Slavery - Free Will -
Revivalism - Second American Awakening
Black slaves and free whites on the American Frontier
shared the same methods to demonstrate their freedom. Whites were
enslaved by Calvinism and its anxiety-producing exclusion of most
people from God's grace. It is not uncommon for people fleeing from
their old religion to retreat into ancient "paradigms" mixed with the
simple faith Christ died to give to mankind to free us from "anxiety
created by religious ritual." Black slaves retreated to an African
form of religion mixed with denominational beliefs to fool the
"masters." Whites were heavily influenced by these methods but often
found -- and find -- their paradigm or pattern in Babylon. Babylon,
by the way is the original source of most ancient religions.
Bloom notes that:
"The American Religion is born about 1800, and that
African-American
religion was a crucial element in this
origin. The ecstasies of Cane Ridge tapped a mysterious current of
sensation
and perseption that emanated from the
slaves." (Harold Bloom, The American
Religion, p. 238)
Bloom notes that this, externally, was freedom
from self
but internally freedom for self, to know and to
be known by a black Jesus. This is why most American religions see
themselves as another Chosen People. This Jesus is not touched by the
rational views of modern life but must be sought in the ancient world
out of which all of us come, especially in a religious sense. To one
new movement, Jesus as a "phallic kind of guy" is not found in the
mind or spirit through the revealed words; he is found in the woods
as we beat the drums and confess our phallic shortcomings.
While externally, black religion took on the
form of Baptists or other groups, internally, they restored their
African roots. Paradoxically, trying to free themselves from
Calvinism to which most were unpredestinated outcasts, white
Americans adopted the methodology of African religion. This included
the African concept of "the little man (spirit) in the big man (me)"
view of the Godhead.
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Ph.D, observes that:
"By 1810 the slave trade to the
United States had officially ended and
the slave population began to increase naturally, making way for the
preservation and transmission of religious practices that were, by
this time, truly "African-American." This
transition coincided with the period of intense religious revivalism
known as "awakenings." In the southern states, where the institution of
slavery still prevailed, increasing numbers of slaves converted to
evangelical religions such as the Methodist and Baptist faiths. Many
clergy within these denominations actively promoted the idea that
all Christians were equal in the sight
of God, a message that provided hope
and sustenance to the slaves.
They also encouraged worship in ways
that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African
worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, dancing, and even
spirit-possession.
"In the slave quarters, however, African
Americans organized their own "invisible institution." Through
signals, passwords, and messages not discernible to whites, they called
believers to "hush harbors" where
they freely mixed African
rhythms, singing, and beliefs with
evangelical Christianity. It was here that the spirituals,
with their double meanings of
religious salvation and freedom from slavery,
developed and flourished;
and here, too, that black preachers, (Note: the
drum was taken away
from them in 1735)
those who believed that God had called them to
speak his Word, polished their "chanted
sermons,"or rhythmic intoned style of
extemporaneous preaching.
Part church, part psychological refuge, and
part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion (Nat
Turner, whose armed insurrection in Virginia in 1831 resulted in the
deaths of scores of white men, women, and children, was a self-styled
Baptist preacher),
these meetings provided one of the few ways for
enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a
better future. African American Religion
Most revivalistic efforts, new and ancient,
move along the same well-trodden path to freedom from "decadent and
deliterious" religions.
Calvinism had a lot in common with
slavery. While both white and black
might have their sinful nature, some (blacks) were predestinated by
God to be slaves; whites to be masters. It had nothing to do with
true value. The black man simply could do nothing to be predestinated
for freedom. In a religious sense,
"But Calvin also taught that God,
in his infinite mercy, would spare a small number of "elect"
individuals from the fate of eternal hellfire that all mankind, owing
to their corrupt natures, justly deserved. That elect group of
"saints" would be blessed, at some point in their lives, by a
profound sense of inner assurance that they possessed God's "saving
grace." This dawning of hope was the experience of conversion,
which might come upon individuals suddenly or gradually, in their
earliest youth or even in the moments before death. It is important
to emphasize to students that,
"in the Calvinist scheme, God
decided who would be saved or damned before the beginning of
history--and that this decision
would not be affected by how
human beings behaved during their lives. The God of Calvin (and the Puritans) did not give
"extra credit"--nor, indeed, any credit--for the good works that men
and women performed during their lives.
