Page 4754 – Christianity Today (2024)

As I sail down Los Angeles's Crenshaw Avenue, I admire the trees that line the road, beautiful trees the likes of which I have never seen. They are perfectly shaped, with silvery-white trunks and graceful limbs full of leaves, bursting with fertility. The trees offer a contrast of radiant, exuberant femininity to the setting of my destination, where a gathering of women will sift through memories of abortions past. It is but one group among many that I am privileged to meet, part of a project commissioned by the National Women's Coalition for Life to understand better the problems that cause women to choose abortion.

From research that has gone before us, I have certain expectations. I assume that these women will cite reasons such as "I couldn't care for a child and keep my job" or "I don't have the material resources to raise a baby."

I will be surprised by what I hear.

LISTENING IN LOS ANGELES

The pregnancy-care center fills several rooms on the first floor of a small building. It resembles most of the other two thousand centers scattered across the country: warm wallpaper, sofas, and cheery posters grace a reception room, which leads to a large meeting area, then an intimate counseling room or two. Racks are stuffed with pamphlets and books for loan, and storage rooms are filled with maternity and baby supplies. These centers usually operate on a shoestring—sometimes the director draws a small salary, sometimes not—and offer everything to clients free.

Five women are gathered in the counseling room. In some ways, they are atypical of the postabortion population: all are now firmly and actively pro-life. Two of them even do abortion grief counseling. These are not women whose wounds are raw, nor whose attitudes toward abortion are ambivalent.

When I ask them to recall the situations surrounding their abortions, Jill offers that her home life was relatively positive and thinks that many aborting women come from normal families and from Christian backgrounds.

But Becky demurs. A victim of sexual abuse, she believes that her experience may be the personal history of many aborting women. Sexual abuse, she explains, leads one to conclude that "sex is how you know that somebody cares about you, which makes you more sexually aggressive." Women with this mindset, Becky suggests, have more sexual encounters and higher risk of pregnancy, usually begun in relationships where the commitment necessary to raise a child is lacking.

When Becky became pregnant, she had at first resolved to have her baby. But the abuse that she endured also made her more willing to do whatever others told her to do. In this case, "they" told her to have an abortion.

Becky's mother took her to a counselor, ordering Becky to wait in the reception room while she conferred with the counselor. They then called Becky in and informed her of their decision: Becky would have an abortion. Her mom added, "If you continue this pregnancy, you can't live in my house."

Becky was stunned, but at a loss for alternatives. She had a vague idea that there might be places for rejected pregnant women to go—"there were some Catholic maternity homes, somewhere"—but she had neither the resources nor the self-confidence to track down these homes. She had the abortion. Eight years later, she is still grieving: "I was already attached to that baby."

Martha reflects on Becky's experience, noting that "when you're considering abortion, you want to get it over with as quickly as possible. You just don't want to think about it." But unlike Martha, Paula says quietly that she agonized over her decision. She was 17, from a "good family," and engaged to marry the baby's 21-year-old father. When she told her mother about the pregnancy she was informed, like Becky, that "you have a choice": the baby or the family.

She recalls crying convulsively on the abortion table. The doctor pleaded, "If you don't stop crying we can't do this, because maybe someone's forcing you," so she choked back her sobs. But after the abortion, she took drugs, found it hard to accept love ("How could anybody love me?"), and even attempted suicide three times. Tears form in her eyes.

This is not the "choice" that pro-choice partisans imagine. "Freedom of choice" brings to mind the image of a stylish, confident woman considering an array of possibilities, all competing for her approval. "Lose your child or lose your home" is a very different sort of choice, and hardly an empowering one.

Deb's story also illustrates a lack of options. She had submitted to her boyfriend's demands for sex ("Say yes or I'm gone"), concluding that "without him, I'm nothing." One demand led to another, and she gave in again when he "forced me to have an abortion." It seemed the best course—she was a teenager, had no high-school diploma, and her boyfriend was facing cocaine charges.

They eventually married, then went through a radical transformation after a faith conversion. "Self-esteem can't come from anywhere but Jesus," Deb says. "He will love you in spite of your failings. If your self-worth is based on your looks, your parents' love, the sense that you're great, it will fail. All that will pass."

The session is drawing to a close, but I have one more question. "What was the main reason you had an abortion?"

Martha says, "I had mine for convenience. The reasons were selfish." This surprises me; I've often criticized the charge that women have abortions for convenience. But Jill, Paula, and Deb agree with Martha. No matter what pressures they faced, they refuse to lay the responsibility for the abortion on anyone but themselves. The judgment seems harsh to me in light of their difficult situations, but they appear to find freedom, even fortitude, in shouldering the burden squarely.

Becky adds that knowing the facts of fetal development, of how the baby grows in the womb, would have stopped her. If she had known that it was really her baby inside her body, she would have done anything to give it life. The other women agree vociferously.

I am impressed with the light in their eyes, the healing won after such piercing pain, and the wholeness all these women now seem to show. But, at the same time, I am skeptical of the belief that the facts of fetal development alone will be convincing in most cases. I wonder whether, given the original desperate situations, it would have even been sufficient for these women who face me now.

I also wonder whether their viewpoint is prevalent among women at the beginning of the journey, those just now considering abortion. It is these women who face that desperate choice today that we are seeking to understand.

