History

Is America God’s Country?    

Veteran American political insider, Pat Buchanan, posed the question 13 years ago, ‘Is America God’s country?’

That hint of despair in his question came during the furore involving the removal of the granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court. 

The melancholia levels have only risen, under eight years of Obama, and many devout Americans are concerned, like Buchanan, as to where the Great Republic is headed.

History is always instructive and American history in particular.

The first Great Awakening was a spiritual tsunami that hit the colonial colonies of North America in the third and fourth decades of the 18^th century, with a peak intensity between 1739-43.

Religious revivals are essentially a manifestation of God; it has the stamp of the deity on it which even the unregenerate and uninitiated are quick to recognise. Revival makes an impact on a community.

 Theologian, Dr Wilbur Smith, outlined nine outstanding characteristics of major revivals and it is interesting to apply them to America in her formative years.

1)    They occurred in a day of deep moral darkness and national depression

This was certainly true of the Puritans of New England as by the third generation strains had developed, there was generally perceived to be a lack of spirituality in the community with what historians have labelled the ‘half way covenant,’ being an attempted remedy. Under this policy they could participate in the Lords Supper but were not full members of the church until they had made a personal profession of faith. However, some ministers then allowed communal confessions rather than for individuals.

The great colonial clergyman Jonathan Edwards also wrote he was concerned about ‘the licentiousness (that) prevailed among the youth of the town’ while ‘the state of society and morals were becoming more and more corrupt.’

2)    They began in the heart of one consecrated servant of God who became the energising power behind it, the agent used of God to quicken and lead the nation back to faith and obedience to Him.

There had been small revivals in the 1720s, notably inspired by the preaching of Dutch Reform minister Theodore Frelinghuysen, in New Jersey, who in turn inspired Presbyterian minister Gilbert Tennent.

But it was Edwards preaching, that triggered off the most far reaching events that started in 1734 and quickly accelerated with 300 commitments in six months.

From the town of Northampton Mass.,it spread to over a 100 towns,including other colonies. Edwards was no village ranter but rather a well read and educated theologian. His record and analysis of the Awakening came to the attention of a young British evangelist, George Whitfield.

3)    Each revival rested on the Word of God and most were the result of preaching and proclaiming God’s law with power

In 1739, God’s lightning’ was to hit all the colonies when Whitefield started his crusades –the Billy Graham of his time.

No less a person than the American colossus Benjamin Franklin, scientist-writer-diplomat-politician, and a confirmed agnostic was astonished by ‘the extraordinary influence of Whitfield’s oratory on his hearers. Indeed to such an extent at one meeting parting with his money despite earlier determining ‘that he (Whitefield) should get nothing from me.’

Franklin, who befriended the young evangelist, was particularly impressed with the power and clarity of Whitefield’s delivery that could be ‘heard and understood at a great distance’ by some 30,000 people according to the great American. That is a huge crowd as the total population in 13 colonies was no more than 2.5 million people. It was also an era without microphones.

Was Franklin, the first truly scientific observer of lightning, listening to God’s lightning rod?

4)    All resulted in a return to worship of Jehovah

The Great Awakening is estimated to have added 250 new churches and 200,000 conversions throughout the colonies with substantial changes in the age composition of church membership. Some 50,000 new souls were added to the churches of New England (out of a population of 250,000) that revolutionized the moral and religious nature of the country and ultimately determined its political destiny during the same century.

5)    Each witnessed the destruction of idols where they existed

As the Puritans, and many other Protestants, were not High Church the bulk of churches had no statues of dead saints, or of Mary, or of anything that smacked of Romanism or Anglicanism.

What they did have was a rigid hierarchical system where public speech was rigidly circumscribed and limited to a college elite. Not for them lay preaching, campfire meetings and the separation of church and state-all part of modern America and Low Church life today.

Thus, it was the tearing down of this ‘idol’ that preserved preaching and prayer to tax supported clergyman and this destruction not only came about because of the activity of the ‘Grand Itinerant’ (Whitfield) but also through their own Jonathon Edwards.

The concept of an itinerant or wandering ministry cut across the Puritan concept that ministers must be settled and the democratisation of the pulpit eventually led to far reaching changes for both religious and secular society.

As historian Perry Miller noted the greatness of Edwards was to perceive the need for changes in worship and bring people, by participation, into a more meaningful relationship.

6)    In each revival there was a recorded separation from sin

The great secular observer, Ben Franklin summed it up:……‘it was wonderful to see the change so soon made in the manners of inhabitants. From being thoughtless and indifferent…..it seemed as if the whole world was growing religious; one could not walk through a town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families in every street.’

7)    In every revival they returned to offering blood sacrifices

In the literal Biblical sense of sacrificing an animal this is not applicable. However, in the sense of warfare providing blood sacrifices it is indeed relevant. The War of Jenkins Ear (1739) was only a small scale affair but it morphed into King George’s War (1744-48) which at that time was the largest of the American colonial wars. This was ultimately supplanted a decade later with the French and Indian War part of the Seven Years War, a global struggle.

8)    Almost all recorded revivals show a restoration of great joy and sadness

As Edwards noted, in the ‘spring and summer, following 1735, the town seemed to full of the presence of God as it never was so full of love nor so full of joy…as it was then.’

Further, in a long letter (12/12/1743) to Rev. Thomas Prince of Boston, Edwards reflected approvingly on the past nine years of revival, including the second wave of the Great Awakening that had occurred in Northampton following Whitefield’s visit. According to him there was also more seriousness, decency, clean talking, together with a decline in lewdness and ‘tavern hunting’ that made the era the best for 60 years.

9)    Each revival was followed by a period of great national prosperity

Economic historian Marc Engel, in tracing the development of the 13 colonies between 1720-75 states the period of most rapid growth was between 1745-60 or the period immediately following the Awakening!

True, there were also strong secular arguments for increased productivity (new techniques, increased prices for exports etc) that admittedly was stronger in the north then the south where economic development was less pronounced. But where was the revival the weakest? Is it only co-incidence, that according to historian, Marc Simmons, ‘in the older areas of the southern colonies the effect of revivalism seems to be far less pronounced?’

Even so the democratisation of the church wrought by the Awakening would ensure that the Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian revolution permeated throughout all the colonies. The Baptists had 96 churches in 1740 but 40 years later with the American Revolution raging had 457 making them the second last denomination.

The Baptists and Methodists would replace the Congregationalist (Puritans) and Anglicans, as the two largest denominations, within half a century after American independence.

Indeed, the Great Awakening presaged the American Revolution by making Americans into participants and protagonists in God’s cause against the mighty of whatever rank and station and once freedom is gained in one area it becomes impossible to stop in another. (That was something that Gorbachev, in our time, discovered when he tried to contain reforms in the USSR).

Thus, the American Revolution was truly an extension of the earlier spiritual revolution that became a harbinger of profound social and political changes.

Those who wish to sneer and jeer at arguments for a God-in-history role may continue to do so, after all from the days of Lot there have always been mockers and scoffers. Nevertheless there is enough historical evidence to conclude American history cannot be argued just from a secularist viewpoint.

It is indeed His story.

Accordingly, Pat Buchanan’s question is resolved in the affirmative and Americans would do well to reflect on that great revival period of their history.