While blacks were excluded from any form of
freedom, whites were excluded from spiritual freedom unless God had
"freed" them by some experience. This led to extreme anxiety,
especially on the American frontier. In a strange twist of logic, the
anxiety of
being excluded from salvation was supposed to be cured by a huge,
man-induced dose of anxiety through so-called "revivals."
The "enslaved" could get free only by passing
through a Red-Sea, Wilderness-wandering of suffering event. The
religionists, deviating from normal Christian values, complied by
waging a real battle for the newly-freed SEEKERS. This gave
expression to the new Baptist view that each had to personally
undergo the "old Testament" experience before Christ came to them
personally. "Believer's Baptism" came to mean that one had already
undergone this personal experience of Christ's personal dying all
over as He is supposed to do in the Catholic Euchrist.
The bonus was that the New Lights would
prove the
superiority of their system over those who had oppressed by slavery
or by Calvinism:
"One important result of the new
revivalism was a further erosion of
older Calvinist beliefs, especially the
doctrine of predestination. (For
information on Calvinism and predestination see under Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Puritanism and Predestination.) Although some evangelical clergymen did not abandon
the idea of predestination entirely (the idea that God had
preordained who would be saved and who would not was, after all, a
logical extension of the conception of God as an eternal, omniscient,
and omnipotent being), in practical terms they held out what amounted
to an idea of universal salvation.
"Most Methodist clergymen came
pretty close to embracing the idea of universalism which held that
Christ's atonement was potentially
universal, available without
restriction to all who would repent and surrender to God.
"Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Church
of Christ, made universalism the hallmark
of his doctrinal system.
Of course, there is a big difference between
universalism and potential universalism.
Alexander Campbell believed that Christ's Atonement was
available
to anyone who accepted it by obedient faith. This, like the
Emacipation Proclamation for blacks, spread like wildfire. Freedom
from blacks did not spread because of the power of some freedom
"preacher." The slaves simply slipped out of the shackles as soon
as someone held "master's hands" long enough.
In the same way, freedom to accept did not
spread just because Alexander Campbell spread it. Rather, like
baptism, the people who were often excellent Bible students "followed
the leaders" only after the leaders got it right and gave them
community standing and the right to be free.
However, once "grace" was wrestled away from
the Calvinist clergy, it had just passed into the hands of others who
determined new terms for permitting you to have access to this new
freedom. This proves that:
- Nothing is
clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels
- of the methods
they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.
- --Will and Ariel
Durant
What was preserved from Calvinism was
some form of supernatural sign that you had been singled out as one
of the select few God had honored to go to heaven while the others,
including infants, went to a burning hell. Faced with this eternal
destiny for the majority what was a few years of slavery to
blacks?
Not to worry! If the new clergy
could fabricate these supernatural proofs in abundance then the New
Lights would prove that they had God's blessing for a universal offer
of salvation. Of course, you were still trapped: you had to manifest
the signs before you were saved. Even the preachers had to be
ordained and you still had to "pray through" to be saved.
To that end, a sequence which
already worked was honed to a sharp edge. Donald Scott of Queens College notes that:
"Conversion consisted of a sequence
of clearly mapped-out steps, each of which was
accompanied by a powerful
emotion that
led the penitent from the
terror of
eternal damnation through redemption
to the
promise of heavenly salvation.
The process of conversion characteristically
began in a state of "concern" about the state
of one's soul and "inquiry" into what were called the doctrines of
salvation propelled by the question "what can I do to be saved?"
This led to a state of acute spiritual "anxiety,"
marked by deep fear over the prospect of eternal damnation, which in turn
grew into an unmistakable sense of "conviction," the heartfelt
realization that one stood justly condemned for one's sins and
deserved eternal damnation.
"Conviction was the
terrifying point of recognition that no matter how much one might
desire it, there was absolutely nothing one could do to earn
salvation. But there was something the penitent could do, indeed, was
bound to do. That was to fully repent and surrender unconditionally
to God's will to do with as he saw fit and to serve him fully. It was
this act of repentance, surrender, and dedication to serving his will
that Finney meant when in his most famous sermon he insisted that
"sinners [are] bound to change their
own
hearts." This moment of renunciation of sin and the abject surrender
to the will to God was the moment of conversion, if it was to come,
the moment at which, through the promise of Christ's atonement for
human sin, a merciful God would bestow his grace upon the repentant
sinner.
Revivalism and the Second Great
Awakening
"A second distinguishing feature of
nineteenth-century evangelicalism was its approach to religious
revivals. The phrase "religious revival" was originally coined in the
eighteenth century to describe a new phenomenon in which churches
experienced an unexpected "awakening" of spiritual concern,
occasioned by a special and mysterious
outpouring of God's saving grace, which
led to unprecedented numbers of intense and "surprising conversions"
that "revived" the piety and power of the churches.
