Revivalism Without Social Reform

In the fall of 1949, a revival campaign was going on in downtown Los Angeles, and there was excitement in the air—perhaps too much excitement. The young evangelist leading the crusade, Billy Graham, was worried. Some famous people had just been converted—a wiretapper for the mob, an Olympic medalist and war hero, and a cowboy musician—and now every night the big tent was swarming with reporters and photographers. Graham feared the carnival atmosphere would drive off the Holy Spirit. So he went to a car in the back corner of the lot for a private conversation with a trusted adviser. There he met J. Edwin Orr, an Irish-born roving revivalist. Orr had a large book with him, ready to point the younger preacher to some wisdom. It was not a Bible, however, but Orr’s doctoral dissertation. Billy Graham was getting a lesson in revival history. Orr quoted a chronicler of the “Prayer Meeting Revival” of 1857-58, who said that the press was “taken possession by the Spirit, willing or unwilling, to proclaim His wonders.” So Orr advised Graham not to fear the news media, for “the Lord may make the American Press act as His publicity agent for nothing.” Graham went forward with renewed confidence.

The wonders of grace, proclaimed by the secular press: that was part of the enduring charm of the Revival of 1857-58. According to its main chroniclers, the Revival started in the fall of 1857, at a prayer meeting in a Dutch Reformed Church in the heart of New York City’s financial district, just as a financial panic began to paralyze the city. Businessmen packed that prayer meeting and others, as they appeared in New York and other cities. Revivals broke out at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia that winter, while lay teams of evangelists, led by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Methodists, swept through cities. The church periodicals reported revivals in the hinterlands. Then, beginning in late February 1858, two major daily newspapers, the New York Heraldand the New York Tribune, made the Revival continual front-page news. The media publicity convinced many that a great awakening was afoot and encouraged widespread copying of the activities in New York. Then, nearly as suddenly as it had begun, the Revival was over. That summer the ordinary rhythms of church life reappeared, and while some revival activities restarted the following fall and winter, they were largely a diminished afterglow.

The Revival brought some lasting results. In 1858, the Protestant churches recorded their greatest accession ever, of nearly 500,000 new members. The Methodists alone gained 130,000. The newly emerging YMCAwas a chief agent of the Revival and became a leading ministry thereafter. A “revival generation” of religious activists became the nation’s postwar evangelical leaders: Dwight L. Moody, urban mass evangelist; John Wanamaker, exemplary Christian businessman; George H. Stuart, organizer of the United States Christian Commission (a “y”-related ministry to the Union soldiers); holiness advocate Hannah Whitall Smith; Annie Wittenmyer, organizer of the Women’s Temperance Crusade; and Lottie Moon, the legendary Southern Baptist missionary to China.

Ever since, suggests Kathryn T. Long, the author of The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening, this revival has fascinated American evangelicals. Its initial setting was urban, commercial, and middle class, and it emphasized ministry to men. For generations thereafter, the Revival’s mythic memory as God’s invasion of modern, urban America framed evangelicals’ expectations for the next awakening. When Billy Graham preached in Times Square, on Wall Street, in Madison Square Garden, at Yankee Stadium, and in Central Park in 1957, with meetings broadcast on network television, evangelical leaders heard echoes from a century before. Graham had learned his revival history well.

The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening
by Kathryn Teresa Long
Oxford Univ. Press
256 pp.; $TK

Professor Long, who teaches history at Wheaton College, became interested in the Revival because of the contrast between evangelicals’ fascination with the event and historians’ relative lack of interest in it. She discovered that the Revival was indeed a formative historical moment, but that its legacy is not nearly so admirable as evangelical memory would have it.

The midcentury awakening, Long contends, hastened the emergence of a transdenominational evangelical Protestant “establishment,” with a new view about the nature of revivals. The Puritan-derived vision of the righteous republic, in which social reform was the fruit of revival, was being superseded by a more socially conservative ideal, first promoted by the Old School Presbyterians but increasingly adopted by the Baptists and Methodists too: revivals were now “vehicles for evangelization and for middle-class spiritual refreshment rather than agents of cultural transformation.” It was revivalism without social reform.

