Bible - CH 40

CHAPTER 40

THE DESTINY OF A NATION

A Christian America?

C an a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment?” Isaiah’s question seemed unusually appropriate for the youthful American nation. In 1835 Lyman Beecher, the well - known Presbyterian and Congregational minister in New England, preached a sermon from the text, Isaiah 66:8, and he called it “A Plea for the West.”

Beecher believed firmly that a vast new empire was opening in the American wilderness. Nothing less than a whole culture was at stake. Christians should seize the opportunity, he said, and shape the “religious and political destiny of the nation.”

And how did he propose to do that? He called for the preaching of the gospel, the distribution of Bibles, the planting of churches, the establishing of schools, and the reform of American morals. Puritan that he was, Beecher knew that a free society needs justice — fair and just laws — and that in a democracy such laws require popular support informed by Christianity.

Beecher spoke for a host of evangelical Christians: Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. His views were so widely shared that historians speak of this era as the age of the “righteous empire.” The vision for a Christian America was a dominant theme in nineteenth - century American Protestantism. We can trace its rise, its major crisis, and the elements of its decline. Without some knowledge of this century, today’s Christians find it almost impossible to understand the social forces and religious figures of their own times.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE AMERICAN WEST

The evangelical campaign to shape the destiny of the young American nation was not new. Like Innocent III’s vision of medieval Europe and Calvin’s design for a Christian Geneva, the evangelical dream for America was an expression of Christian concern for society. The American West provided Christianity with its greatest opportunity ever to press the claims of the gospel on a whole nation.

If this vision has faded in our time — and it has — the basic impulse remains, for it is part of the Lord’s purpose for his people: “You are the light of the world . . . you are the salt of the earth.” How can Christians not be concerned for the world around them?

The great fact of the nineteenth - century world in America was the West, the ever - moving frontier. Early visitors beyond the Allegheny Mountains sang the praises of the region. In 1751 Christopher Gist described it as “watered with a great number of little streams and rivulets, and full of beautiful natural meadows, covered with wild rye, blue grass, and clover.”

After the Revolutionary War, so many Americans poured into the territory that the whole continent seemed to tilt toward the Pacific. Between 1792 and 1821, nine new states were added to the original thirteen. By midcentury half of the American people were west of the Appalachians.

It was a violent shift. Between the rough tasks of expelling the Native Americans and subduing the wilderness, the frontiersmen gained a reputation for wild and lawless living. Only a few Christian groups — the Quakers, for instance — recognized the rapacious treatment of the Native Americans as immoral and sub - Christian behavior. The majority of Christians were more concerned about evangelizing the settlers, who were largely illiterate, rugged, and a law unto themselves. Their barbarian manner never failed to shock the occasional European who ventured beyond the mountains.

One English visitor found that the “backwoodsmen . . . fight for the most trifling provocations. Their hands, teeth, knees, head and feet are their weapons, not only boxing with their fists . . . but also tearing, kicking, scratching, biting, gouging each other’s eyes out by a dexterous use of a thumb and finger, and doing their utmost to kill each other.”

At the birth of the United States of America, the denominations seemed ill prepared to face the opportunities of the West. Christian influence was at an all - time low. Only 5 or 10 percent of the American people were church members. In time, however, the crude, turbulent, and godless society of the West was tamed, and more than any other single force, it was evangelical Christianity that did it.

As evangelicals faced the challenge of winning a nation to Christian obedience, two instruments were available to them: the voluntary society and the revival.

The Bill of Rights, with its provision of religious liberty for all, had in effect sanctioned the denominational concept of the church and had ruled out any direct influence of the churches on the government. The denominations were free to define their own faith and practices. But what about Christian responsibility for public life and morals? That is where the voluntary society came in.

William Carey and other English evangelicals had designed the voluntary society to carry the gospel to India and to fight the slave trade in the West Indies. American evangelicals seized the idea for their own purposes. It seemed to be the perfect instrument for the free society in America to exert influence on public opinion, to provide support for far - reaching missionary and educational activities, and to spread reform ideals in the youthful nation. The voluntary societies allowed Christians from the various denominations to unite in some matter of common concern: temperance, for example, or the observance of the Sabbath.

