REVIVALISM: IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION

Russell E. Richey

Such a common and prominent feature of modern, western religiosity as revivalism would seem to require no definition. Everyone, surely, knows a revival when he/she sees one; knows what it is; and knows how to describe it. Yet, despite, perhaps even because of that familiarity, definitions do not come easily. Like Puritanism, the Enlightenment, utopianism, evangelicalism, reform, or liberalism, the very familiarity of the term "revivalism" invites a measure of confusion. The word is so ready for use that precision does not seem to be required. Students of the phenomenon can discuss it at some length before they discover themselves to have fundamentally different conceptions.

Three Ways to Definition

Scholarship has found ways of coping. Perhaps the most common and certainly the safest course-that taken by so many excellent discussions-is to offer more of a narrative portrayal than a definition.1 In so doing the referent is depicted, described, indicated. This approach does not, however, lend itself to discrimination between what is and what is not a revival, to judgment about what constitutes revivalism, to determination of the temporal and geographical boundaries of the phenomenon. Or perhaps it would be better to say, it undertakes those definitional tasks primarily by limiting or extending the depiction. The definition is left for the viewer to extract from the picture. At the other extreme from that full depiction, some scholars reach for the essential characteristics of the phenomenon, the two or three determinants that all revivals share.2 Much of the social history of awakenings, conversion, and piety attempts to isolate the few factors-typically extrinsic factors-that explain revival.3 Such screening can be immensely helpful as well. In principle, it should serve comparative purposes. Problems in this approach arise when the definition norms itself on the revivalism of a particular epoch, confession, or movement. For instance, Jonathan Edwards, the actors in the Methodist camp meetings, or Charles Grandison Finney easily become the measure of revival, certainly setting a standard that each would have approved, even demanded, and yet perhaps not the most even-handed approach.4 The other extreme, possible when the mesh on the screen is quite wide, is to find revivals or revivalism in virtually every apparently authentic religious expression. Finney himself fell prey to that temptation, affirming, "Almost all the religion in the world has been produced by revivals."5. The present discussion takes an intermediate path. Instead of a full portrayal or a screen, we propose a constellation of ingredients as defining revivalism. The ingredients or factors appear in various combinations in revivals and revivalism. It is their combination, the constellation, that constitutes the definition. And while many revivals will exhibit the full range of these factors, the absence of one or two in a movement need not lead us automatically to refuse the label "revival."6 It is the aggregation of these factors that yields the most adequate definition. This approach takes its departure from within generally recognized revivalist phenomena in 18th century and later American society, but goes on to ask in what sense the marks of these revivals can be understood in a more extended sense. This approach allows us to recognize revivalism or revivalistic patterns in 19th century abolition and temperance crusades and permits a scholar like Jay Dolan to speak of Catholic Revivalism.7 It also constrains us to recognize some boundaries to revivalism and to question its use outside essentially "modem" contexts, i.e., for pre-modern revitalization, religious excitements and conversion, and/or for efforts at proselytism in the modern epoch, but where "modem" conditions do not pertain. This point should become clearer as we proceed.

Ten Marks of the Beast

(1) Revivalism rests on Pietism. Pietist or pietist-like assumptions, beliefs, mores, and communal structures-the patterns of life and thought espoused by Spener and Francke, by the Jansenists, by the Hasidic Jews-give revivalism its shape and form. The association of revivalism with Pietism is so close that one can appropriately ask whether revivalism has existed or can exist apart from Pietism. Certainly, we can argue that a pietist-like ethos seems vital. Particularly important are Pietism's insistence on experimental religion; on both consciousness and expression of the heart's commitments; on an obedient life and corporate discipline as appropriate expressions thereof; on the accessibility of the Biblical word and rule to the awakened lay spirit; on the importance of a witness communally shared through prayer, Bible-reading, hymns and preaching; on everyday life as a sacrament to be shaped and enlivened by a vibrant faith; and on doctrine or doctrines as the light by which all this activism stays on course. It is this Pietist world-view that gives revivalism its character and dynamic. Were a one-factor definition to be required, Pietism would come closest to sufficing. In places, Pietism succeeded in shaping society and culture such that revivalism became almost a way of life.8 The transmission of this culture then became a communal and preeminently a family project, permitting and requiring vital roles on revivalism's behalf for women as well as men.9 Particularly in the 19th century, women involved themselves on behalf of revival-within families, nurturing the piety of spouse, children, servants; in congregations, through prayer groups and Sunday schools; and outward into community, nation and world through mission, benevolent and reform societies. Pietism lowered the gateway into ministry and raised the expectations of laity, thereby drawing women as well as men, blacks as well as whites into public witness, lay preaching, and eventually formal ministry. Pietism made revival always a communal endeavor.

