I Awakenings - The Revival Machine

The Revival Machine

The myth persists,” wrote the historian Timothy L. Smith
several decades ago, “that revivalism is but a half- breed child of
the Protestant faith, born on the crude frontier, where Christianity
was taken captive by the wilderness.”1 Like all myths, it is almost
true. But the captive taken was wilderness itself, and the captor was
the American religion. Jonathan Edwards—and, later, Charles Gran-
dison Finney—did not so much tame the wilderness of the American
mind as tap its secret power. Nearly a hundred years after Edwards
awakened Northampton, Finney would lead a series of revivals across
the Northeast and Britai n that would win for his populist vision of
evangelicalism not the hundreds who were converted under Edwards,
but uncounted multitudes. In what was then the heart of Manhattan
he built the Broadway Tabernacle, the country’s rst megachurch. It
seated 2,50 0, and often close to twice that number crowded into the
sanctuary—a pillared theater in the round like a Roman stadium —
for Finney’s orchestrations of scripture and sentiment, moralism and
sensation. Crowds fell like wheat before his beautiful, terrifying,
consoling voice. Most receptive to his message were the new little big
men of the nation, the petit bourgeoisie, physicians, inventors, entre-
preneurs, self-made men and their wives, wealthier than the old Pu-
ritan aristocracy. “Under my preaching,” Finney boasted of just one
of his many revivals in the new city of Rochester, “ judges and lawyers
and educated men
were converted by the scores.”2
Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, extended the vote to men


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without property. Charles Grandison Finney, whose early career
strangely m irrored Jackson’s presidency, extended the passionate
God of the frontier, the pious morality of hell re and certainty, to
the men and women who would lay the foundations of the Gilded
Age. Here we nd the origins of evangelicalism as we know it: the
marriage of new money and “new life” that would stoke the furnaces
of industrial empire. It was a di erent expression of democracy than
Jackson’s, but just as potent. And, overlooked by the successive gen-
erations of evangelicals and fundamentalists who study Finney’s re-
vivals to this day—Billy Graham insists that “no one can read [Finney]
without being challenged by his passion for
evangelism”3—we nd
also an intimacy, a love of secret feelings that Edwards would have
understood and that we can recognize in the blend of masculinity
and sentiment, muscle and tender self-regard, that su uses funda-
mentalism even now.


On the afternoon of October 7, 1821, after yet another church
service that left him bored, Charles Grandison Finney decided to
settle the question of God. “A splendid pagan of a man,” i n his grand-
son’s description, he was, at twenty-nine, six-two, thick-chested,
could wrestle any challenger to the ground.4 Women thought him
the most elegant dancer in Adams, a farming ham let on the rough
western edge of New York. His sandy hair was thin on top but given
to a rakish curl, and his violet eyes were so bright they leap out even
from black-and-white photographs, “ intense, xating, electri fyi ng,
madly prophetic eyes,” wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, “the
most impressive eyes —except perhaps for John C. Calhoun’s—in
the portrait gallery of ni neteenth-century America.”5
Finney led the Presbyterian church choir, and he enjoyed discuss-
ing theology with his pastor, but until that October day in 1821, he’d
had little use for and less bel ief in the Lord. Long set in the pride of
his own intel lect, he was past the usual age of such inquiries. As a
you ng man he’d hoped to nd a way to Yale, but instead he became a
schoolteacher and now he was a lawyer, and many people believed


