The French Revolution unleashed new hopes for the common man, just as science raised new questions for traditional Christians. Power seemed to be within the reach of the masses. For Christianity this meant that new social unrest was added to the challenge of intellectual doubts. How are Christians supposed to meet the needs of the urban masses? Was man simply a product of evolutionary forces? Christians were seriously divided over ways to face these problems. Without the traditional support of the state many Protestants turned to voluntary societies to minister to the poor and the oppressed, as well as to carry the gospel to foreign lands.

In the brief ten years before the century ended, France formed a republic, executed a king, established an effective if faction-ridden revolutionary regime, and passed from that through a period of confusion that ended with a coup d’etat and General Napoleon Bonaparte’s accession to power. Through it all, the French nation continually fought the rest of Europe.

The leaders of the revolution soon drove 30 to 40,000 priests out of their native towns into exile or hiding. And that proved to be only a prelude. The revolution began to take on a religious character all its own. A new calendar removed all traces of Christianity and elevated the cult of “Reason.” Soon parish churches were converted to “Temples of Reason,” and in the cathedral of Notre Dame revolutionaries enthroned an actress on the high altar as the “Goddess of Reason.” This set the pattern for the provinces. Young girls decked out as Reason or Liberty or Nature led processions through towns to altars erected to the new religion of the revolution.

By 1794 this parody of Christianity had spent its force and a decree early the following year guaranteed the free exercise of any religion in France. All over the country Catholics returned to the altar. The Church of Rome, however, never forgot: Liberty meant the worship of the goddess of Reason!

When Napoleon seized the reins of power he had the good sense to work out an agreement with the pope—the Concordat of 1801—that restored the Church of Rome to a special place in France. It was called “the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen,” but the Church had lost forever its position of power.

The whole strategy of the ultramontanists, led by Pius IX, shaped the lives of Roman Catholics for generations to come. Surrounded by the hostile forces of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, Rome chose to withdraw for safety behind the walls of an exalted and infallible papacy.

Unfortunately, fortresses have a decided disadvantage. They grow stuffy. They allow no enlargement of thinking and after a time you begin to imagine that the only world of any importance lies within the walls.

In many ways the nineteenth century belonged to Britain. England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. London became the largest city and the financial center of the world. British commerce circled the globe; the British navy dominated the seas. By 1914 Britannia ruled the largest empire in extent and in population ever fashioned by man.

The dawning of the Age of Progress found English Protestants either in the Established Church, Anglicanism, or in the Nonconforming denominations, Methodist, Baptists, Congregationalists, and a few smaller bodies. The striking movements of the nineteenth century, however, did not surge along traditional denominational lines. The increasing liberties of the age allowed Christians to form a host of religious societies to minister to English life in some vital way or to spread the gospel overseas. These societies were not churches in the traditional sense of sacraments, creeds, and ordained ministers. They were groups of individual Christians working for some specific objective, the distribution of Bibles, for example, or the relief of the poor.

At the opening of the Age of Progress, the greatest power in English religious life was the evangelical movement, sparked and spread by John Wesley and George Whitefield. The chief marks of the movement were its intense personal piety, usually springing from a conversion experience, and its aggressive concern for Christian service in the world. Both of these were nourished by devotion to the Bible, and both were directed by the central themes of the eighteenth-century revival: Gods love revealed in Christ, the necessity of salvation through faith, and the new birth experience wrought by the Holy Spirit. This evangelical message echoed from a significant minority of pulpits in the Church of England and from a majority in the Nonconforming denominations.

Finally, victory crowned their labors. On 23 February 1807, the back of the opposition was broken. Enthusiasm in the House mounted with the impassioned speeches of supporters of abolition. When one member reached a brilliant contrast of Wilberforce and Napoleon, the staid old House cast off its traditional conventions, rose to its feet, burst into cheers, and made the roof echo to an ovation seldom heard in Parliament. Wilberforce, overcome with emotion, sat bent in his chair, his head in his hands, and the tears streaming down his face.

