Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (153 page)

As the human family, at a very remote period of antiquity, was scattered about over the face of the earth, from the base of the Tower of Babel . . . so the people of all those languages, thus created, are now coming together again to enter another and a perpetual monument, not of human pride against heaven but of freedom against despotism; and to perfect this work, they require to be chained to us by a band of iron across this continent.
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The majority of the Republic's churchgoers, and the overwhelming majority in positions of power, were Protestants of some description, although the Roman Catholic Church also benefited hugely from immigration during the century and by around 1850 became America's largest single denomination. It is not surprising that, in the wake of the Revolution, entirely new Churches began to be founded - perhaps more puzzling, in fact, is that hardly any brand-new denominations had been created before 1776.
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American Methodism was in effect the first of the new foundations, since it stonily ignored John Wesley's annoyance and gave itself episcopal organization in 1787, its Conference pointedly dropping its undertaking to follow the great man's commands in the matter. Methodists enjoyed with Baptists the lion's share of a new Protestant growth over several decades, which those looking back on it christened a Second Great Awakening. While Episcopalians mostly stood aloof, Puritan Churches in the north-east were partly drawn in.

New England Congregationalists were disorientated by their loss of established status and cultural leadership after playing such a crucial role in the Revolution, and they were divided in their attitude to their Reformed theological inheritance. Many of their influential leaders were still children of the Enlightenment, seeking a rational faith for a new Republic, and they led their congregations into Unitarianism. Others resisted that drift, took their stand on a generous reshaping of Reformed predestinarianism, and emphasized various campaigns for moral and social improvement which would Christianize the idealism of the Declaration of Independence. That was the Awakening for them. There was plenty for both sides to campaign about, especially slaveholding in the South (the North being spared the economic attractions of such exploitation) and alcohol temperance or total abstention. This latter cause, as elsewhere particularly beloved of women, entailed Evangelicals undertaking some heroic exegetical explaining away of Jesus's miracle of Cana turning water into wine. Prohibition was to have a fateful later consequence in the USA.
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Matters were less genteel in the South and in the growing tide of settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. Here the revivals of the first Awakening were seen again, sweeping congregations past their ministers' expectations in wordless but often highly noisy expressions of apparent liturgical nihilism. Crowds gathered for communion in the frontier 'camp meeting' tradition stretching back to seventeenth-century Scotland and Ulster, but now they were running, singing, even barking in what were significantly termed 'exercises'. Protestantism was rediscovering physicality and spontaneity after its two-century diet of preachers' words and planned music, and the discovery came within an Evangelical mode which generally valued a common fervent style and proclamation of sin and redemption more than confessional background or history. Revivalism was firmly in Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian culture already, so not only could they happily accommodate all this, but as ministers grappled to harness their congregations' startling releases of emotional energy, it was not worth worrying too much about denominational labels. In one of the first of these devotional explosions at Gasper River in Kentucky in 1800, a Presbyterian was host minister, but the preacher stirring the fire was a Methodist - Reformed and Arminian side by side in front of the wailing crowd, Amazing Grace indeed to astonish Calvin or Melanchthon.
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The voices of deist Founding Fathers seemed far away. Urban elites in Washington, Philadelphia and Boston would have to start taking notice of these people, because after all an increasing number of the menfolk among them had votes. American politicians have done well to keep an eye on the Evangelical constituency ever since.

Now among a proliferation of joyfully jerry-built churches, witnessing to new birth and discipline amid harsh and lawless farmscapes, with a dread of some very angry dispossessed Native Americans lurking on the horizon, there developed increasingly original forms of Christian experience. It was predictable that American Evangelical excitement should again look to the Last Days - if crowded and crapulous Regency England could produce apocalyptic fervour, how much more could a pure and open frontier? Surely America and not Old Europe was to be the setting for God's final drama: had not the great Jonathan Edwards given his blessing to that thought? One of those who gave an answer emphatically in the affirmative, William Miller, was himself a one-man exemplar of Protestant America's spiritual trajectory: rejecting his Baptist upbringing for the reasonable faith of deism in Vermont's remote New England farming country, moving into revivalism via his anxious search for evidence of the Last Days in his King James Bible (noting Archbishop Ussher's dates in its margins), ordained by the Baptists, preaching his startling message through the nation that the Advent of Christ was due in 1843 - much excitement - then 1844 - even more excitement - and then followed the Great Disappointment.