LISTENING IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Five women have come tonight to share their stories. There is a different tone here than in previous gatherings; the women are more relaxed and confident, and they laugh comfortably with one another—four of them, that is. Sandi comes in looking pale and subdued, wearing a navy sweatshirt and no makeup. Her smiles come a few seconds late, socially correct but fleeting. Sometimes she lowers her head into her hands. She will be the last to tell her story.

Elizabeth, a brunette with alert, dark eyes, takes the lead. Her abortion took place in 1968 when she was 16; she was in a casual relationship with a boy and became pregnant the second time they had sex.

"I hardly even knew how babies were made," she says, "and the guy was even more immature than me. I didn't know there was such a thing as abortion; it was my mother who set it up. I fought her on it, but she was adamant. She had seen girls have their lives destroyed by gossip. My mom said, 'That's not going to happen to you.' How can you fight that?"

I ask if some part of her fantasized about having the baby and starting her own family. Elizabeth responds, "Yes, I had a husband all picked out—a former boyfriend. Of course, he took off running, and I don't think he's been seen since." Chuckles spread throughout the room.

She adds, "To continue the pregnancy, I would have needed a support system. The Nurturing Network has a wonderful program now, and if there had been something like that back then, I would not have had the abortion."

Elizabeth's story strikes a nerve in Kelly, who says, "I was 22 when I got pregnant, and I was 19 weeks pregnant before I realized it. When I did, I was mostly worried that if I told my dad, he would die of a heart attack—not that it would break his heart, but that he would literally die.

"My boyfriend and I had been dating for four years, but when I told him the news, he was terrified. He didn't want to admit that it was his child." A chorus of sympathetic "oh's" sounds through the room, attesting to a shared understanding of this especially painful rejection. "I went to a pregnancy-care center for my pregnancy test. While I was waiting for the results, they showed me photos of aborted fetuses. I guess this was supposed to make me reconsider what I was doing, but it had the opposite effect—it made me angry; just shut me off like that." She snaps her fingers. "In a way, those pictures became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"For a while, I thought, 'If I'm five months along, maybe I should stick it out.' I was trying to find an internship or something so I could finish the pregnancy, but it didn't click. Then, all of a sudden, I switched gears and thought, 'If we don't do it now, we can't do it at all.' "

Kelly's concern was valid; time is an essential factor in the abortion process. In the first three months, the fetal child can be pulled to pieces and vacuumed out of the womb with a narrow-gauge plastic tube. This suction procedure became available in the 1970s, replacing the dilation and curettage (d&c) method, which cleaned out the uterus by scraping it with a metal blade.

After the first trimester, the fetus can be killed by injecting a highly concentrated salt solution into the womb, after which natural labor sets in to expel the dead child. This lengthy procedure—sometimes lasting 24 hours—is hard on the woman, who feels the child thrashing in its chemical-burn bath for an hour or so until it dies, and who may be alone when the napalm-red body of her son or daughter is born. No woman who sees this ever forgets.

The larger the baby, the more difficult the abortion task is, and the more dangerous the procedure is for the mother. A method for later pregnancies that is also hard on the doctor is a procedure called dilation and evacuation (d&e). The woman visits the doctor a couple of days before the procedure to have natural-fiber rods inserted in the mouth of the womb to slowly open it. When she returns for the procedure she is usually placed under general anesthesia. The doctor then reaches into the womb with forceps and by brute force pries off pieces of the child—a leg, an arm—reassembling it on a table nearby. When the bloody jigsaw puzzle is complete, the procedure is over.

Most clinic staff find this process emotionally grueling; at one clinic specializing in d&e abortions, 8 of 15 staff members reported emotional problems, finding it "destructive and violent." The risk to the woman is greater, too, as jagged pieces of the fetus can damage the interior of the uterus during the process.

More recently a procedure has been developed to avoid uterine damage. In dilation and extraction (d&x) the living fetus is delivered feet first, up to the head; a tube is then inserted into the base of the skull and the brains are suctioned out, killing the child. The doctor who presented this technique at an abortionists' convention said that he had done over 700 of these abortions and was pleased with the results; a colleague was using the technique up through the ninth month of pregnancy. It is not yet known whether d&x will replace d&e as the late-pregnancy method of choice.

I ask Kelly what method she had used. "It was the dilation and evacuation. I didn't have general anesthesia—they did it under local."

"And I thought I went through hell," comments Elizabeth.

"Yes, it was pretty traumatic," Kelly sighs. "They tell you, 'Once we start, we can't stop,' and you're thinking—and it's obviously very sick, you're nauseous [sic]. … " Her words momentarily trail off.

"The first two years after my abortion, I was probably the strongest pro-choice supporter you could find," she concludes. "I had to prove that what I did was right. I often wonder about some of the louder pro-choice voices out there, because I remember feeling like that."

"I used to be a big contributor to Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League," Elizabeth agrees.

"I went the opposite way," says Bette. "I was 19, and I had a lot of guilt about having premarital sex. But I did love the guy, and we stayed together three years after the abortion. Sick as it sounds, I stayed with him partly because we had a special bond—he was the father of my dead child.

"I remember sitting with him and my friend Carrie after I found out I was pregnant. Carrie told me that she'd had an abortion and it wasn't so bad. I kept thinking, 'I can't believe this is happening; this isn't what I want.' I had to leave the room to answer the door, but I heard my boyfriend saying, 'Carrie, you've got to talk her into this.' I was furious.

