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The Awakening had shaken everybody up, and henceforth even the Old Lights were ready to ascribe apocalyptic significance to current events. Jonathan Mayhew was convinced that “great revolutions were at hand,” when a series of earthquakes occurred simultaneously in various parts of the world in November 1755; he looked forward to “some very remarkable changes in the political and religious state of the world.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Mayhew instinctively saw the imperial struggle during the Seven Years War between Protestant Britain and Catholic France over their colonial possessions in America and Canada in eschatalogical terms. It would, he believed, hasten the Second Coming of Christ by weakening the power of the Pope, who was Antichrist, the Great Pretender of the Last Days.
(#litres_trial_promo) New Lights also saw America as fighting on the front line of a cosmic battle with the forces of evil during the Seven Years War. It was at this time that Pope’s Day (November 5) became an annual holiday, during which rowdy crowds burned effigies of the Pontiff.
(#litres_trial_promo) These were frightening and violent times. Americans still looked to the old mythology to give their lives meaning and to explain the tragedies that befell them. But they also seemed to sense impending change and, as they did so, developed a religion of hatred, seeing France and the Roman Catholic Church as satanic and utterly opposed to the righteous American ethos.
(#litres_trial_promo) As they cultivated these apocalyptic fantasies, they seemed to feel that there could be no redemption, no final deliverance, no liberty, and no millennial peace unless popery was destroyed. A bloody purge would be necessary to bring this new world into being. We shall find that a theology of rage would frequently be evolved in response to dawning modernity. Americans could sense that transformation was at hand, but they still belonged to the old world. The economic effects of the Seven Years War led the British government to impose new taxes upon the American colonists, and this provoked the revolutionary crisis that resulted in the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775. During this protracted struggle, Americans started the painful process of making that radical break with the past that was central to the modern ethos, and their religion of hatred would play a major role in this development.
The leaders of the Revolution—George Washington, John and Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, for example—experienced the revolution as a secular event. They were rationalists, men of the Enlightenment, inspired by the modern ideals of John Locke, Scottish Common Sense philosophy, or Radical Whig ideology. They were deists, and differed from more orthodox Christians in their view of revelation and the divinity of Christ. They conducted a sober, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power, moving only slowly and reluctantly toward revolution. They certainly did not see themselves as fighting a cosmic war against the legions of Antichrist. When the break with Britain became inevitable, their goal was practical and limited to terrestrial objectives: the “united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, with John Adams and Franklin, and ratified by the Colonial Congress on July 4, 1776, was an Enlightenment document, based on the ideal of self-evident human rights propounded by Locke. These rights were defined as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration appealed to the modern ideals of independence, autonomy, and equality in the name of the deist God of Nature. The Declaration was not politically radical, however. There was no utopian talk of redistributing the wealth of society or founding a millennial order. This was practical, rational logos, outlining a far-reaching but sustainable program of action.
But the Founding Fathers of the American republic were an aristocratic elite and their ideas were not typical. The vast majority of Americans were Calvinists, and they could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Indeed, many of them regarded deism as a satanic ideology.
(#litres_trial_promo) Initially, most of the colonists were just as reluctant to break with England as their leaders were. Not all joined the revolutionary struggle. Some 30,000 fought on the British side, and after the war between 80,000 and 100,000 left the new states and migrated to Canada, the West Indies, or Britain.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those who elected to fight for independence would be as much motivated by the old myths and millennial dreams of Christianity as by the secularist ideals of the Founders. In fact, it became difficult to separate the religious from the political discourse. Secularist and religious ideology blended creatively to enable the colonists, who had widely divergent hopes for America, to join forces against the imperial might of England. We shall find a similar alliance of religious and secularist idealism in the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978–79), which was also a declaration of independence against an imperialist power.
