The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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felt slighted by the republican government. By 1790, some 40 percent of Americans lived in territory that had only been settled by white colonists some thirty years earlier. The frontiersmen felt resentful of the ruling elite, who did not share their hardships, but who taxed them as harshly as the British, and bought land for investment in the territories without any intention of leaving the comforts and refined civilization of the eastern seaboard. They were willing to give ear to a new brand of preacher who helped to stir up the wave of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening. This was more politically radical than the first. These prophets were not simply concerned with saving souls, but worked to shape society and religion in a way that was very different from anything envisaged by the Founders.
The new revivalists were not learned men, like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, who had studied at Yale and Oxford. They hated academia and insisted that all Christians had the right to interpret the Bible for themselves, without submitting to the theological experts. These prophets were not cultivated men; in their preaching they spoke in a way that ordinary people could understand, often using wild gestures along with earthy humor and slang. Their services were not polite and decorous, but noisy, rowdy, and highly emotional. They were recasting Christianity in a popular style that was light-years from the refined ethos of the Age of Reason. They held torchlight processions and mass rallies, and pitched huge tents outside the towns, so that the revivals took on the appearance of a vast campsite. The new genre of the Gospel Song transported the audience to ecstasy, so that they wept, rocked violently backward and forward, and shouted for joy.70 Instead of making their religion rational, the prophets relied on dreams and visions, signs and wonders—all the things that were deplored by the scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment. And yet, like the Jeffersonians, they refused to see the past as the repository of wisdom, conservative-wise. They were moderns. People should not be bound by learned traditions. They had the freedom of the sons of God, and, with common sense, relying on the plain facts of scripture, they could figure out the truth for themselves.71 These new preachers railed against the aristocracy, the establishment, and the learned clergy. They emphasized the egalitarian tendencies of the New Testament, which stated that in the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God sent his insights to the poor and unlettered: Jesus and the Apostles had not had college degrees.
Religion and politics were part of a single vision. With his flowing hair and wild, glittering eyes Lorenzo Dow looked like a modern-day John the Baptist. He would see a storm as a direct act of God, and relied on dreams and visions for his insights. A change in the weather could be a “sign” of the approaching End of Days; he claimed the ability to foretell the future. He seemed, in sum, to be the antithesis of the new world of modernity. Yet he was likely to begin a sermon with a quotation from Jefferson or Thomas Paine, and like a true modernist, he urged the people to throw off the shackles of superstition and ignorance, cast off the authority of the learned establishment, and think for themselves. It seemed that in the new United States, religion and politics were two sides of a single coin and spilled easily into each other, whatever the Constitution maintained. Thus Elias Smith first experienced a political conversion during Jefferson’s presidential campaign, when he became a radical egalitarian. But he then went on to found a new and more democratic church. Similarly, James O’Kelly had fought in the revolution and been held prisoner by the British. He had been thoroughly politicized, wanted a more equal church, and seceded from mainstream Christianity to found his own “Republican Methodists.” When Barton Stone broke with the Presbyterians, he called his secession a “declaration of independence.” Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), who had received a university education, cast off his Scottish Presbyterianism when he migrated to America, to found a sect that approximated more closely to the egalitarian Primitive Church.72 Still more radical was Joseph Smith (1805–44), who was not content to read the Bible, but claimed to have discovered an entirely new scripture. The Book of Mormon was one of the most eloquent of all nineteenth-century social protests, and mounted a fierce denunciation of the rich, the powerful, and the learned.73 Smith and his family had lived for years on the brink of destitution, and felt that there was no place for them in this brave new republic. The first Mormon converts were equally poor, marginalized, and desperate, perfectly ready to follow Smith in an exodus from and symbolic repudiation of the United States. Mormons subsequently founded their own independent kingdoms, first in Illinois and, finally, in Utah.
The establishment looked with disdain upon Dow, Stone, and Joseph Smith, regarding them as mindless demagogues who had nothing to offer the modern world. These preachers seemed to be barbarous anachronisms, relics of a primitive bygone world. The response of the mainline clergy and American aristocrats to these latter-day prophets was not dissimilar to the way in which liberals and secularists regard fundamentalist leaders today. But they were wrong to dismiss them. Men such as Dow or Joseph Smith have been described as folk geniuses.74 They were able to bring the revolutionary modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could understand and make their own. These new ideals that were going to be essential in the new world that was coming to birth in America were brought to the less privileged majority in a mythological context that gave them meaning, and provided a necessary continuity during this time of turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. These new prophets demanded recognition, and, though they were reviled by the established elite, their reception by the people showed that they answered a real need. They were not content with individual conversions, like the preachers of the First Great Awakening, but wanted to change society. They were able to mobilize the population in nationwide mass movements, using popular music and the new communications media to skilled effect. Instead of trying to impose the modern ethos from above, like the Founding Fathers, they built from the ground up and led what amounted to a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Elias Smith, O’Kelly, Campbell, and Stone, for example, amalgamated to form the Disciples of Christ. By 1860, the Disciples had some 200,000 members and had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States.75 Like the Mormons, the Disciples had institutionalized a popular discontent that the establishment could not ignore.
But this radical Christian rebellion against the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment had a still more profound effect. The Second Great Awakening managed to lead many Americans away from the classical republicanism of the Founders to the more vulgar democracy and rugged individualism that characterize much American culture today. They had contested the ruling elite and won a substantial victory. There is a strain in the American spirit that is closer to the populism and anti-intellectualism of the nineteenth-century prophets than to the cool ethos of the Age of Reason. The noisy, spectacular revivals of the Second Great Awakening made a permanent impression on the distinctive political style of the United States, whose mass rallies, unabashed sentiment, and showy charisma are so bewildering to many Europeans. Like many fundamentalist movements today, these prophets of the Second Great Awakening gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited in the new states a means of making their views and voices heard by the more privileged elite. Their movements gave the people what Martin Luther King called “a sense of somebodiness,”76 in much the same way as the fundamentalist groups do today. Like the fundamentalist movements, these new sects all looked back to a primitive order, and determined to rebuild the original faith; all relied in an entirely new way upon Scripture, which they interpreted literally and often reductively. All also tended to be dictatorial. It was a paradox in early-nineteenth-century America, as in late-twentieth-century fundamentalist movements, that a desire for independence, autonomy, and equality should lead large numbers of people to obey religious demagogues implicitly. For all his talk about enfranchisement, Joseph Smith created what was virtually a religious dictatorship, and, despite his praise of the egalitarian and communal ideals of the Primitive Church, Alexander Campbell became the richest man in West Virginia, and ruled his flock with a rod of iron.
The Second Great Awakening shows