Arizona State University Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians Essay

Revivals,
Awakenings, and
Reform
Chicago History of
Amencan Religion
A Senes Edited by
Martin. E. Marty
Revivals,
Awakenings, and
Reform
An Essay on Religion
and Social Change
in America, 1607-1977
William C. McLoughlin
The UnivenIty a/Chicago Press
Chicago and London
I dedicate this book to my
friend and mentor, Oscar Handlin
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
? 1978 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1978
Paperback edition 1980
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 II 10 09 08 10 II 12 13 14
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56092-2 (paper)
ISBN-IO: 0-226- 56092-9 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mcloughlin, William Gerald.
Revivals, awakenings, and reform.
(Chicago history of American religion)
Biography: p.
Includes index.
1. Revivals-United States. 2. United StatesChurch history. 3. United States–Civilization.
I. Title.
BV3773.M32
269′ .2’0973
ISBN 0-226-56092-9 (paper)
77-27830
e The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for
Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
v
Foreword by
Martin E. Marty
Preface
Awakenings as Revitalizations
of Culture
The Puritan Awakening and
the Culture Core
The First Great Awakening,
1730-60
The Second Great Awakening,
1800-1830
The Third Great Awakening,
1890-1920
The Founh Great Awakening,
1960-90(?)
Suggestions for
Further Reading
Index
Vll
Xlll
1
24
45
98
141
179
217
229
Foreword
Individuals do not ordinarily live their lives at a single pitch of
intensity. Periods of high drama are interspersed among longer
periods of mild boredom. After times of vitality come stretches of
exhaustion. As with individuals, so with cultures. The people who
make them up could not sustain “peak experiences” every day or
every year, yet after barren or serene periods they almost welcome
disturbances and challenges. Historians measure cultures both by
the way they endure ebbs or enervations and enjoy flows or
revitalizations.
William G. McLoughlin has written an essay on revitalizations in
the culture of America, or at least in many of the subcultures that
make up the nation. The fact that these times of agitation and fresh
impetus appear to him to have a religious dimension or that they
sometimes are even fundamentally religious does not result merely
from his assignment to write a book in a series on American
religious history. His is a full-length illustration of a theme in the
writings of Paul Tillich: that religion is the soul of culture and
culture the form of religion. Whether in the discovery and
settlement of the New World, the revolutionary struggles to shape
the nation, the Civil War agonies to preserve it, or the recurrent
times of troubles or new dedication, deeply religious themes come
to light. The writings of Christopher Columbus, ThomasJefferson,
and Abraham Lincoln or the inaugural addresses of numerous
presidents illustrate this bonding of national and spiritual themes.
At times the revitalizations begin and even run their course as
religious movements. As such they often can go unnoticed by
VII
VUI
Foreword
historians who have their eyes trained chiefly on economic or
political indicators, on tariff debates or diplomatic treaties. Even
the most significant religious events often appear to be so diffuse
and subtle that “hard news” reponers and historians tend to
neglect them. To take an example: in the year of the American
Bicentennial numerous polls of historians and news reponers
ranked the most important events in American history. Never did
the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s show up in the
one hundred top selections. Yet scrutiny of colonial life on the pan
of specialists turns up evidence that this Great Awakening was
perhaps the most extensive intercolonial event; that it reached into
vinually every kind of community and crossroads; that its effects
were at first profoundly unsettling to the established order and then
became creative elements in establishing a new order; and that
indirect lines connect many of its impulses to those of the War of
Independence and nation-building endeavors. Perry Miller and
Alan Heimert argue with considerable effect that the awakening
began “a new era, not merely of American Protestantism, but in
the evolution of the American mind,” that it was a watershed, a
break with the Middle Ages, a turning point, a “crisis.”
If this First Great Awakening, its Second counterpart, sixty
years later, and two or three later eruptions were so revitalizing,
why, it may fairly be asked, are they so obscure and neglected in
national consciousness? Certainly their diffuse character or their
elusiveness cannot be the only reason; historians welcome the
challenge to style past cultural trends and to give a shape to
intellectual phenomena that are hard to chart. We must look
elsewhere for answers to the question. One possible answer comes
from the character of the American academy in what many call a
secular period and a pluralist society. With the binh of the modern
university and its accompanying division of labor, the study of
religious history was edged into segregated seminaries and divinity
schools. Especially with the rise of public tax-supported institutions
the study of religion became problematic. Add to this the fact that
many intellectuals were themselves in rebellion against what they
experienced as repressive and limiting childhood religion, and it is
easy to see why the study of awakenings did not draw notice the way
charting of military conflicts or presidential elections did.