That halted the legal traffic in human lives, but the slaves were still in chains. Wilberforce continued the battle for complete emancipation until age and poor health forced him from Parliament. He enlisted the skills, however, of a young evangelical, Thomas Fowell Buxton, to assume leadership of the “holy enterprise.” Buxton was a wise choice. The certainty of the passage of the Emancipation Act, freeing the slaves in the sprawling British Empire, came on 25 July 1833, four days before Wilberforce died.

The great fact of the nineteenth-century world in America was the West, the ever moving frontier. Early visitors beyond the Allegheny Mountains sang the praises of the region. In 1751 Christopher Gist described it as “watered with a great number of little streams and rivulets, and full of beautiful natural meadows, covered with wild rye, blue grass, and clover.”

After the Revolutionary War so many Americans poured into the territory that the whole continent seemed to tilt toward the Pacific. Between 1792 and 1821, nine new states were added to the original thirteen. By mid-century half of the American people were west of the Appalachians.

At the birth of the United States of America, the denominations seemed ill prepared to face the opportunities of the West. Christian influence was at an all time low. Only five or ten percent of the American people were church members. In time, however, the crude, turbulent, and godless society of the West was tamed and more than any other single force it was evangelical Christianity that did it.

As evangelicals faced the challenge of winning a nation to Christian obedience, two instruments were available to them: the voluntary society and the revival.

The Bill of Rights, with its provision of religious liberty for all, had in effect sanctioned the denominational concept of the church and had ruled out any direct influence of the churches upon the government. The denominations were free, therefore, to define their own faith and practices. But what about Christian responsibility for public life and morals? That is where the voluntary society came in.

Thus, early in the nineteenth century a host of societies appeared seeking to shape some aspect of American life: the American Bible Society, the American Colonization Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Education Society, and hosts of others. “One thing is becoming daily more evident,” Beecher observed in 1830, “that the grand influence” of the church and the triumphs of the last forty years are the result of the “voluntary association of Christians.”

The second instrument evangelicals used to subdue the wilderness was the revival. Beecher argued that the churches could look to revivals “for their members and pastors, and for that power upon public opinion which gives energy to law, and voluntary support to religious institutions.”

In 1790 evangelicals faced a dual evangelistic challenge: to regain the East and to win the West. In the East, especially in a number of colleges, fresh enthusiasm for the life of the Spirit was apparent before 1800. This revival came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. It provided the next generation with skilled and dedicated leaders for the western crusade.

In July 1800, McGready had his Pentecost—and changed the course of American history. After an initial revival at Red River, he decided to send out advance notice of the next sacramental service at the Gasper River church. When the word spread through the settlements, scores of pioneers headed in wagons, in the saddle, and on moccasined feet, for Gasper River, ready for the Spirit to work. They came from as far away as 100 miles. Scores of families came to Gasper River with tents and vittles—cold pork, slabs of corn bread, and roasted birds—ready to stay a while to see, hear, and feel the hand of God.

We now look back to Gasper River as the first “camp meeting”—that is, the first religious service of several days’ length held outdoors, for people who had traveled a distance to attend. They camped on the spot—thus the name.

McGready was a pacesetter. For almost two centuries the revival preacher and the camp meeting have endured in America. Time, however, had its way and the intensity of the preaching cooled. It was inevitable. Man does not live by fire alone. Under the leadership of men like Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham, the camp meeting moved indoors and continued its winning ways in rural chapels and urban auditoriums.

Not everyone, of course, favored revivals. Many Lutherans and Presbyterians felt that they slighted sound doctrine. Roman Catholics and Episcopalians considered them emotional eruptions, not true worship.

The American practice of slavery had begun on 20 August 1619, when 20 Negro slaves were unloaded from a Dutch frigate at Jamestown, Virginia. By 1830 their number had increased to about two million. As a nation spread west, the institution became the issue. Every time a new state came into the Union, every time settlers moved out to fresh land, the white-hot issue of slavery burned the national conscience more deeply. Should the new territory be slave or free? Was slavery to be extended indefinitely? In the passion to preserve both liberty and union, if one must choose, which must come first?