"I also worried about how I could tell my parents. Although I know they would have ended up supporting me, I couldn't bring myself to do it. If I had only had someone to go with me to tell them, it would have helped a lot. If just one of my friends had said, 'I'll be there for you,' I could have made it. But I felt like they were saying, 'I'll be there for you—if you have the abortion.' No one was there if I didn't do what they wanted."

I turn toward the still-silent Sandi, who has ridden out all our lively talk with a wan smile. "Sandi, do you feel like talking?" I ask. "You don't have to if you don't want to."

"Yeah, I just, yeah," she says, collecting herself. "It's interesting to listen to other people. I've thought about my abortion a lot." She begins her story, the earlier suggestion of depression fading. Instead, it is replaced by a calm, deliberate quality, a quietness rooted in self-possession.

"I had a close relationship with God in high school, but as the years passed I wanted to make decisions in my life without him. Pretty soon I was involved with alcohol and guys. When I found out I was pregnant, I told the father that I planned to go the adoption route. But he said, 'How could you even consider it?' He offered to pay half the cost of the abortion.

"I wanted to do anything I could to hang on to this relationship. And I wanted to keep my scholarships and not interrupt my education. But then this guy said, 'If you tell your mom, it could be the last straw,' knowing that my dad had died a year before in heart surgery."

"Golly!" "What a prince!" the other women comment.

"And also, I considered this life to be not all that great. I thought that if this kid skipped over this life and went straight to heaven, I would be doing it a favor.

"In the last year or so, God has been showing me that every single part of my decision has affected my life since then. Like with my career. The fact that I didn't want to interrupt my education led to a compulsive need to advance in my work, and I became a nervous wreck. I wasn't able to relax until I realized that God was taking care of me.

"What has taken years for me to understand is that there is tremendous value in this life, and I had to admit that I took this great gift away from my child. But I also realized that, even though I did this terrible thing, God loves me; he loved me even before I said, 'I'm sorry.' "

The other women are murmuring "hmmm," and a few eyes are glistening. Sandi goes on quietly, "The last thing is, I felt God say to me, 'You know, you're a mother.' That was a real healing, to be allowed to mourn for this child. Women after abortion don't have anywhere to go; everything's supposed to be okay because it's what you needed to do, and there was nothing in there anyway. But God says: 'You're a mother.' "

I reflect on the paradox: in acknowledging the death of her baby, Sandi gave life back to herself. It makes me wonder how many dying mothers there are in the world today.

LISTENING IN BOSTON

As four women and I sit clustered around the end of a massive table, I ask each one to sign a release form, giving me permission to use her story. It specifies that I will not use her real name.

Rita Ann surprises me by doing something that no one else has done. She takes out her pen and carefully draws a line through the last sentence of the release.

"I want you to use my real name," she says. "I'm ready to tell my story." She looks at me with calm confidence, a woman well into middle age, her straight, auburn hair cut short, no earrings, pale blue eyes. I know she has never told her story before.

Marion, across the table, looks up at this exchange. "I sure don't have anything to hide," she laughs. "Go ahead and use my name, too." A tiny, effervescent brunette whose every fiber seems to proclaim "Kiss Me, I'm Italian," she takes the lead, describing a chaotic childhood. Her father beat his wife and kids until, at the age of 13, Marion broke up a fight and commanded her dad to leave, which he did. After the divorce, Marion's mom embarked on a new life: promiscuity, bars, and drugs. Marion says, "I thought she was awful cool—and at the same time, I thought, 'This is really stupid. I hate this.'

"When I was 15, I decided to get pregnant," she says. "It was the only noble way to leave my younger brothers and sisters and get out of the house. I went to Planned Parenthood because they gave a free test; I didn't know about any crisis centers. I spilled out my story—'My dad's a jerk, he beats us up'—and not in pretty language. The counselor ripped off a sheet of paper and wrote on it the address of an abortion clinic.

"But as I was going home on the bus, I was thinking, 'I don't want to do this.' I knew that abortion would mean killing my baby. So, I decided to go to a church for help. I picked this church because it was pretty; it had stone and vines and window boxes, and I thought, 'If God lives, he'd live here.' I went in and blurted out my story to the minister.

"Well, he hit the roof. Got up and started, like Jimmy Durante, a 'what's-this-generation-coming-to' speech. Then he sat down, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and handed me $150 in greenbacks.

"I was 15, I didn't ask any questions. I took the money, put it in my pocket, and he shoved me out the door. I was standing outside the church thinking, 'What does he want me to do with this?' Then I realized." Marion's voice grows quiet. "God wanted me to have an abortion.

"I couldn't believe that this was what God really wanted. But every adult I talked to told me it was best. I was sad, and I couldn't go home right away, so I walked by the river and sat on a bridge. I swung my feet and talked to my baby. I said, 'I've wanted to have you since I was five years old. I wish I could have you—but I can't.' " There's a catch in Marion's throat. " 'And I wonder if you're a girl, or a boy, and I'm really sorry—that I have to kill you—but God wants me to.' "

Marion's story goes on, through another abortion, a miscarriage (brought on by her father's beatings), drugs and drinking, a third pregnancy and marriage, all before her life was changed by Campus Crusade missionaries who brought her the gospel.

Rita Ann, however, had a "storybook romance abortion." She recalls, "I was the youngest of four, with three older brothers in an Italian family. Talk about princess, I was a queen. I could do no wrong.

