The Fate of American Revivalism
The Fate of American Revivalism
When the historical importance of revivalism is understood, one can appreciate that the question, “Could America experience another revival?” is also a question about the fate of Christianity in America.
As a Lutheran who is a scholar of Pentecostal revivalism, I am a rare bird. My Lutheran friends often ask for my comment on various aspects of American evangelicalism. So, I was not completely surprised when a colleague (a Lutheran pastor and theologian) recently asked for my thoughts on the fate of revivalism in America. Specifically, he wanted to know if I thought it was possible for American culture to experience another major religious revival.
A revival is a celebrated period of enhanced Christian commitment, usually associated with large numbers of conversions. Also known as “awakenings,” revivals are so important that any attempt to tell the story of American Protestantism without them would yield disconnected nonsense. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) fashioned the American Protestant theological tradition. His theological vision was shaped by his experience, leadership, and theorizing about revivals in his Massachusetts congregation during the period later known as the First Great Awakening. Despite the significant differences between Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans, the promotion of religious awakening across the North American colonies by the likes of George Whitefield (1714-1770) nourished a shared sense of religious sentiment that would prove important both to the founding of the republic and its sense of destiny in the century to follow.
In the decades following independence, revivalism evolved but was no less historically decisive. Whereas earlier revivalism stressed God’s mysterious, “surprising” will in causing a revival, nineteenth-century revivalism took a more practical view. According to the great theorizer of revivals, Charles G. Finney (1792-1875), religious awakenings are like crop harvests—nothing grows without God’s consent, but humans must contribute by correctly employing the appropriate materials and tools. Finney preached during the era known as the Second Great Awakening. Along with urban revivals, this era especially featured camp meetings in rural areas and the ever-expanding frontier of the United States. The ostensible goal was to convert “the heathen,” by which these revivalists meant fellow citizens of European descent whom today we might call “unchurched.” But Finney and other revivalists believed that spreading Christianity was synonymous with spreading civilization and humanitarian efforts in the “Wild West.” So, the Second Great Awakening was also the origin point for American Sunday Schools, missionary societies, the temperance movement, abolitionism, and institutions of care for the disabled and mentally ill.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the habits of revivalism lived on in pockets of holiness groups. These believers were heirs of John Wesley’s theology of Christian perfection. According to holiness adherents, perfection (or entire sanctification) is attained by God’s grace in a moment, sometime after conversion. All that was needed was for one to claim it by faith. Revivalism was enlisted to further this theology: camp meetings and tent revivals were the site not only for conversion but also the experience of sanctification. To this mix was often added the experience of divine healing and, for the holiness offshoot known as Pentecostalism, baptism with the Holy Spirit, often demonstrated by speaking in tongues.
The Pentecostal style of revivalism became especially important in the twentieth century. Earlier Pentecostal faith healers like F.F. Bosworth (1877-1958) held massive tent revivals aimed at both conversion and healing, cutting a template for the faith healers of the television age like Oral Roberts. Meanwhile, another form of revivalism was taking shape as the hard-nosed American fundamentalism softened into the “new evangelicalism” incarnated by Billy Graham. Rather than picking fights about biblical inerrancy or evolution, this reborn evangelicalism focused on saving souls. With his massive “crusade” meetings, Graham was a master soul-saver. But his success also garnered immense cultural influence for him (and the evangelicalism he represented). Graham provided spiritual advice to every U.S. president, from Truman to Obama.
When the historical importance of revivalism is understood, one can appreciate that the question, “Could America experience another revival?” is also a question about the fate of Christianity in America. From the First Great Awakening in the colonies to the Second Great Awakening on the frontier to the neo-evangelical awakening of the postwar era, revivals have been interpreted as a shot in the arm for an anemic Christian culture. Whether God sends it miraculously or Christians labor to bring it about, a genuine revival can presumably impact not only the souls that are converted but also Christianity’s cultural role for generations.
I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. And only a fool would declare what God will or won’t do without a clear Scriptural warrant. But from my limited vantage point, I have difficulty seeing a revival on America’s horizon. My incredulity rests on two observations.
First, Americans don’t know the Bible. Since the 1960s, Americans have been going to church less, reading the Bible less, and catechizing their children less. Biblical literacy is so rare it is quaint. With Christian knowledge in such decline, it might seem like the ripe time for a revival—after all, you can’t revive what isn’t dying. But it is an added challenge to revive what is fully dead. Although revivalists of the past thought of themselves as converting “the heathen,” in reality, they were securing personal commitments to Christianity from people who had significant general knowledge of the tenets of Christianity and whose lives were already shaped by its beliefs and practices.
In one famous example recorded by Jonathan Edwards, after a four-year-old girl finally attained her conversion experience, she immediately started reciting with joy passages from her catechism. Clearly, before her experience of grace, she knew that to be converted was to pray in earnest “thy kingdom come” and to hold that the goal of life was to “enjoy God forever.” In the mid-twentieth century, Billy Graham could take for granted substantial biblical and theological familiarity, for instance, describing the state of the saved as those “who have been washed in the blood of the lamb.” Such language may be effective rhetoric to those who have grown up singing Victorian-era gospel hymns and read or heard preaching from the book of Revelation. However, it likely does not resonate with a populace in which only 39% can correctly identify Job as the famous biblical sufferer. American revivalism has always relied on general familiarity with biblical language, images, and themes.
Second, Americans have a very thin concept of guilt. This is probably the greater obstacle of the two. At the heart of revivalism has always been the basic conversion message: repent. Those who would be converted feel—in some way or another—the weight of their sin, God’s wrath, and their unworthiness before a righteous God. This could manifest as dark desperation, violent physical jerking as a judgment from God, or a solemn realization of the reality of hell. But in all cases, the notion of repentance in revivalism has traded on widespread readiness to believe that humans really are evil apart from Christ. But today, when over 70% of American adults believe people are born innocent in God’s sight, this is a tough sell. Christians themselves speak much more readily of humans’ glory as image-bearers of God than their shame as carriers of original sin. When Christians and non-Christians think of God, their operating framework is moralistic therapeutic deism, which has no room for guilt. Of course, when God is not even nominally in the picture, Americans work overtime to deny culpability. The climactic character breakthrough in the film Good Will Hunting portrays the leading anthropology of the day: “It’s not your fault.” Believing that is apparently all the conversion experience we need.
I can’t say with certainty that our nation will never again experience a widespread revival. But from what we know about how American revivals have worked in the past, I struggle to imagine how an awakening could materialize in a culture lacking biblical knowledge and an aptitude for guilt. If somehow a mass increase in Christian commitment and conversion to the faith did occur in our present cultural setting, it would likely be without these elements. For those who care about orthodox Christianity, I’m not sure that would count as a revival at all.
Set against the precarity of revivals, however, we have the certainty of God’s promise. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). This promise, given especially in baptism, may not be coupled with dramatic conversion experiences or mass cultural turnings toward Christianity, but for those who receive it, something infinitely better is in store. In Christ, they are a new creation, awaiting a new heaven and a new earth.