Thus early in the nineteenth century a host of societies appeared seeking to shape some aspect of American life: the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Education Society, and scores of others. “One thing is becoming daily more evident,” Beecher observed in 1830, “that the grand influence” of the church and the triumphs of the last forty years are the result of the “voluntary association of Christians.”

The second instrument evangelicals used to subdue the wilderness was the revival. Beecher argued that the churches could look to revivals “for their members and pastors, and for that power upon public opinion which gives energy to law, and voluntary support to religious institutions.”

In 1790 evangelicals faced a dual evangelistic challenge: to regain the East and to win the West. In the East, especially in a number of colleges, fresh enthusiasm for the life of the Spirit was apparent before 1800. This revival came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. It provided the next generation with skilled and dedicated leaders for the western crusade.

The great western frontier revival took place in newly settled regions between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi and centered in Kentucky and Tennessee. This awakening took on the characteristics of the inhabitants. It was rugged, wild, and boisterous.

Timothy Flint, who knew the region well, left us a portrait of the western preacher: “Travelling from month to month through dark forests . . . the men naturally acquire a pensive and romantic turn of thought and expression. . . . Hence the preaching is of a highly popular cast and its first aim is to excite the feelings. . . . The country opens a boundless theatre for strong, earnest and unlettered eloquence; and the preacher seldom has extensive influence or usefulness who does not possess some touch of this power.” 83

In a largely illiterate population, this frontier preacher, whether white or black, became the primary channel for the spread of Christianity. One of the most pungent of these rough - hewn western revivalists was a tall, angular Presbyterian with keen black eyes and a “bold and uncompromising manner”: the Reverend James McGready.

THE INFLAMMABLE JAMES MCGREADY

McGready came from Scots - Irish stock in Pennsylvania, but he hurled his first thunderbolts in North Carolina. Stressing the wrath of the Lord against stiff - necked sinners, McGready ignited a revival that drove scores of penitents to conversion.

ButtonText_image (This is the third reconstruction of the Red River Meeting House in Kentucky. In this region, James McGready ignited a revival that reached horse thieves, desperados, and murderers.) This is the third reconstruction of the Red River Meeting House in Kentucky. In this region, James McGready ignited a revival that reached horse thieves, desperados, and murderers.

He found, however, that frontier congregations did not always wilt under torrid preaching. When McGready abruptly moved to Kentucky in 1798, a tale circulated that the suggestion he move west had come from an anonymous letter written in blood!

In Kentucky the inflammatory McGready preached to three small congregations at Red River, Gasper River, and Muddy River. All three were in Logan County, in the southwestern corner of the state. That area was described by one frontier parson as a Rogues’ Harbor, abounding in horse thieves, desperados, and murderers. Surprisingly, lawless backwoodsmen there responded enthusiastically to McGready’s pictures of heaven and hell.

He would describe heaven so vividly that his calloused congregation would almost see its glories and long to be there. Then he would paint hell and its horrors so effectively that sinners would tremble and quake, imagining a lake of fire and brimstone yawning to overwhelm them, and the wrath of God thrusting them down into the abyss.

In July 1800 McGready had his Pentecost and changed the course of American history. After an initial revival at Red River, he decided to send out advance notice of the next sacramental service at the Gasper River church. When the word spread through the settlements, scores of pioneers headed in wagons, in the saddle, and on moccasined feet for Gasper River, ready for the Spirit to work. They came from as far away as one hundred miles. Scores of families came to Gasper River with tents and vittles — cold pork, slabs of corn bread, and roasted birds — ready to stay a while to see, hear, and feel the hand of God.

We now look back to Gasper River as the first camp meeting — the first religious service of several days’ length held outdoors for people who had traveled a distance to attend. They camped on the spot — thus the name.

