CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MORE CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM: INSIDE AMERICA’S SECOND GREAT AWAKENING
No spiritual revival lasts forever. If the church does not remain faithful in prayer and faithful to the Spirit-filled teaching of God’s Word, even the children and grandchildren of those who have been greatly awakened can find themselves drifting off to sleep. Unfortunately, after the American Revolution, after the long, hard fight against the British, many Americans began drifting again from the nation’s biblical moorings, and before long, the new democracy was experiencing a cultural crisis that threatened to unravel the fabric of the country.
Professor Mark Noll, the esteemed Christian historian who in 2005 was named by Time magazine as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,”[378] described post-Revolution America in his extensive and insightful book A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada.
The state of Christianity after the American Revolution was not good. The tide of warfare itself had disrupted many local congregations, particularly where the fighting had been most intense—in New Jersey, New York City, the Philadelphia area, and the Carolinas. The Revolution had dealt an especially hard blow to the Episcopal church, whose ties with England made it particularly suspect. . . . Interest in religion more generally also seemed on the decline. Concern for creating a new nation, for populating the open lands west of the Appalachians, for overcoming the ravages of inflation, and for avoiding foreign entanglements left little time for church. . . . [After the Revolution,] well under 10 percent of the population belonged formally to local congregations, and many on the frontier were entirely devoid of Christian influence.[379]
Fortunately, God chose to move in a very powerful way in America in the early 1800s, and we can learn much from what became known as the Second Great Awakening.
The Second Great Awakening (1800–1850s)
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I first became curious about this period in history back in the late 1990s, when I was working as a senior aide to Steve Forbes, editor in chief of the nation’s foremost business magazine and two-time presidential candidate. During the four years I worked for Steve (1996–2000), I had the opportunity to work closely with him on two books, a small paperback titled The Moral Basis of a Free Society and a hardcover titled A New Birth of Freedom. One of the things I appreciated so much about Steve was his command of American history and his great curiosity about the Second Great Awakening. He spoke of it frequently during his 1996 campaign.
Before I joined the campaign, I remember watching Steve on C-SPAN and other networks as he suggested to audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire that America had made positive, sweeping changes in the past and that we could do so again. Such talk captured my interest. It wasn’t often that I heard business leaders or presidential candidates talk about the vital importance of spiritual revivals in American history, much less our urgent need for more of them. I was impressed, and when I was asked to join his team as a communications advisor, I was honored to do so. I believed in his message and was eager to help more people hear it. I was particularly encouraged when Steve decided to embark on these two writing projects and asked me to do more research on the Second Great Awakening.
What we found—drawing on the work of Professor Noll and a range of other Christian and secular historians—was fascinating.
Following the Revolutionary War, America experienced a period of moral decline. . . . Spiritual devotion waned, and social problems proliferated. From the late 1770s until the late 1820s, per capita consumption of alcohol in America rose dramatically, to about four or five times what it is today. Everybody took a swig from the jug—teachers, preachers, children. They called it “hard cider,” but it was nothing like the cider we buy at the grocery store today. In those days, it seemed everyone was in a haze by noontime. . . . The social consequences were predictable.
“Illegitimate births were rampant. . . . Thomas Paine was proclaiming that Christianity was dead—and certainly the body of faith appeared to be in a coma. Yet even as church rolls were shrinking and greed, sensuality, and family breakdown were becoming more widespread, America was about to experience a great spiritual revival.”
Slowly at first, then building over the next several decades, one wave of spiritual renewal and religious rededication after another swept the country, in what historians now call America’s “Second Great Awakening.” In one community after another, people began to wake up from their moral and spiritual slumber as though saying, “If we’re going to have a self-governing nation, it must be occupied by self-governing people.” The first public health movement in America was launched not by government but by citizens such as Lyman Beecher, the founder of the American Bible Society and a pastor who went on to form the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance in 1826. This enterprise became known as the Temperance Movement—and it worked. Within one generation alcoholic consumption in America fell by two-thirds.
Soon pastors and community leaders were opening elementary and secondary schools (this was before “public” education), founding colleges and universities, setting up orphanages and homes for abandoned children, creating shelters for the poor, building hospitals, and exhorting people to stop drinking and spend more time with their families.[380]
I learned a lot in the process of working on those projects. Since then I’ve taken the time to look even more closely at this remarkable period of American history. I’ve learned that in many ways the Second Great Awakening was even more powerful and impactful on American society in the nineteenth century than the First Great Awakening had been in the eighteenth. The more I learned, the more I found myself hoping that maybe, just maybe, the Lord will bless us with a third such sweeping spiritual awakening in our times.
The Rise of Francis Asbury (1745–1816)
One of the most important figures in the Second Great Awakening was a man named Francis Asbury. Born near Birmingham, England, on August 20, 1745, as America’s First Great Awakening was in full swing, Asbury was raised in a strong Christian home by parents who had been heavily influenced by the teachings of John Wesley. In 1771, after Asbury had finished his schooling, he heard Wesley urge young people in Britain to become missionaries to America. The twenty-six-year-old Asbury quickly signed up.
