Unitarianism, Evangelicalism, and Romantic Organicism

Religion in the First Half

of the Nineteenth Century

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I. The Second Great Awakening

Drastic political changes after American Revolution brought about profound cultural developments, which expressed themselves most explicitly in religion. The basic characteristics of the evangelical Protestantism of the first half of the nineteenth century – the Second Great Awakening – were • a proliferation and splintering of religious sects,

• a weakening of clerical authority and a strengthening of lay control,

• a blurring of theological distinctions and doctrines,

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• a growing tendency toward Arminianism in the process of conversion,

• and an increased emphasis on an activist and progressive postmillennialism.

Some radical preachers claimed that the Scriptures were to democratic religion what the Constitution was to democratic politics—the fundamental document that would bind all the competitive American Christian sects together in one national communion.

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• Although some Calvinists still tried to stress predestination and the sovereignty of God, conversion more and more seemed to be within the grasp of all who desired it—a mere matter of letting go and trusting in Christ.

• By emphasizing free will and earned grace, the Methodists especially set the entire evangelical movement in a decidedly Arminian direction.

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• Sin was no longer conceived as something inherent in the depravity of human beings but as a kind of failure of a person's will.

• Even some of the Calvinist Presbyterians and Baptists felt compelled to soften their opposition to Arminianism in the face of the challenges by free will believers.

• Many came to believe that the moral behavior of people—their "character"—was more central to religious life than the introspective conversion of their souls.

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• As one preacher told his audience in 1806, each individual was "considered as possessing in himself or herself an original right to believe and speak as their own conscience, between themselves and God, may determine.”

• Religion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it had ever been; and people were freer to join and change their religious affiliation whenever they wished.

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• Most of the leading American churches began to picture the Second Coming of Christ following rather than preceding the thousand years of glory and bliss.

• Such an approaching age of perfection seemed to be beginning in America itself.

• This new postmillennialism represented both a rationalizing of revelation and a Christianizing of the Enlightenment belief in secular progress.

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• It was optimistic and even worldly; • it promised not the sudden divine destruction of a corrupt world but a step by step human directed progression toward perfection of the world.

• Since the United States was itself leading humanity toward the earth's final thousand years of bliss, millennial hopes came to focus on contemporary events in America as signs of the approaching age of perfection.

• This perfection would be brought about, Finney said, "not by miracles but by means," indeed, by human efforts.

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• Every move westward across the continent and every advance in material progress—even inventions and canal building—were now interpreted in millennial terms.

• Such millennial beliefs identified the history of redemption with the history of the new Republic.

• They reconciled Christianity with American democracy.

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II. Revivalism and Conversion: Charles Finney

• The social promise of evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening was that by converting individuals, society could be transformed.

• Social reform would grow naturally from the actions of the converted.

• A process of democratization of Christianity was started by Methodists in the period of American Revolution. The ministry of Charles Finney during the 1830s climaxed this process.

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• Finney made religion “audience centered.” • He borrowed the techniques of populist politicians in presenting his religious message.

• His preaching exploited the “language of common life.”

• Finney relied upon Christian republican thinking by fusing “intelligence and virtue” with “the fear and love of God.”

• These were means of protecting “self-government” against the dangers of both the despotism of the mob and the despotism of the individual will.

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• Many historians see Finney’s theology as theism of commonsense and scientific predictability.

• The proper causes should be activated by revivals to produce the desirable effects:

• “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as… sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.”

• Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics.

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• Finney and his allies wanted to stretch the boundaries of accepted ecclesiastical practices.

• His “new measures,” were mostly taken over from the Methodists.

• Finney held protracted meetings of many days in a single location, he prayed aloud for the unconverted called by name,

• he took it s a sign of divine blessing when hearers collapsed in response to his message,

• and he allowed women to speak before mixed audiences. • Americans enjoyed a free marketplace in religion, and through his Lectures on Revivals of Religion Finney instructed preachers on how to market their message.

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• Persons who seemed promising candidates might be seated in front of the church on what was called “the anxious bench,” especially if they were prominent citizens whose conversion would encourage others.

• In their new theology of how revivalism should be organized, the evangelists turned themselves into early psychologists of the techniques of persuasion.

