Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah…[Isaiah 62:4. KJV]
For all of its history, a principal battle for the Christian church has been the preservation and defense of biblical truth. For centuries the European church fought among themselves and with their respective governments or kings all the while accumulating wealth, power, and worldliness. Following centuries of neglect, compromise, and corruption of the sustaining power of pristine biblical truth, the decline of the church worsened as it came under the influence and eventual domination of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought and its religion of humanism. For many of the faithful, Europe and the state churches had become wicked Babylon and a new colony at the edge of the vast American wilderness was seen as a Beulah land, a new Jerusalem favored and blessed by the Lord. And so it was to be for a season.
It all began as a tiny ship approached the shores of a primitive continent called America. Historian Paul Johnson in his massive A History of the American People called the arrival on December 11, 1620 of an old wine ship at New Plymouth as “…the single most important formative event in early American history.” The Mayflower contained a mixture of thirty-five English Calvinist Christians including some who had lived in exile in Holland to escape religious persecution in England. All were going to America for religious freedom. They were Separatist Puritans who had despaired of reforming the Church of England and its episcopal form of government and heavy influence of Catholic teaching. They were accompanied by sixty-six non-Puritans. The two groups contained forty-one families.[1]
The Pilgrims weren’t the first colonists to arrive. In 1607 the first English colony was established at Jamestown by gentlemen-adventurers, indentured servants, and landless men attempting to better themselves. The best men of the Jamestown colony brought with them English traditions of fair-mindedness, freedom, reverence for the common law, and a sense of government that looked to the common interest and general needs of society. But the Puritans of Plymouth were completely different as to personality and motivation. Johnson described their various members as “…the zealots, the idealists, the utopians, the saints…immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous…creative too but ideological and cerebral, prickly and unbending, fiercely unyielding on occasions.”[2]
Paul Johnson’s belief in the singular importance of the Pilgrims’ arrival as the formative event in early American history rests on the monumental influence of the Pilgrims in shaping future generations of Americans. The Pilgrims established the model for faith, family, community, and governance which was followed to a large degree by Americans over the next two hundred years. They came not as individuals but as a community and not primarily for earthly gain but to create God’s kingdom on earth. This sense of community was formalized in a remarkable document signed barely three weeks before their arrival. Having endured two months of a winter voyage in the turbulent North Atlantic amid the discomforts of a tiny and crowded ship, forty-one heads of households gathered in the main cabin of the ship and signed the Mayflower Compact which pledged them to unity and the provision of a future government.[3]
In the Name of God, Amen…Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country…Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politic, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.[4] [emphasis added]
Here we see that the Mayflower Compact represented far more than just a commercial venture based on a secular civil arrangement to secure unity and a form of governance for the moment. The Pilgrims had solemnly and mutually pledged in the presence of God and each other to a “civil Body politick” under “just and equal laws…[for the] furtherance of the glory of God.” This simple document foreshadowed a theme that reverberated throughout the colonies over the next 150 years and led to the American Revolution. It put forth the idea that a just and equal society must rest on the foundation of religious faith. It recognized that government flowed from the governed—under God. It also recognized that there was a close connection between government and religious faith.[5] But for a time the colonists struggled to discover how the church-state relationship was to be properly constituted and limited according to the tenets of the Bible.
The Pilgrim Separatists were a humble people and often viewed as radicals because of their desire to separate from the Church of England as opposed to most Puritans who wanted to stay in the church and reform it from within. This second group formed the great migration of English Puritans beginning in 1628 upon the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Many were able men with wealth and social position. Twenty thousand had crossed the Atlantic by 1640 and resided in the Salem area. They would not separate from the Church of England but wanted separation from its corruption. If they could not reform the church in England, they would bring the church to America and change it to their liking. One of those changes was borrowed from the much despised small band of radical Pilgrim Separatists—the congregational form of church government.[6]
The English Puritans had arisen in 1560 within the Anglican Church and sought reforms to bring about “a pure and stainless church.” When the Church of England did not respond favorably to the Puritans ideas of reform, many sailed to America during the first half of the 1600s. Sherwood Eddy called those early years of colonial Puritanism “…the finest expression of spiritual life that Britain or America or Continental Europe had at that time.”[7] But by the end of the 1600s and beginning of the 1700s, interest in the colonists’ hard-won Christian legacy was eroding due to a decline of religious fervor and to a lesser extent because of the assault by the forces of deism and the Enlightenment. The ardor and commitment of the religious life of the early seventeenth century colonists had settled down into a moralistic Christian routine by the end of that century and into the early eighteenth century.[8] Eddy described the dismal condition of the church.