IX
Foreword
While the academy was isolating and pushing aside the
religious subject. the study of revitalizations. then. tended to
become “church property.” Historians of the movements tended
to denominationalize the experience and argue over it along the
lines of their sectarian preserves. As a result. some of them chose to
define revivals and awakenings as precisely and as narrowly as
possible. In church life you can hear intense debates over whether
the terms “revival” or “awakening” are more appropriate than
others; whether Baptists or Methodists were most responsible for
them; whether non-Protestants were caught up in the ethos of
renewal; whether the hand of Providence must be seen in such
movements or whether ordinary social and psychological explanations are in order. As a result. it is easy to see the majority of people
who are not members of the contending parties yawning and
serenely ignoring the whole discussion.
Professor Mcloughlin is as gifted and persistent as any of the
specialists in these churches in his efforts to track the trails of
revivalists. He has written the most extensive general history to date
in his Modern Revivalism. and his biographies. Billy Sunday Was
His Real Name and Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age. have
been lively contributions to the literature. Mcloughlin does not
choose. however. to fence in the revivalists or put narrow borders
around awakenings. In the present essay he moves more boldly than
anyone I have yet read to extend the study of American awakening
into culture-wide phenomena called “revitalization movements.”
The rea~er must be forewarned not to expect fully conventional
uses of sectarian terms in this book; the same reader must be
forewarned against the idea that he or she can. after reading this.
settle back comfortably with unchanged views of American culture.
The task of conceiving. chartering. eliciting. and seeing to
fruition a book of this sort from preoccupied and busy scholars takes
a number of years. My first correspondence with McLoughlin. the
author. dates back more than ten years before the time of
publication. Around 1967 not many Americans were speaking
about revivals or awakenings. They were aware. of course. of the
durable efforts of evangelist Billy Graham. but for the rest
revivalism smelled of the old sawdust trail and the southern rivers of
baptism. Agitation over the Vietnamese War or the movements of
x
Foreword
Black Power swept campuses, and most collegians would have been
embarrassed to be caught knowing what “born again” meant, to
say nothing of being seen at a prayer meeting.
In the same late sixties, however, many Americans were beginning to send out subtle signals that a change was in the air. Some of
the protest against the war turned pacific; “flower children”
replaced the militants, and some of them retreated to communes
where interest centered in Zen Buddhism, macrobiotic diets, or the
Children of God. In the cultural avant-garde, people sang of an
impending Age of Aquarius and began to consult their friendly
neighborhood astrologer. Eastern religions found Western embodiments on campuses and in cities. Suddenly the long-latent fundamentalist, evangelical, and pentecostal movements erupted closer
to the mainstream and Middle American cultures. By 1976 the two
presidential candidates were part of prayer-revival movements, and
the more flamboyantly “born again” of the two became president.
The best-selling books in the nation touted the experience of revival
and awakening, and celebrities never tired of revealing their
horoscopes or laying bare their experience of the Holy Spirit.
Professor McLoughlin, who dates “The Founh Great Awakening”
from 1960, found himself writing in the midst of cultural changes
that few had anticipated.
The reader will note that the final chapter heading looks beyond
the present to 1990-with a question mark. No one can know how
long the ferment will last. Some of the noisier hucksters on the
revivalist trail claim that a new epoch of the Spirit, a time of
permanent Awakening, is at hand. The more sober have learned
from history that there are what Emile Durkheim called “moments
of effervescence,” “periods of creation and renewal,” times when
people “are brought into more intimate relations with one another,
when meetings and assemblies are more frequent, relationships
more solid and the exchange of ideas more active. ,. They also know
that, after crises pass, “all that has been said, done, thought and
felt during the period of fertile upheaval survives only as a
memory … an idea, a set of ideas.” More than a memory. these
“flows” leave a sediment, a changed cultural landscape.