"It was 1965, and I had been going with Tom for a couple of years. When we made plans to marry, I got pregnant. I told my dad, and he took it well enough; he said, 'We'll just have a smaller wedding, and you won't get as many gifts.'

"Then I told Tommy. His reaction knocked me for a loop. 'We can't get married with you pregnant. I can't do that to my family,' he said. I was bewildered. I told him, 'I already told my family; we'll just get married in February instead of May.' But he was adamant. He wanted me to have an abortion. After our Christmas engagement, on January 22—yes, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—he took me to a hotel over by the Boston Harbor, a real pit stop. And then he handed me over to two men in a coffee shop."

Here Rita Ann slows her story, reduces it to broken bits. "Two men took me into a room. I was five months pregnant. They injected me with saline—I hemorrhaged. I left there looking like Gandhi in a sheet, with it wrapped around my legs. I ended up at the hospital in a coma with peritonitis, septicemia," she draws it out slowly, "a 106.7 temp, and sterile.

"I did marry Tom. Being raised as I was, Italian, I thought if I couldn't have children, what purpose did I serve on God's green earth? And who else would have me? So I stayed with the only man who knew it all."

Eventually, Tom and Rita Ann divorced. Rita Ann spent ten years in another relationship before it, too, ended. "That August, 1987, I was just falling apart," Rita Ann remembers. "I walked into Saint Joan's Church and met a priest; he had just said mass and he was still all draped. I said, 'I want to go to confession.' Less than five minutes later I was saying"—her words rush out—" 'It's been 22 years since my last confession and I had an abortion!' I walked out of that church like I was in a first Communion dress, and it has been with me ever since."

Just like that: the truth set Rita Ann free, as it did many of these women once they were willing to face it. Acknowledging truth is searingly painful, especially the truth that one's own baby has died. But once faced, whether in the company of a priest or alone, the truth opens prison doors.

REAL CHOICES

What new truths did I discover through the stories of these women?

My earlier expectations that women had abortions for x, y, and z reasons may not have been completely wrong, but neither were they completely right. I discovered that there was seldom a single, compelling, practical reason for the abortion. Instead, there was nearly always a complex nest of problems, affecting both a woman's material situation and her emotional well-being.

And yet, as I listened to these women, and others in cities all across America, a surprising theme emerged. In nearly every case, the abortion was undertaken to fulfill a felt obligation to another person: a parent (and then, most often, her mother) or the father of her unborn child. The predictable barriers of housing, jobs, and money faded rapidly in significance when these women were faced with a loved one's disapproving frown. They needed personal support and encouragement more than any material aid.

Both pro-choice and pro-life leaders have long said, "No woman wants to have an abortion." But if women are doing something they don't want 4,400 times a day, they are further from freedom than ever. If a woman is to make a life-affirming choice, one that both she and her baby can live with, she needs more than the one miserable alternative of abortion. It is time to give women real choices.

********************

Frederica Mathewes-Green directed the Real Choices research project and is currently director of communications for the National Women's Coalition for Life. This article was adapted from her book Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Questar, (c)1994).

Copyright (c) 1995 CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine

The age of revivals and circuit riders saw the comet’s tail sweep across America and dazzle everyone with visions of glory. Europeans visiting the American wilderness and encountering a revival firsthand were convinced that Americans had gone mad. But the ecstasy was evident far beyond the shouts and jerks of the camp meetings.

In a letter to Thomas Carlyle in the Autumn of 1840, American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to describe New England to his English friend: “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”

Revivals were the big story but not the whole story. Revivals whetted the country’s appetite for an immediate encounter with God. But here and there a visionary took to creating a Christian community where every detail of daily living could be ordered by God.

In the half-century before the Civil War, about 120 social experiments were founded, and a few dozen became celebrated, though temporary, successes: New York claimed the Oneida community; Ohio had its Zoar; the Shakers were in Kentucky; Brook Farm in Massachusetts; Amana in Iowa; and a black utopia, Nashoba, appeared in Tennessee.

These religious communities agreed to hold their property in common, just as the apostles had apparently done in early Judea. They insisted that God called for a distinctive people reflecting the kingdom of God in all essentials of economic and family life, an earthly model of life in the heavenly kingdom.

Let me illustrate with some of the best-known examples.

Shaking Quakers

Perhaps the best-known of these religious communities today are the Shakers. Antique lovers everywhere treasure the graceful, simple lines of Shaker furniture and crafts. Less well known is the fact that Shakers were first Quakers.

The origins of the movement lie in eighteenth-century England where, under the leadership of Quakers Jane and James Wardley, enthusiasts began meeting to express vexation over their sins. Their outbursts gained them the label “Shaking Quakers.” They cried out warnings of Christ’s imminent second coming and predicted that cosmic catastrophes would soon fall on the wicked.

In 1770 one of the members, Ann Lee (1736–84), received a revelation that all human depravity was rooted in the sex act. This was Adam and Eve’s original sin. Mother Ann, as she was called, was the wife of a blacksmith and mother of four children, all of whom died in infancy. Her revelation made celibacy a hallmark of the Shaker movement. A later Shaker hymn expressed it well:

As lust conceived by the Fall
Hath more or less infected all;
So we believe ’tis only this
That keepeth souls from perfect bliss.