During the first decade of the revolutionary struggle, people were loath to make a radical break with the past. Severing relations with Britain seemed unthinkable, and many still hoped that the British government would change its policies. Nobody was straining forward excitedly to the future or dreaming of a new world order. Most Americans still instinctively responded to the crisis in the old, premodern way: they looked back to an idealized past to sustain them in their position. The revolutionary leaders and those who embraced the more secular Radical Whig ideology drew inspiration from the struggle of the Saxons against the invading Normans in 1066, or the more recent struggle of the Puritan Parliamentarians during the English Civil War. The Calvinists harked back to their own Golden Age in New England, recalling the struggle of the Puritans against the tyrannical Anglican establishment in Old England; they had sought liberty and freedom from oppression in the New World, creating a godly society in the American wilderness. The emphasis in the sermons and revolutionary rhetoric of this period (1763–73) was on the desire to conserve the precious achievements of the past. The notion of radical change inspired fears of decline and ruin. The colonists were seeking to preserve their heritage, according to the old conservative spirit. The past was presented as idyllic, the future as potentially horrific. The revolutionary leaders declared that their actions were designed to keep at bay the catastrophe that would inevitably ensue if there was a radical severance from tradition. They spoke of the possible consequences of British policy with fear, using the apocalyptic language of the Bible.
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But this changed. As the British clung obstinately to their controversial imperial policies, the colonists burned their boats. After the Boston Tea Party (1773) and the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) there could be no going back. The Declaration of Independence expressed a new and courageous determination to break away from the old order and go forward to an unprecedented future. In this respect, the Declaration was a modernizing document, which articulated in political terms the intellectual independence and iconoclasm that had characterized the scientific revolution in Europe. But the majority of the colonists were more inspired by the myths of Christian prophecy than by John Locke. They would need to approach modern political autonomy in a mythological package which was familiar to them, resonated with their deepest beliefs, and enabled them to find the psychological strength to make this difficult transition. As we shall so often find, religion often provides the means that get people through the painful rite of passage to modernity.
Thus, ministers in many of the mainline churches (even the Anglicans) Christianized the revolutionary rhetoric of such populist leaders as Sam Adams. When they spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, this made sense of Adams’s fiery denunciations of the corruption of the British officials.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Great Awakening had already made New Light Calvinists wary of the establishment and confident of their ability to effect major change. When revolutionary leaders spoke of “liberty,” they used a term that was already saturated with religious meaning: it carried associations of grace, of the freedom of the Gospel and the Sons of God. It was linked with such themes as the Kingdom of God, in which all oppression would end, and the myth of a Chosen People who would become God’s instrument in the transformation of the world.
(#litres_trial_promo) Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), president of Yale University, spoke enthusiastically of the revolution ushering in “Immanuel’s Land,” and of America becoming “the principal seat of that new, that peculiar Kingdom which shall be given to the saints of the Most High.”
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1775, the Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin insisted that the calamities of the war could only hasten God’s plans for the New World. Jesus would establish his glorious Kingdom in America: liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and had moved westward, across the Atlantic. The present crisis was preparing the way for the Last Days of the present corrupt order. For Provost William Smith of Philadelphia, the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.”
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But if churchmen were sacralizing politics, secularist leaders also used the language of Christian utopianism. John Adams looked back on the settlement of America as God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity.
(#litres_trial_promo) Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
(#litres_trial_promo) The rational pragmatism of the leaders would not itself have been sufficient to help people make the fearsome journey to an unknown future and break with the motherland. The enthusiasm, imagery, and mythology of Christian eschatology gave meaning to the revolutionary struggle and helped secularists and Calvinists alike to make the decisive, dislocating severance from tradition.
So did the theology of hatred that had erupted during the Seven Years War. In rather the same way as Iranians would later call America “the Great Satan” during their Islamic Revolution, British officials were portrayed as being in league with the devil during the revolutionary crisis. After the passing of the notorious Stamp Act (1765), patriotic poems and songs presented its perpetrators, Lords Bute, Grenville, and North, as the minions of Satan, who were conspiring to lure the Americans into the devil’s eternal Kingdom. The Stamp was described as the “mark of the Beast” that, according to the Book of Revelation, would be inscribed on the damned in the Last Days. Effigies depicting the British ministers were carried alongside portraits of Satan in political processions and hung from “liberty trees” throughout the colonies.
