The New Old-Time Religion
Evangelicals defy easy labels. Here's why--and why their numbers are growing
In 1729, Edwards inherited the Northampton, Mass., pulpit of his widely revered grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. But from the beginning he felt uneasy about his grandfather's lax requirements for church membership. For that reason, Edwards found special value in the revival that he instigated in and around Northampton in 1734. His published account of this spiritual renewal became a major catalyst of the First Great Awakening of the 1740s, but Edwards had a more personal reason to value the 1734 revival: It provided an alternative means of establishing the spiritual authenticity of his congregants. In his later Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Edwards would caution, however, that intense experience alone was insufficient, even dangerous, unless accompanied by reason, a close regard for Scripture, and a disciplined and regular church life. Eventually, many of his own parishioners began to chafe under Edwards's strictness, and they finally rebelled and dismissed him from his post. Unbowed, Edwards joined an Indian missionary community in Stockbridge, Mass., and for seven years, while preaching to the Mohawks, penned some of his greatest works. In 1757, Edwards accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was then called. But soon after his installation, his life was cut short by a smallpox inoculation that went bad.
Excesses. Had Edwards lived to witness the birth and early years of the American republic, he would have seen the excesses of the First Great Awakening become even more pronounced in the Second Great Awakening. Along with the demographic explosion that saw America grow from 2 1/2 million in 1776 to 20 million in 1845 came a huge expansion and transformation of the religious landscape, with the number of ministers per capita more than tripling. But these ministers belonged mainly to upstart and aggressively evangelizing churches, the Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and assorted African-American churches of those and other denominations. All these new churches shared Edwards's conviction that revival was a central part of the religious experience. But all were populist, democratic, antielitist, and even anti-institutional to an extreme that would have horrified Edwards. This democratic revolution in American Protestantism established the lastingly populist character of evangelical Christianity. And its broad, folksy appeal is probably the single greatest reason that America became and remained the most religious of all modern industrial nations.
But Edwards was almost uncanny in anticipating how enthusiastic religion could go astray. Above all, he saw how certain developments could end up placing the individual (or worldly agendas), and not God, at the center of the religious experience. For Edwards, born into a clerical family, the existence of a genteel, well-educated, and authoritative clergy was almost an indispensable element of an orderly religious life and society. The Second Great Awakening shattered that ideal, opening the doors of the ministry to people from all rungs of society and often to people without any particular education or training for the ministry.
The anti-institutional tendencies of the awakening created other problems, including proliferating sectarianism. The Protestant Reformation had itself been a sectarian movement dividing European Christendom into two major camps. Protestants attacked Catholicism for institutional excesses and shifted the focus of religious life toward individual experience. But the leaders of Reformed Christianity--Martin Luther, John Calvin, and their heirs in America--believed their new churches required what Nathan Hatch calls the "ecclesiastical walls of liturgy, governance, theology, and instruction." The evangelical explosion of the early 19th century threatened to bring down those walls. As denominations subdivided into new denominations, offering frontier Americans an expanding menu of possibilities, the old, quasi-established denominations, Anglicanism and Congregationalism, lost their authority and following. And ministers of the new, upstart churches often behaved like shameless hucksters in their efforts to win over spiritual consumers.
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