In 1774 Ann Lee led a band of eight from Manchester, England, to New York, where they settled in the wilderness a few miles north of Albany. During the final years of her life, Mother Ann performed miracles and received visions that convinced her followers she was Christ in his “second appearing.” Shaker services were marked by dancing, singing, speaking in tongues, bodily contortions, and even “spiritualists” who claimed to communicate with the dead.

In 1787, under the leadership of Joseph Meacham, a convert from the Free Will Baptists, a society was organized at Mount Lebanon. Soon eleven communities in New York and New England had adopted the Shaker way of life. A new period of growth followed the great Kentucky revival in 1805. New communities were soon prospering on the frontier, especially in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.

The Shakers continued to reject sex, as well as the sacraments and the inspiration of the Bible, but Meacham brought order to the wild worship of the early gatherings. The communities soon gained a reputation for their industry and accumulated wealth. At the height of their influence, Shakers numbered about 6,000 members. Today, only a few believers remain at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, and Canterbury, New Hampshire.

Amana Inspiration

Seven villages nestled in the Iowa farmlands a few miles from bustling Interstate 80 contain quaint two-story, gabled houses and bright gardens of flox and marigolds—vivid reminders of the faith, industry, and pride that once nurtured the Amana community.

The correct name for these villages was the Community of True Inspiration. Many visitors in the woolen mills there today think that Amana is connected somehow with Amish folk, probably because of the similarity of the popular names. But there is no connection beyond their German origins.

The first settlers in the Amana colonies had gathered initially at various places in the German Rhineland before deciding to migrate to America. They were a pietistic fellowship under the leadership of Christian Metz and Barbara Heinemann. When the fellowship first arrived in 1843, they founded a community called Ebenezer near Buffalo, New York. They gradually moved to east-central Iowa, where they established and maintained their cluster of villages. In all about 1,800 persons sought to live out their Inspirationist message, as formulated originally in 1714 by Eberhard Gruber and Johann Rock.

The villages were committed to working out their salvation “through the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ, in self-denial, in the obedience to our faith, and in the demonstration of our faithfulness in the inward and outward service of the Community.” Metz provided strong leadership until his death in 1867, when Heinemann became the leader. A prosperous woolens industry provided a secure economic base for the communities.

Succeeding generations found it hard to maintain the simple piety of the founders. Financial problems mounted until a special committee proposed a drastic overhaul of the community. In 1932 spiritual and temporal concerns were separated, and the Amana industries became a joint-stock cooperative. This individual ownership of the industries proved an economic boon and helps to explain the international reputation of Amana refrigerators and microwave ovens.

The religious community, the Amana Church Society, continues today with about 1,200 members. They hold simple meetings in the village chapels, during which they read the writings of their Inspirationist founders.

Not So Harmonious

Another group rooted in this German pietist tradition was called the Rappites. They were named after the Lutheran dissident and millennialist George Rapp (1757–1847). With about 600 followers, Rapp arrived in the United States in 1804. The group chose to settle in Pennsylvania. They called their community Harmony, but their beliefs centered in a strict doctrine of purity and the imminent arrival of the millennium. Members considered themselves the righteous remnant that would be judged pure and holy when the Lord returned to judge all peoples. Rapp ruled the community as a virtual dictator.

In 1815 the group moved to a new Harmony, on the banks of the Wabash in southern Indiana. Ten years later, they moved again, back to Ohio where they established their “permanent” home at Economy, not far from Pittsburgh.

But by this time, members were becoming dissatisfied with Rapp’s authoritarian leadership. In 1832, after an internal rebellion, about one-third of the community defected. Rapp and the community survived, though weakened. Rapp died 15 years later, and the community dissolved completely in 1905.

Forced Idealism

In 1817, after years of religious harassment, Joseph Bimeler led about 300 Quaker-like pietists from Germany to their American home in Zoar, Ohio. They become known as the Zoar Separatists. They hoped to live a simple life of devotion to God. Poverty, however, rather than ideals, forced the community to adopt a policy of common ownership of property. Economic relief came to Zoar only when the regional economy improved as a result of westward expansion of the nation.

Like several other groups, notably the Shakers, the Zoarites adopted the practice of celibacy. When the community was forced to come to terms with human nature and allow children, they raised their young communally; they wanted to elevate devotion to the community over that given to biological families.

Bimeler, the community leader, just like Rapp, held a privileged position within the village and chose early on to marry and live in an elegant home. When he died in 1853, the community survived for a time, but devotion to families remained a source of conflicts within the community until it finally dissolved in 1898.

Charismatic Leaders

The panorama of these early American utopian experiments can be painted in much wider strokes. The history might include, for example, the Mormons, who emerged in New York, Ohio, and Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s. They shared many of the traits of communitarians: for a time they shared property; they fervently expected Christ’s second coming; they had their own “special revelation.” They also had a charismatic leader in Joseph Smith (1805–44).

In that, they give us a clue as to what might unite all these diverse experiments. Though each community had a unique origin and personality, each was the lengthened shadow of some charismatic leader or self-conscious innovator. The leader’s vision of utopia created the community, and his or her firm will imposed order. And in most cases, when the charismatic leader passed on, the community drifted toward death.

