in his experimental school in Concord, and Emerson in his many philosophical lectures and writings.

The earthier intelligentsia.   But for those less comfortable, where life's dangers were not guaranteed to be manageable, where life could suddenly take a violent turn (hunger, disease, Indian massacre) such Humanist rationality seemed as absurd to hardened Realists as a personal trust in a God of miracles seemed absurd to the Humanists.  Indeed, even Nathaniel Hawthorne, who once was a neighbor of the Concord Transcendentalists, eventually became something of an anti-Transcendentalist, tending to delve more into the darkness of the religious ethical issues of his era in his stories The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).  Likewise, Edgar Allan Poe could be just as abrasive in his dislike of the romantic optimism of Transcendentalism.

THE REKINDLING OF AMERICA'S CHRISTIAN FIRES

However ... the highly individualistic but also highly isolated life on the part of those Americans that lived well away from the comforts of the East produced among Westerners a hunger for personal meaning within the context of community – membership in larger society being a rare but well-appreciated commodity.  Most frequently this took the form of huge gatherings whenever a local Christian revivalist appeared in the region.  Thousands would turn out to spend a week at an improvised encampment listening to an array of preachers, singing and dancing, shouting and fainting, and having a thoroughly good time.

Particularly prominent in this matter were the Baptists and Methodists (the latter a denomination that had only recently come over to America from Wesley's England) – both groups very different in style from the sober worship styles of the Congregationalists of New England, the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies and the Episcopalians of the South.  Unlike the latter groups whose pastors generally came to the pulpit by way of years of college and seminary training, the preachers of this newer group of Christians were simply common folks who received a call from God to take up preaching directly, without having to go through all the formal schooling of the older Christian denominations.

These new preachers fit more closely the democratic mood of the Jacksonian era and were able to relate better to life on the frontier – where they gathered huge numbers of spiritually hungry Americans to their flocks with their frequent open-air preaching.

Francis Asbury – and the frontier revival.   Francis Asbury had been one of the two Methodist pastors who had remained behind in colonial America when, at the outbreak of the American rebellion in 1776, Methodism's founder John Wesley called his pastors (part of the Anglican episcopal system and thus answerable to Wesley as their bishop) back to England.  But after the war Wesley ordained Asbury as one of his two American superintendents (essentially a Methodist bishop) – and Asbury began to take up revivalist preaching alongside his supervisory duties (1784-1816).

Asbury's travels and preaching on the widening American frontier by becoming himself one of his Methodist "circuit riders" soon became legendary:  in the face of cold, heat, hunger and angry Indians, he traveled some 275,000 miles to deliver 16,000 sermons – helping to increase the size of the Methodist denomination from 1,200 to 214,000 members and bringing 700 ordained preachers to join him in this work.

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and AME Zion churches.   A similar revival was to come among America's free Black population, most notably in urban America ... most notably in the American North. In Philadelphia Richard Allen and David Coker (inspired by Asbury) set up a number of new Methodist churches, and were able to call their first national conference in 1816, the startup of another large American denomination.  Meanwhile in New York City, James Varick was able to do much the same in bringing an expanding Zion church into the Methodist union.  The two Black denominations would compete quite successfully in bringing the free-Black world more widely and intimately into Christianity.

Thus it was that the Methodists – and the independently-operating Baptists – grew to be the most numerous Christian groups in America.

Finney – and the "Second Great Awakening."   But some of the Presbyterians also saw the challenge and took up a similar path.  But as in the 1740s, this would create a deep division within the denomination between the New School, supporting the revivalist trend, and the Old School, disdainful of the emotionalism of this trend.

Among these Presbyterian New School revivalists was Charles Grandison Finney, who in New York during the mid-1820s to mid-1830s developed a quite precise revival style that others would pattern their own revivals after.  Indeed, upstate or rural New York became the scene of wave after wave of revivals such as his – so much so that Finney himself termed the region the "burned-over district."[1]

A more favorable term for the same event was "The Second Great Awakening" – actually a period of Christian revival that began slowly after 1790, gathered momentum in the early 1800s, and reached something of a peak in the 1830s and 1840s, slowing down finally in the late 1850s.

Christian-mission societies.   But even Old School Christianity had its own way of contributing to the "awakening" sweeping America.  Notable in this regard was the growth of a large number of interdenominational Christian societies that sought to set Christianity to the task of taking on social problems – to provide Christian answers to such issues as poverty, illiteracy, and just plain ignorance of the Christian gospel.  Working even across denominational lines (Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, etc.), Christians were very active in forming such groups as The American Bible Society (to help every American family find itself in possession of a Bible), the American Sunday School Union (to develop Biblical literacy among the children of all social classes), the American Tract Society (to put in the hands of everyone the simplest explanation of and call to Christianity), the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the American Temperance League (both fighting particular social evils).  These volunteer organizations became a vital part of the American social-cultural dynamic that developed in accompaniment with America's spread across the North American continent.

Christian colleges.   From the time of the Puritans' early settlement in America, higher education was a matter of vital necessity, not only in training the pastors who would be expected to lead the Christian communities the Puritans were establishing but also in training others who would be entering such fields as the law, business and finance, and teaching – all vocations greatly vital to the self-sustaining life of their communities. And even the South caught on to the importance of founding new educational institutions. Thus Christian America founded Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, Princeton, Georgetown, New Brunswick and Andover Theological Seminaries – as well as colleges such as Mount Holyoke, designed to give women the same opportunity at a higher education.  In fact, in the period between the founding of the colonies and the mid-1800s, over 500 colleges were founded by America's various denominations.  This too was a key part of Christian America's larger mission to be a Light to the Nations.