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1774, King George III became associated with the Antichrist when he granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory conquered by England during the Seven Years War. His picture now adorned the liberty trees alongside pictures of the Papal Antichrist and the Devil.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even the more educated colonists fell prey to this fear of hidden cosmic conspiracy. The presidents of Harvard and Yale both believed that the colonists were fighting a war against satanic forces, and looked forward to the imminent defeat of popery, “a religion most favourable to arbitrary power.” The War of Independence had become part of God’s providential design for the destruction of the Papal Antichrist, which would surely herald the arrival of God’s millennial Kingdom in America.
(#litres_trial_promo) This paranoid vision of widespread conspiracy and the tendency to see an ordinary political conflict as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil seems, unfortunately, to occur frequently when a people is engaged in a revolutionary struggle as it enters the new world. This satanic mythology helped the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the old world, for which they still felt a strong residual affection. The demonizing of England transformed it into the antithetical “other,” the polar opposite of America, and thus enabled the colonists to shape a distinct identity for themselves and to articulate the new order they were fighting to bring into being.
Thus, religion played a key role in the creation of the first modern secular republic. After the Revolution, however, when the newly independent states drew up their constitutions, God was mentioned in them only in the most perfunctory manner. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson disestablished the Anglican church in Virginia; his bill declared that coercion in matters of faith was “sinfull and tyrannical,” that truth would prevail if people were allowed their own opinions, and that there should be a “wall of separation” between religion and politics.
(#litres_trial_promo) The bill was supported by the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of Virginia, who resented the privileged position of the Church of England in the state. Later the other states followed Virginia’s lead, and disestablished their own churches, Massachusetts being the last to do so, in 1833. In 1787, when the federal Constitution was drafted at the Philadelphia Convention, God was not mentioned at all, and in the Bill of Rights (1789), the First Amendment of the Constitution formally separated religion from the state: “Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Henceforth faith would be a private and voluntary affair in the United States. This was a revolutionary step and has been hailed as one of the great achievements of the Age of Reason. The thinking behind it was indeed inspired by the tolerant philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the Founding Fathers were also moved by more pragmatic considerations. They knew that the federal Constitution was essential to preserve the unity of the states, but they also realized that if the federal government established any single one of the Protestant denominations and made it the official faith of the United States, the Constitution would not be approved. Congregationalist Massachusetts, for example, would never ratify a Constitution that established the Anglican Church. This was also the reason why Article VI, Section 3, of the Constitution abolished religious tests for office in the federal government. There was idealism in the Founders’ decision to disestablish religion and to secularize politics, but the new nation could not base its identity on any one sectarian option and retain the loyalty of all its subjects. The needs of the modern state demanded that it be tolerant and, therefore, secular.
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Paradoxically, however, by the middle of the nineteenth century the new secularist United States had become a passionately Christian nation. During the 1780s, and still more during the 1790s, the churches all experienced new growth
(#litres_trial_promo) and began to counter the Enlightenment ideology of the Founding Fathers. They now sacralized American independence: the new republic, they argued, was God’s achievement. The revolutionary battle had been the cause of heaven against hell.
(#litres_trial_promo) Only ancient Israel had experienced such direct divine intervention in its history. God might not be mentioned in the Constitution, Timothy Dwight noted wryly, but he urged his students to “look into the history of your country [and] you will find scarcely less gracious and wonderful proofs of divine protection and deliverance … than that which was shown to the people of Israel in Egypt.”
(#litres_trial_promo) The clergy confidently predicted that the American people would become more pious; they saw the expansion of the frontier as a sign of the coming Kingdom.