(2) Revivalism requires a theology conducive to, or at least permissive of, aggressive proselytism. Historically, it has not had to be Arminian, though the Methodists vehemently insisted that it did, but it has had to countenance a preached word and personal witnessing that can reach beyond the lines of existing (Christian) community. The vigorous New Light or Edwardian Calvinism of the First Great Awakening served quite well. Revivalistic theology typically stipulates that the response to preaching produces an authentic faith and genuine Christian community. Theology associated with revivals may well recast itself to make revival and conversion the norms of Christian community and existence. Then the nature and task of theology are conceived in evangelistic terms. Not surprisingly, in the 19th century, when this did occur, the term most apt for this theology was "evangelical."10 That rubric served to identify a distinct camp within American Protestantism, one of three broad camps, and thereby distinguished revivalistic versions of Protestantism from the more rigidly orthodox (the Princeton theology) and liberal (Unitarian). With respect to revivalism, the term "evangelical" may now confuse matters more than it helps since 20th-century Evangelicalism derives as much from 19th-century orthodoxy as from revivalism and functions with a more confessional sense of purpose than its 19th-century counterpart.11 Perhaps today "missional" or "missionary" would be a more apt adjective. What needs to be underscored, at any rate, is that revivalism requires a theology of action. It eschews theologies of inaction-like the hyper-Calvinism of such 18th-century figures as John Gill and John Brine or any extreme quietist, individualistic or rational positions. Revivalism needs and generates a theology of transformation.

(3) Revivalism works with a soteriology of crisis. It maps the religious pilgrimage so as to route all the faithful on Paul's trip to Damascus.12 A conversion or conversion-like experience is normative. Revivals ritualize this conception of the religious life. They so stage the religious message as to exhibit conversions as "the" faithful communal response. In that sense, they seek to produce conversions. Since Finney, ministers have self-consciously assumed control, even manipulative control, over these rituals; as revivalists they have presumed that they could produce revivals. From that same period, the revival ritual has been adapted to various causes for which a conversion seemed requisite. "Evangelists" staged revivals for abolition, temperance, the social gospel, peace, civil rights, abortion. The methodology worked marvelously with any cause that required converts. Revivalism's soteriology of crisis proves useful to some who disdain revivalism's claims.

(4) Revivalism, it is commonly said, assumes a declension. It would be perhaps more accurate to say that revivalism assumes a worldview in which declension is premised-nature is pitted against grace, "worldly" souls must be wrenched from perdition to salvation, that passage opening the way into the church. The existence of worldliness and its hold on individuals is conceived as a fall from a purer form of the church, the present "declension" points ahead to a renewal by appealing for the purer past as a reachable standard, and that jeremiadic gospel of fall and hope is preached. Within such an understanding, conversions and revivals define the community, distinguish the community of the faithful from the world. Those lines do not hold and really, for the revivalist, cannot, must not hold. Were they to do so, were the community to remain faithful, there would be no more revival or at best revival only for those outside. But declension marks the world's intrusion into that community, indicates that the boundaries have been violated, and requires the church to once again define its contours. So revival is again called for. Without conversions and revival the church is not fully the church. And without a declension, revival is both conceptually and programmatically impossible. Declension serves then as a form of social analysis, a way of reading history, a scheme for identifying the work of Satan, a means of diagnosing the signs of God's hand in human affairs.13 The preaching of declension and the preaching of revival are the alternating currents of revivalistic culture.

(5) Revival is also impossible without crowds. That may seem a trivial or incidental concomitant of the matter. It really is not. Without provision for gatherings, perhaps frequent or protracted meetings of some kind, revivalism cannot occur. Here we can draw the line between a revitalization of religion ("revival" in some generic sense of the term) and modem revivalism. The former might occur through various agencies of social change and over an extended period; in that sense, Charlemagne's reforms produced a "revival" or revitalization. Revivalism proper, on the other hand, does not refer to change that happens piecemeal over time and that might be discernable only after the fact. It is an event, a visible happening, a species of crowd behavior. Revivalism happens. It happens to crowds. And crowds require a certain social density, a population to draw together. This fact allows us to put in perspective the notion, popularized by William Warren Sweet, that revivalism was a frontier phenomenon.14 In fact, revivals, even in their 19th century form, were a well-developed "eastern" and even urban phenomenon before they moved west, as Terry Bilhartz has shown.15 The frontier as a place of sparse settlement16 should have been an unlikely spot for revival. Hence the importance of the camp meeting. It transformed wilderness into the city of God. For a short period it turned a region of sparse settlement into a dense congregation in the wood. Thereby it made revival possible, it made crowds possible under frontier conditions where otherwise neither crowds nor revival would ordinarily occur. And as revival produced the camp meeting so as to shape space to its own ends and achieve the necessary crowds, so also revival affected discourse so as to hold the crowds that had gathered. Revivalistic preaching emerged as popular discourse, preaching pitched to be heard under crowd conditions, rhetoric that would move the people, proselytizing utterance that focused attention on Pietistic belief and the expectation of conversion. The revival would be known by its "crowd" preaching.17