THE The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 75
that soon he’d be a politician, perhaps a senator one day. If that was
to come to pass, he decided, he’d better get his inner life in order.
That Sunday in October, he cleared his schedule for Monday and Tues-
day and resolved to decide by Wednesday whet her he was a man
of God.
The truth was that religion had been creeping up on him. As a
boy he had witnessed powerful Baptist preaching, the stomping,
shouting, Holy Ghost power kind, but as a man he had remained im-
mune to the revivals that swept the region so often that it would later
be called the “Burned Over District” for the i ntensity of its spiritual
r e s . 6 Then, one day, he bought a Bible. For his law library, he said,
and everyone bel ieved him. Finney preferred it that way. He took to
shutting his o ce door, clogging the keyhole with a rag lest anyone
peep on him, and praying in whispers. When the Bible had been just
one more big book among the tomes of law in his library, he’d read it
openly. Now, it became a secret companion.
He had a reputation to uphold; his very name was in Adams the
standard of Logic and Reason. “If religion is true,” one man de-
manded of his wife, “why don’t you convert Finney? If you Christians
can convert Finney, I will believe in religion.”
But no one could convert Finney. “I had not much regard for the
opinions of others,” he’d confessed. As he sought God from Sunday
night through Monday and Tuesday, it seemed as if his heart grew
harder. “I could not shed a tear; I could not pray.” On Tuesday night,
terror struck him. He thought he would die. “I knew that if I did, I
should si nk down to hell.” He wanted to scream. He braced himself
in bed and waited for dawn.
As soon as light broke, he dressed and hurried to his o ce, to
return to the Bible that taunted him. The town was already awake.
He nodded and smiled at farmers and ladies, quickening his pace to
avoid unbearable conversation. And then, he froze. Stopped and
stood dead still in the middle of the dirt road that was the town’s
main street. Creaky wagon wheels rolled left and right, their drivers
cursing. Women may or may not have spoken to him. Good day, Mr.
Finney. Mr. Finney? Oh, dear. He doesn’t hear. Quite unlike him! Just how


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long he stood still, he’d never be able to say. There was only one sen-
tence among his thoughts, but it seemed to come from elsewhere,
spoken in vibrating, terrifying tones that did not correspond to the
seconds and sounds of the material world.
Will. You. Accept. It. Now. Today?
He bolted. Walking fast, smiling at passersby so they wouldn’t
notice his distress, a cold, clammy feeling overtaking him. He aimed
himself for a piece of woods over a hill on the north side of the vil-
lage, but he charted an indirect path, because he did not want anyone
to know where he was goi ng. “I skulked along under the fence, til I
got so far out of sight that no one from the vill age could see me. I
then penetrated into the woods.” He found himself a closet of trees,
fallen timber crisscrossing to create a mossy fort open to the sky. He
crawled in on a damp bed of pine needles and re-red oak leaves and
knelt. There, he determ ined, he would Accept It Now Today, and if he
did not he would not return to the world. He waited for prayer. For
“relief.” But he could nd none. When he opened his mouth, he
heard only the rustle of leaves. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned.
Somewhere close by, a twig snapped. Finney started, opened his
eyes, began to rise, blood ushing his cheeks. Had he been discov-
ered? Openmouthed like a sh opped down among the trees, the
knees of his lawyer’s suit brown with dirt like those of a farmer? Had
they seen his knobby knuckles knitted together like those of a school-
boy? Would they laugh? Would God?
Then Finney broke. He screamed. “What!” he bellowed. What!
His voice lowered and quickened and heaved on a sea of gulping air
and grief and shame. “Such- a-degraded- sinner- as-I-am, on my knees,
confessi ng my sins to the great and holy God, and ashamed to have
any human being, and a sinner like myself know it, and nd me on
my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my o ended God!”
He went on for hours, tears streaming, his hands and his faith
brown with the dirt of the forest oor, his knees dark with mud, his
body aching, “releasing” all his shame, all his pride. He had found his
enemy at last. It was his own mind. God, he’d say, gave him promises
and revealed to him truths too precious for words. “They did not


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seem so much to fall into my intellect as into my heart.” The m ind, he
realized, was nothing but a tool.
Finney rose and began wal king, stumbling like a drun ken man
back to town, his feet tangli ng, but his mind so quiet “it seemed as if
all nature listened.” He’d left before breakfast. By the time he returned,
his law partner, Benjamin Wright, had gone home, but, he’d later
say, Jesus Christ himself stood i n the o ce, “ face to face,” awaiting his
deposition. Into the darkness came then the Holy Spirit. “Like a wave
of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed it seemed to
come in waves, and waves of liquid love.” Finney roared out loud, his
shame dissolved in his fear and ecstasy. “I shall die if these waves con-
tinue to pass over me.” The waves kept rolling, and he dipped and
bobbed in the spirit, the crests and the troughs of the ocean soaking
one message i nto his bones, the idea-that-is-not- an-idea that he would
take as his text for what would become the greatest revival since the
days of Jonathan Edwards: before God, you are nothing.