(#litres_trial_promo) Democracy had made the people sovereign, so they must become more godly if the new states were to escape the dangers inherent in popular rule. The American people must be saved from the irreligious deism of their political leaders. Churchmen saw “deism” as the new satanic foe, making it the scapegoat for all the inevitable failures of the infant nation. Deism, they insisted, would promote atheism and materialism; it worshipped Nature and Reason instead of Jesus Christ. A paranoid conspiracy fear developed of a mysterious cabal called the “Bavarian Illuminati” who were atheists and Freemasons and were plotting to overthrow Christianity in the United States. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800, there was a second anti-deist campaign which tried to establish a link between Jefferson and the atheistic “Jacobins” of the godless French Revolution.
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The Union of the new states was fragile. Americans nurtured very different hopes for the new nation, secularist and Protestant. Both have proved to be equally enduring. Americans still revere their Constitution and venerate the Founding Fathers, but they also see America as “God’s own nation”; as we shall see, some Protestants continue to see “secular humanism” as an evil of near-satanic proportions. After the revolution, the nation was bitterly divided and Americans had an internal struggle to determine what their culture should be. They conducted, in effect, a “second revolution” in the early years of the nineteenth century. With great difficulty and courage, Americans had swept away the past; they had written a groundbreaking Constitution, and brought a new nation to birth. But this involved strain, tension, and paradox. The people as a whole had still to decide the terms on which they were to enter the modern world, and many of the less privileged colonists were prepared to contest the cultural hegemony of the aristocratic Enlightenment elite. After they had vanquished the British, ordinary Americans had yet to determine what the revolution had meant for them. Were they to adopt the cool, civilized, polite rationalism of the Founders, or would they opt for a much rougher and more populist Protestant identity?
The Founding Fathers and the clergy in the mainline churches had cooperated in the creation of a modern, secular republic, but they both still belonged in many important respects to the old conservative world. They were aristocrats and elitists. They believed that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead the nation from above. They did not conceive of the possibility of change coming from below. They still saw historical transformation being effected by great personalities, who acted rather like the prophets of the past as the guides of humanity and who made history happen. They had not yet realized that a society is often pushed forward by impersonal processes; environmental, economic, and social forces can foil the plans and projects of the most coercive leaders.
(#litres_trial_promo) During the 1780s and 1790s, there was much discussion about the nature of democracy. How much power should the people have? John Adams, the second president of the United States, was suspicious of any polity that might lead to mob rule and the impoverishment of the rich.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the more radical Jeffersonians asked how the elite few could speak for the many. They protested against the “tyranny” of Adams’s government, and argued that the people’s voice must be heard. The success of the revolution had given many Americans a sense of empowerment; it had shown them that established authority was fallible and by no means invincible. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. The Jeffersonians believed that ordinary folk should also enjoy the freedom and autonomy preached by the philosophes. In the new newspapers, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and other specialists were ridiculed. Nobody should have to give total credence to these so-called “experts.” The law, medicine, and religion should all be a matter of common sense and within the reach of everyone.
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This sentiment was especially rife on the frontiers, where people 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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,”
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 the sort of solutions that many people find attractive when their society is going through the wrenching upheaval of modernization. Like modern fundamentalists, the prophets of the Second Great Awakening mounted a rebellion against the learned rationalism of the ruling classes and insisted on a more religious identity. At the same time, they made the modern ethos accessible to people who had not had the opportunity to study the writings of Descartes, Newton, or John Locke. The prophetic rebellion of these American prophets was both successful and enduring in the United States, and this means that we should not expect modern fundamentalist movements in societies that are currently modernizing to be ephemeral and a passing “madness.” The new American sects may have seemed bizarre to the establishment, but they were essentially modern and an integral part of the new world. This was certainly true of the millennial movement founded by the New York farmer William Miller (1782–1849), who pored over the biblical prophecies, and, in a series of careful calculations, “proved” in a pamphlet published in 1831 that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in the year 1843. Miller was reading his Bible in an essentially modern way. Instead of seeing it as a mythical, symbolic account of eternal realities, Miller assumed that such narratives as the Book of Revelation were accurate predictions of imminent events, which could be worked out with scientific and mathematical precision. People now read texts for information. Truth must be capable of logical, scientific demonstration. Miller was treating the mythos of Scripture as though it were logos, and he and his assistant Joshua Hines constantly stressed the systematic and scientific nature of Miller’s investigations.
