The constantly interacting realms of the marketplace and religion represent one of the most fundamental relationships in American religious history. It may also be observed in arenas often (mistakenly) thought to be devoid of crass market or “popular” considerations: in high theology (that is, theological formulations defined by the writings of trained intellectuals). Conversely, groups thought to be opposed to, or perhaps just willfully ignorant of, “high” theology often have their roots (acknowledged or not) in deep theological traditions and innovations. Mark Noll’s “Theology” and Douglas A. Sweeney’s “Evangelicals in American History” illuminate the major patterns of Christian theology in America, particularly for evangelical Protestants. Here we wish to emphasize the interaction of theological traditions with the dynamic and innovative religious practices that have evolved in American religious history. The two Great Awakenings serve as an ideal example of this point, as does the twentieth-century “awakening” of Pentecostalism.
Unwittingly, Jonathan Edwards set the stage in the eighteenth century for the coming evangelical–republican alliance. Seeking to reinvigorate traditional Protestant piety, his innovative theology began a process of the “disruption of the historic colonial churches” and a merging of Protestant thought and republican intellectual/political culture. Along the way, the central intellectual concept of Puritanism—the covenant, by which God, individuals, and society were linked— was replaced with a Christian republicanism. The Great Awakening of the mid- eighteenth century was the turning point. It provided space for the ideas that spurred the American Revolution and then the democratic explosion of Christianity in the nineteenth century.
The Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century encouraged a similar set of interchanges between high theology and popular expression. Popular evangelicalism as the characteristic style of American religious expression may be dated from the nineteenth-century awakening, beginning with the great camp meetings held at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, during the earliest years of the century, and extending to the expansion of evangelical dominance throughout much of the growing country during the first half of the nineteenth century. The staggering growth of evangelical churches impressed many at the time; a great number believed that they were entering the millennium of the book of Revelation. Some of them thought so literally; they dated the Second Coming precisely and retreated to their appointed locations to await the Messiah; some even did so repeat- edly, after refiguring their end-time calculations and discovering that they had been slightly off the first time. They experienced “the great disappointment,” but left behind a few of the new evangelical formations (including, in this case, the
Seventh-Day Adventist Church), which survived to become part of America’s religious landscape. The evangelical awakening also spurred a host of moral reform movements, ranging from fad diets to prison reform to abolitionism.
Because the awakening in the early years of the republic is thought of as “popular,” it is often not connected to formal theology. But it should be. Just as was the case in earlier centuries, popular movements compelled theological rethinking, just as theological innovation sometimes predated and often energized popular religious movements. Charles Finney—lawyer, president of Oberlin College, and the most famous of a generation of evangelical itinerants—provided a theological rationale for the movement of the spirit. This great Protestant preacher eased northern (especially New England) suspicions about the social turmoil that might be unleashed by potent plain-folk revivalism. Himself not exactly of the plain folk—he was a lawyer and college president as well as an evangelist—Finney articulated theological reasoning common to antebellum Christians. A revival, he explained, was simply “the right use of the appropriate means.” Revival preachers sowed the seed. Ultimately, only God’s blessing allowed the seed to blossom and the harvest to come. What was the result, Finney asked, of the older doctrine of divine sovereignty, that men had no agency in their own salvation? Finney’s answer: while the church fiddled, America burned. Millions had “gone down to hell, while the church has been dreaming, and waiting for God to save them with- out the use of means. It has been the devil’s most successful means of destroying souls.” Just as political campaigning brought out the vote, revivalism produced sure results. Churches were “awakened and reformed,” sinners saved, profligates reclaimed, “harlots, and drunkards, and infidels, and all sorts of abandoned characters, are awakened and converted. The worst part of human society are softened, and reclaimed, and made to appear as lovely specimens of the beauty of holiness” (Charles Finney, “What a Revival of Religion Is” [1835], available at http://www. concentric.net/~fires/revival.htm).
Initially uneasy about the plain-folk evangelicalism of the antebellum republic, American theologians gave it theological imprimatur. As demonstrated in Mark Noll’s magisterial work, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002 [a summary of which appears in his contribution to this book]), American theology was transformed in the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. Noll suggests that American theology emerged from a synthesis of “evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning.” The synthesis provided the theology, ethics, bases for action, and overarching intellectual framework for American thought from the 1790s to the Civil War. “The process by which evangelical Protestantism came to be aligned with republican convictions and commonsense moral reasoning,” Noll concludes, “was also the process that gave a distinctively American shape to Christian theology by the time of the Civil War.” The nexus between white evangelical Protestant thought, common-sense philosophy, and republicanism gave Americans their distinctive elaboration of the relationship between religion and freedom.