(6) Voluntarism functions as an extrinsic factor for revivalism. Revivalism flourishes when it has legal and social permission to exist, where crowds can gather, when proselytism is not forbidden, where clerical activism is sanctioned. Voluntarism provides these conditions. It also, of course, underlies the complex structure of denominational, parachurch, media and informal networks that define the voluntary religious sector. The prevalent western way of structuring the social order, voluntarism has developed under religious toleration, constitutional democracy and respect for human rights. Whether revivalism can exist outside such a "modern" ethos is difficult to determine. At any rate, we can say that revivalism presumes voluntarism-the right of individuals to "will" or choose what to believe, the right of individuals who will to believe and follow a given faith to congregate for those purposes, and the right for those who so congregate to offer that gift to others. Revival is actually a particularly aggressive form of voluntarism.

(7) A revival has liturgical form. This point was most forcefully made in the 19th century by the Mercersburg theologians, John Nevin and Philip Schaff. Nevin's portrayal of The Anxious Bench and the sect system rendered revivalism's liturgical form in pejorative terms.18 In less judgmental terms, his depiction still serves well. He grasped the important point that revivalism has liturgical shape and that it readily displaces other ways of being the church. From his angle, catechesis and the anxious bench vied for the loyalty of the German Reformed people. He insisted that the revival be recognized as a liturgical form. That form, of course, is not unitary, differs by region and movement, and has evolved over time. Edwards and Whitefield would doubtless have been shocked by 19th century camp meetings; Cartwright and Finney would doubtless be as shocked by today's television revivalism. Liturgical forms evolve, differ. However, the variety and evolution of revival, the revivalists' attempts at being non-liturgical, and their self-conscious repudiation of liturgy should not confuse us. Revivals are revivals and are recognizable as revivals because they have definite ritual form. A revival dramatizes the path to salvation (as the stagers understand it). Revivalism might be seen as a belief in, an insistence on, and the pro-vision for that liturgical form. Revivalism requires effective rituals, program and space with which to give dramatic expression to itself. Today's tele-evangelists are probably wrongly criticized for being theatrical. Theater belongs to the phenomenon. The more critical questions concern the gospel being dramatized, its fidelity to Scripture and creed, the appropriateness of the action to that gospel, the character and quality of Christian life which the revival opens, the stewardship of the movement in question, and so forth.

(8) Revivals require charisma. Specifically, they depend upon charismatic leadership. It is the leader, the revivalist, around whom the drama of a revival unfolds. So critical have been the revivalists to the phenomenon that we tend to conflate the two, revivalist and revival. Certainly, since Whitefield that conflation has been easy. The man seemed to be the event. Revivals gave expression to the personality and person of the revivalist. The ministries associated with Bakker and Swaggart wrestled with issues having, in part, to do with the identification, the virtual equation of person and ministry. Those issues are not new. James Davenport posed such problems for the First Great Awakening. Subsequent revivals have been haunted by the indiscretions of one or more actors. In that regard, the genius of the camp meeting might again be noted. The camp meeting made it possible to orchestrate revivals and draw on charisma without producing a "one-person" play. Camp meetings were revival with many actors.19

(9) Implicit in virtually all the above points is an assumption or belief essential to revivalism. Those caught up in a revival believe it to be the work of the Spirit of God.20 No one has quite equaled Jonathan Edwards' exacting analysis of the Spirit's working.21 Most would settle for less elegant ways of advancing the claim: Affections that are truly spiritual and gracious, do arise from those influences and operations on the heart, which are spiritual, supernatural and divine.22 The historian may or may not wish to honor this belief in his/her analysis. Today sophisticated commentary brackets out pneumatological claims. It is essential, however, to recognize that the actors in revivals believed the Spirit to be at work.

(10) Revivalism requires a communication network, a means by which the Spirit's working becomes known, a way by which a specific episode or series of episodes of conversions are claimed by the larger community. In the 18th century, that network consisted of traveler's reports, letters between sections of the country and across the Atlantic, word of mouth, newspaper reports, concerts of prayer, and, most important, the itinerating figure of George Whitefield. Eventually papers and journals appeared which were dedicated to the spread of "religious intelligence." Revival created channels of communication; revival established new channels as society and technology required; and, of course, revival now employs satellites to beam television signals.

Revivals and Awakenings

This last point provides a useful way of distinguishing revivals and awakenings. When the network stimulates revivals, when revival one place helps trigger revival elsewhere, when revival becomes contagious and is communicated to the general society, when revival sustains itself over a prolonged period of time, revival becomes Awakening. At least, that might be one way of distinguishing the two and defining an awakening. Definitions of awakenings are every bit as slippery as definitions of revivalism. Claims of a "Great Awakening" depend, we should add, upon this particular factor-namely a communication network, a revival seismograph, that registers quakes of "awakening" magnitude. An awakening is, then, a social construction. So also is a revival.23 They differ, according to this reading, primarily in scale. At any rate, that social construction we call "revival" takes institutional expression in a communication network.