McGready was a pacesetter. For almost two centuries the revival preacher and the camp meeting have endured in America. Time, however, had its way and the intensity of the preaching cooled. It was inevitable. Man does not live by fire alone. Under the leadership of evangelists like Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham, the camp meeting moved indoors and continued its soul - winning ways in rural chapels and urban auditoriums.

Not everyone, of course, favored revivals. Many Lutherans and Presbyterians felt that they slighted sound doctrine. Roman Catholics and Episcopalians considered them emotional eruptions, not true worship.

Such criticisms, however, were largely ignored as enthusiastic revivalists and increasing numbers of missionaries moved west, preaching the gospel, planting churches, and founding colleges. By the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville, a keen observer from abroad, discovered that “there is no country in the world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men.” Many others agreed.

A deadly cancer, however, spread through the tissues of “Christian America.” How could a democracy infused with Christian principles continue to sanction the enslavement of millions of human beings?

The American practice of slavery had begun on August 20, 1619, when twenty African slaves were unloaded from a Dutch frigate at Jamestown, Virginia. By 1830 their number had increased to about 2 million. As a nation spread west, the “peculiar institution” of slavery became the issue. Every time a new state came into the union, every time settlers moved out to fresh land, the white - hot issue of slavery burned the national conscience more deeply. Should the new territory be slave or free? Was slavery to be extended indefinitely? In the passion to preserve both liberty and union, if one must choose, which must come first?

The dimensions of this struggle were so basic to human existence, so religious in character, that all sides turned to the Scriptures to interpret their experiences.

CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE SLAVES

The slave turned to the Bible for meaning to fill his emptiness. He turned mostly out of necessity because his white master had stripped him of all else, including his African gods.

The uprooting of Africans and their transportation to an alien land had a shattering effect on their lives. In destroying their African culture and in breaking up their social organization, slavery deprived them of their sense of place in the world.

Some slaves committed suicide during the middle passage — the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Others tried to escape from bondage in their new environment. The vast majority of them, however, submitted to their fate and, in their confusion and bewilderment, sought a meaning for their existence in the white man’s world.

Christianity gave the slaves a language and a new center for their new life in a new land. At first some owners strongly opposed teaching the Scriptures to their slaves. They feared that the slaves might find in the Bible ideas of human equality that could incite them to rebellion. Opposition declined, however, as masters became convinced that the New Testament itself offered arguments in support of slavery. Some masters were persuaded that the best slaves — those willing to accept the control of their white masters — were those who knew the Bible best.

From the Bible, then, slaves learned about the white man’s God and what he expected of people. Since all other forms of organized social life were forbidden among the slaves, the black preacher arose as the important figure in the “invisible institution” — the slave church. Reflecting the revival spirit of the frontier, black preachers were called to this office nearly always through some experience that indicated God had chosen them to be a spiritual leader. By this means they came to display their eloquence and influence and achieved a position of dominance. Such dramatic callings gave black pastors unprecedented influence. They learned to dramatize biblical stories and to interpret many characters and events in terms of the slave’s experiences.

PROFILES of Faith

Richard Allen (1760 – 1831) was born into slavery and sold as a child to work on a Delaware plantation. After hearing a traveling minister rail against slavery, he joined the Methodists at age seventeen and began evangelizing other slaves eagerly. “Sometimes, I would awake from my sleep preaching and praying,” he later recalled. Prompted by Methodist teachings, Allen’s master became convinced of the sinfulness of slavery and allowed his slaves to purchase their freedom. After buying his freedom for $2,000, Allen moved to Philadelphia and became a Methodist preacher. Though his sermons at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church were popular, he was restricted to the 5:00 a.m. service and resented that his black congregants were seated separately from the white worshipers. Alongside fellow Methodist preacher Absalom Jones, Allen formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 as the first fully independent black denomination in the United States. Today, the AME church boasts more than 2.5 million members.