Nearly everywhere except in the United States, Christians held republican ideas in suspicion, precisely because they encouraged individual free thought and excoriated the organic institutions that European Christians had seen as anointed by God. What was regarded as the product of a “lunatic fringe” elsewhere took hold in America as a result of the absence of a strong church establishment and the alliance of classically trained elites and democratic evangelicals in the common cause of the Revolution and freedom of religion. White Americans created a powerful theological hermeneutic, one bolstering a democratic and individualist Reformed Protestantism. Indeed, even groups that might have been the foes of this synthesis in other places took hold of the same combination of evangelical and republican reasoning; it simply was omnipresent in the theology of the era. It was routine, Noll concludes, for “American believers of many types to speak of Christian and republican values with a single voice.” Many were like the former Methodist turned Unitarian James Smith, who wrote to Thomas Jefferson that he had found “shelter under the mild and peaceable Gospel of Jesus Christ, the most perfect model of Republicanism in the Universe”; or the radical Christian Elias Smith, who exulted in “One God—one Mediator—one lawgiver—one perfect law of Liberty—one name for the children of God, to the exclusion of all sectarian names—A Republican government, free from religious establishments and state clergy—free enquiry— life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel.” Over time, the high theological ideas of Jonathan Edwards and his disciples in subsequent generations (the neo-Edwardseans) wound their way into the common-sense thought of the nineteenth century. Most important, the notion that everyone could, and should, read the Bible for himself, and that the Bible spoke truth to ordinary people, defined American evangelicalism through the mid-nineteenth century. Of course, southerners and northerners employed this same theological reasoning and arrived at diametrically opposed understandings of slavery. And then, by Appomattox, this evangelical synthesis lay in ruins.
A twentieth-century example of the interaction of high theology and popular religious movements may be seen in the birth of Pentecostalism and fundamentalism. Both grew from roots in high theology; both became major social and political movements in the twentieth century; and both drew most of their adherents from common folk disaffected by mainstream churches. Margaret Bendroth considers this history in “Religious Conservatism and Fundamentalism.”
Pentecostalism was a twentieth-century extension of the nineteenth-century holiness movement, a set of doctrines that embraced eighteenth-century Methodist ideas of the soul’s quest for perfection. Holiness believers looked for a work of God following conversion—what believers referred to as a “second blessing” or “sanctification”—when the Holy Spirit infused and completely purified the soul. In the antebellum era, the informal Bible studies of the New York Meth- odist Phoebe Palmer, who revived John Wesley’s musings about achieving an ideal state of spiritual purity, popularized the holiness movement for an urban, northern audience influenced by the pervasive ideas of perfectionism. Palmer and her followers retooled sanctification into a distinct and discrete event following conversion, one wholly cleansing the believer of sin. Holiness drew few followers in the South until after the Civil War, largely because of the movement’s connection with social radicalism, especially abolitionism. By the late nineteenth century, however, holiness had been denuded of some of its earlier theological and political implications. It then spread quickly, especially among Methodists in the Southeast.
Twentieth-century Pentecostal doctrine added speaking in tongues as evidence of the movement of God’s spirit. The significance of tongues speech was heat- edly disputed among the faithful. Some assumed that it was a required “initial evidence” of sanctification. Others called it a “third blessing” following conver- sion and sanctification. Still others interpreted tongues speech as just one of many gifts that God bestowed differentially on individuals. Holiness teacher Charles Parham’s revivals at his Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 set a theological precedent for the emergence of the new Pentecostal doctrines. The second baptism of sanctification—the ultimate cleansing from sin explained by holiness theologians—was necessary but not sufficient, he preached. Only the final Holy Spirit baptism could complete the initiate’s spiritual quest. When God’s power suffused the human vessel, the believer spoke in tongues, a practice that was evidence of the “latter rain” of the Holy Spirit. The early Pentecostals anxiously anticipated the imminent and catastrophic coming of the “end times” (in contrast to the more optimistic postmillennialism common to many in the nineteenth- century northern holiness movement) and espoused a literalist biblicism that very nearly merged into fundamentalism. Like the fundamentalists, too, the Pentecos- tals shunned the consumption of tobacco and alcohol and what they perceived as adornment in dress (jewelry for women and neckties for men being the most vili- fied worldly baubles). However, Pentecostals remained distinct from fundamen- talists because of the doctrine of tongues speech as evidence of the baptism of the Spirit, an innovation too closely akin to antinomian anarchy for the guardians of a literalist evangelical orthodoxy.
The history of fundamentalism, as Margaret Bendroth shows in her chapter, suggests a similar evolution from high theology to mass cultural movement. Fundamentalism—defined by one historian as militant and angry anti-modernism in theology—emerged originally as an intellectual movement in nineteenth-century northern seminaries, Bible institutes, summer camp meetings, and inter-denominal national schools. The early theological fundamentalists kept alive the Scottish common-sense realist tradition once pervasive in American thought. God’s will, went their reasoning, was manifest in the world; his workings were abundantly evident for anyone who would examine them using the principles of Baconian inductive science. The order of the natural world, for example, glorified the workings of the Creator, and the movement of God’s spirit in the individual soul left a sensory impression that only the willfully stubborn (meaning most of mankind) could ignore.