Cultural fads, crazes, and manias come and go; as the date of
publication nears, there are signs that many of the more effervescent
XI
Foreword
phenomena have already lost some of their bubble and fizz. It is
possible that before long the “meetings and assemblies” will lose
their hold, that their partisans will turn schismatic and see their
vitality diminish. The basic secular aspects of the culture may not
have been decisively altered. If people regain confidence in their
political and technical processes, some of the passion for personal
experience of a religious character may be diverted into other
channels. Should that day come soon, this essay by William
McLoughlin is likely to be recognized as one of the more helpful
efforts to put a name on this complex set of events and to place it in
the much longer context of Americal history.
Martin E. Marty
The University of Chicago
Preface
In part this essay is designed to distinguish between America’s
“great awakenings” and the religious revivalism that accompanies
them. Revivalism is the Protestant ritual (at first spontaneous, but,
since 1830, routinized) in which charismatic evangelists convey
“the Word” of God to large masses of people who, under this
influence, experience what Protestants call conversion, salvation,
regeneration, or spiritual rebirth. Awakenings-the most vital and
yet most mysterious of all folk arts-are periods of cultural
revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and
extend over a period of a generation or so, during which time a
profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals
alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a
whole people or culture.
Psychologists and theologians study transformations in individual
outlook and behavior; historians, sociologists, and anthropologists
study transformations of cultural outlook and behavior. Insofar as a
theological position (say, Calvinism, deism, Evangelicalism, Liberal
Protestantism, Humanism) is an ideology, that is, gives meaning
and order to the lives of a people, it is subject to reinterpretation (or
dissolution) in the light of significant changes in the economic,
demographic, political, or social affairs of the people who hold it.
The intellectual historian who attempts to explain the complex
relationship between ideologies and social change faces the task of
comprehending the whole social order of a community over time.
This essay, in seeking to explain America’s five great awakenings, or
periods of ideological transformation, is thus an interpretation of
xiii
XIV
Preface
American cultural history from 1607 to the present. As such, it can
hope to provide in a relatively short book only a suggestive model of
social change.
In addition, I hope to stimulate a more coherent approach to the
history of religion in America than we have had. We cannot study
one aspect of one awakening (say, the New England phase of the
First Great Awakening) and hope to comprehend the total
phenomenon; nor, in summarizing one awakening, can we
comprehend why the phenomenon seems constantly to repeat
itself. This essay suggests that beneath the recurring pattern of
ideological (or theological) change lies a common core of beliefs
that has provided continuity and shape to American culture (insofar
as our culture, which is really a subculture of Western civilization,
has a distinctive ideology or national character). Consequently, the
reader is asked to trace the evolutionary changes in a group of
interlocking myths, hopes, and ideals that have shaped, and been
reshaped by, the events of our history. At the heart of our culture
are the beliefs that Americans are a chosen people; that they have a
manifest (or latent) destiny to lead the world to the millennium;
that their democratic-republican institutions, their bountiful
natural resources, and their concept of the free and morally
responsible individual operate under a body of higher moral laws
(to transgress which is to threaten our destiny); and that the
Judeo-Christian personal and social ethic (especially in the formulation described by Max Weber as “the Protestant ethic” and called
by recent generations “the success myth,” “the work ethic,” and
“the American dream”) causes the general welfare to thrive by
allowing the greatest possible free play and equal opportunity to
each individual to fulfill his or her potential.
This individualistic, pietistic, perfectionist, millenarian ideology
has from time to time been variously defined and explained to meet
changing experience and contingencies in our history, but the
fundamental belief that freedom and responsibility will perfect not
only the individual and the nation but the world (because they are
in harmony with the supreme laws of nature-and of nature’s
God) has been constant. American history is thus best understood
as a millenarian movement. The five periods of social and ideological crisis that have produced our great awakenings have served
xv
Preface
essentially to sustain this common core of cultural myths (which
even the most recent immigrants rapidly assimilate, if they do not
arrive possessing them).
In this essay I endeavor to explain the sources of our recurrent
ideological crises and the process of reorientation and redefinition
of the core of beliefs and values that has enabled us to emerge from
each crisis with renewed self-confidence as a people. This renewed
confidence in turn produces those recurrent eras of social and
institutional reform that (taken as a whole) constitute the American
liberal tradtion. As God sheds “new” or “further light” on our
mission, we refashion our pattern of life and enculturation to
enable rising generations to cope with the unfolding complexities
of human redemption. In a concluding chapter I suggest that, since
1960, we have been in the process of what may well be the most
traumatic and drastic transformation of our ideology that has yet
occurred.