• Finney also benefited from his charismatic personality and an intuitive sense of his audience.

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• Finney couched his message in terms of making a personal decision for Christ, not in terms of waiting for the grace of God.

• Christians loyal to the theology of the Reformation believed that such an appeal left too little role for divine initiative.

• Some of them reproached Finney for excessive emotionalism, as other revivalists have been reproached before and since.

• But the feature of Finney revivals most criticized in his own day was the role played by women.

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• Like Lyman Beecher, Finney saw social implications in the Christian message.

• He preached against the evils of alcohol and tobacco.

• He actively opposed slavery:• He refused the sacrament of communion to slaveholders on the grounds that they were unrepentant sinners.

• In 1833, he offered the chapel to a meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society.

• Oberlin College, where Finney became a professor in 1835 and a president in 1852, trained Christian missionaries and antislavery activists of both sexes.

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• Before he accepted his professorship, Finney stipulated, “we should be allowed to receive colored people on the same conditions that we did white people.”

• Oberlin became a part of the underground railroad for slaves escaping to freedom in Canada.

• Finney’s impact on history derives not only from his own efforts but also from the work of those he converted and trained.

• For Finney, the reforms were ancillary to Christianity, but for other evangelicals the reforms became primary goals.

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III. Revivalism and Reform: Lyman Beecher

• Second Great Awakening was an outburst of evangelical activity, which sought to transform society along moral lines.

• For the religious crusaders who led the temperance, peace, antislavery, missionary, and other benevolent societies, it was not enough to win individual souls to Christ; society as a whole must respond to His call.

• Evangelicals typically believed in the collective redemption of society.

• Society would become more prosperous and at the same time cleansed of its sins.  

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• Lyman Beecher saw his time as both blessed with progress and full of danger.

• On the side of the Lord, American commercial growth, progress in education, and territorial expansion signaled the rising fortune of God’s nation.

• At the same time, the Devil continued to wreak havoc in Europe and threaten the US.

• Beecher’s theology consecrated the American nation as a new Israel to lead the nations to a millennial and democratic renovation of human existence in covenant with God.

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• His religious ideology was the basis of programs of action and of a sense of identity.

• Beecher believed in postmillennialism, which provided him with the optimistic view on history.

• As he proclaimed in 1827 “our nation had been raised up by Providence to exert an efficient instrumentality in this moral renovation of the world.”

• Within the framework of evangelical cosmic optimism, periodic reverses and disappointments could be accommodated.

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• Beecher’s theology represented an activist religious orientation that emphasized the conscious structuring of life – both one’s own and others.

• Temperance like any other aspects of the evangelical movement, was predicated on the assumption that each person has a potential and is morally obliged to develop it.

• Dependence on liquor threatens “dissipation,” that is, loss of focused energy and talent necessary to creating conditions for self-realization.

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• When the Connecticut Society for the Reformation of Morals was founded in 1812, Beecher became its driving force.

• He and his colleagues were determined to outlaw dueling, control the use of alcohol, promote revivals, found literary magazines, and publish books that the public would read.

• (All of the most-read theological writings of the period were published by ecclesiastical activists).

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• Beecher and his colleagues valued freedom, which for them meant freedom to shape one’s own life rationally and religiously, according to the principles of moral philosophy.

• The kind of freedom they approved was equivalent to self-discipline.

• The objective of their Calvinism was to blend the activist, voluntaristic, ambitious attitudes of the nineteenth-century America with the religious doctrines of the Reformation.

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• Americans adopted an optimistic view of what their new republic was capable of achieving. They believed that the American experiment was unique and that having once begun, the path to further improvement lay open.

• One aspect of this optimism, which helped to fuel the era of reform in the 19th century was the belief that the westward sway of empire would carry republicanism, civilization, and Christianity into the western regions of the United States.

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• Still, there was a fear that the American experiment could be compromised.

• The European monarchies remained a threat.• Immigrants, with different languages, folkways, and versions of Christianity provoked suspicions that they could be easily seduced and turned into instruments of political corruption.

• Beecher was anxious to create a evangelical united front to include as wide a spectrum of Protestants as possible because of the threat he perceived from the expansion of Roman Catholicism in the United States.