As Willard Sperry, dean of Harvard Divinity School, once explained, chief among these events was the exodus, and first among the biblical characters was Jesus. The Egyptian bondage of God’s people, the deliverance from Egypt, the passage through the Red Sea, the destruction of Pharaoh’s host in that sea, the wanderings in the desert, and the final crossing of Jordan into the Land of Promise — these were the elements that furnished the constant themes for slave sermons and spirituals. In the days of bondage there seemed little hope of deliverance here on earth, so emancipation came to be linked with death, when Jesus would strike the shackles from the slave and release him into another and happier world. 84

Looking back on it now, it is difficult to see how any Christian ever could have defended slavery. Most didn’t try until the 1830s. We sometimes forget that during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the antislavery movement was stronger in the South than in the North. For a combination of reasons, however, the antislavery movement faded, and a Southern defense of the institution arose. Some of the arguments for slavery were drawn from the Bible, thanks to Southern churchmen.

At the root of the Southern defense of slavery was the fact that the Bible by precept and example seemingly assumed the right to hold slaves. Richard Furman, South Carolina’s leading Baptist, argued that the Israelites in the Old Testament were directed to purchase their bondmen and once purchased they were to be “bondmen for ever” (Lev. 25:46 KJV). Similarly, in the New Testament, Furman reasoned, the inspired apostles never demand the emancipation of slaves. Masters are only required “to give them the things that are just and equal, forbearing threatening. . . .”

The associations of evangelical religion and race came to be a distinctive feature of the Southern way of life during the years of the Cotton Kingdom. The South became increasingly isolated, not only from the North but from much of the rest of the Western world, where strong judgments against slavery were often expressed. This isolation led to defensiveness. The region seemed obsessed with the institution. Harriet Martineau, a visitor from abroad in the 1830s, observed, “A magic ring seems drawn around those who live amidst slavery; and it gives a circular character to all they think and do upon the subject. There are but few who think within it who distinctly see anything beyond it.” One thing Southerners saw beyond their “magic ring” were threats and attacks.

A primary fountain of the evangelical sentiment against slavery in the North can be traced to the revival preaching of Charles G. Finney. Through the broad impact of Finney, strong antislavery feelings built up in the Midwest, especially around Oberlin College, where Finney served as president. At the forefront of this crusade was one of Finney’s disciples, Theodore Weld. His powerful writings, The Bible against Slavery (1837) and Slavery as It Is (1839), served as a catalyst for abolitionism.

Lyman Beecher’s daughter Harriet was especially impressed with Slavery as It Is . According to Weld’s wife, Angelina Grimke Weld, “Harriet Beecher Stowe lived with Slavery as It Is day and night till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom’s Cabin .” In her famous antislavery book published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe appeals, “Christians! Every time that you pray that the kingdom of Christ may come, can you forget that prophecy associates, in dread fellowship, the day of vengeance with the year of His redeemed?” She was referring to the violent overthrow of evil, Babylon, predicted in the last book of the Bible. According to the widely held millennialist interpretation of Revelation, the death throes of Babylon, which began with the Protestant Reformation, would be marked by the convulsion of nations.

Thus the American nation, destined to play a key role in the divine plan, must be purged of its guilt as it rushes toward the climax of human history. Slavery is not a sin of the South alone. The guilt is national; the purgation must be national. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin , then, Harriet Beecher Stowe was striking at the national conscience in the hope that a cleansing of the nation’s soul would avert a divine scourging of the body politic.

The book sold a million copies and was so influential in arousing antislavery sentiment that Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said upon meeting Stowe in 1863, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

PROFILES of Faith

Harriet Tubman (1825 – 1913) was born and abused as a slave in Maryland. She escaped to Pennsylvania in 1849 but returned to lead others to freedom by way of the “underground railroad” from one abolitionist safehouse to another. Although illiterate and in chronic pain from her injuries, over ten years she made nineteen trips, guiding more than sixty slaves to freedom, never losing a “passenger.” During the Civil War she served as a nurse, a spy, and a scout for Union troops, liberating more slaves in the South. She settled in New York, spoke publicly for women’s rights, and established a home for elderly black Americans. Vocal about her faith in Christ, she said of her work, “ ’Twant me, ’twas the Lord. I always told him, ‘I trust to you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,’ and he always did.”