Finney titled the rst postconversion chapter of his memoirs “I
Begin My Work With Immediate Success.” Not for him Jonathan
Edwards’s curiosity about the workings of the Holy Spirit he was so
certain owed through him like electric current. Finney’s was the
faith of the industrial age. Whereas Edwards wondered if rel igion
might, like light itself, be subject to natural laws, Finney hit a switch
and expected the power to ow. Likewise their political understand-
ing of evangelism: Edwards studied Locke and anguished over the
democratic contradictions of revival. Finney read the law books of
Blackstone and took his Bible un ltered and applied what he learned
with equal-opportunity fervor. By Fi nney’s reckoning, every citizen
had the right—the obligation—to be as zealous as the man he called
“President Edwards,” in honor of Edwards’s brief tenure as the head
of Princeton University.
The night after Finney returned from his forest grotto a changed
man, a member of the choir that old God-spurning Finney had led
came to see him. The chorister found Finney in the dark. The lawyer’s


78 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
shoulders were shaking. His breath was loud and heaving. “What ails
you?” the visitor asked. Finney wiped away his tears. “I am so happy
that I cannot live,” he answered.
But he did, into the dawn, at which point the Holy Spirit checked
in on him. “Will you doubt? Will you doubt?” a voice demanded.
Finney the lawyer knew the answer to that one. Same as a verdict,
guilty or not guilty, black or white. “No! I will not doubt; I cannot
doubt.” Satis ed with Finney’s reply, the Spirit “then cleared the sub-
ject up” in Finney’s mind, the subject being the question of his con-
version and whether he was saved. He was.
If such instant grace is a commonplace of American fundamental-
ism today, it was an oddity to be doubted in Finney’s time. Saul had
become Paul in a ash some eighteen hundred years previous, and
there had been other miracles since, but not every country lawyer
could call the voices in his head God’s and be believed. Not until then,
anyway; American Christendom was changing fast. Finney’s epiphany
contained in it the summation of two developing ideas of the times,
ideas that would vastly expand Christ’s jurisdiction over America in
the minds of believers: the radical notion that to perceive the divine is
to accept divine authority, without question; and the mechanistic un-
derstanding of faith as instantaneous for all who want it. Sign here,
and you’re a soldier in the army of God, ready for battle.
Finney sallied forth to his law o ce clad in his new spiritual armor
and promptly began the war. Benjamin Wright passed by, and Finney
threw o some remark. He did not pay enough attention to remember
what it was, but such was the “e cacy” of his new religion that the re-
mark he made pierced Wright “like a sword.” Next came a client, ready
to go to court on a civil matter. Finney shook his head. He could not
even o er an apology. He was, he said, an “enlisted” man now. He quit
his life’s love, lawyering, on the spot and set about the cause of convict-
ing souls. His method? Wander, argue, destroy. He was, if not the most
educated man in the countryside, probably the brightest between Lake
Erie and the Atlantic. Moreover he was a physical giant by the stan-
dards of the day, and his voice was deep, and there were those radiant
eyes. Nobody could stand rm before his onslaught.


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The rst to fall was a you ng man in a shoemaker’s shop, a icted
by modern ide as, universalism, the awkward faith of those
not-quite- secular citizens who styled themselves sophisticated. “The
you ng man saw in a moment that I had demolished his argument” and
immediately ed. To safety? To reprieve from insistent evangelists?
Impossible. Finney had shown him by force of logic the absolute cer-
tainty of God’s total power. All that remained was for the man to
conform his will. That was his only real choice: conform or be
dam ned. Finney watched, pleased, as the broken universalist ran to
the edge of town, hopped a fence, and made for the forest grotto.
God would meet him in among the dark trees and x his soul.
The grotto never failed. Finney’s faith was, in comparison to that
of Edwards, almost mechanical; it was industrial. In the weeks that fol-
lowed, Finney sent a pro cession of townspeople tromping into the
woods, there to repeat the form of his own intimate encounter. T he
story of his forest salvation was t he secret weapon of his crusade,
the mythic ammunition behind his “arguments” for the undeniable au-
thority of God, more persuasive in his raw country town than the
principles of Blackstone, spiritualized. Or rather, the two narratives
worked in tandem, o ering the citizens of pastoral Adams, New
York—adrift in the great in- between of America, no longer wilderness
and not yet settled—both savagery and civilization, a weeping, scream-
ing, singing forest god and a straightforward, law-based, citizen-Christ
for the democratizing nation.
Finney’s law partner, Wright, a respectable man with connec-
tions to the coming political powers of the state, thought he could
accept the latter without the former. Swept up in the townwide re-
vival that followed in the wake of Finney’s conversion, Wright deter-
mined to settle his accounts with the new Jesus. But “ he thought that
he had a parlor to pray in,” and he would not go to the forest li ke
Finney’s other soldiers. Wright prayed in his parlor for days and
nights. Jesus would not answer. He prayed out loud into the early
morning. Jesus would not answer. Because Jesus had chosen a place
shadowed by trees for their meeting. I’m not proud! Wright wept, but he
could not receive the wave of Jesus-love of which Finney had spoke n,