• It was also a tactic to unify American Protestantism.

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• “The Catholics have a perfect right to proselyte the nation to their faith if they are able to do it. But I too have the right of preventing it if I am able” (A Plea for the West 144).

• The nativists like Beecher did not really seek to cut off immigration, but they were ardent promoters of education because they were not certain that they would otherwise succeed in imposing their values on others.

• To attain confidence, Beecher had also to invoke divine providence.

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IV. “Reasonable” Christianity: William Ellery Channing

• In addition to Catholicism, Unitarianism became another danger that Beecher saw in the contemporaneous American culture.

• Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity” typified an early-nineteenth-century rationalism.

• For Channing and other Unitarians, all human beings had a share of the divine presence in their souls and of the universal reason in their minds.

• They believed in the innate moral goodness of the individual and the moral authority of the individual conscience.

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• The exposition of their anti-Trinitarian position was elaborated in1819, when Channing delivered his sermon “Unitarian Christianity.”

• Unitarian Christianity urged that religion was based on God’s inspired word as revealed in Scripture.

• Sent by God, though not God, the divine Christ was still the cornerstone of faith.

• God was morally perfect. • God’s qualities were human ones raised above error and imperfection. Hence, human nature was able to mimic him.

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• The structure of the world corresponded with the mind of man.

• This correspondence proved that everyone had a ray of the divine.

• Religion revealed the connection of the creator to his creation.

• Otherwise, it would be a vehicle of terror fit perhaps for the superstitious world of the sixteenth century but not for the progressive intelligence and charity of the nineteenth.

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• Channing inherited from his Puritan precursors an image of the clergyman as an intellectual and moral leader of the community.

• As for most intellectuals of his time, his social ideas derived from the religious ones.

• He supported “the education of the laboring classes” and opposed slavery.

• Although he criticized revivals for what he perceived as shallow emotionalism, both Beecher and Finney respected his personality, if not his theology.

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• Channing’s philosophy is best characterized as a form of Christian humanism. Like the humanists of the European Renaissance, he affirmed the values of a classical education and believed in realizing the potential divinity in human nature.

• To his Christian humanism Channing added an Enlightenment faith in individual rights and in reasoning from empirical evidence similar to that of most other American Protestants.

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• Channing preached his famous sermon in 1819, at the ordination of the minister of a newly erected church dedicated to “Unitarian and anti-Calvinistic worship.”

• His sermon was a synthesis of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment. He declared science and the Bible perfectly compatible, for God “never contradicts in revelation what He teaches in his works.”

• Channing and his followers interpreted Bible as a progressive revelation – much as lawyers interpreted the Constitution.

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• Channing’s sermon found no justification for the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejected it and attributed his own teaching to “Unitarian Christianity.”

• He also rejected the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The idea that God would actually intend the damnation of the wicked, as opposed to merely foreseeing it, was a contradiction to divine moral perfection.

• The sermon deeply impressed not only liberals but also some of the orthodox in his audience who eventually joined the Unitarian church. Tens of thousands of copies of his sermon were sold.

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• Referring to the Bible in the first part of his sermon, Channing established the principles according to which Scripture should be interpreted.

• He described the Bible as “a book written for men, in the language of men,” with “meaning to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.”

• All over his sermon he advocated the exercise of reason in religion, claiming that “the existence and veracity of God… are conclusions of reason and must stand or fall with it.”

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• In the second part of the sermon Channing presented his conclusions from a reasoned study of the Bible.

• Denouncing the notion of Trinity, he asserted that nowhere does the New Testament’s word for God mean three persons; that a doctrine of the Trinity is confusing and thereby distracting the mind from the communion with God.

• Proclaiming the unity of God as the central object of worship, Channing also emphasized the unity of Jesus Christ as “one mind, one soul, one being… one conscious intelligent principle, whom we can understand.”

• He criticizes a confusing compound of two different beings of Jesus Christ, the one divine, and the other human.

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• Seeing the highest object of Christ’s mission in the recovery of human beings to virtue, Channing explains his vision of the nature of Christian virtue.

• He believes that all virtue is immanent to the moral nature of human beings and that it constitutes their consciousness and their sense of duty.