"In the early nineteenth century,
however, as "the revival" became a central instrument for
provoking
conversions, it became as much a human
as a divine event. In the terms of
Charles Grandison Finney, a revival was something preachers and
communicants did. It was a deliberately
orchestrated event that deployed a
variety of spiritual practices to provoke conversions
especially among the unconverted "youth" (men and women between 15
and 30) in the community.
"The new, self-consciously wrought
revivals took several forms. They first emerged at the turn of the
eighteenth century with the invention of the camp
meeting in western Virginia and North Carolina and on the Kentucky
and Ohio frontier by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists. At
these meetings, the most famous (or notorious) of which took place at
Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, hundreds and sometimes thousands of
people would gather from miles around in a wilderness encampment for
four days to a week.
"There they engaged in an unrelenting series of
intense spiritual exercises, punctuated with cries of religious agony
and ecstasy, all designed to
promote
religious fervor and conversions.
These exercises ranged from the singing of hymns addressed
to each of the spiritual stages that marked the
journey to
conversion, public confessions and renunciations of sin and
personal witness to the
workings of the spirit, collective
prayer,
"all of which were surrounded by
sermons delivered by clergymen especially noted for their
powerful "plain-speaking" preaching.
"The second, major variant of
the new revivalism consisted of the "protracted meetings" most often
associated with the "new measures" revivalism of Finney
but which by the late l820s had
become the characteristic form of most northern and western
revivalism.
"Protracted meetings," ordinarily conducted
once a year at a time when they would be less disruptive of ordinary
life, usually lasted two to three weeks, during which time there
would be preaching two or three times each day,
addressed especially to the
anxious penitents who would gather on an "anxious bench" at the front of the
church to be prayed for by the congregation, and prayer and
counseling visits by newly converted Christians to the concerned and
anxious.
Once a person had gone through the
experience
of conversion and rebirth, he or she would
join the
ranks of visitors and exhorters, themselves becoming evangelists for
the still unconverted around them.
Like most urges to awake people religiously
through external means, a strong belief in Kung's "now but not yet
kingdom" could be brought to earth if religionists gave Jesus a push
by making the earth a fit place for His habitation. Of course, they
would keep their promises and Christ would let them sit on the right
hand and left hand to bestow rewards and administer punishments as
God's prepared swat team.
"They came to believe that it was
given to them and their generation of evangelical Americans
to prepare the way for Christ's
Second
Coming
(which Jonathan Edwards had predicted would take place in the New
World)
by working
unrelentingly to bring about the
thousand-year reign of righteousness that would precede his return to
earth.
More specifically, what this meant was that
they and their communicants were to enlist themselves in a
broad set of campaigns to
reform American society.
Most religious denominations split because the
Northern churches saw the abolution of slavery as part of the
predestinated play for God's predestinate people. After all, they had
proven their Christ-given agency by the great revivals.
In
another article we will list some
of the evidence that the civil war was a religious war provoked by
northern nominal Christians destined to pour out God's wrath as truth
goes marching on.
Those who feel guilty that we are not able to
reconstruct events like Cane Ridge and therefore feel that their
religion is, as charged, decadent and deliterious, should remember
that these events were never a part of the American Restoration
Movement. Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians who "cooked" Cane
Ridge went on to populate Quakers, Mormonism and Holiness groups. In
time, the excitement gave way to more Biblical education and some of
the people began to reject their old beliefs and became a seed-bed
for a saner, more Biblically-based faith and practice. Alexander
Campbell was never a part of these movements but taught
"universalism" in the sense that anyone who so choose could come to
Christ.
Alexander Campbell's unique contribution was
teaching preachers who, in turn, told people that they didn't have to
go to the "mourner's bench" and pray through. They could, just as God
created them, hear, believe, repent, confess and be baptized with no
higher permission than that given to you in Acts 2:38.
In the Awakening series, we will look at some
of the documentation showing that these physical manifestations were
common to what many earlier people identified as mental
disequilibrium often produced by the religious "doctors" trying to
sell them a "cure." If you didn't need their eye-salve they would
poke you in the eye and then sell the cure.
While most people involved in these movements
were sincere, it is important to understand that the methods and
madness produced by driving people to the brink of catastrophe often
cannot be distinguished from the methods of purely pagan religious
forms.
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