There was a gradual loss of the sense of sin, and the idea of God’s sovereignty became a means of oppression by the ecclesiastical oligarchy…The children of the hardy pioneers became softer and more worldly. The unregenerate second generation were allowed to remain in the church as members though not in full communion. Thus originated the halfway covenant with a mixed membership of a more all-inclusive church that had lost the purity of a separated regenerate sect.[9]
In 1740, one hundred and ten years after the arrival of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay, evangelist George Whitefield wrote, “Boston is very wealthy. It has the form but has lost much of the power of religion. Ministers and people are too much conformed to the world. There is an external observance of the Sabbath. Many rest in a head knowledge, and are close Pharisees.” [10]
Whitefield’s remarks about worldliness in the church would also apply in varying degrees to the remainder of the American colonies. The decline in religious fervor that had enveloped the American colonies reached its nadir by the early part of the eighteenth century. But the decline of religious life was dramatically reversed as new religious forces exploded on the scene in the 1730s and caused a revival and resurgence of Christian churches. As these forces combined and grew over time, it became known as the Great Awakening and was the major formative event that crafted the worldview of the founding generation.[11] Sherwood Eddy captures the importance of the American religious awakening during the eighteenth century upon the Revolution and later writing of the Constitution:
Throughout the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, the religious and the secular life of America could not be separated. The very ideals of political freedom had grown out of the principle of religious liberty of the Reformation and out of the experience of the Pilgrims, Puritans, and protesting colonists. It was in the churches of Boston and Virginia that revolutionary meetings were held. The clergy of the free, dissenting, and popular churches were preaching liberty as a religious principle. The pulpit inspired the Revolution and summoned the faithful to patriotic service and to the realization of the American Dream.[12]
Following the American Revolution (1776-1781) and efforts to form a new nation, there was a second ebbtide of religious fervor and an increase in secularism and irreligion, especially in the decade of 1790s. America’s spiritual and moral decline threatened the survival of the new republic. As a result of coordinated and concerted prayer among the American churches, the Second Great Awakening crossed the Atlantic in the late 1790s and resulted in a spiritual and moral regeneration and initiated other civilizing influences on the young nation. These influences included popular education, Bible Societies, Sunday schools, the modern missionary movement, and ultimately sowed and nurtured the seeds that led to the abolition of slavery.[13] Just as the Great Awakening was the formative moment in American history preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible, the Second Great Awakening was the stabilizing moment that saved the new nation from political and moral destruction and whose effects lasted until the 1840s.
The Third Great Awakening began in 1857-1858 and has been called by many names including the Businessman’s Revival, the Layman’s Revival, and the Union Prayer Meeting. But it is most widely known as the Revival of 1857-1858. Much like the central theme of the Protestant Reformation, this revival was about personal religious transformation from which society greatly benefited. It must be remembered that the ordering of society and the addressing of its social ills must begin with the individual and an ordering of his soul in right relationship with God. This must certainly be the greatest impact of the Revival of 1857-1858 as the nation was soon to be immersed in its greatest struggle for survival.
The Third Great Awakening was the sustaining moment that prepared the nation to endure the national conflagration of the Civil War and made possible its survival in the war’s aftermath. The efforts to abolish slavery in America began even before the nation’s Founding as a result of the moral suasion of Christian people who saw slavery as morally unacceptable within the biblical worldview. The Revival caused men and women, in both the North and South, to be spiritually prepared for the coming struggle in which the nation would exorcize the demon of slavery and recover its national unity.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), pp. 28-29.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 29.
[4] Henry Steele Commager, ed., “Mayflower Compact,” Documents of American History, Vol. 1 to 1865, (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1934), p. 15-16.
[5] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp. 27-28.
[6] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 328.
[7] Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941), pp. 48, 56.
[8] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington, D. C.: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), p. 333.
[9] Eddy, p. 55.
[10] Ibid., p. 54.
[11] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Press, 2011), pp. 123-124.
[12] Eddy, p. 115.
[13] J. Edwin Orr, “Prayer brought Revival,” http://articles.ochristian.com/article8330.shtml (accessed November 26, 2010); Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, pp. 410-411.