All sides in the struggle, then, used the same set of symbols. There was one Bible, one heaven, one hell, one Jesus Christ, one path of salvation. Yet the symbols were employed for opposite causes. How could God be the God of the South against the North and of the North against the South? How could he have sponsored slavery, as Southerners said, and opposed slavery, as Northerners contended?

No one was more aware of these questions than the man who bore the burden of resolving the issue, President Abraham Lincoln. Although shaped by a largely Christian culture, Lincoln never joined a church and found himself at home with no particular creed. His language and thought, however, were formed by the Bible, and from it he learned that no one could interpret precisely what the will of God was for the nation.

ButtonText_image (Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), a Puritan, held firmly to a vision for a Christian America.) Lyman Beecher (1775 – 1863), a Puritan, held firmly to a vision for a Christian America.

“In great contests,” he once said, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.” Another time — in his second inaugural address — he observed, “Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. . . . The Almighty has his own purposes.” Lincoln knew that people should try to do God’s will as well as they could determine what it was for them, but the Almighty has his purposes that go beyond the plans of men.

So it proved. The war was fought; much blood was shed; the nation endured. The vision for a Christian America also survived, but like the nation itself it was greatly weakened. Black churches arose in large numbers, the primary institutional expression of their freedom, and the constant reminder of the blind spot in the earlier vision for a Christian America.

CULTURAL SHOCKS FOR CHRISTIANS

The streets of Atlanta were scarcely cleared before a series of cultural shocks raised widespread questions about the truth or relevance of traditional evangelical beliefs.

The first shock came from Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species , perhaps the most important book of the century. Darwin’s evolutionary theory presented a major challenge to evangelicals. The book argued that evolution took place by a mechanism called natural selection. Species seek to survive. The stronger ones that can adapt to their environment endure; species that are weaker and prove unable to adapt die off. Many believers anticipated where this idea would lead. Would such a theory eventually rule out a creating or sustaining God? How was the biblical story of creation to be understood?

The second shock to the traditional faith came from the increasing industrialization of American society and the rush to the cities. Small towns became big cities overnight. Urban conditions brought social ills — poverty, crime, homelessness, absence of basic education. People came not only from America’s hinterland but from other countries, many of whom brought religious customs and allegiance that were alien to the traditional way Protestant Americans had viewed their country and their Bibles.

The third and most direct assault on confidence in the Scriptures came in the form of higher criticism of the Bible. As more and more seminary and college professors took advanced degrees in the leading European universities, critical views became increasingly dominant in American higher education and eventually in many major denominations. Imagine the jolt to the churches when it was suggested that Moses did not author the first five books of the Bible and that Jesus was a somewhat deluded visionary and not the Son of God in the flesh.

Taken together these shocks were part of the general shift in Western culture from Christian to secular forms of thought and behavior. And Christians disagreed about what actions they should take to meet the new challenges.

Among traditionally evangelical denominations, two rather distinct parties developed. One party chose to embrace the changes as blessings sent from God that Christians needed to adapt to; another chose to resist the changes as threats to the biblical message.

Professor Martin Marty suggests that we call the parties Public Protestants and Private Protestants. His terms arise from the fact that one group spoke of social Christianity, social gospel, social service, and so on, while the other, often using the term evangelical, stressed primarily the need for individual salvation.

Leaders of the social emphasis were distressed over the human damage they saw in the new industrial order. Certainly, they argued, the prophets and Jesus would not have faced such miseries and exploitation with merely repeated calls for personal conversion. What about the Good Samaritan, who bound up the wounds of his “neighbor”? What this public group wanted was not promises of happiness in the sweet by and by but the transformation of the world in this life.

The private party continued in the tradition of revivalism. They threw their energies into the crusade for individual conversions, believing that if an individual’s heart was right with God, then economic and social problems would take care of themselves.