He didn’t see much success at the beginning of his ministry. After all, the Revolutionary War was about to disrupt everything and make Americans extremely wary if not hostile toward anyone from England. In fact, soon after the war broke out, every single other Methodist missionary left America and returned to England. But not Asbury. He stayed put. He carefully navigated the dangerous political climate, built strong personal relationships with pastors throughout the colonies, faithfully planted the seeds of the Word of God, and preached the gospel. In so doing he laid the groundwork for a ministry that in time, he prayed, would bear much fruit, just as the Wesley brothers had taught him.
In reading various accounts of Asbury, several things moved me.
First, Asbury was a man deeply committed to Jesus Christ. He rose around four or five o’clock in the morning—obviously not to watch television or check his e-mail or engage in trivialities. Rather, Asbury spent at least an hour in prayer, pleading with God to give him strength and wisdom and to change the hearts of Americans wherever he preached.[381]
Second, Asbury was a man deeply committed to the Word of God. Asbury studied the Bible voraciously and read many other Christian books as well. Indeed, he wrote in his journal that his daily routine was to read at least a hundred pages to keep his mind and heart sharp and focused.[382]
Third, Asbury was a man deeply committed to preaching the gospel no matter what the cost. Over the course of his ministry as a Methodist church circuit rider, he logged more than three hundred thousand miles on his trusty horse, riding from town to town, village to village, state to state to spread the Word of God and try to save men’s souls. He is said to have crossed the Appalachian Mountains more than s
ixty times to find and reach Americans who had never heard the gospel before.[383] During all those travels—often through blistering heat or driving rain or freezing snow (conditions that frequently left him ill)—he preached more than ten thousand sermons.[384] Though he wasn’t known as a particularly fiery or charismatic speaker, he was convinced that living frugally, teaching the Bible simply, being out among the people, understanding their concerns, and communicating in a way they could understand would ultimately be effective. And it was. This life wasn’t easy for him or for his wife. But Asbury was determined to be found faithful to this high calling and let nothing distract him from his mission.
Fourth, Asbury was a man deeply committed to making disciples, recruiting and training new pastors, and planting new churches that were biblically based and theologically committed to solid, orthodox Christianity. He believed that Christ had given him—and all believers—the great commission not simply to go and preach the gospel but also to make disciples. So that’s what he did. He knew full well that the vast majority of towns and villages he traveled to and through didn’t have a church and couldn’t afford a preacher. He also knew that he couldn’t personally shepherd all the people he and his allies were helping lead to Christ. So he became determined to do more than simply preach the gospel in these areas. He also wanted to help the new Christians start their own congregations with pastors who could minister to them year-round. He held training meetings. He organized and taught at regional Bible conferences. Like the apostle Paul on his missionary journeys, Asbury returned to visit new pastors in various far-flung parts of the country time and again so he could answer their questions and encourage them and help them not feel isolated and alone. He proved to be an extraordinary organizer of men as he followed (and at times improved upon) the methods that Wesley had taught him in England, for which the Methodists became so well known in their early history. On top of all this, and again following the Wesleys’ lead, he dedicated himself to caring for the poor and needy and the disenfranchised in society, and he encouraged the men he trained to care for them as well.
The Impact of Francis Asbury
The impact of Asbury’s approach was nothing less than astounding. Inspired by the Wesley brothers to leave England and become a Methodist missionary in America, Asbury was the model disciple. He studied the Wesley model carefully, applied it tirelessly, prayed continuously, and by the grace of God saw tremendous fruit.
Yet what impresses me most about Asbury is his keen understanding that his objective should not simply be winning converts in the colonies, as wonderful as that would be. Rather, he saw his objective as identifying, recruiting, training, and mobilizing into action future pastors, evangelists, and disciple makers. Winning more souls to Christ, he determined, would simply be a ministry of addition—useful but shortsighted. Recruiting and training more soul winners and church planters, by contrast, would be a ministry of multiplication. If he did it right and did it well, relying upon the power of the Holy Spirit and not his own human effort, Asbury realized that a ministry of multiplication could help the Methodist church not simply expand but grow exponentially over time. That was the Wesleys’ theory. It was heartily embraced by Asbury. And they were right.
“Statistics can never tell a whole story,” Mark Noll wrote, “but when Francis Asbury came to America in 1771, four Methodist ministers were caring for about 300 laypeople. When he died in 1816, there were 2,000 ministers and over 200,000 Methodists in the States and several thousand more in Canada devoted, as he put it, to ‘the dear Redeemer . . . of precious souls.’”[385]
Many of those new Methodist pastors were saved through Asbury’s preaching and were recruited and trained in part by his efforts. Such men then followed his lead and saw extraordinary results.
• By 1830, there were over 500,000 followers of Christ who had become members of the Methodist church in the United States.