Long’s thesis challenges the late evangelical historian Timothy L. Smith’s classic work, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (1957). Smith argued that revivalism, augmented by the zeal for moral perfection that revivals ignited and the drive to reform society that moral perfectionism propelled, was a progressive and pervasive cultural force from Charles G. Finney’s revivals in the mid-1830s through to the Civil War.

Smith saw the Revival of 1857-58 as the culmination of this progression. His Revivalism and Social Reformis an eloquent, finely crafted work, which has inspired a generation of reform-minded evangelicals. There was a day, Smith argued, when evangelicals were on the cutting edge for progressive social change in America, from the rights of women to the liberation of the slaves. His pioneering work challenged the established academic view that religion ceased to matter long ago in America, and that its demise was welcome, because it was a retrograde social force. Revivalism and Social Reform, then, is one of the last books that an evangelical historian would set out to devalue, and Professor Long had no such intention. Nevertheless, she demonstrates that the Revival of 1857-58 simply will not bear the interpretive freight that Timothy Smith laid on it. Indeed, she insists, it marked a shift toward a more conservative evangelicalism.

Long’s case runs like this: far from bolstering the reformist side of evangelicalism, the leaders of the Revival excluded it from the main arenas of the awakening. The downtown prayer meetings ruled out any discussion or prayers concerning “controverted points” such as slavery or the public ministry of women. While women were converted at about an even rate with men during the Revival, prayer meeting leaders at its downtown New York epicenter expressed a “desire … that the ladies would keep away.” Downtown meetings in other cities followed suit. Business districts were no place for respectable women, and revival leaders worried about defeating the revival’s effect on businessmen by upsetting the masculine tenor of the meetings. When Harriet Olney, a Methodist exhorter, testified at the YMCAmeeting in New York’s Barton Theater, she was told not to come back. Phoebe Palmer, the Methodist holiness advocate who collaborated with her husband in a number of revivals in Ontario and upstate New York, wrote a defense of women’s right to preach and testify, The Promise of the Father (1857). But she kept her distance from the downtown meetings.

Evangelical reformers of the day noted the conservative turn of the Revival, Long insists, and they protested bitterly. George Cheever, the evangelical antislavery pastor of the Congregational Church of the Puritans in New York, labored long and hard for the Revival, but he was distressed to see this “season of refreshing” running parallel to a “revival of evil,” the tacit Northern acceptance of slavery. Cheever insisted that a “revived and true Christianity” should reawaken an “abhorrence against this infinite abomination.” Smith’s Revivalismalso saw a progression toward the later Social Gospel movement in evangelicals’ efforts to bring salvation and social betterment to the urban poor during the 1840s and 1850s. Long acknowledges that these efforts continued during and after the Revival year, but she also notes elements of change within them. One of Smith’s key cases was Phoebe Palmer’s founding of the Five Points Mission in 1850 on behalf of New York’s poor. According to Long, both Palmer’s mission and several others were shifting their emphasis from conversion-resistant adults toward children by the late 1850s. Evangelical social workers were making their welfare work subservient to evangelism.

This tendency permeated the work of the YMCAand the U.S. Christian Commission as well, Long argues, citing the USCC’s stated mission: to work for “the spiritual good of the soldiers … and incidentally their intellectual improvement and social and physical comfort” (emphasis Long’s). Long asserts that on the eve of the Civil War evangelicals were drawing back from the destitute, the oppressed, and the outcast. Increasingly they concentrated on people more like themselves, such as the young adults served by the ys. And while Long cautiously reminds the reader that some evangelicals persisted with urban ministries, she finds no evidence for increased commitment to such ministries as a result of the Revival.