The major urban revivalist during the generation following the Civil War was Dwight L. Moody. Moody and scores of lesser - known preachers felt that their primary task was the winning of souls to Christ and preparation of saved men and women for Christ’s second coming.

PROFILES of Faith

Nick Chiles (1861? – 1929) founded and edited the Topeka Plaindealer , the longest - running African American newspaper (1899 – 1958) in the United States. The most famous Topekan then was Charles Sheldon, author of In His Steps (1896), a novel urging Christians to ask, “What would Jesus do?” In 1900 Sheldon served as guest editor of the Topeka Capital newspaper, editing “as Jesus would” for a week. Chiles urged him to address racist lynchings and burnings. Chiles wrote afterward, “Rev. Sheldon has accomplished one thing . . . if all else was disappointing. He used the upper - case ‘N’ in Negro. We know that’s what Jesus would do?” Chiles continued to confront white Christians, including correspondence with Pope Pius X, about the contrast between the ideals they professed and the reality of racism in American society.

Clearly, however, Beecher’s dream of a Christian America was fast fading. Millennialist hopes dissolved in the hatred of the War between the States, the trauma of strikes and financial panics in the 1870s and 1880s, and the formation of an urban world with its rejection of Christian values. In increasing numbers evangelicals, especially in the urban North, turned to speculation about the future and to the cultivation of the inner life.

The decisive character of the half century between the Civil War and World War I is evident in two statements — one at the beginning of this period and the other at the end.

In an 1873 address to the Evangelical Alliance, the Reverend Theodore Woolsey, retired president of Yale, asked, “In what sense can this country be called a Christian country? In this sense certainly,” he answered, “that the vast majority of the people believe in Christ and the gospel, that Christian influences are universal, that our civilization and intellectual culture are built on that foundation.”

Fifty years later in 1924, H. L. Mencken, widely read critic of American ways, remarked that “Christendom may be defined briefly as that part of the world in which, if any man stands up in public and solemnly swears that he is a Christian, all his auditors will laugh.” 85

Beecher never would have believed it.

CHAPTER 40: THE DESTINY OF A NATION

A Christian America?

• Question posed by Isaiah: "Can a country be born in a day?"

• Lyman Beecher (1835) emphasized Christians shaping the nation's destiny.

• Proposal for action: preaching the gospel, distributing Bibles, planting churches, establishing schools, and reforming morals.

• The era termed the age of the "righteous empire" in nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

The Challenge of the American West

• The West provided an unprecedented opportunity for evangelization.

• The American population shifted west, with many new states created.

• Frontiersmen had a reputation for lawlessness, prompting evangelicals to focus on evangelizing settlers.

• Evangelicals relied on two key instruments: voluntary societies and revivals.

• Voluntary societies facilitated cooperation among various denominations.

• Revival movements were centered in regions like Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Inflatable James McGready

• A significant revival figure who preached to lawless congregations in Kentucky.

• Organised what would become the first camp meeting in American history at Gasper River.

• McGready's success laid the foundation for future revivals and camp meetings.

Christianity Among the Slaves

• Slaves turned to Christianity for meaning after the destruction of their African culture.

• Black preachers emerged as vital leaders in the slave churches, translating biblical teachings to address the slaves' plight.

• The struggle with slavery was an ethical dilemma for American Christians.

Profiles of Faith

• Richard Allen: Born into slavery, became a prominent Methodist preacher and co-founder of the AME Church.

• Harriet Tubman: Escaped slave who led many to freedom via the Underground Railroad and remained deeply faith-driven.

Cultural Shocks for Christians

• The rise of Darwinism and industrialization challenged traditional beliefs.

• Higher criticism questioned the authorship and divine nature of the Bible.

• Emergence of two parties within evangelicalism: Public Protestants (focused on social reforms) vs. Private Protestants (focused on personal salvation).

The Decline of Beecher’s Vision

• The historical context emphasized a fading dream of a Christian America.

• Discrepancies in perceptions of America’s Christian influence between figures like Theodore Woolsey and H.L. Mencken.