Definition? These factors typify revivalism: an underlying pietism, a missional theology, a soteriology of crisis, a jeremiadic understanding of "these days," crowds, voluntarism, dramatic ritual form, charismatic leadership, confidence in the Spirit's presence, and a communication network. By this constellation, we can define revivals and revivalism. These elements help us to recognize the phenomenon and to distinguish it from other religious forms and other modalities of societal change. But, to reiterate the point made earlier, they do not constitute a screen. The presence or absence of an element cannot be determinative in the identification of a movement as revival. Rather, the constellation highlights factors that occur in complex interaction in revivalism. This is, obviously, not a history of religious definition of revivalism, but one that effectively limits its applicability. One might imagine situations in which the definition might be useful for movements in Judaism or Islam, but in general it will work best in modern, western Protestantism.

NOTES

1See, for instance, the excellent essay by my colleague Stuart C. Henry titled "Revivalism." It appears in the the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, eds., Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), II: 799-812. Also Bernard A. Weisberger, They Gathered at the River (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958); Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1965); William G. McLoughlin, The American Evangelicals, ]800-1900. An Anthology (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968) and William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism (New York: Ronald Press, 1959).

2David W. Bebbington in an unpublished essay, "Revival and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England," and in his Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) provides a sophisticated version of this approach. Bebbington proposes four defining characteristics: conversionism, crucicentrism, biblicism and activism. A superb illustration of this approach, albeit to a different religious impulse, can be found in Henry E May's The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). He proposes "that the Enlightenment consists of all those who believe two propositions: first, that the present age is more enlightened than the past; and second, that we understand nature and man best through the use of our natural faculties" (xiv).

3Stephen R. Grossbart provides an insightful tour through and testing of such hypotheses in "Seeking the Divine Favor: Conversion and Church Admissions in Eastern Connecticut, 1711-1832," The William and Mary Quarterly 46 (Oct.1989), 696-740. He questions the demographic, familial and economic factors lately used to explain revivals.

4Both the value and the limitations of this approach are well exhibited in Finney's first lecture, "What a Revival of Religion Is," Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960). Finney's Arminian definition severely limits the applicability of his insights, essentially to the movement of which he was a part. See the second paragraph, which is calculated to warm Calvinist hearts: "Religion is the work of man. It is something for man to do" (9).

5Ibid., 9.

6A much respected example of this approach can be found in Sidney E. Mead's analysis of "Denominationalism" in The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963)-six formative elements characteristic of the phenomenon. Randall Balmer's "Eschewing the 'Routine of Religion': Eighteenth-Century Pietism and the Revival Tradition in America," also utilizes this approach.

7Jay P Dolan, Catholic Revivalism. The American Experience, J830J900 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978).

8See on this point, Philip J. Greven, Jr., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self In Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977).

9Representative of a growing body of literature investigating familial and female roles in revivalism is Mary P. Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class. The Family in Oneida County, New York, J790-J865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

10For discussion of evangelicalism and the literature thereon, see Leonard I. Sweet, ed., The Evangelical Tradition in America (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984) and especially the editor's essay.

11See my colleague George M. Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

12This represents a constriction of more traditional Protestant (or Catholic) morphologies of religious experience. On this point, see Charles Lloyd Cohen, God's Caress. The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

13For discussion of declension and its analytical meanings, see Sac-van Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) and Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

14See his Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-]840 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), The Story of Religion in America, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1950) and Revivalism in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945).

15Urban Religion and the Second Great Awakening: Church and Society in Early National Baltimore (Rutherford, N.J.: FDU Press, 1986).

16This is one of the several meanings which Frederick Jackson Turner gave to the term.

17For the religious, political and societal import of this new form of rhetoric, see Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul. Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

18The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, 1843).

191t should be obvious that revivals demand a certain set of charismatic gifts and that other religious movements require other charismatic gifts. Charismatic leadership can take many forms and function in many contexts.

20Finney insisted: "Ordinarily, there are three agents employed in the work of conversion, and one instrument. The agents are God,-some person who brings the truth to bear on the mind,-and the sinner himself. The instrument is the truth. . . ." "The agency of God is two-fold; by His Providence and by His Spirit" (17).

21Affections. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed., John E Smith, vol.11 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).

22Ibid., 197. This is Edwards' statement of the first of twelve signs that affections are truly religious and spiritual.

23For an effort to define these two in relation to one another using Anthony E C. Wallace's revitalization theory, see William G. McLoughlin, Revivals Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology

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