Because this is an essay and not a scholarly monograph, I have
avoided the use of footnotes by identifying in the text the principal
sources upon which I have drawn. I must also acknowledge, of
course, that I have drawn upon the writings and thoughts of a host
of colleagues, friends, and students. To any who find their ideas
intermixed in this book with mine, without acknowledgment, I
offer my apologies and my thanks. I also wish to extend special
appreciation to David Buchdahl for much help with chapter 6 and
to my daughter,)eremy, for her assistance with that chapter. Above
all, as ever, I am thankful to Virginia.
1
Awakenings as
Revitalizations
of Culture
Revivalism and Protestant Hegemony
Awakenings have been the shaping power of American culture
from its inception. The first settlers came to British North America
in the midst of the great Puritan Awakening in England bringing
with them the basic beliefs and values that provided the original
core of our culture.
Our Revolution came after the First Great Awakening on
American soil had made the thirteen colonies into a cohesive unit (e
plunous unum), had given them a sense of unique nationality, and
had inspired them with the belief that they were, “and of right
ought to be,” a free and independent people.
Shortly after the Constitution had launched the American
republic, a second era of religious revivals created the definitions of
what it meant to be “an American” and what the manifest destiny
of the new nation was. After the Civil War had cemented our sense
of the Union (“One nation, indivisible under God, with liberty
and justice for all”), the Third Great Awakening helped us to
understand the meaning of evolutionary science and industrial
progress and led us into the crusades “to make the world safe for
democracy” in 1917 and 1941.
Since 1960, Americans have been in the midst of their Fourth
Great Awakening (or their fifth, if we include the Puritan Awakening). Once again we are in a difficult period of reorientation,
seeking an understanding of who we are, how we relate to the rest
of the universe, and what the meaning is of the manifold crises that
2
Chapter 1
threaten our sense of order at home and our commitments as a world
power abroad.
Great awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are the
results, not of depressions, wars, or epidemics, but of critical
disjunctions in our self-understanding. They are not brief outbursts
of mass emotionalism by one group or another but profound
cultural transformations affecting all Americans and extending
over a generation or more. Awakenings begin in periods of cultural
distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the
legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the
authority of our leaders in church and state. They eventuate in basic
restructurings of our institutions and redefinitions of our social
goals.
Great awakenings are not periods of social neurosis (though they
begin in times of cultural confusion). They are times of revitalization. They are therapeutic and cathartic, not pathological. They
restore our cultural verve and our self-confidence, helping us to
maintain faith in ourselves, our ideals, and our “covenant with
God” even while they compel us to reinterpret that covenant in the
light of new experience. Through awakenings a nation grows in
wisdom, in respect for itself, and into more harmonious relations
with other peoples and the physical universe. Without them our
social order would cease to be dynamic; our culture would wither,
fragment, and dissolve in confusion, as many civilizations have
done before.
Revivals and awakenings occur in all cultures. They are essentially
folk movements, the means by which a people or a nation reshapes
its identity, transforms its patterns of thought and action, and
sustains a healthy relationship with environmental and social
change . To understand the functions of American revivalism and
revitalization is to understand the power and meaning of America
as a civilization. Until the present generation these periods of
cultural readjustment have been associated almost wholly with the
Protestant churches. The association of awakenings with revivalism
derives from the fact that Protestant ideology has, until recently,
been so dominant in our culture that other faiths have not really
counted, or have not been counted, in measuring the growth of the
nation in it efforts to redeem the world.
3
Awakenings as Revitalizations
of Culture
Until recently, most Americans assumed that the progress of
their nation toward the millennium could be measured in the
growing adherence of people here and around the world to some
form of Protestantism. Protestants assumed that the preaching of
God’s Word (especially by gifted evangelists or missionaries) would
eventually bring the whole world into a right relationship with
God. Periods of mass conversion were seen as evidence of God’s
favor and of man’s obedience to his will. R. H. Tawney said, in
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, that “Calvin did for the
bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the
proletariat of the nineteenth . . . ; the doctrine of predestination
satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the
universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a
different age by the theory of materialism.” Americans, whose
nation began with the upthrust of Calvinism in England and whose
prosperity rose with the success of capitalist enterprise, have always
felt that they were the elect of God, and the growth in church
membership (which in seventeenth-century New England included
about 20 percent of the population) to close to two-thirds of the
population in the 1970s confirmed the view that God had blessed
America spiritually as he had blessed it materially.