Bruce L. Shelley is senior professor of church history at Denver Seminary. He is author of many books, including All the Saints Adore Thee: Insight from Christian Classics (Baker, 1994). He is an editorial advisor to Christian History.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

American Religion

1771-1799 Preparation

1776 Methodists number 4,921

1784 Baptists number 35,101; Francis Asbury ordained as America’s first Methodist bishop

1790s First Methodist awakenings in North, West, and South

1798 James McGready begins revivals in Logan County, Kentucky; Bishop Asbury begins annual circuits from Maine to Georgia and along the Western frontier

1799 McGee brothers inspire revivals in Kentucky

1800-1835 “Second Great Awakening”

1800 Revivals in Gaspar River and Mud River, Kentucky

1801 Cane Ridge, Kentucky, revival under Barton Stone

1802 Revival at Yale under Timothy Dwight; collegiate awakenings throughout East

1804 Shakers send missionaries to frontier

1810 Founding of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, America’s first foreign missions society

1816 American Bible Society formed

1817 American Sunday School Union begun

1825 Charles Finney begins seven years of intense evangelism in the Northeast

1826 American Tract Society and American Home Missionary Society begun

1828 Lane Seminary founded in frontier Cincinnati to provide clergy for the West

1830-1850 Fragmentation

1830 Finney’s greatest revival, at Rochester, New York; Joseph Smith founds Mormons

1833 Founding of Oberlin College, abolitionist stronghold

1835 Lyman Beecher’s “A Plea for the West” calls for Christian civilization of the West

1837 Presbyterian Church split into Old and New School branches over various issues, including revivalism

1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” outlines Transcendentalism

1844 YMCA founded; Methodist church splits over slavery

1845 Baptists split over slavery

1847 Mormon migration to Utah

1848 The Fox sisters begin the Spiritist movement, which sweeps America

1850 Membership in Protestant denominations soars to 3.5 million

1855 Dwight L. Moody converted at age 18; Methodists claim 1,577,014 members, and Baptists 1,105,546 members

1857 China opened to missions

1857–1858 Prayer Meeting Revival or “Third Great Awakening”—estimated one million converted

U.S. History

1771-1799 Preparation

1787 Constitutional Convention

1792 Washington reelected unanimously; Kentucky statehood; Whitney’s cotton gin invented

1794 Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason

1796 Tennessee statehood

1800-1835 “Second Great Awakening”

1801 Thomas Jefferson becomes third president

1803 Louisiana Purchase doubles size of the United States

1805–1806 Lewis and Clark expedition explores West

1807 First successful steamboat

1812–1814 War with England

1817–1818 Seminole wars

1820 Missouri Compromise

1822 Santa Fe Trail opens

1823 Monroe Doctrine

1825 Erie Canal opens

1830-1850 Fragmentation

1826–1846 Indians removed across the Mississippi

1828 Andrew Jackson elected president; Baltimore and Ohio Railroad begun

1831 The McCormick reaper

1833–1837 Financial panic and recession

1835 The Colt revolver

1836 Samuel F.B. Morse’s telegraph; Texas gains independence; Battle of the Alamo

1845 The phrase “manifest destiny” appears

1846–1848 Mexican-American War

1846 Irish potato famine

1848 Gold discovered in California

1852 Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin published

1857 Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court

1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species; first oil well,

Keith J. Hardman is professor of philosophy and religion at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania. He is author of Charles Grandison Finney: 1792–1875 (Syracuse, 1987) and a member of the Christian History advisory board.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

American revivalism between 1780 and 1840 has attracted great attention from historians. A good place to begin further reading is with an overview. Two of the most valuable are Bernard Weisberg’s They Gathered at the River: The Story of the Great Revivalists and Their Impact upon Religion in America (Little, Brown, 1958) and William G. McLoughlin’s Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change, 1607–1977 (Chicago, 1978).

Frontier Religion

In terms of revivalism’s frontier phase, and the spectacular camp meeting, pioneer historian William Warren Sweet’s four-volume Religion on the American Frontier remains essential. Each volume contains a lengthy introduction and representative documents: The Baptists (1931), The Presbyterians (1936), The Congregationalists(1939), and The Methodists (1946; all reprinted by Cooper Square, 1964).

More focused reading should begin with John Boles’s The Great Revival, 1787–1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Kentucky, 1972), a detailed examination of revivalism on the Southern frontier. The classic study of the camp meeting is Charles Johnson’s The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time (Southern Methodist, 1955). It may be supplemented by Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Tennessee, 1974), and especially by Paul K. Conkin’s superb Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Wisconsin, 1990).

Larger Dimensions

In recent years, scholars have been looking at transatlantic dimensions of American revivalism: see Richard Carwardine’s Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Greenwood, 1978), and especially Holy Friars: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 1989), in which Leigh Eric Schmidt shows that American frontier camp meetings have their roots in Communion gatherings of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Another dimension to early revivalism is the role of African-Americans: see Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Greenwood, 1979) and Albert J. Raboteau’s essential Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford, 1978).

The influence of revivalism on the Methodist church has been traced by Russell E. Richey in Early American Methodism (Indiana, 1991). How revivalistic Methodism helped transform values and ideals, especially in the South, is described in A. Gregory Schneider’s The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Indiana, 1993).

For its impact on both black and white Southerners, see Donald G. Mathews’s Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977). Nathan Hatch has shown how revivalism reinforced democratic tendencies in churches and in society in The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale, 1989).

Accounts from the Times

No one interested in the frontier revival should miss The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright (Abingdon, 1956) or Edward Eggleston’s lively 1873 novel, The Circuit Rider: A Tale of the Heroic Age (Kentucky, 1970). A rare early African-American document, the 1810 Brief Account of the Life, Experience, Travels, and Gospel Labours of George White, An African, has been republished, with a valuable introduction by Graham Hodges, in Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (Madison House, 1993).

Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent book is Archibald Grimke: Portrait of a Black Independent (LSU, 1993).

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Many history textbooks practically ignore the spiritual ferment of the early 1800s. Yet recent historical research reveals that religious enthusiasm was widespread and that it had a profound effect on our nation. To better understand this era, Christian History talked with Nathan O. Hatch, professor of history and vice-president of advanced studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of the award-winning The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale, 1989).

Early America was a time of tremendous religious energy. How significant was this era?

The American population grows spectacularly in the early republic. But the growth of the churches far surpasses it.

Between the American Revolution and 1845, the United States grew from 2.5 million to 20 million—about eight-fold. But the number of clergy per capita tripled, from 1:1,500 to 1:500. Methodists and Baptists grew from a few thousand to 1.5 million each. By the Civil War, America was essentially an “evangelical nation.”

Why the spiritual ferment at this time?

Coming out of the American Revolution, there is a tremendous political upsurge, a revolt against traditional authority. Common people asked, “Why should we defer to our ‘betters’?” There’s a revolt against the clergy, who have been to college, who read their sermons, who are “gentlemen,” who don’t work with their hands.

The democratic ferment sweeping the land helps empower popular religion. You see the rise of all kinds of groups led by common people, men and women without college education, who speak the common idiom. Someone like Lorenzo Dow, who became a phenomenal character in the early republic, was untutored and unlearned and made no bones about that. It was almost a badge of honor not to be educated.

In addition, during this period, people are no longer interested in high-toned and formal religion; instead, they’re looking for something more expressive. Methodism especially introduces the supernatural into everyday life by respecting emotional expressions of faith. You see the prevalence of dreams, visions, ecstasy, swooning, dancing, the jerks, the barks—this is boiling-hot religion.

What role did the frontier play in all this?

During the era, the frontier is undergoing tremendous population surges. For instance, from 1776 to 1790, Kentucky grew from having almost no European-descended settlers to a population of 75,000. Not since the seventeenth century had such a high proportion of the white population lived in newly settled communities.

Whether it’s the Maine frontier or the New England hill country or Tennessee or Ohio, fresh communities are springing up, where traditional denominations—Presbyterian, Congregational, Anglican—don’t play much of a role. It’s a religious free market. The Methodists and Baptists and itinerant revivalists offer a grassroots, non-traditional Christianity that appeals to the people pouring into these places.

How did these non-traditional preachers do it?

Their sermons are extemporaneous, not written, and they’re in the language the people speak. The same is true of the singing; hymns have more of a folk feeling—this is the beginning of gospel hymns.

One lesser-known factor is the effective use of print. The early republic was the great age of the decentralization of the press. Paper and printing presses had become cheap. Almost anyone could crank out printed material, but the evangelicals were the shrewdest at using this technology.

The Methodists were geniuses at using print—tracts, pamphlets, Bibles, newspapers. Revival preachers and sect leaders were communication entrepreneurs who used the popular press to command their audience. They published hundreds of thousands of tracts and papers.

What caused the unusual bodily manifestations in the early revivals?

Where you get unrestrained popular religion you often get “enthusiasm.” It’s as if there’s a paradigm shift.

Lorenzo Dow was preaching in the Chesapeake region, and a woman started screaming and fell into religious ecstasy. He suddenly cried out, “God is here. He is with that woman!” If that had happened in a Presbyterian or Congregational church, the pastor would have called the woman deranged. For revival preachers, this was evidence of the divine presence. You have a new, utterly different sense of how God works.

I think this is one reason why the Methodists and Baptists are so successful in converting African-Americans. Presbyterians and Anglicans were always trying to control religious impulses through formal services. The Methodists and Baptists allowed blacks, among others, to experience religion more on their own terms.

Wasn’t religious ecstasy known to occur during the First Great Awakening? How novel were these bodily manifestations?

Congregationalist minister William Bentley kept an extensive diary of the revivals occurring in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1800. He notes the eruption of religious ecstasy in his night meetings, and African-Americans, sailors, and women are preaching and exhorting. He said it hadn’t been like that “since Mother Hutchinson’s time.” He’s talking about the enthusiasm of Anne Hutchinson in the seventeenth century.

So there’s a tradition of religious ecstasy that continued through Edwards’s and Whitefield’s revivals and in outcroppings in the Revolutionary period.

But at the turn of the century, particularly with the Methodists, there’s a quantum leap of religious ecstasy: more of it and more dramatic. Before, it was controlled, and churches frowned upon it and in some ways suppressed it. In the 1800s’ religious free market, there’s nothing to suppress it.

As a historian and Christian, how do you see God at work in all this?

There were people whose conversions completely turned their lives around. They go from living for themselves—some of them dissolute and mean-spirited, unconcerned about others—to becoming model citizens or even Methodist exhorters and itinerants. To put it in Pauline language, you see the fruit of the Spirit manifested in them.

As Jonathan Edwards noted some 60 years earlier, religious ecstasy—trembling, groaning, crying out, panting, fainting—may be signs of God’s power, but you don’t know. In the 1800s, you see these same expressions in the early Mormons and Shakers. Ecstasy is no guarantee of orthodoxy or that Christian fruit will result.

