#The slaying stone review full
The woods was full of teams and wagons, hitched everywhere, feeding out of the wagon troughs and stomping to keep off the flies…. There was as much as a thousand people there, from twenty mile around. Huckleberry Finn went to a Campbellite revival:
#The slaying stone review free
Revivals broke free not only of church buildings but of denominational divisions, creeds, and rituals. Dozens of preachers ministered to the people at Cane Ridge-including Presbyterians like Stone as well as some Baptists and (especially) Methodists. Stone’s weeklong revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 drew a likely 20,000 people, over 10 percent of the state population. The religious convulsions Whitefield and Wesley had inspired in England were called by Ronald Knox “Methodist paroxysms.” These spasms traveled well to America.Īs the American West opened up, “going out” took on further meaning in the camp meetings or tent revivals of preachers like Barton Stone, Alexander Campbell, and their epigones. The Holy Spirit’s urging made for responses like “Amen,” or “Hallelujah,” or “Come Lord Jesus,” or “Glory!”-or the later “Praise the Lord.” Spasmodic seizures of different sorts made outsiders call the saved ones “holy rollers” or “quakers” or “shakers” or “jumpers.” The people would “turn, turn, turn,” as in the song “Simple Gifts.” Some would faint, “slain in the spirit.” The preacher himself could get worked up to pitches of near hysteria. The preacher was credentialed not by church authorities but by the size of his crowd and its responses to him-by the number of souls he saved.Įmotion was communicable. The crowd was important to the whole ethos of the movement. It was salvation in a hurry, time was running out, too urgent for formal rites. It was symbolically important for the people to be “going out”-an exodus from the ordinary, including the ordinary religious formalities (ordained ministers, ecclesiastical garb, liturgical ceremony, a reverent hush in the congregation). It could happen any day, and run for several days. This was nothing like going to one’s church on Sunday. The crowds were astounding because they were self-assembled, gathered outside the normal parish structures. The great Samuel Johnson said of Whitefield, “He would be followed by crowds were he to wear a night-cap in the pulpit, or were he to preach from a tree.”
It is worth while to go twenty miles to hear him.” Any man who could astonish Hume in Scotland and Franklin in America was a preacher beyond any orbit of expectation. When Benjamin Franklin went to hear Whitefield preach from the steps of Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1739, he measured with characteristic precision the reach of his voice in different directions, and felt that he had verified reports that 25,000 people could hear him preach in a cleared space.īefore he came from England, Whitefield had already become a “field preacher” the skeptic David Hume, who listened to one of his sermons in Edinburgh, is said to have told a friend, “He is…the most ingenious preacher I ever heard. The leading preacher in a cadre of them, George Whitefield-who, with John and Charles Wesley, founded the Methodist movement in England-had followings that overflowed the churches and followed him out to streets, plazas, or the nearby countryside. The first Great Awakening, of the 1730s and 1740s, stunned entire regions by the numbers of people who took part. It can best be characterized, for taxonomic purposes, by three things: crowds, drama, and cycles. Evangelical religion is revival religion, that of emotional contagion. But she does direct us to the right starting point, to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Awakenings, major religious events in our early history when the word “evangelicalism” came into wide American use.
“Evangelicals” is an elastic term, and FitzGerald intermittently shrinks or stretches it. What repeatedly makes us look again is what she is here to tell us. Donald Trump posing for photographs after he delivered the convocation at Liberty University, an evangelical university in Lynchburg, Virginia, January 2016Įvery few years, it seems, conservative religious groups, quiescent or unnoticed, come blazing back onto the national scene, and the secular press reacts like the bad guy in the 1971 western Big Jake who says to John Wayne, “I thought you were dead.” Wayne drily answers, “Not hardly.” Now, in The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, Frances FitzGerald answers the recurrent question, “Where did these people come from?” She says there is no mystery involved.
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