The success of the British colonists against the pagan Indians and
their Catholic Spanish and French allies prior to 1776 seemed proof
of this. Our successful revolution against British tyranny, our rapid
expansion to the Pacific, our rise to industrial power, our triumphal
role in the great European wars, and our assumption of global
power after World War II added further conviction that we were
indeed God’s chosen people. But that conviction rested on the
ideological assumption that Protestants had replaced Catholics as
the true church after 1517 just as Christians had replaced Jews after
the death of Christ. Protestant church growth was the measure of
Christianity’s success, and revivalistic evangelism was the means of
that growth.
The first inkling of the possibility that evangelical Protestantism
might not remain the dominant religious ideology of the new
nation came with the massive immigration of Irish Catholics in the
second quaner of the nineteeth century. Their resistance to evangelistic effort produced a great fear among pious Protestants that
4
Chapter 1
the safety and progress of the nation were endangered. Fear as well
as hope has been a spur to revivalism ever since. Evangelistic efforts
to reach the unchurched redoubled after 1830, and a host of
“professional” revivalists arose to sustain Protestant church growth.
After the Civil War, when the cities were described by home
missionaries as seething caldrons of foreign, godless, and radical
immorality among’ ‘the masses,” new evangelistic techniques were
directed toward “winning the cities for Christ.” Revivalists like D.
L. Moody,). Wilbur Chapman, Sam P.Jones, and Billy Sunday led
elaborate revival campaigns in cities across the country. Because
they were thought to have a special gift for” reaching the masses,”
they were given broad Protestant support and publicity. Their
success, however, proved limited.
After World War I, when it became statistically evident that
non-Protestant church membership was rising more rapidly than
Protestant membership and when the split between Fundamentalists and Modernists led many of the rising generation to abandon
formal church affiliation for agnosticism, humanism, or atheism,
xenophobic fears became so great that the nation’s first immigration-restriction laws were passed. These were specifically written to
exclude immigrants from non-Protestant countries (just as earlier
laws and agreements had specifically excluded Oriental immigrants).
The New Pluralism
Fundamentalist Protestants began to adopt a premillennial perspective on human history at the end of the nineteenth century
because their conception of America’s covenant with God ceased to
be dominant among the largest denominations. Pervaded by gloom
as the non-Protestant immigrants increased and as Protestant
leaders abandoned belief in a literally infallible Bible, the Fundamentalists concluded that they were the saving remnant. Yet they
doubted whether they alone could save America or the world from
the imminent Apocalypse. The Modernists or Liberal Protestants,
accommodating the Bible to the higher criticism of the Bible and to
Darwinian evolution, assumed that God still intended to work
5
Awakenings as Revitalizations
of Culture
through America to redeem mankind. However, they yielded
considerable authority to the scientists (including sociologists,
psychologists, economists, and political scientists) in working out
man’s progress toward the millennium. The nonchurchgoing
humanists and agnostics, relying on science rather than revelation
or the churches, had more in common with the Modernists than
with the Fundamentalists. And, for the first time, Liberals (whether
Modernist Protestants or lapsed-Protestant humanists) made
gestures of including Catholic and Jewish liberals in their efforts to
overcome the roadblocks to the millennium. After all, many of the
poor, and many members of the working class, were recent
immigrants; to uplift them, to allow them to participate fully in the
working-out of America’s millennial mission, could be construed to
be as much the task of the Catholic and the Jew as of the Liberal
Protestant and the progressive humanist.
Unfortunately, this tentative ecumenism was still tainted with
superciliousness on the part of the native-born; their general
support of restrictions on immigration and their feeling that
Catholic and Jewish immigrants needed to be “uplifted” from
their “backward” and “superstitious” ignorance scarcely contributed to religious equality. However, when the Bolshevik
Revolution in 1917 created a revolutionary force in the world that
rivaled the potential power of the Americal Revolution as a source
of hope for the oppressed of the world, a new kind of ecumenism
began to develop among conservative Fundamentalists, Catholics,
and Jews.