80 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
the power without which he was certain he would die. He took from
his pocket a small knife, weighed it in his hand, imagined its bite.
Relief. He was not proud; he would prove it with blood.
But he was proud, and he threw the knife away, “as far as he could,”
said Finney, because Lawyer Wright knew he was too petty to resist
temptation. For weeks he struggled. One night he collapsed in the
muddy street, kneeling in puddles. See? I am not proud! But he was.
He would not accept the Christ waiting for him among the trees.
“One afternoon I was sitti ng in our o ce,” recalled Finney, when
the shoemaker’s universalist, now a “Christian,” burst into the room.
“Esquire Wright is converted!” he shouted. He had been up in the
woods himself, there to pray, when he heard from a neighbori ng val-
ley the echoes of shouting. He had climbed a hill for a view and spot-
ted Wright in the distance. Wright was a fat man, heavy, not athletic
like Finney, but there he was in the wild, marching and shouting.
Like a soldier on watch, pivoti ng and turning, pivoti ng and turning,
to and fro. He’d stop, wi nd back his arms like wings and clap “with
his full strength and shout ‘I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!’ ”
As the man told the story, Finney heard shouting, looked up, and
saw Lawyer Wright marching down the hill. The big man inter-
cepted old Father Tucker on the edge of town and lifted him o the
ground and squeezed him, dropped him, marched. Stopped, clapped,
barked, “I’ve got it!” Wright fell to his knees before Finney and told
him that he had been saved. He’d had a choice: suicide or the trees.


Jonathan Edwards had been a scientist of religion, maybe a mad
one. Finney—nothing if not sane, his language plain, “colloquial and
Saxon”—became its promoter, its mass distributor, a pious variation
on his better-remembered contemporary, Phineas Taylor Barnum.
He favored raw emotion as his medium but practiced religion like a
country lawyer, an American exhorter. “ I came right forth from a
law o ce to the pulpit, and talked to the people as I would have
talked to the jury.” Old churchmen shivered at his vulgar words. “Of
course,” he said of that crowd, “to them I was a speckled bird.”


THE The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 81
Theologians of that time and historians of ours parse Finney’s
words to discover whether he broke with Edwards or continued his
tradition. They take a typical Fi nney proclamation such as this—
“Knowing your duty, you have but one thi ng to do, PERFORM
IT”—and consider it in light of debates over Calvinism and, if they’re
bold, the politics of Andrew Jackson. But they give little credence to
the words Fi nney felt must be capitalized. PERFORM IT. Finney’s was
a faith of action, a fact com monly noted. He was an abolitionist, a
temperance man. Less considered is the emphasis of the action that
bridged the theological isms and the politics of the day: performance.
The subtle delights and terrors of spectacle that link Finney’s revivals
to those of our present megachurch nation.7
For Edwards, revival had been a strange and wonderful phenome-
non, a displacement of ordinary air by the immaterial body of the Holy
Ghost. But it was delicate, revival, neither a force to be directed nor
one that would abide exploitation. Its politics were implicit. For Finney,
a self-taught preacher declaring a frontier Christ for the industrial age,
revival was a machine made up of “new measures”: “powerful preach-
ing,” a well-timed hymn, the “protracted meeting”—movements of
the Spirit scheduled on a daily basis for weeks at a time. Its politics
were as plain as the public confessions of sinners called to grease the
gears of Finney’s cleverest innovation, the anxious bench, the titillation
of which P. T. Barnum would never rival.8
Finney was recently married when he conceived of the anxious
bench, but not much drawn to his wife. He left her alone for most of
the rst six months of their marriage while he wandered from church
to meeting house to schoolhouse to parlor in the little towns of west-
ern New York, preaching wherever he could nd a pulpit or a room
ful l of people. His reputation was growi ng, as the tal l young man
who spoke hell re, who called sinners blis tered and skinned and broken
down. And what’s more, called them by name. Not for Finney ab-
stractions of theology and tics of old English that distanced the man
in the pulpit from the men and women—mostly women—who lled
the pews. Finney said “you.” And he stared at you. And if he found
out your name, he’d call you a sinner. It was thrilli ng.