Premillennialism, another key tenet of fundamentalist doctrine, originated in the nineteenth century among conservative English theologians who schematized the world’s history into seven “dispensations,” or discrete periods leading to the millennium. They prognosticated that the return of Jesus to gather up his disciples would precede a time of tribulation and Armageddon, speeding human history to a catastrophic end. Human history, they imagined, already had entered the concluding era of the seventh dispensation. Fundamentalists also objected to the higher textual criticism of the Bible imported from German universities, which increasingly shaped American seminary education, as well as modern modes of scientific thought such as Darwinism. Fundamentalism was not synonymous with anti-intellectualism, at least in its origins. More accurately, early fundamentalism defended an intellectual tradition drawn from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schools of theology and philosophy against the assaults of modern theology, science, and psychology.
But “fundamentalism” as a social movement emerged in the twentieth century with the publication of The Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets in the 1910s that attempted to set in concrete those biblical doctrines that were not negotiable. In the 1920s, fundamentalists increasingly created fights within, and withdrew completely from, the mainstream Protestant churches. They suffered through the media debacle of the Scopes Trial in 1925, when their hero William Jennings Bryan (himself a progressive Social Gospeler in politics, even while a conservative in theology—a common combination in his era) was humiliated on the stand by the agnostic and iconoclastic defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. From the 1920s through the 1960s, fundamentalists created an entire set of institutions—nonde- nominational megachurches, radio stations, schools, colleges and universities, newspapers, publishing houses, and the like—and nurtured a generation of evangelical activists. Then, from the 1970s forward, they experienced their own Second Coming, first in anti-abortion activism and then through political organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. Along the way, they cultivated an intellectually coherent worldview on which this conservative religious social movement could be built. Far more than the conservatives, it was the liberals who experienced a “high–low” split, as the intellectual ideas flourishing in mainstream church seminaries and religious studies programs grew increasingly disconnected from the concerns of everyday church folk.
A final example of the popularization of profound theological traditions may be seen in the spread of Asian religious ideas on American soil. American dab- bling in Asian religions dates from the nineteenth century, when Henry Steel
Olcott became America’s “first [white] Buddhist,” and when the World’s Parliament of Religions, meeting at Chicago’s mammoth World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, introduced many Americans to Asian religious ideas (despite the liberal Protestant cast of the parliament itself). But it was only after World War II that Asian religions came to attract followers other than intellectuals and eccentrics. In a reverse missionary motion, figures such as the British Episcopalian intellectual Alan Watts and the Japanese priest Shunryu Suzuki instructed a growing American audience in Japanese Buddhism and Taoism. “What I saw in Zen,” Watts told his listeners in the 1950s, “was an intuitive way of understanding the sense of life by getting rid of silly quests and questions.” Watts delivered more than a thousand lectures and published twenty-six books through the 1950s and 1960s, teaching countercultural luminaries such as the poets Allen Ginsberg (himself interested primarily in Tibetan Buddhism) and Gary Snyder. Watts remained at some distance from Asian religious practitioners in San Francisco, where he taught, having heard too many assimilated Japanese Buddhists chanting lines such as “Buddha loves me this I know / For the sutra tells me so.” Under the guidance of Shunryu Suzuki, however, Japanese Buddhism established a strong presence on the West Coast. Suzuki touted the total meditative practice of zazen. “The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is itself enlightenment,” he explained to his mostly white audience. “In this posture there is no need to talk about the right state of mind. You already have it. This is the conclusion of Buddhism.”
The most recent Asian immigrants—Thais, Cambodians, and others—have brought their own Buddhist traditions (especially Theravada Buddhism) to this country. In 1999, the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader of Tibetan Buddhism, explained his philosophy to 40,000 interested listeners in New York’s Central Park. He specifically rejected the role of proselytizer, but his celebrity presence served to make known his hopes for ecumenical peace and harmony. The scholar Timothy Tseng explores the broader story in “Asian American Religions.” Spreading from intellectuals on the coasts, Asian Buddhism as expressed through its acolytes has slowly found its way into the heartland. For example, growing up in Montana, future basketball guru Phil Jackson, son of a Pentecostal minister, sought religious enlightenment beyond his narrow upbringing. He eventually found it in the practice of zazen, and it did not hurt his basketball game either. “The more skilled I became at watching my thoughts in zazen practice, the more focused I became as a player,” he explained. Sitting zazen taught him to “trust the moment—to immerse myself in action as mindfully as possible, so that I could react spontaneously to whatever was taking place.” Baseball player Yogi Berra’s dictum—“You can’t think and hit at the same time”—illustrates in a folkkoan the same principles that Jackson brought to his championship basketball teams. His players might have been more interested in television endorsements than Eastern ways, but their disciplined yet creative playing symbolized the very virtues Jack- son sought to teach. In this case, an ancient theology meshed perfectly with the triangle offense and a disciplined but gentle guru. It was a striking yet familiar combination of high theology and everyday practice. It was also an example of the intertwining of religion and popular culture of the kind Philip Goff explores in “Religion and Popular Culture.”
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