Fearing that Communism represented the Anti-Christ, aware
that it threatened not only private property and American
capitalism but the Judeo-Christian faith, many Fundamentalists
and Catholics found common ground in defending “the Cross and
the Flag” against this satanic foreign conspiracy. The creation of
the State of Israel in 1948 (following Hitler’s efforts to eliminate
the Jews from human history) provided a link between conservative
Evangelical Christians and Jews. According to Fundamentalist
exegesis of the Bible, the redemption of the human race included a
role for the Jews; particularly noted was the prediction that in “the
latter days” a sign of the millennium would be the return of the
Jews to their homeland. Defense of religious liberty, of capitalist
6
Chapter 1
hegemony in the world. of “inalienable natural rights” against
tyrannical fascists and communists alike. also united Liberal
Protestants and humanists behind a common front with Catholics
and Jews after 1950.
At this point Americans at last accepted the concept of a
pluralistic nation. at least to the extent. as Will Herberg put it in
1955, of agreeing that “to be a Protestant, a Catholic, or aJew are
today the alternative ways of being an American. ” The election of a
Roman Catholic to the presidency in 1960 and the admiration for
Henry Kissinger (a foreign-born Jew) as secretary of state after 1968
were outward symbols of this pluralism. Although Orientals were
still only a tiny group in the nation, their religious outlook gained
respectability in the 1950s when the rising generation found the
ecumenism of the new pluralistic’ ‘establishment” too fear-ridden,
conservative. and culture-bound. The interest in Zen Buddhism
suggested that ecumenism should be worldwide rather than
American or Western.
When a tremendous upsurge of interest in religion began in the
1960s. many journalists and social critics found signs that a new
awakening was at hand. but they found them at first in the older
symbols of revivalism. Protestant evangelists like Billy Graham.
Oral Roberts. and Kathryn Kuhlman resurrected the tradition of
mass revivalism in the cities. while Catholics like Monsignor Fulton
J. Sheen and Jews like Rabbi Joshua Liebman aroused tremendous
popular response within their faiths. Revivalism seemed more
ecumenical but not essentially different. What did not fit the old
pattern was the new interest in Zen Buddhism. magic, astrology.
satanism. and the occult. It seemed that, while the older generation
of Americans was ready to reaffirm its Judeo-Christian heritage. a
large proportion of the younger generation was ready to abandon it.
There was also a renewed interest in atheistic Marxism in the 1960s.
not to mention the continued appeal of scientism, evident in
Scientology, Esalen. and est. Faith in the Holy Spirit was matched
by faith in ESP. Revivalism was present, but it did not seem to be at
the center of the new awakening. The emergence of the Jesus
People and the new popularity of neo-Evangelicalism (personified
in President Jimmy Carter and his faith-healing sister) were
matched by the death-of-God movement and the new rural
7
Awakenings as Revitalizations
of Culture
communes, which seemed to reject the nation’s Judeo-Christian
heritage. To explain all this, a new definition of an “awakening”
was necessary.
Toward a New Definition ofan Awakening
The purpose of this essay is to indicate why the key to a great
awakening is no longer to be found simply in Protestant (or even
ecumenical) mass revivalism. Most historians, although they note a
serious ideological shift in American culture between 1890 and
1920, do not describe that period (as I shall here) as America’s
Third Great Awakening. They do not because they rightly see that
Dwight. L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Aimee Semple MacPherson
were not really at the heart of that ideological reorientation in the
same sense that Jonathan Edwards was at the center of our First
Great Awakening and Lyman Beecher at the center of our Second.
Nevenheless, these four great eras of ideological reorientation
(along with the Puritan movement) are similar. What we need,
therefore, is a model that can abstract the causes, functions, and
results of such reorientations from the Protestant revivalism that
originally characterized them.
If we can rid ourselves of the old Protestant definition of
revivalism and awakenings and think more sociologically and
anthropologically about religion, we will better understand our past
as well as our present times of concern with man’s place in the
universe. Ever since the first applications of psychological analysis to
religious experiences in the 1890s there has been a tendency to
denigrate their spiritual quality. But while such analysis freed us
from doctrinal explanation of conversions, it also tended to deny
their religious dimension. Despite the best efforts of William
James, most psychologists, whether Freudian or behaviorist, have
reduced religious experiences to secular terms by stressing latent
versus manifest content. The scientific