For true apocalypticists there is no giving up hope, although Miller, now scorned by the Baptists, retired to Vermont to contain his chagrin with a handful of followers. A welter of arguments over a decade produced one of the nineteenth century's many visionary teenage girls, the prophetess Ellen G. Harmon (soon to be the bride of Adventist James White). Cut-price printing presses aided Mrs White's urgent campaign to share roughly two thousand of her visions with the public, not to mention her decided opinions about sensible diet. What now became known as Seventh-Day Adventism flourished once more; like the Seventh-Day Baptists before it, it observed as its holy day of rest not Sunday but Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Modern vegetarianism, a cause earlier championed by radical English Evangelicals, now found its master salesman in Mrs White's Adventist benefactor and collaborator, Dr John H. Kellogg, whose breakfast cereals and benevolence brought lasting and worldwide prosperity to the Adventist Church.
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Miller's prophecies have continued to fertilize the imaginations of drifting but compelling personalities like himself. One Millerite schism produced the Jehovah's Witnesses: millenarian, pacifist and with strong views against blood transfusions. Another recent prophet, Vernon Howell, was driven to rename himself David Koresh (that is the Persian King Cyrus, liberator of the Jews from Babylon), and he brought his own terrible Last Days on those who believed in him at Waco in Texas in 1993. Beyond that hideously mismanaged clash between Koresh's followers and the Federal government came Timothy McVeigh's equally ghastly act of revenge for Koresh two years later in the Oklahoma City bombing: a grim legacy for Miller alongside the corn flakes.
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There was plenty more creative reconstruction of Christianity in this most industrious and ingenious of Western societies. Spiritualism and the Church of Christ Scientist (products of yet more visionary women) both spread themselves from the USA through the Western world and beyond. Yet of all new departures amid the Second Awakenings, the most radical was the work of Joseph Smith, who may be seen as one of a chain of gifted young people in the nineteenth century applying their gifts to escaping the deprivation and social uncertainty in which they found themselves, both exploiting and inspired by the polychrome religious turbulence of their age.
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Hong Xiuquan, nine years younger than Smith, was another (see pp. 896-7). Smith's creation of a Heavenly Kingdom proved more long-lasting and less destructive than the Taiping, though likewise it brought him premature and violent death. Born in rural poverty in Vermont (not far from where Miller was beginning his married life) and pursued by poverty in his New York State childhood which deprived him of a decent education, Smith developed a keen interest in treasure-hunting amid a landscape haunted by Native American earthworks, devouring what conversation and what books (the Bible naturally among them) came his way. The boy, both dreamer and likeable extrovert, on the edge of so many cultures - Evangelicalism, self-improvement, popular history and archaeology, Freemasonry - constructed out of them a lost world as wonderful as that future paradise which confronted Hong Xiuquan.
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Shortly after Smith's marriage in 1827, he had the first of a series of visits from a heavenly being in white, Moroni, who, according to Smith, was a former inhabitant of the Americas. Moroni took him to a secret store of inscribed golden plates. Smith was the only person definitely to view the plates, and their eventual removal was as angelic as their excavation; but the message which the semi-literate twenty-two-year-old translated into King James Bible English (his newly wed and devoted wife, Emma, and later two friends taking his dictation the other side of a curtain) was a formidably long text. It was published in 1830. The Book, written long before largely by Moroni's father, Mormon, was the story of God's people, their enemies and their eventual extinction in the fourth century CE. Yet these were no Israelites or Philistines, but Americans, and the enemies who destroyed them were the native peoples whom Smith's society called Red Indians.
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Now the spiritual descendants of Mormon were called to restore their heritage before the Last Days. Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.
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There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings
saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work. Tolkien's story-telling has many of the same characteristics as the Book of Mormon, although most people today would find Tolkien's prose a good deal more readable.