[1]Actually much the same level of activity was going on elsewhere, especially along the American frontier to the West.  But Finney's "burned over district" did indeed produce some very exceptional religious developments.

SOME SPIRITUAL INNOVATIONS

Perfectionism.   In any case, behind all this religious "awakening" was something very much of the spirit of the Jacksonian times.  Americans had a strong sense of personal destiny – an urgency to accomplish some greater work, to move forward, to fulfill some nobler purpose in life.  Life was viewed as a challenge, one faced with many obstacles, many of them deficiencies in the people themselves, personal sins that needed cleansing, that required some act of purification that would clear the way for them to move toward some personal victory.  Christian revivals offered exactly just such an opportunity for "getting things right with God."

Millennialism.[2]  Empowering this activity was an abiding sense that history was about to find completion in the form of the second coming of Christ and his final judgment of all people, saints and sinners – a widespread sentiment of the times due in part to the horrible 1837-1841 Depression which undercut severely the American belief that life moved forward along largely logical lines.  Surely this grand catastrophe pointed to the ultimate and thus final judgement of God – in the form of the long-awaited coming of Christ as the supreme judge of life on earth.

Consequently, many Americans came easily to the conclusion that they were approaching the millennium described in Scripture (Revelation) in which all must be made perfect in preparation for that coming of Christ.  Sinful behavior needed to be corrected, both for society as well as the individual.  Perfectionism or social reform was thus urgent.  The institution of slavery in particular needed to be abolished – immediately.  Alcoholism, which was rampant on the Frontier and in the workshops back East, needed to be curbed.  Caring for the poor became a priority.  Injustices of whatever variety needed to be addressed – the treatment of women being one of the issues taken up by a new generation of feminists.

Social experiments accompanied this mood – in which varieties of utopian programs were put in place to answer the challenge of the times.  Most of these failed miserably.  But failure did not seem to discourage others from trying.

William Miller – and the Seventh-Day Adventists.  One group (the "Millerites") that survived failure were the followers of the Baptist preacher William Miller, who gathered on hilltops and rooftops in March, again in April and finally in October of 1844 in anticipation of the rapture, when they expected to greet Jesus as he came to earth.  A "Great Disappointment" occurred when Jesus failed to show up on schedule, causing his following to break up.

But others picked up Miller's millennial vision, importantly the female prophet and religious writer Ellen G. White, who cultivated a huge group of followers that would eventually take the name "Seventh Day Adventists."  They took up perfectionist ways in the avoidance of alcohol, meat, and other foods, advocating instead vegetarianism.[3]   From this group would eventually come such famous breakfast food producers as Kellogg and Post.

Joseph Smith and the Mormons.   But perhaps the most amazing phenomenon to come out of the burned-over district of New York during this period were the Mormons or Latter-Day Saints, a group that followed the prophecies and teachings of Joseph Smith.  As a teenager (early 1820s) Smith had a number of visions, the most important being a visit by the Angel Moroni, who he claimed directed him to a place where he uncovered a book of golden plates on which were written in some form of "reformed Egyptian" the story of the ancient Jews and of Christ and his visit to America.  Using a special technique, he translated what he saw written there by ancient authors (Mormon being chief among them) – which in 1830 Smith published in English translation as the Book of Mormon.[4]  That same year he formed his first congregation as the Church of Christ, teaching his followers the new doctrines, and then sending them west to spread the new revelation as "Latter-Day Saints."

Ultimately, like the Puritans of old, Smith wanted to found a community that could live to the high principle of (his version) of the Christian religion – and moved with thousands of followers first to Ohio, then to Missouri, and – being driven from there – he and 8,000 of his followers moved across the Mississippi River back to Illinois.  But they ran into trouble with the locals there as well, and in 1844 he and his brother were killed by an angry mob.

Smith's movement splintered into several distinct factions – although Brigham Young was able to take the lead of the largest of these factions – and move them west to Utah (1847) where they could then build their new Zion without upsetting any neighbors.  But eventually even there, conflict would erupt from time to time between the Mormons and those who eventually came West to build homes and farms of their own.

[2]A belief that the coming of Christ will usher in a 1,000-year Golden Age, a long period of time prior to the Day of Judgment, and the establishment of a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Actually, there was something of a big divide within this community of Christian Evangelicals or Millennialists.  "Progressive" Christians tended to be "Postmillennialist" in believing that the thousand-year reign of Christ (the Millennium) would come only after a fully successful conversion of the world had taken place, a matter requiring ever greater effort of Christians to bring Christianity and its civilizing qualities to the world.  The "Premillennialists" on the other hand believed that only a time of great tribulation (not human progress) would announce the arrival of the Millennium – requiring of the faithful spiritual vigilance, rather than the progressive social works of the Postmillennialists.

[3]Vegetarianism was a common trend among the millennialists, who believed that meat-eating made man a brutal beast.

[4]The book states that an ancient tribe of Israel had managed to get themselves to the New World, as well as Jesus himself, who appeared to the Indians soon after his Resurrection, producing a period of exceptional peace among the Indians lasting several centuries.



Go on to the next section:  Gathering Storm Clouds

  Miles H. Hodges