• Consequently, virtue is the power of forming human “temper and life” according to their conscience. In other words, virtue has its foundation in reason.

• That does not diminish the importance of God as a source of “illuminating and persuasive influence,” free of compulsion and fear.

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• Channing opposed the virtue of reason as a fundament of goodness and piety to the fanaticism and insanity, which are not an indication of piety but simply of “disordered nerves.”

• He warns against repetition of horrible mistakes the Church made in the past, persecuting everybody with a different religious opinion, “sheltering under the name of pious zeal the love of domination… and trampling on men’s rights under the pretense of saving their souls.”

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V. Christian Family: Horace Bushnell

• Horace Bushnell opposed Unitarians’ heavy reliance of reason in their religious sensibilities.

• He saw the Unitarians’ reduction of religion to the rational as “foolish and destructive.”

• The religion for him was not literal but symbolical, and Trinitarian Congregationalism was represented by the richest mass of symbolism.

• The shaping of the believer’s character begins far earlier than the Unitarians had suspected, and much of this shaping is unconscious.

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• The starting point of Bushnell’s theory of the family was his attack on revivals of religion.

• Bushnell believed the revival, intended to elicit decisions for Christ, overemphasized individualism and conscious choice.

• He was convinced that religious attitudes were more effectively transmitted as a part of a total cultural heritage and personality structure without conscious reflection during childhood.

• Early conditioning accomplished before the development of independent judgment makes the child a Christian without even considering himself as being otherwise.

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• Bushnell’s position on parenting represented a synthesis of competing views on human nature circulating during his lifetime.

• Like the Calvinists, he acknowledged the existence of original sin.

• Like the Lockeans, he emphasized the power of nurture to shape personality.

• Like the romantics, he respected the human dignity of children.

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• In his Christian Nurture, Bushnell develops the theory of childhood in psychological as well as philosophical terms.

• He considers the personality in its relationship to society and culture.

• The family is the environment where individual personalities are socially determined.

• Parents are the representative of the system of values established by society; and those values are conveyed to children within the family.

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• Parents represent the model to be imitated through the mechanism of the unconscious submission to power.

• On the other hand, parents are also mediums of divine love.

• In place of God’s bestowal of supernatural grace on his elect, Bushnell set the power of parents over their children.

• When it came to religious training, parents should try to convey a feeling rather than a doctrine. Example is far more important than precept.

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• Christian Nurture provides an example of organicist social thought.

• Bushnell sees society as an organism; while• Family is the model for such an organic society.

• Instead of considering society as the creation of individuals, he focuses on the individual as the creation of society by the means of parenting.

• “All society is organic. A pure, separate, individual man, living wholly within and from himself, is a mere fiction.”

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• Bushnell had a deep sense of history and of the gradual development of legal, moral, and other cultural principles over time.

• He claimed that Western civilization showed a tendency to progress that was missing in other civilizations because of the cultural superiority of Protestantism.

• In unison with Lyman Beecher, Bushnell attacked the Catholic Church as both theologically unsound and as an enemy of the republican values.

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• Bushnell claimed in one of his letters, that American public schools should be a Protestant institution;

• Catholic schools don’t teach children to be “Americans”; they are instructed instead “into the foreign prejudices and superstitions of their fathers, and the state, which proposes to be clear of all sectarian affinities in religion, will pay the bills!”

• Like Beecher, Bushnell was convinced that Catholics were destroying the culture of the United States and focused on education as a means of preventing such destruction.

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Quiz # 2Among the authors you’ve read and discussed in Unit 2, who expressed the idea that  1. the existence of both state and federal governments guarantees a double security to the rights of American people?  2. honoring a living king is a form of idolatry?  3. the best way of serving God is doing good to people? 

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4. a political power is justified only by the consent of people to be governed?  5. in order to guarantee the stability of American national government the president should be elected for life? 6. there is no human being without conscience? 

7. if American colonies are the “children” of their “mother-country,” Britain, they are abused “children”?  

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• 8. different races differ in their natural abilities for reason and imagination?

 • 9. to be truly representational of the American people the House of Representatives should consist of more than 65 members?

 • 10. it is impossible to cleanse political structures from the emergence of factions but the negative effects of factional ambitions can be controlled.

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