[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.  Their alienation from theestablished order matched their aptitude for mobilizing people.This set themapart from the generation of George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent in the mid-eighteenth century, who labored to revive lukewarm establishments but left thecreation of new institutional forms to the will of providence and the discretion ofthose who pursued a New Light call.In the main, the creation of new congre-gations was an unintended and episodic consequence of the preaching of theearlier Great Awakening.Dissent in America after the Revolution was characterized by a shift fromseeking conversions to movement building from the ground up.A battery of youngleaders without elite pedigrees constructed fresh religious ideologies around whichnew religious movements coalesced.W.R.Ward has noted that Francis Asburywas an entrepreneur in religion, a man who perceived a market to be exploited.The itinerant-based machine which he set in motion was less a church in anytraditional sense than a   military mission of short term agents.  15 Similarly, thefounder of the Churches of Christ, Barton W.Stone, eschewed normal pastoralduties and dedicated himself utterly to the pursuit of   causes  in religion.Elias100 A Protestant EraSmith went so far as to define religious liberty as the right to build a movement byitinerating without constraint.16 All of these leaders eventually defined successnot by the sheer number of converts but by the number of those who identifiedthemselves with their fledgling movements.This quest for organization lay at theheart of Methodism s success.One unfriendly critic observed that the movementproduced such great results   because it took hold of the doctrines which lay in theminds of all men here, and wrought them with the steam, levers, and pulleys ofa new engine.  17Above all, these upstarts were radically innovative in reaching and orga-nizing people.Passionate about ferreting out converts in every hamlet and cross-roads, they sought to bind them together in local and regional communities.Theycontinued to refashion the sermon as a profoundly popular medium, inviting eventhe most unlearned and inexperienced to respond to a call to preach.These ini-tiates were charged to proclaim the gospel anywhere and every day of the weekeven to the limit of their physical endurance.The resulting creation, the colloquialsermon, employed daring pulpit storytelling, no-holds-barred appeals, overt hu-mor, strident attack, graphic application, and intimate personal experience.Theseyoung builders of religious movements also became the most effective purveyors ofmass literature in the early republic, confronting people in every section of the newnation with the combined force of the written and spoken word.In addition, thisgeneration launched bold experiments with new forms of religious music, newtechniques of protracted meetings, and new Christian ideologies that denied themediations of religious elites and promised to exalt those of low estate.18The result of these intensive efforts was nothing less than the creation ofmass movements that were deeply religious and genuinely democratic at the sametime.Lawrence Goodwyn has suggested that the building of significant mass dem-ocratic movements involves a sequential process of recruitment, education, andinvolvement that allows a   movement culture  to develop.This new plateau of so-cial possibility, based on self-confident leadership and widespread methods of in-ternal communication, permits people to conceive of acting in self-generateddemocratic ways, to develop new ways of looking at things less clouded by inheritedassumptions, and to defend themselves in the face of adverse interpretations fromthe orthodox culture.Like the later Populist movement about which Goodwynwrites, insurgent religious movements such as the Methodists, a variety of Bap-tists, the Christians and Disciples, the Millerites, and the Mormons dared to aspiregrandly, to surmount rigid cultural inheritances, to work together in order to be freeindividually.If nothing else, these movements were collective expressions of self-respect, instilling hope, purpose, meaning, and identity in thousands upon thou-sands of persons whom the dominant culture had defined as marginal.19The Democratization of Christianity 101All of these movements challenged common people to take religious destinyinto their own hands, to think for themselves, to oppose centralized authority andthe elevation of the clergy as a separate order of men.These religious communitiescould embrace the forlorn and the uprooted far more intensely than any politicalmovement and offer them powerful bonds of acceptance and hope.As one newMethodist convert recalled,   I now found myself associated with those who lovedeach other with a pure heart fervently, instead of being surrounded by those withwhom friendship was a cold commerce of interest.  20 These new movements couldalso impart to ordinary people, particularly those battered by poverty or infirmity,what Martin Luther King, Jr., called   a sense of somebodiness   the kind of con-solation that another Methodist found so appealing in worship held in the crudeenvironment of a log cabin:   an abiding confidence that he was a subject of thatpowerful kingdom whose Prince cared for his subjects.  21 These movements alsoallowed common people to trust their own powerful religious impulses.They wereencouraged to express their faith with fervent emotion and bold testimony.In themost democratic gesture of all, some preachers even began to take their cues forevidence of divine power from expressions in the audience.During a camp meetingon an island in the Chesapeake Bay, Lorenzo Dow was interrupted by a womanwho began clapping her hands with delight and shouting   Glory! Glory!  In aresponse that was the opposite of condescension, Dow proclaimed to the audi-ence:   The Lord is here! He is with that sister.  22In passing, it is instructive to suggest at least four reasons that histori-ans have failed to explore the dynamics of popular religion in this era.First, inthe mid-twentieth century, the quickened interest in religion as a cultural forceemerged within a broader historiographical tendency to downplay the social im-pact of the Revolution.Second, historians have interpreted the Second GreatAwakening as an attempt by traditional religious elites to impose social order upona disordered and secularized society revivalism as an attempt to salvage Prot-estant solidarity.A third reason is that church historians from the more populardenominations have had reasons to sanitize their own histories.Modern churchhistorians have chosen to focus on those dimensions of their own heritage thatpoint to cultural enrichment, institutional cohesion, and intellectual respect-ability [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]