(#litres_trial_promo) The movement was also democratic: anybody could interpret the Bible for him or herself, and Miller encouraged his followers to challenge his calculations and come up with theories of their own.
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Improbable and bizarre as the movement seemed, Millerism had instant appeal. Some 50,000 Americans became confirmed “Millerites,” while thousands more sympathized without actually joining up.
(#litres_trial_promo) Inevitably, however, Millerism turned into an object lesson in the danger of interpreting the mythos of the Bible literally. Christ failed to return, as promised, in 1843, and Millerites were devastated. Nonetheless, this failure did not mean the end of millennialism, which became and has continued to be a major passion in the United States. Out of the “Great Disappointment” of 1843, other sects, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, appeared, adjusted the eschatological timetable, and, by eschewing precise predictions, enabled new generations of Americans to look forward to an imminent End of history.
At first this new, rough, and democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer and more uneducated classes. but during the 1840s, Charles Finney (1792–1875), a pivotal figure in American religion, brought it to the middle classes. He thus helped to make this “evangelical” Christianity, based on a literal reading of the Gospels and intent on converting the secular nation to Christ, the dominant faith of the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century.
(#litres_trial_promo) Finney used the uncouth, wild methods of the older prophets, but addressed lawyers, doctors, and merchants, urging them to experience Christ directly, without the mediation of the establishment, to think for themselves and rebel against the hegemony of the learned theologians in the denominations. He also urged his middle-class audiences to join other evangelicals in the social reform of society.
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After the Revolution, the state had declared its independence of religion and, at the same time, Christians in all the denominations began to withdraw from the state. There was disillusion and disenchantment with the Revolution, which had not managed to usher in the millennium after all. Protestants began to insist on preserving their own religious “space,” apart from the deist republican government. They were God’s community and did not belong to the federal establishment. Protestants still believed that America should be a godly nation, and public virtue was increasingly seen as nonpolitical
(#litres_trial_promo); it was better to work for the redemption of society independently of the state, in churches, schools, and the numerous reform associations which sprang up in the northern states during the 1820s, after the Second Great Awakening. Christians started to work for a better world. They campaigned against slavery and liquor, and to end the oppression of marginalized groups. Many of the Millerites had been involved in temperance, abolitionist, and feminist organizations.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was certainly an element of social control in all this. There was also an unpleasantly nativist motivation in the emphasis on the Protestant virtues of thrift, sobriety, and clean living. Protestants were greatly disturbed by the massive flood of Catholic immigrants into the United States. At the time of the Revolution, America had been a Protestant country, with Catholics comprising only about one percent of the total population. But by the 1840s, there were over 2.5 million Catholics in America, and Roman Catholicism was the largest Christian denomination in the United States.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was an alarming development in a nation that had long regarded the Pope as Antichrist. Some of the evangelical reform effort was an obvious attempt to counter this Catholic influence. Temperance, for example, was promoted to oppose the drinking habits of the new Polish, Irish, and Italian Americans.
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Nevertheless, these evangelical reform movements were also positive and modernizing. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being. They actively promoted an egalitarianism that would help to make slavery, for example, intolerable in the northern states, though not in the South, which remained virtually untouched by the Second Great Awakening, and which retained a premodern, elitist social structure until long after the Civil War.
