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Social Reform and the Divided Conscience of Antebellum Protestantism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

James H. Moorhead
James H. Moorhead
Affiliation:
Mr. Moorhead is assistant professor of religion in North Carolina State University, Raleigh.
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Extract

It is a commonplace of antebellum historiography that the numerous reforms of the age often bore an intimate connection with Protestant evangelicalism, and Charles Grandison Finney is often portrayed as a symbol of this link. In addition to endorsing such causes as antislavery and temperance, the great evangelist inspired numerous converts to work out their salvation through useful service, including reform; and the areas swept by his revivals provided fertile soil for every manner of ultraism. Both as theological innovator and religious activist, he seemed to epitomize a tide of perfectionist optimism surging with great force against institutional restraints.Yet there was a very cautious side to Finney. He seldom committed himself unreservedly to any cause other than revivalism and generally eschewed the most controversial approaches to reform. Viewing this aspect of his career, one scholar has recently argued that “the basic thrust of Finney's thought and activity was conservative, status conscious, and pessimistic about human nature.” Because of these two faces, the historian is tempted to fix on one or the other as the “real” Finney, but it is more profitable to probe his ambiguities than to mitigate them. An examination of Finney offers fruitful insight into nineteenth-century evangelicalism's explosive potential for reform and its equally powerful tendency to limit and contain that impulse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 1979 , pp. 416 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1979

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References

1. Information concerning Finney's views of reform and society can be gathered from Cole, Charles C. Jr, The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelists (New York, 1954);Google ScholarMcLoughlin, William G., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York, 1959), pp. 65–121;Google Scholar and Vulgamore, Melvin L., “Social Reform in the Theology of Charles Grandison Finney” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1963).Google Scholar My thinking about evangelical Protestantism's relationship to reform is especially indebted to Davis, David B., “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Anti-Slavery Thought,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (09 1962): 209–230;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLoveland, Anne C., “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Anti-Slavery Thought,” Journal of Southern History 32 (05 1966): 172–188;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSmith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Nashville, 1957);Google Scholar and Thomas, John L., “Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,” American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965): 656–681.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12. Quoted in Oberlin Evangelist, 04 13, 1859, p. 57.Google Scholar

13. Perry Miller's phrase is quoted in Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), p. 128.Google Scholar The introspective spirituality enjoined by Puritanism is ably discussed in Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966).Google Scholar For an example of Finney's Arminianism, see his sermon “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts” which appears in his Sermons on Important Subjects (New York, 1836), pp. 3–28.Google Scholar

14. Oberlin Evangelist, 03 11, 1840, p. 43.Google Scholar Finney's mature thinking on sanctification is set forth in Systematic Theology, pp. 402–481. Also useful is Johnson, James E., “Charles G. Finney and Oberlin Perfectionism,” Journal of Presbyterian History 46 (03 1968): 42–57 and (06 1968): 128–138.Google Scholar

15. Finney, , Systematic Theology, p. 122.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 405.

17. Ibid., p. 110. Opie, John, “Finney's Failure of Nerve: The Demise of Evangelical Theology,” Journal of Presbyterian History 51 (Summer 1973): 155–173,Google Scholar sees in Finney's perfectionism a gnostic tendency which made conversion an uncertain prelude to the higher Christian life of sanctification.

18. Oberlin Evangelist, 12 6, 1843, p. 195.Google Scholar The literature on American millennialism is extensive and growing. Perhaps the best introductions to the subject are Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison, 1978);Google ScholarGaustad, Edwin S., ed., The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1974);Google Scholar and Tuveson, Ernest L., Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1978).Google Scholar My American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven, 1978)Google Scholar also discusses important aspects of American millennialism. Finney's contrast between a hopeful postmillennialism giving encouragement to every good work and a pessimistic premillennialism destroying the motive for action, was a distinction often made by antebellum critics of Adventism and has found echo among many contemporary scholars, including Tuveson. Although this model works relatively well in the context of nineteenthcentury Protestantism, millennial symbols and the social uses to which they may be put are more ambiguous than this typology suggests; and in practice there was often considerable blurring of differences among the variations of millennialism. See, for example, Butler, Jonathan M., “Adventism and the American Experience” in Rise of Adventism, pp. 173–206;Google ScholarDavidson, James W., The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, 1977);Google Scholar and Maddex, Jack P. Jr, “Proslavery Millennialism: Social Eschatology in Antebellum Southern Calvinism,” American Quarterly 31 (Spring 1979): 46–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Finney, , Lectures on Revivals, p. 306.Google Scholar

20. Oberlin Evangelist, 12 22, 1841, p. 204.Google ScholarDavidson, , Logic of Millennial Thought, especially pp. 122–175,Google Scholar analyzes millennialism's fusion of personal and corporate salvation into one process and discusses its rhetoric of polarization. Millennialism seems admirably structured to fit into the psychological mechanism of commitment discussed in Tompkins, Silvan S., “The Psychology of Commitment: The Constructive Role of Violence and Suffering for the Individual and for His Society” in The Antislavery Vanguard, ed. Duberman, Martin (Princeton, 1965), pp. 270–298.Google Scholar

21. Haroutunian, . Piety Versus Moralism, pp. 166–176;Google ScholarMeyer, Donald H., The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 89–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWeddle, David L., “The Law and the Revival: A ‘New Divinity’ for the Settlements,” Church History 47 (06 1978): 196–214,CrossRefGoogle Scholar has noted that the concept of moral government in the new divinity corresponded to a widespread antebellum faith in legal order and that Charles Finney, a practicing lawyer before he became an evangelist, symbolizes this link.

22. Quoted in Cole, , Social Ideas, p. 209.Google Scholar

23. The anarchistic potential in antebellum notions of moral government is suggestively explored in Perry, Lewis, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, 1973).Google Scholar

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27. Oberlin Evangelist, 01 21, 1846, p. 11.Google Scholar

28. C. G. Finney to Arthur Tappan, April 30, 1836, Finney Papers at Oberlin College. Finney became embroiled in a dispute with the Tappans over segregation; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969), pp. 177–178.Google Scholar

29. Fletcher, Robert S., A History of Oberlin College, 2 vols. (Oberlin, Ohio, 1943), 1: 242–245.Google Scholar

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38. This insight is among the many topics fruitfully explored by Kraditor, Aileen, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

39. Finney, , Lectures on Revivals, p. 150.Google Scholar

40. Quoted in Vulgamore, , “Theology of Finney,” p. 137.Google Scholar

41. Oberlin Evangelist, 04 22, 1840, pp. 65–66;Google ScholarFinney, , Lectures on Revivals, pp. 416–417.Google Scholar

42. Oberlin Evangelist, 04 28, 1841, pp. 65–66.Google Scholar

43. Finney, , Systematic Theology, p. 228.Google Scholar

44. Charles Finney to J. N. Stickney, April 4, 1874, Finney Papers.

45. Finney, Charles G., The Character, Claims and Practical Workings of Freemasonry (Chicago, 1913 [1869], especially pp. 89–101, 184–198.Google Scholar

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47. S. T. Spear to Charles Finney, Dec. 14, 1874, Finney Papers.

48. Many formulations of the social control thesis, for example, Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill, 1960),Google Scholar are concerned with the efforts of a conservative elite to salvage its threatened position in a rapidly changing society; but this study focuses the question in a different way: was evangelical endeavor a means by which a “new” middle class (a rising, not a declining, group) achieved hegemony? See Singleton, Gregory H., “Protestant Voluntary Organizations and the Shaping of Victorian America,” in Victorian America, ed. Howe, Daniel W. (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 47–58.Google Scholar

49. Oberlin Evangelist, 03 27, 1839, p. 59;Google ScholarFinney, , Lectures on Revivals, p. 438.Google Scholar On the rise of “industrial morality,” see Thompson, E. P., “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (12 1967): 56–97;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gutman, Herbert G., Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976), pp. 3–78.Google Scholar

50. Finney, Charles G., Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York, 1876), pp. 289, 297.Google Scholar

51. Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978), p. 140.Google Scholar

52. Oberlin Evangelist, 03 13, 1839, p. 51; 07 21, 1839, p. 130; 03 12, 1845, p. 42;Google ScholarWyatt-Brown, , Lewis Tappan, p. 44.Google Scholar

53. In spite of his emphasis upon the entrepreneurial origins of Finney's revivals, Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium, also allows that by the late 1830s many working class individuals “found their own uses for the Protestant tradition” (p. 202). On worker's culture see, for example, Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, 1976);Google ScholarFaler, Paul, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, Shoemakers and Industrial Morality, 1826–1860,” Labor History 15 (Summer 1974): 367–394;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gutman, , Industrializing America, pp. 79–118.Google Scholar On the English working class, consult Harrison, Brian, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (London, 1971), especially pp. 107–146;Google Scholar and Laqueur, Thomas W., Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976).Google Scholar

54. For this concept, I am indebted to Harrison, , Drink and Victorians, p. 25.Google Scholar

55. My understanding of hegemony has been greatly influenced by Davis, David B., The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975), pp. 349–385.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 455.

57. See, for example, Dayton, Donald W., Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York, 1976);Google Scholar and Moberg, David O., The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern (Philadelphia, 1972).Google Scholar

58. Findlay, James. F. Jr, Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837–1899 (Chicago, 1969), p. 353.Google Scholar More extreme variants of premillennialism are treated in Kraus, C. Norman, Dispensationalism in America: Its Rise and Development (Richmond, 1958);Google Scholar and Sandeen, Ernest L., The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970).Google Scholar