The dimensions of this struggle were so basic to human existence, so religious in character, that all sides turned to the Scriptures to interpret their experiences.

Looking back on it, it is difficult to see how any Christian could ever have defended slavery. Most didn’t try until the 1830s. We sometimes forget that during the first three decades of the nineteenth century the antislavery movement was stronger in the South than in the North. For a combination of reasons, however, the antislavery movement faded and a Southern defense of the institution arose. Some of the arguments for slavery were drawn from the Bible, thanks to Southern churchmen.

The associations of evangelical religion and race came to be a distinctive feature of the southern way of life during the years of the Cotton Kingdom. The South became increasingly isolated not only from the North but from much of the rest of the Western world, where strong judgments against slavery were often expressed. This isolation led to defensiveness. The region seemed obsessed with the institution. Harriet Martineau, a visitor from abroad in the 1830s observed:

A primary fountain of the evangelical sentiment against slavery in the North can be traced to the revival preaching of Charles G. Finney. Through the broad impact of Finney strong antislavery feelings built up in the Midwest, especially around Oberlin College where Finney served as president.

All sides in the struggle, then, used the same set of symbols. There was one Bible, one heaven, one hell, one Jesus Christ, one path of salvation. Yet the symbols were employed for opposite causes. How could God be the God of the South against the North and of the North against the South? How could He have sponsored slavery, as Southerners said, and opposed slavery, as Northerners contended?

No one was more aware of these questions than the man who bore the burden of reconciliation, President Abraham Lincoln. Although shaped by evangelical culture, Lincoln never joined a church and found himself at home with no particular creed. His language and thought, however, were formed by the Bible, and from it he learned that no one could interpret precisely what the will of God was for the nation.

“In great contests,” he once said, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.” Another time—in his second Inaugural Address—he observed: “Both (Union and Confederacy) read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.… The prayers of both could not be answered. … The Almighty has his own purposes.” Lincoln knew that men should try to do God’s will as well as they could determine what it was for them, but the Almighty has his purposes that go beyond the plans of men.

So it proved. The war was fought; blood was shed; the nation endured. The vision for a Christian America also survived but like the nation itself it was greatly weakened. Black churches arose in large numbers, the primary institutional expression of freedom, and the constant reminder of the blind spot in the vision for a Christian America.

The first shock came from Charles Darwin’s pen. In 1859 he published The Origin of Species—perhaps the most important book of the century. Darwin’s evolutionary theory presented a major challenge to evangelicals. If there was no overseeing eye of Providence in creation, if in fact there was no creation at all but merely an evolution from simple to more complex forms of matter and energy, what was left of traditional Christian belief in a creating and sustaining God? If Darwin was right, how could the Bible be true?

The second shock to the traditional faith came from the increasing industrialization of American society and the rush to the cities. Small towns became big cities overnight. People came not only from America’s hinterland but from Germany, Norway, Italy, and other European countries. Most of the new immigrants brought religious opinions alien to the traditional way Protestant Americans had viewed their country and their Bibles.

The third and most direct assault on confidence in the Scriptures came in the form of higher criticism of the Bible. As more and more seminary and college professors took advanced degrees in the leading European universities, critical views became increasingly dominant in American higher education and eventually in many major denominations. Imagine the jolt to the churches when it was suggested that Moses did not author the first five books of the Bible, and that Jesus himself was a somewhat deluded visionary and not the Son of God in the flesh.

Taken together these shocks were part of the general shift in Western culture from Christian to secular forms of thought and behavior. And Christians disagreed about what actions they should take to meet the new challenges.

Among traditionally evangelical denominations, two rather distinct parties developed. One party chose to embrace the changes as blessings sent from God; another chose to resist the changes as threats to the biblical message.