(#litres_trial_promo) The reform movements helped people to accommodate the modern ideal of inalienable human rights in a Christian package, at least in the North. The movements for feminism and for penal and educational reform, which were spearheaded by evangelical Christians, were also progressive. The reform groups themselves also helped people to acquire the modern spirit. Members made a conscious, voluntary decision to join an association, and learned how to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a modern, rational way. Eventually evangelical Christians would form the backbone of the Whig party (to which the later Republican party was in large measure the successor), while their opponents (the Old Lights and the Catholics) tended to gravitate to the Democratic party. The Whigs/Republicans wanted to create a “righteous empire” in America, based on Godly rather than Enlightenment virtues.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the evangelicals were no longer marginalized and disenfranchised. They had challenged the secularist establishment and made their voices heard. They were now engaged in a Christian reconquista of American society, which they were determined to return to a strictly Protestant ethos. They felt proud of their achievement. They had made an indelible impression upon American culture, which, despite the secular Constitution of the United States, was now more Christian than it had ever been before. Between 1780 and 1860, there was a spectacular rise in the number of Christian congregations in the United States, which far outstripped the national rate of population growth. In 1780, there were only about 2,500 congregations; by 1820 there were 11,000, and by 1860 a phenomenal 52,000—an almost 21-fold increase. In comparison, the population of the United States rose from about four million in 1780 to ten million in 1820, and 31 million in 1860—a less-than-eightfold increase.
(#litres_trial_promo) In Europe, religion was becoming increasingly identified with the establishment, and ordinary people were turning to alternative ideologies, but in America, Protestantism empowered the people against the establishment, and this tendency has continued, so that it is difficult to find a popular movement in America today that is not associated with religion in some way. By the 1850s, Christianity in America was vibrant, and seemed poised for future triumphs.
It was a very different story in Europe. There the chief ideologies taking people into the modern world were not religious but secularist, and, increasingly, people’s attention focused on this world rather than the next. This was clear in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who brought the transcendent God down to earth and made it human. Fulfillment was to be found in the mundane, not in the supernatural. In Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), the universal Spirit could only achieve its full potential if it immersed itself in the limiting conditions of space and time; it was most fully realized in the human mind. So too, human beings had to give up the old idea of a transcendent God in order to understand that they were themselves divine. The myth, a new version of the Christian doctrine of incarnation, can also be seen as a cure for the alienation from the world experienced by many modern people. It was an attempt to resacralize a world that had been emptied of the divine, and to enhance the vision of the human mind whose powers had seemed so curtailed in the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. But above all, Hegel’s myth expressed the forward-thrusting dynamic of modernity. There was no harking back to a Golden Age; Hegel’s world was continually re-creating itself. Instead of the old conservative conviction that everything had already been said, Hegel envisaged a dialectical process in which human beings were constantly engaged in the destruction of past ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. In this dialectic, every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash and are integrated and fulfilled in a more advanced synthesis; then the whole process begins again. In this vision, there was to be no return to fundamentals, but a continuous evolution toward entirely new and unprecedented truth.
Hegel’s philosophy expressed the driving optimism of the modern age, which had now irrevocably left the conservative spirit behind. But some could not see why Hegel should even have bothered with God. Religion and mythology were beginning to be viewed by some Europeans as not only outmoded but positively harmful. Instead of curing our sense of alienation, they were thought to compound it. By setting up God as the antithesis of humanity, Hegel’s pupil Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued, religion was bringing about “the disuniting of man from himself.… God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak.”
(#litres_trial_promo) For Karl Marx (1818–83), religion was a symptom of a sick society, an opiate that made the diseased social system bearable and removed the will to find a cure by directing attention away from this world to the next.
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Atheists were beginning to take the high moral ground. This became clear in the aftermath of the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, by Charles Darwin (1809–82). This represented a new phase of modern science. Instead of collecting facts, as Bacon had prescribed, Darwin put forward a hypothesis: animals, plants, and human beings had not been created fully formed (as the Bible implied), but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin proposed that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same proto-ape that was the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Darwin’s name has become a byword for atheism in fundamentalist circles, yet the Origin was not intended as an attack upon religion, but was a sober, careful exposition of a scientific theory. Darwin himself was an agnostic but always respectful of religious faith. Nevertheless, the Origin was a watershed. It sold 1400 copies on the day of publication. Certainly, it and Darwin’s later work dealt another blow to human self-esteem. Copernicus had displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos, Descartes and Kant had alienated humans from the physical world, and now Darwin had suggested that they were simply animals. They had not been specially created by God, but had evolved like everything else. Indeed, there seemed no place for God in the creative process and the world, “red in tooth and claw,” had no divine purpose.