• By 1840, that number had climbed to over 890,000.
• By 1850, there were more than 1.2 million professing Methodists in the U.S.
• By 1900, that number had skyrocketed to more than 4.6 million.[386]
Can we say with absolute certainty that each and every one of those was a born-again believer? We cannot, though many certainly were, and there is a rich history of people being truly converted through the Methodist church during the nineteenth century and becoming mobilized to care for the poor and needy, to start schools and orphanages, and to impact their communities in other positive ways in the name of Jesus.
Sadly, in the twentieth century many Methodist congregations embraced liberal theology and distanced themselves from the orthodox teachings of their predecessors, but that cannot be held against the movement’s founders or early leaders. Indeed, we should pray for the Methodist church to experience another awakening today that would take it back to its solid biblical roots, that it might again have such a powerful effect on the American nation.
The Rise of Timothy Dwight (1752–1817)
In the last chapter, we noted the remarkable legacy of Jonathan Edwards’s descendants and the key roles many of them have played in American religious, social, and political life, as well as in overseas missions. Consider briefly the story of one of those descendants, an important but generally overlooked figure in the Second Great Awakening.
Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards on his mother’s side, was born on May 14, 1752, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Raised in a deeply devoted Christian home, he gave his life to Jesus Christ at a young age. He was a brilliant boy who was homeschooled by his mother (since there were no public schools at the time) and loved to study the Scriptures. “It didn’t take long for Mary Dwight to discover her eldest had an unusually quick mind,” one chronicler noted. “By age four, Dwight was reading the Bible, songbooks, books on prayer, and whatever else his mother gave him. At the age of six, the precocious Dwight would overhear Latin lessons given to older boys at a local grammar school, and then steal away on his own to go over Lily’s Latin Grammar. He had a remarkably absorbent mind and not infrequently surprised adults by recounting stories he had read, with all the minutiae included.”[387]
Dwight attended and graduated from Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut (later expanded into Yale University). Among other subjects, he studied theology and became an ordained minister, serving as a military chaplain during the Revolutionary War. After the war, he became the pastor of a congregation in Greenfield, Connecticut, started an elementary school, was twice elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and became an outspoken opponent of slavery. Committed as he was to impacting both the church and the newly free American nation for the cause of Christ, he was also determined to impact the world for Christ. Working toward this goal, he helped start three foreign missions societies to recruit, train, send, and support evangelists, pastors, and church planters to win souls in other countries.
Despite poor health and weak eyesight, Dwight read constantly, and he loved to write. He was a poet and penned a multi-book epic titled The Conquest of Canaan about the Jews conquering and settling the land of Israel.
For most men, such accomplishments would have been enough, but not for a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. For Dwight, this was merely preparation for how God was going to use him next. In 1795, Dwight was elected president of Yale College, his alma mater. He wasn’t entirely sure, however, that he wanted the assignment. Yale was not the school it had once been. Founded in 1701 by clergymen who wanted to train young men to make a difference for Christ, Yale had built an impressive legacy early on. Twenty-five of its graduates had served in the Continental Congress. Four had signed the Declaration of Independence. But since the end of the war, the prestigious school had drifted from its biblical moorings, and Dwight wasn’t convinced it could be turned around.
“Before [President Dwight] came college was in a most ungodly state,” a Yale student during this time later wrote. “The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were ske
ptical, and . . . intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common.”[388]
“Students found pleasure in nightly revelings that frequently included breaking tutors’ windows and smashing bottles,” another chronicler wrote. “Yale men regularly clashed with drunken townsmen in violent engagements where rocks flew and clubs flailed. Christian faith was unfashionable and reviled on campus.”[389]
From 1701 to 1744, records show that on average, half of Yale’s graduates went into full-time Christian ministry. By the late 1790s, however, most of the students attending Yale weren’t even professing Christians.[390] The year Timothy Dwight took office, barely one in ten of the 125 students enrolled at Yale would admit to being a Christian.[391]
“To build up a ruined college is a difficult task,” Dwight remarked upon being named Yale’s president.[392]
Nevertheless, that’s what he set out to do.
The Impact of Timothy Dwight
After much prayer and analysis of the situation on campus, Dwight concluded that the only way to change Yale was to change the minds of the students and faculty who lived and worked there. The only way to change their minds was to change their hearts. And the only way to change their hearts was for God to do it himself by bringing about a revival.
Dwight knew revival was possible. As a boy he had seen the effects of the Great Awakening with his own eyes. He had heard his mother’s and grandfather’s stories with his own ears. He had read his grandfather’s books. He knew that in dark times Jonathan Edwards had trusted in the inerrancy of God’s Word and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Dwight couldn’t know for sure whether God would choose to send revival again or not. But he had faith in passages of Scripture like “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2, NIV) and “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16). What’s more, he believed that revivals would precede the second coming of Jesus Christ, and he wanted to be faithful in doing his part while praying for and expecting God to do his.