The new evangelicalism marked a definite departure from the evangelical united front of the 1830s, which had linked voluntary societies for evangelism and social reform. What was behind this conservative turn? First, many evangelicals sensed that revival-fired reform had failed. In 1835, Charles Finney told a New York audience that if Christians did their duty, the millennium could come in three years. By the 1850s it was clear that revivalism had not brought social reform. Now, with their nation in crisis, Northern moderates and conservatives feared that further zealotry would break it apart.

The second factor was an adjustment, more implicit than conscious, to the realities of an urbanizing America. North and South were more interdependent than ever before, and this fact was most evident to the merchants and bankers of New York City, whose welfare depended upon the Southern economy. Antebellum cities now were increasingly multicultural, and the new immigrants were both resistant to evangelization and apparently a threat to urban law and order. The idea, born in Puritan villages, that a revival would bring reform to an entire community, fell hard against the realities of New York City. Even Finney himself eventually made accommodations to the city. His Chatham Street Chapel (founded in 1832) was part of a revival-fired “free church” movement to save New York’s tough neighborhoods. Yet it suffered from continual strife over racial issues and from the decreasing participation of middle-class families. Four years after its founding, the congregation moved to a more middle-class site. By the 1840s, the whole “free church” movement in New York was disintegrating. The evangelical ideal of communitywide awakening, with reforms following, was in decline as well.

On the eve of the Civil War evangelicals were drawing back from the destitute, the oppressed, and the outcast

So what could evangelicals hope for? The conservative view of awakenings, held by Old School Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed, seemed to fit the situation much better. It emphasized that revival was for the spiritual rejuvenation of churches, and for a fresh harvest of converts. God had his own purposes for society, which he would effect in his own time. Social betterment was an indirect product of a revival, by means of the sober, pious, honest, and decent citizens it created. As their adherents became more middle class, Baptists and Methodists also began to lean toward the conservative outlook on revival. Their earlier emphases on revival-fired emotional excitement, personal liberation, and empowerment for the poor were set aside, along with the New School Calvinists’ expectations of sweeping social reform. A new evangelical consensus began to emerge.

This new evangelicalism had some additional features, Long explains, that were less an adjustment to the new social realities than a heedless embrace of them. One of the most striking was the focus on masculine piety and the ethos of the business world. The most exciting and newsworthy feature of the Revival was that it brought prayer to the financial district. Contemporary observers enthused that this exceedingly worldly sector was being made sacred, but Long argues that, in fact, the values, methods, and outlook of business were invading religion. “The noon meetings were … an appointment with God,” she observes, “scheduled to fit into the rhythm of the business day and reflected the intense time consciousness of Victorian men.” Prayer, too, translated into a “productive activity,” and the publicity for prayer meetings mingled with advertisements for consumer products and worldly entertainment. Ever sensitive to the mood, needs, and tastes of its audience, evangelical Christianity was once again accommodating itself to the popular culture.

The leading organizational beneficiaries of the revival, the YMCAand the USCC, celebrated manly vigor, patriotism, and the compatibility of religion and business. Both were lay led, male oriented, and organized outside of the churches. The USCC sought volunteers who had “knowledge of the world, experience in business, and ability in affairs.” In other words, parlor-sitting ministers need not apply. These new ministries marked the beginning of a turn toward the parachurch agency as a major source of religious activity. When businessmen like D. L. Moody and John Wanamaker got religion, their ambition turned toward doing some great work for God. Rather than submitting to the constraints on lay leadership within churches, these entrepreneurs created new religious agencies. In this growing “parachurch” realm, a “masculine sphere” for religious enterprise arose to challenge the Victorian feminization of religion.

Still, Long does us a service by pointing out the ways in which evangelical Christians were too readily making peace with their new surroundings. For the gospel is not only about Christ making himself at home in our culture; there is a pilgrim principle to it as well, which prompts the children of God never to feel perfectly at home again, to know that faithfulness to Jesus Christ will put them out of step with their society. How much did that restlessness pervade the Revival of 1857-58? Not very much, seems to be the verdict of Professor Long. How much does it mark conservative evangelicalism today? We can hope that books like hers will provoke some healthy self-criticism.

Joel A. Carpenteris provost of Calvin College.