Yet in the years immediately following the publication of the Origin, the religious reaction was muted. There was much more fuss the following year, when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews, which made the latest biblical criticism available to the general reader.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since the late eighteenth century, German scholars had applied the new techniques of literary analysis, archaeology, and comparative linguistics to the Bible, subjecting it to a scientifically empirical methodology. They argued that the first five books of the Bible, traditionally attributed to Moses, were in fact written much later and by a number of different authors; the book of Isaiah had at least two different sources, and King David had probably not written the Psalms. Most of the miracles described in the Bible were simply literary tropes and could not be understood literally; many of the biblical events were almost certainly not historical. In Essays and Reviews, the British clerics argued that the Bible must not have special treatment, but should be subjected to the same critical rigor as any other text.
(#litres_trial_promo) The new “Higher Criticism” represented the triumph of the rational discourse of logos over myth. Rational science had subjected the mythoi of the Bible to radical scrutiny and found that some of its claims were “false.” The biblical tales were simply “myths,” which, in popular parlance, now meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism would become a bogey of Christian fundamentalists, because it seemed a major assault upon religion, but this was only because Western people had lost the original sense of the mythical, and thought that doctrines and scriptural narratives were logoi, narratives that purported to be factually accurate and phenomena that could be investigated scientifically. But in revealing how impossible it was to read the Bible in an entirely literal manner, the Higher Criticism could also have provided a healthy counterbalance to the growing tendency to make modern Christian faith “scientific.”
Noting the discrepancy between Darwin’s hypothesis and the first chapter of Genesis, some Christians, such as Darwin’s American friend and fellow scientist Asa Gray (1810–88), tried to harmonize natural selection with a literal reading of Genesis. Later the project known as Creation Science would go to even greater lengths to make Genesis scientifically respectable. But this was to miss the point, because, as a myth, the biblical creation story was not an historical account of the origins of life but a more spiritual reflection upon the ultimate significance of life itself, about which scientific logos has nothing to say.
Even though Darwin had not intended it, the publication of the Origin did cause a preliminary skirmish between religion and science, but the first shots were fired not by the religious but by the more aggressive secularists. In England, Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95), and on the Continent, Karl Vogt (1817–95), Ludwig Buchner (1824–99), Jakob Moleschott (1822–93), and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), popularized Darwin’s theory, touring and lecturing to large audiences to prove that science and religion were incompatible. They were, in fact, preaching a crusade against religion.
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Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. Reason, he insisted, must be the sole criterion of truth. People would have to choose between mythology and rational science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Scientific rationalism was, for Huxley, a new secular religion; it demanded conversion and total commitment. “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration,” he urged his audience. “And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Huxley was supported by the whole thrust of modern, progressive culture, which had achieved such spectacular results that it could now claim aggressively to be the sole arbiter of truth. But truth had been narrowed to what is “demonstrated and demonstrable,” which, religion aside, would exclude the truth told by art or music. For Huxley, there was no other possible path. Reason alone was truthful, and the myths of religion truthless. It was a final declaration of independence from the mythical constraints of the conservative period. Reason no longer had to submit to a higher court. It was not to be restricted by morality but must be pushed to the end “without regard to any other consideration.” The continental crusaders went further in their war against religion. Buchner’s best-seller, Force and Matter, a crude book which Huxley himself despised, argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything in the world had derived from a simple cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. But the large numbers of people who read this book and the huge crowds who flocked to Haeckel’s lectures showed that in Europe a significant number of people wanted to hear that science had disproved religion once and for all.