So with Smith's inspiration, the Mormons took shape: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, regarding itself as a restoration of an authentic Christianity otherwise lost. It moved en bloc, as so many utopian groups then did, to found a new ideal community on the frontier. The first stop in Ohio proved only one in a series of moves, because Smith and his leadership were prone to involve themselves deeply in state politics and risky business ventures, and their ambitions for power frightened and infuriated their neighbours. Finally Smith, now in charge of his own private army in Illinois, was fortified by fresh revelations to declare his candidacy in the 1844 presidential election. After further confrontations with the forces of unbelief, vigilantes shot him and his brother dead in an Illinois jail, while he was awaiting trial on charges of intimidating a hostile local newspaper out of existence. Yet this was not the end for the Mormons. One of Smith's long-standing lieutenants, Brigham Young, Hong Rengan to Smith's Hong Xiuquan, seized the initiative and led the battered faithful on the final journey which would save their movement, at a cost of a hundred days' westwards travel by wagon to Utah. Young would have liked a territory to rival the Taiping conquest in scale, but he had to settle for the wilderness that the United States government allowed him. There was a long and stormy path to wary acceptance by wider American society, not least because of one of Smith's later revelations, posthumously released to the public in 1852, which had interesting resonances with the battles then going on in Protestant missions in Africa. He had been told that he must authorize polygamy.

Brigham Young reminisced in later life that he 'desired the grave' when first informed of this in 1843, but he later implemented it thoroughly in his own life, with as much public decorum as the nineteenth century would wish. As one of his less reverential biographers observed, Young's home in Salt Lake City 'resembled a New England household on a larger scale. Instead of one superficially forbidding lady in blacks or grays, there were nineteen of them'. The widowed Mrs Emma Smith, previously much tried by Prophet Smith's own clandestine accumulation of wives, married again; but not to a Mormon.
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It was 1890 before the mainstream of the Church laid polygamy aside, and plenty of Mormons did not acknowledge that decision (some still do not, in carefully maintained seclusion in Utah and Arizona), but Utah still became a full state in 1896.
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If polygamy proved a casualty of external nineteenth-century social assumptions, the end of the twentieth century saw another incursion of external liberal values when, in 1978, a revelation allowed men of Negro descent to take their place among whites in the universal priesthood allotted to all adult Mormon men - the original ban is of contested origin.
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Wholesome prosperity such as the youthful Smith might have envied has become a worldwide Mormon speciality, together with a systematic approach to spreading the message which has hardly been equalled in the Christianity which reserves itself the description Evangelical. The Mormons' doctrinal interest in genealogy, motivated by their belief in posthumous baptism of ancestors, has exercised a powerful appeal on those whose history is based on migration from another country. In the United States, its growth has been such that it has a good claim to be America's fourth-largest Christian denomination.
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Behind all this nationwide outburst of energetic service of a Protestant God, a shadow lay across the expanding Republic. The British Parliament resolved the question of slavery in 1833; it took a civil war to do so in America. Before that, the Evangelical nation which shared the same rhetoric of redemption and sang the same hymns was split three ways: a white grouping (with its strength in the Northern States) repeated the arguments of eighteenth-century abolitionists with increasing anger; an equally angry defence of white Southerners' slaveholding recycled all the arguments that the Bible and the Enlightenment had provided; and lastly African-American Churches, which served both the enfranchised and the enslaved, made common cause with white Northern abolitionists. Among Southern whites, the defence of slavery slid into a defence of white supremacy, since that was a useful way to unite the white population behind a coherent ideology; most Southerners did not actually own slaves, and had no necessary interest in defending that institution alone.
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