Antebellum African Missions and the Evangelical South

My latest at the Anxious Bench:

I recently read Erskine Clarke’s remarkable By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey, which tells the epic chronicle of John Leighton Wilson and Jane Wilson, antebellum southern missionaries to west Africa. Clarke is one of the most gifted historians of American religion, with particular mastery of the antebellum southern Christian mind. By the Rivers of Water is a natural sequel to his Bancroft Prize-winning Dwelling Place.

As I have written earlier, the nineteenth-century American missions movement was often driven by Calvinists (in this case, Presbyterian Calvinists) like the Wilsons. Clarke shows how Calvinism and the belief in God’s providence fit into the larger “coherent moral universe” of the Wilsons. He particularly considers how their slaveholding ethos was challenged, but not finally defeated, by evangelical faith and missionary work among west Africans.

The Wilsons freed their own slaves and fought for decades against the slave trade in Africa, yet when the crisis of slavery and secession came to America in 1860, John Leighton sided with the Confederacy and became a key player in the organization of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America – especially its missionary efforts.

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The Science of Sound: George Whitefield’s Massive Crowds

Over at The Gospel Coalition, I have an interview with Braxton Boren about George Whitefield and the science of sound:

[Excerpt]: George Whitefield was the most spectacular preacher of the First Great Awakening in Britain and America, drawing revival audiences reported in the tens of thousands. News accounts of these meetings drew the attention of many, including Whitefield's friend and publisher, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia.

I recently interviewed Braxton Boren, a PhD candidate at the Music and Audio Research Laboratory at New York University, about his new study of Whitefield's preaching and the science of sound. Boren specializes in the physics of sound and computational acoustic simulation techniques. 

How did you get interested in studying George Whitefield's revival audiences?

My dad was a history teacher at my high school, and he had me read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography for one of his classes. After I had done some research into acoustical simulation of music in the Venetian Renaissance, my dad read my thesis and reminded me about the autobiography's story of Franklin performing an experiment to estimate the range of Whitefield's voice. I realized that modern acoustical simulation techniques could test Franklin's data to estimate Whitefield's overall loudness, and to project his intelligible range at the actual sites where he was preaching.

The reported size of Whitefield's crowds was controversial during his lifetime and remains so among historians today. How many people do you think might reasonably have heard him speak at one time?

It is important to note that Whitefield's largest crowds were reported during the summer of 1739 when he was a young man, after which his novelty wore off. When he was older and perhaps wiser, he revised his earlier journal entries and removed passages he considered to be "justly exceptionable." This included changing estimates of crowds larger than 20,000 to say "so many thousands that many went away because they could not hear." It may be that Franklin's acoustical method is the best estimate we have for the effective size of Whitefield's largest outdoor assemblies.

Using speech intelligibility, distance, geometry, and our best information about the Market Street area during Franklin's experiment, we worked backward to estimate the average sound pressure level (SPL) of Whitefield's speaking voice. This was interesting because the computer model yielded a best guess of about 90 decibels at a distance of 1 meter from his mouth. This is incredibly loud. The international standard for "loud" speech is only 74 decibels, so it was unclear initially whether such a high SPL could be achieved by any human voice.

To test it, we measured SPLs in a lab for several trained actors and opera singers, and surprisingly the highest levels anyone could produce were right around 90 decibels. This suggests that there is a higher loudness level available to trained vocalists, which may have been more common in the days before electronic amplification. So the first component of this research projected that Whitefield was probably as loud as anyone for whom we have experimental evidence in history.

Based on this assumption, we then set up a computer model of the sites of Whitefield's largest reported congregations in London, using a virtual George Whitefield preaching to a crowd filling the entire area of the space. We had to account for different levels of background noise, as Whitefield made it clear that some crowds were quiet while others were boisterous or unruly. For different sites, our models project that Whitefield had a maximum intelligible area of 25,000 to 30,000 square meters under optimal conditions. A solid crowd over that area would constitute about two people per square meter, leading to an overall crowd of 50,000 to 60,000. However, if the crowd was slightly noisier, or if Whitefield was a little hoarse, the intelligible crowd area could decrease quickly.

The ideal acoustic conditions probably were fragile with any crowd of such a large size, but it seems possible that on certain occasions he may have been able to reach 50,000 people, at least for short periods of time. However, the majority of his large crowds were reported at 20,000 to 30,000, and these were the sizes Franklin was trying to validate. From our simulations we can say that these sizes of crowds were certainly possible.

How did Franklin do his experiment, and how reliable do you think his calculations were?

[read the rest here!]

Of Platforms and Publishing

My latest at Patheos:

In my recent post on publishing, I noted that “To publish a book with an established press, you ordinarily need a “platform” from which to write a book – in the world of religious history, the most common such platforms are an academic position or a pastorate,” and that “Platform is a much bigger issue, increasingly connected to social media reach. Michael Hyatt does a great job explaining why a platform is essential, but Scot McKnight recently registered some important doubts about platform-based publishing.”

McKnight’s sobering post got me thinking about the problems with “platform-based” publishing, or publishers’ calculations about the size of one’s probable audience prior to offering contracts. We can all agree that there are serious downsides to platform-based publishing. In case you had not realized it yet, the bestseller lists and front tables at Barnes and Noble do not necessarily display the highest quality books! Similarly, in the Christian publishing world, well-known figures with huge churches or big lists of Twitter followers do not necessarily produce the most profound texts. And yes, little-known authors with no obvious platform (an academic position, a pastorate, a well-followed blog, etc.) struggle terribly to get book contracts with major publishers, no matter how worthy their project.

Read the rest here: