my review of Shelby Balik's Rally the Scattered Believers

From the Dec. 2015 American Historical Review: 

In the early nineteenth century, a Baptist named Betsey Walker wrote to a trusted minister about a revival sweeping Arundel, Maine. For a month Walker attended twice-a-day prayer meetings, assemblies that fueled an awakening which eventually seemed to sweep up all of Arundel’s adults. “Tis all on fire,” she exclaimed, “such times I never expected to see” (140).

Walker’s observation could serve as an apt description of religious and population growth throughout northern New England during the early republic. Shelby Balik’s deeply researched Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography offers a finely grained picture of that era of burgeoning development. Along with Alan Taylor’sLiberty Men and Great Proprietors (1990), Balik’s book delivers one of the best histories of precisely what the “Second Great Awakening” amounted to in northern New England.

Through prodigious archival work, Balik draws out the voices of legions of Methodists, Baptists (both Calvinist and Freewill), Universalists, and others. She explains that the fundamental transition in the “geography of religion” during that period was from the “town-church” model of traditional Congregationalism, to the “itinerant” system of the Methodists, Baptists, and others. Although we knew prior to Balik’s book that this era represented a time of remarkable Baptist and Methodist growth, her religious geography approach provides a substantially new way of understanding religious change and church-state controversies during the period.

As the oxymoronic “dissenting establishment” of colonial New England, the Congregationalists had followed a parish model of spiritual responsibility for the people of a village or neighborhood. Of course, the Puritans were also concerned with discerning whether people had experienced conversion before admitting them to full membership. But even after church attendance was no longer legally enforced, there was a sense in Massachusetts and its northern hinterlands that all people in a town were somehow affiliated by default with the nearby Congregationalist church, which typically received support from mandatory religious taxes.

Itinerant preaching, and the advent of Separatist and Separatist Baptist breakaways from many established churches during the First Great Awakening, represented the initial major challenge to New England’s town-church system. Because of the onset of the Revolution, the rise of the Methodists, Freewill Baptists, and others, and the pressure to disestablish Congregationalism, the itinerancy system gained more traction. Under itinerancy, religious affiliation was assumed to be voluntary, not an accident of one’s birth or residence. As floods of immigrants moved into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Baptist and Methodist itinerant preachers kept pace and threatened the older town-church model.

Balik notes that the Congregationalists, and their allies in the New England state governments, did not accept this transition without a fight. Congregationalists (again dating back to the First Great Awakening) engaged in their own itinerant and missionary practices, eventually turning Congregationalism itself into an “itinerant movement” (178). Yet even after formal disestablishment, the New England governments provided practical support and preferences for Congregationalist churches and their pastors. The era of close church-state cooperation was hardly over. Itinerant churches also could drift toward a greater emphasis on settled town ministers and neighborhood churches (a local and voluntary model Balik calls the “denominational church”). For Balik, the town and itinerant models represented tendencies rather than fixed positions—all denominations demonstrated aspects of both over time.

Similarly, Balik demonstrates that the itinerancy-based denominations were not as “democratic” as they are often portrayed. “The religious transformation of the early nineteenth century depended not on the advent of democratic theology,” she writes, but on the ways both Congregationalists and their challengers “negotiated new physical and spiritual ground” (8). Often the Methodists, Freewill Baptists, and others created more heavily centralized organizations than did the Congregationalists, organizations which helped to guide these churches’ expansion into the frontier. Nathan Hatch most famously made the argument for evangelical populism in his Democratization of American Christianity (1989), although even Hatch emphasized the contradictory role of authoritarian leaders in the “democratic” evangelical movements. And in spite of her skepticism about rising religious democracy, Balik also notes that the end of establishments and growth of religious competition inevitably meant that regular people could exercise more choice in their religious practices and affiliations, or lack thereof.

