Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (128 page)

From the beginning, such popular excitement was associated with those who wished to emphasize the distinctiveness of Scottish religion in the face of Stuart attempts to conform it to English practice, and Britain's conflicts in the seventeenth century crystallized the movement's identification with the Presbyterians who seized power in Scotland in 1691 (see p. 734). 'Holy Fairs' continued to break out into revival in the motherland and in Ulster through the eighteenth century. In both settings, Scottish identity struggled to assert itself against an English and Anglican state which, after the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, held increasing political power over Scots. In particular, Ulstermen who cherished their Presbyterianism were discontented at the increasingly unchallengeable established status of the episcopally governed Church of Ireland (they were also fairly accomplished at quarrelling with each other), and the discontented looked across the Atlantic. Scots also emigrated to North America, in default of their own colonies: the English had played a part in helping to stifle an ill-conceived independent Scots colonial enterprise in Central America. There these immigrants from Ulster and Scotland set up their own Presbyterian Churches, and the 'Holy Fairs' proved no less appropriate to the American frontier than they had been to the frontiers of Ulster. By the 1720s their network of Churches ('Scotch-Irish' in American usage) was flourishing, especially in the Middle Colonies, where religious patterns were so much more open than further south or north. They came into increasing conflict with the older English established Churches. The tensions of a new element in the American religious mix were about to burst into creative energy.

One of the earliest public stirrings in the 1720s sprang from the dissatisfaction felt by a newly arrived minister from north-west Germany, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, with what he saw as the formality of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Jersey. In his German homeland, a borderland between Lutheranism and the Reformed, he had been spiritually formed by Pietism. In his own Church in New Jersey he probably did more to stir up trouble than to bring new life, but he helped to create a lasting pattern: an appeal to the need for personal conversion and 'revival' in the Church, and a tension between those who advocated revival and those who did not find this a useful or appropriate way of expressing their Christian commitment. During the 1730s a similar excitement (and similar backlash) appeared in the anglophone Presbyterian Churches, led by a family of ministers who classically were Scots immigrants from Ulster, William Tennent and his sons Gilbert and William.

Gilbert Tennent's often uncomfortable ministry looked back to the enthusiasms of Ulster, and when he met Frelinghuysen in America, he was delighted to find that model confirmed. Soon he was roving beyond his own congregation in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to take the message further. From 1739 he found a like-minded Calvinist colleague in the electrifying English preacher George Whitefield, but their style developed very differently. Whitefield's ministry in North America was consistently marked by its combative spirit, often towards fellow Calvinists whom he felt were obstructing revival, but Tennent was jolted out of his tendency to similar confrontation by an abrasive meeting in 1741 with no less a representative of German Pietism than Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, in the course of one of the Count's tours of America for the Moravians, his most far-flung journey from Herrnhut. Alarmed both by Zinzendorf's theology and his aggressive personality, Tennent spent the latter half of his career mending fences with those in his own Church whom his extrovert and emotional preaching had alienated. The encounter and its effect on Tennent are a significant symbol of a constant tension within modern Evangelicalism, not merely between Calvinists and Arminians as in the case of Wesley and Whitefield, but between institutional loyalties and individual initiatives - often also between considerable rival egos.
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In the northern colonies, Awakenings were led in the Congregational Church by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards combined an academic rigour which came from his deep interest in philosophy with an uncompromising attachment to Calvinism, reinforced by an experience of conversion in 1727. He insisted that we must worship God with the whole person, mind and emotion, and from the greatest philosopher to the smallest child we must love God in simplicity. In a sermon of 1738, he ended by assuring his listeners, 'if ever you arrive at heaven, faith and love must be the wings which must carry you there'.
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There are echoes here of words which Edwards would have known from one of Protestant England's earliest hymn writers, his fellow Congregationalist Isaac Watts, who thirty years before had prayed:

Give me the wings of faith to rise
within the veil, and see
the saints above, how great their joys
how bright their glories be.

Edwards was a champion of the composition of new hymns over the traditional Puritan singing of metrical psalms, and they became a major feature of the revival meetings of the Great Awakenings. As so often, a new religious movement which had little actually new in its beliefs (Edwards prided himself in his traditional Reformed theology) took a novel face through its use of music.
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In 1734, at much the same time that Gilbert Tennent's revival ministry began stretching beyond a single congregation, Edwards's people in Northampton, Massachusetts, experienced the exhilaration and disruption of revival, to the astonishment of New England - not least because it was reported that the folk of Northampton had no time to be ill while the 'awakening' was seizing the town.
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Edwards continued to puzzle over the phenomenon and, unusually among his fellow revivalists, he tried to analyse it in a major study of the psychology of religion,
A Treatise concerning religious affections
(1746). He was hospitable to George Whitefield, while doing his best to deal with the emotional havoc caused in congregations in the wake of Whitefield's visits, and he agonized about how far to restrict the communion table to the demonstrably regenerate, remembering the Half-Way Covenant of his forebears. His ministry, largely as a consequence of his agonizing, was never free of quarrels. But he remains among the most celebrated of the powerful personalities who rallied crowds to the themes of the Awakening.

An important consequence of Edwards's teaching was that his great intellectual reputation lent respectability to a seductive conception of the Last Days, known in the jargon of theologians as 'postmillennialism'. This proposition was a development of that traditionally exciting idea, dating right back to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century CE, that human history would culminate in a thousand-year rule of the saints. Edwards believed that this millennium would take place before the Second Coming of Christ - hence the Second Coming would be 'post-millennial'. So the millennium would indeed be part of history, unfolding out of present-day human experience, and open to the reconstruction of a perfect human society, for which it was possible to make practical plans. Edwards was among those suggesting that America might be the place where the golden age of the millennium was scheduled to begin, in untamed wildernesses unsullied by ancient European sins. It was an exhilarating idea which bound those in its grip to begin activist efforts to improve society in a great variety of ways, and it suggested a special destiny for the thirteen colonies. Despite Isaac Watts's dry comment on his fellow Congregationalist's excitement, 'I think his reasonings on America want force', the mood has never fully left America.
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The Great Awakenings thus shaped the future of American religion. They destroyed the territorial communality which was still the assumption of most religious practice back in Europe. Religious practice, like conversion, became a matter of choice. Charismatic ministers who lacked the scruples of Gilbert Tennent or Jonathan Edwards ignored traditional boundaries in setting out to win souls - but in turn, if they were successful in setting up a new congregation which hearkened to their message, they found themselves prisoners or servants of their enthusiasts who were their means of support. Freelance preachers are not unnaturally often much concerned with financial survival, which can be an unhealthy preoccupation. Priorities in worship changed in the Awakenings. Renewal was experienced as renewal of enthusiasm rather than performance of an unchanging liturgy; Protestant Churches which did not adapt, and which based themselves on traditional European models, suffered. The Anglicans, strongly linked to the Church of England, which was struggling at the same time with the Methodist and Evangelical Revivals, were even more resistant than the Congregationalist Churches of New England to the style of the Awakenings. They did little missionizing on the ever-expanding frontiers, and they lost out as a result. In 1700, they served roughly a quarter of the colonial population; in 1775, even after rapid population growth, roughly a ninth.
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Coalescing out of the welter of new gatherings came new denominations. In the south, a Church called the Separate Baptists was virtually created by the Awakenings, and the Methodists, after suffering setbacks for their British loyalism during the Revolution, soon took off once more; so two of the most influential strands within American Protestantism owe their prominence to the first Awakenings period. The sense of common American heritage among different Protestant denominations was much strengthened by this experience. That would have a considerable effect on politics. Moreover, the Awakenings enjoyed huge success among enslaved people. In 1762, one Anglican missionary calculated sadly that of around 46,000 enslaved in South Carolina, only five hundred were Christians.
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That reflected the fact that many plantation owners were reluctant to allow their human property Christianity, but it is possible that he really meant that only five hundred were Anglicans, because he was writing amid the religious fervour of the Awakenings sweeping through the colonies. These eventually made spectacular breaches in the earlier barriers to evangelization of the enslaved, and fostered an African-American Christian culture which expresses itself in the fervency of extrovert Evangelical Protestantism rather than in the cooler tones of Anglicanism.

Why did the Awakenings succeed so mightily with enslaved Africans where the Anglicans failed? Central to the answer must be the Evangelical demand for a personal choice: that gave dignity to people who had never been offered a choice in their lives, just as the confraternities and saints' devotion of the Catholic Church provided the opportunity to make religious choices (see pp. 712-14). Related was Methodism's insistence on complete personal transformation or regeneration, an attractive theme in lives which offered little other hope of dramatic change. Moravians brought song and uninhibited celebration of God's blood and wounds to people who knew much of both. Moravians also insisted that God was pleased by cheerfulness, a congenial thought in a culture which remembered better than Europeans how to celebrate. And at the centre was the library of books which was the Bible, in which readers could suddenly find themselves walking into a particular book and recognizing their own life. Where Catholic enslaved peoples in the Caribbean or Iberian America had saints, Protestant American enslaved people had texts which gave them stories and songs. They sang about the biblical stories which made them laugh and cry, in some of the most compelling vocal music ever created by Christians, 'Negro Spirituals': a fusion of the Evangelical hymn tradition of the Awakenings with celebratory rhythms and repetitions remembered from days of African freedom.

What might the Bible-readers choose? For people made slaves, the Bible contained the experience of Israel's exile and desolation, in the prophets and psalms. A captive people escaped and entered a promised land (and the deliverer Moses, like St Patrick, brooked no nonsense from snakes). The Saviour was a poor man, whipped and executed, who died for all and rose again. There were thrones for the downtrodden people at the end of time. In other words, there was justice. It was irrelevant that many of these themes had inspired the English to cross the Atlantic a century before, only to become the colonial people who oppressed the African-American; this was a discovery anew, forged painfully out of the acquisition of literacy by a minority of privileged or freed people. How could they not accept such a vulnerable, all-powerful Saviour? They sang of him:

Poor little Jesus boy
Made him to be born in a manger
World treated him so mean
Treat me mean, too.
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The results were spectacular, but posed new questions. By 1800, around a fifth of all American Methodists were enslaved people - and enslaved they were still, despite being Methodists. In this aftermath of the Revolution which had talked much of life, liberty and human happiness, African-Americans whether free or bonded found little welcome in white Churches and at best would be directed to a segregated seat. So they frequently made a further choice - to create their own Churches (see Plate 41). From 1790 there was an African Methodist Episcopal Union; there followed Black Baptist Unions, taking their known origin from a congregation of Baptists no more than eight strong in the 1770s.
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Congregations demanded their share in Christian decency - and how could Evangelical Protestants deny them that? Clothing and the dignity it conveyed, indeed, would become a major theme in Evangelical mission worldwide. Plantation slaves had frequently been kept naked for work - fuelling white fantasies about their innate lasciviousness.
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Now members of black congregations were known to walk more than fourteen miles to church, dressed in their special Sunday clothes but barefoot, carrying their clean shoes with them, which they put on when they reached their church buildings. Such independent Churches naturally wanted their own clergy - white clergy would not minister to them in such settings. In a land which restricted any blacks to the manual work for which they had been imported, suddenly there was a profession open to them, and it was difficult for white Evangelicals to deny the clerical character of such ministers who used the same charged language of conversion, and won souls for Christ just as they did.
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