This was because by treating religious truths as though they were rational logoi, modern scientists, critics, and philosophers had made them incredible. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) would proclaim that God was dead. In The Gay Science, he told the story of a madman running one morning into the marketplace crying “I seek God!” When the amused and supercilious bystanders asked him if he imagined that God had emigrated or run away, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”
(#litres_trial_promo) In an important sense, Nietzsche was right. Without myth, cult, ritual, and prayer, the sense of the sacred inevitably dies. By making “God” a wholly notional truth, struggling to reach the divine by intellect alone, as some modern believers had attempted to do, modern men and women had killed it for themselves. The whole dynamic of their future-oriented culture had made the traditional ways of apprehending the sacred psychologically impossible. Like the Jewish Marranos before them, who had themselves been thrust, for very different reasons, into a religious limbo, many modern men and women were experiencing the truths of religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and incomprehensible.
Nietzsche’s madman believed that the death of God had torn humanity from its roots, thrown the earth off course, and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had once given human beings a sense of direction had vanished. “Is there still an above and below?” he had asked. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?”
(#litres_trial_promo) A profound terror, a sense of meaninglessness and annihilation, would be part of the modern experience. Nietzsche was writing at a time when the exuberant exhilaration of modernity was beginning to give way to a nameless dread. This would affect not only the Christians of Europe, but Jews and Muslims, who had also been drawn into the modernizing process and found it equally perplexing.
4. Jews and Muslims Modernize (#ulink_16b371a8-3c39-5828-a137-33084518f1a3)
(1700–1870) (#ulink_16b371a8-3c39-5828-a137-33084518f1a3)
IF MODERNIZATION was difficult for the Christians of Europe and America, it was even more problematic for Jews and Muslims. Muslims experienced modernity as an alien, invasive force, inextricably associated with colonization and foreign domination. They would have to adapt to a civilization whose watchword was independence, while themselves suffering political subjugation. The modern ethos was markedly hostile toward Judaism. For all their talk of toleration, Enlightenment thinkers still regarded Jews with contempt. François-Marie Voltaire (1694–1778) had called them “a totally ignorant nation,” in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1756); they combined “contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all the nations which have tolerated them.” Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), one of the first avowed atheists of Europe, had called Jews “the enemies of the human race.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Kant and Hegel both saw Judaism as a servile, degraded faith, utterly opposed to the rational,
(#litres_trial_promo) while Karl Marx, himself of Jewish descent, argued that the Jews were responsible for capitalism, which, in his view, was the source of all the world’s ills.
(#litres_trial_promo) Jews would, therefore, have to adapt to modernity in an atmosphere of hatred.
In America, the developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had split Protestant Christians into two opposing camps. There had been a similar conflict within Eastern European Jewry at the same time. The Jews of Poland, Galicia, Belorussia, and Lithuania were divided into opposing parties, which would both play a crucial role in the formation of Jewish fundamentalism. The Hasidim, who were not unlike the New Lights, made their appearance at exactly the same time as the American Calvinists were experiencing the First Great Awakening. In 1735, a poor Jewish tavern-keeper called Israel ben Eliezer (1700–60) announced that he had received a revelation that made him a “Master of the Name” (baal shem), one of the faith healers and exorcists who roamed through the villages and rural districts of Poland working miracles of healing in the name of God. But Israel soon acquired a special reputation, because he tended to the spiritual as well as to the physical needs of the poor, so he became known as the “Besht,” an acronym of the title Baal Shem Tov, literally “the Master of the Good Name,” a Master of exceptional status. This was a dark time for Polish Jewry. People had still not fully recovered from the Shabbatean scandal, and Jewish communities, which had suffered grave economic problems ever since the massacres of 1648, were now in spiritual crisis. In their struggle for survival, wealthier Jews did not distribute the tax burdens fairly, the social gap between rich and poor widened, strongmen, habitués of the nobles’ courts, seized control of the kehilla
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