As successful as Balik’s religious geography framework is, there are points at which her rather functionalist approach to religion may not have fostered precise understandings of the ideas which drove pastors and laypeople. Rally the Scattered Believers speaks of the Baptists, for example, in some peculiar ways. Penitents converted not to Baptist principles, the book says, but to a movement Balik calls “Baptism,” as in the statement that “reading the Bible led [one man] to convert to Baptism” (120). This is a confusing usage that I do not believe most Baptists or religious historians have employed. Further, we are told that because they “believed that full immersion was the one way to bring about the new birth, Baptists considered anyone who had not undergone the ritual unconverted” (40). Countless Baptists who rejected infant baptism, and then received believer’s baptism, after their own conversions would find this claim strange. The act of baptism symbolized the new birth, but it did not bring it about.

I hesitate to point out these concerns because Rally the Scattered Believersis not a theological history, and because it is otherwise so successful in making the case for a spatial/geographic understanding of change in the period. But more attention to theological particularities—ideas about the nature of the church, salvation, and baptism—that drove the upstarts to revolutionize that geography would have only enhanced Balik’s compelling argument about the religious transitions of New England’s Second Great Awakening.

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.

Read the rest here.

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:

Gov. Bob McDonnell receives copy of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots

The wonderful folks at Patrick Henry's Red Hill presented a copy of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell yesterday in Richmond.

Red Hill is on Facebook, where they have posted a whole album of their visit to the Virginia capitol.

Column at patheos.com: "Patrick Henry, Homeschooler"

Patrick Henry, the greatest orator of the American Revolution, was homeschooled. Born in 1736 as the second of eleven children, he attended a small common school until he was 10. After that, his father took primary responsibility for his education. He read classics of Greek and Roman antiquity (sometimes in the original languages), ancient and modern history, and of course, the Bible. He also worked on his family's farm, hunted, and learned to play the flute and the violin. As a young man, Henry taught himself law in order to pass the bar exam, and in 1765 he burst onto the national scene when, as a freshman legislator in Virginia, he penned the colony's resolves against the Stamp Act and fulminated against the act on the floor of Virginia's House of Burgesses.

Read the rest at http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Patrick-Henry-Homeschooler-Thomas-Kidd-12-07-2011.html

Mayor Bloomberg and the Ban on 9/11 Prayers

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has refused to allow clergy to participate in the official 9/11 commemoration, much to the (appropriate) consternation of many. Some have suggested that Bloomberg does not want to contend with the problems of involving Muslims in the ceremony. But at root, his decision speaks to a fundamental discomfort that many American elites, especially of the east and west-coast variety, have with the public role of religion in American life.

There are three main reasons that prayers offered by clergy of major religious groups (including Muslims) should be allowed. First, and the most paltry reason, is that it would do Americans good (including the Muslim community) once again to have an imam publicly grieve with the victims’ families and agree with them that 9/11 was an abominable evil.

Second, these prayers would be consistent with the best of the American historic tradition. As Jordan Sekulow recently noted, we have always marked such tragedies and commemorations with prayers for the nation, from President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, to President Obama’s January address in Tucson commemorating the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the related death of six others.

Third, tragedies such as 9/11 beg for reference to God’s transcendent purposes and ultimate sovereignty. Refusing to address these themes deprives the grieving of their most important frame of reference. A commemoration without prayer—or at least without recourse to theistic principles-- can’t say much that is meaningful about 9/11, other than “We’re sorry this happened. We’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Those sentiments are nice, but the evil exposed on 9/11 requires more; we need--we want--to agree as a community that there is an ultimate source of comfort in suffering, and that He has plans and purposes beyond what we can know in this life. He will set things right in the end.

On a cautionary note, however, Christian believers should remember that New York City was never going to have an exclusively Christian service to observe 9/11. The relatively generic prayers of such public events normally do not address the fundamental solution to human evil and the problem of suffering. That solution, Christians believe, is to be found in the cross of Christ. Mayor Bloomberg may ban faith from New York’s remembrance service, but nothing will stop churches from lifting up Christ, the "man of sorrows," this September 11.