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One warm spring day, Finney walked three miles through a pine
forest to a church in the town of Rutland. The rst to arrive, he took
a seat in the pews. He carried no sermon. A crowd began to gather,
but nobody recognized him. In walked a woman, slender and lovely,
“decidedly” so, graceful, wearing a bonnet adorned with plumes. “She
came as it were sailing around, and up the broad aisle toward where I
sat, mincing as she came.” She sat right behind him. He could feel her
close to him. He shifted his hips, threw an elbow over the back of his
chair. Watched her watching him. Two beautiful creatures, a delight
to behold. His violet eyes consumed her, “from her feet up to her bon-
net and then down again. He was not secret in his glances.
She blushed. Hello, stranger.
His lips were thick and wide, set in a strange, calm smile, brown
like his skin from the sun. But he did not look like a farmer. There
were those Finney eyes, giant and glowing. When he opened his
mouth, his voice was low, not tender.
“Don’t you believe that God thinks you look pretty? ”
What?
“Don’t you think all the people will think you look so very nice? ”
The blood must have drained from her cheeks.
His voice dropped lower. “ Did you come here to divide the wor-
ship of God’s house?”
This, Finney noted, made the pretty, proud thi ng “writhe.”
“I followed her up in a voice so low that nobody else heard me,
but I made her hear me distinctly.”
Vanity, “insu erable vanity.”
The woman was trembling, “her plumes were all in a shake.” At
last, Finney was ready to preach. He ascended to the pulpit and re-
vealed himself as the man the congregation had been waiting for. The
woman must have gasped; she began to shake.
He preached to a full house that followed him deep i nto the lit-
eral gospel. They saw what he had done to the woman and wanted
him to slay them also, to convict them, to crush them. Such words
were part of his new measures. Then—“I did what I do not know I
had ever done before.” He called on those who would be saved to rise


THE The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 83
from their seats and come to the front of the hall, there to stand ex-
posed in their sin. Of course the woman rose, the rst to respond.
She fell out into the aisle. “Shrieked,” remembered Finney.
Her squeal excited the crowd. They too surged forward, moan-
ing and stumbli ng and screaming, eager to feel, as the shrieking
woman had, the intensity of conversion. The machine was working,
electri ed by the anxious bench, Finney’s most thrilling invention.


“T h e Spirituality of Christians does not lie in secret Whispers, or
audible Voices,” wrote an eighteenth-century New England divine who
was rm ly opposed to revivalism—its God-chosen men, its shouters
and fainters and
falling-down people.9 True religion, he believed, did
not depend on special revelations for the self- anointed nor the noisi-
ness of a crowd shaking with Holy Ghost electricity.
Perhaps not. But power requires both, whispers and voices, the
intimacy of the grove and the public outcry of the anxious bench.
Finney’s revival machine made use of both, and more important,
made them interchangeable: private experience became public rel i-
gion’s badge of authenticity, and public religion’s pulsing current
gave to Finney’s inner piety the intensity of a collective, a movement,
a multitude. “The church,” Finney would declare of the community
of believers years after he’d left the upstate wilds, “was designed to
make aggressive movements in every direction.” Finney meant this
politically—believers were “bound to exert their i n uence to secure
a legislation that is in accordance with the law of God”—but also as a
matter of performance.10 “The church” was not bricks and mortar,
nor even simply the sum of Bible- Christians, Finney’s term for follow-
ers of his protofundamentalism. The church, to Finney, was the indi-
vidual’s encounter with Jesus in the wilderness, the mass contagion
of the anxious bench; and it was the chemical reaction that occurred
when the certai nty of the former combined with the jolt of the latter
to force the issue of Finney’s American Christ onto the nation.