And ecstasy did lead to excess. In New York, they talk about the “burned-over district.” The fire of the Spirit revived many lives there. But the expression also points to the many people who had high religious emotion that didn’t stick, leaving them spiritually burned out.

Ecstasy is no guarantee of orthodoxy or that Christian fruit will result.
—Nathan O. Hatch

How did these revivals affect our nation?

Popular religion became tied to American popular culture, and that connection has not gone away. The intellectual elite of our nation may not have much sympathy with religion, but the common person still does. In modern America, evangelical religion is still vital.

The religion of the sawdust trail also had a profound effect on American politics. One historian has shown that American politicians learned a great deal from revival preachers—how to simplify issues into either/or choices, how to turn political concerns into moral causes, how to develop political “crusades.” Much of Jacksonian politics had the flavor of Methodist revivalism. For better or worse, that made American politics more populist, so that we no longer get sophisticated political discussion, as we did during the era of the founding fathers.

What has been the effect of camp-meeting religion on American Christianity?

The expectation of revival remains deeply embedded within American evangelicalism. We think of Christianity in conversionist terms, which is very different from the Christianity of Europe or the British Isles. There religion is more connected to the institutional church; they want their children nourished in the church; they see the institutional church as a guardian of society’s values.

In America, we downplay the importance of tradition and ecclesiastical institutions. The evangelical churches are not interested in guarding society’s values as much as in converting them.

Furthermore, the church is somewhat incidental to the conversion process. We instead look to revivalists—the Whitefields, Moodys, Sundays, Grahams, Palaus—and to parachurch organizations to make the most evangelistic progress.

Finally, instead of getting our cues from the history and the traditions of the church, we try to start over. We would just as soon do away with history; history has taken a bad turn; it has nothing to teach us; we’ve got to get back to the New Testament and start all over again. In secular terms, this is very Jeffersonian. It’s very much part of popular culture, and it’s very much a part of early and modern evangelicalism.

Many Christians today are praying for a national revival. From your reading of history, how likely is that?

I would answer in two ways.

First, God has always used human means to accomplish his ends. At this point in our history, I’d have to say that the human context is not well prepared for a national revival. In the First and Second Great Awakenings, there was a national consensus of Christian belief. Today, we live in a much more pluralistic society; in some sectors there is little or no Christian memory.

In addition, in both of those awakenings, Christian leaders were at the avant garde of communication and popular culture, and there were fewer competitors. When Whitefield came, it was like an appearance of Billy Graham, Garth Brooks, and Bill Clinton all rolled into one. Today there are an astounding number of voices in the market competing for one’s allegiance.

Think of contemporary cable television. You may have a Christian channel, but right next to that you have MTV, and next to that, the p*rnographic channel. So it’s a much more segmented society in which religion is just one competitor for people’s souls.

On the other hand, as a Christian historian, it’s clear that the Spirit of God has moved in powerful and unpredictable ways. I would never rule out the possibility that there could be a massive turning to God and fresh, exciting growth in the church.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

In most early camp meetings, the focal point of the gathering was receiving Communion.

The circuit rider often oversaw the preparations of the site for the camp meeting. A site previously used could be “reclaimed” in a single day, and he would direct volunteers in clearing away fallen branches and making any needed repairs to the plank seats. Preparing a new site, however, might take three or four days.

The banner year for camp meetings was 1811, when from 10 to 33 percent of the entire American population attended at least one.

Many camp meetings lasted six days or even nine days. Eventually, four days became the fixed number, with meetings beginning on Friday afternoon or evening and continuing until Monday noon. One proverb said, “The good people go to camp meetings Friday, backsliders Saturday, rowdies Saturday night, and gentlemen and lady sinners Sunday.”

Many people at the early camp meetings displayed unusual physical manifestations: fainting, rolling, laughing, running, singing, dancing, and jerking—a spasmodic twitching of the entire body, where they hopped with head, limbs, and trunk shaking “as if they must … fly asunder.”

At some camp meetings, watchmen carrying long white sticks patrolled the meeting grounds each evening to stop any sexual mischief. Enemies of camp meetings sneered that “more souls were begot than saved.”

Drinking was such a problem at camp meetings that some states prohibited sale of intoxicating beverages within a one- or two-mile radius of a meeting.

Experience taught circuit riders that “Christians enjoy those meetings most which cost them the greatest sacrifice.” A fifty-mile journey was “a pretty sure pledge of a profitable meeting.”

An observer describing the preaching of James McGready, an early leader of camp meetings, said, “Father McGready would so describe Heaven, that you would almost see its glories … and he would so array hell and its horrors before the wicked, that they would tremble and quake, imagining a lake of fire and brimstone yawning to overwhelm them.”

The “Great Revival” of the early 1800s began with an emphasis on Christian unity, with many denominations participating together. By 1810, the revival had resulted in at least two distinct splinters from the Presbyterian Church: The Christian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Defending camp meetings, James B. Finley said, “Much may be said about camp meetings, but, take them all in all, for practical exhibition of religion, for unbounded hospitality to strangers, for unfeigned and fervent spirituality, give me a country camp meeting against the world.”

Methodist Francis Asbury (1745–1816) became one of the best known circuit riders in America. Letters addressed “Bishop Asbury, United States of America” were promptly delivered. Plagued by illness all his life, he continued to visit circuits even when he had to be tied to the saddle to remain upright.

The early American Methodists asked four questions about each candidate offering himself for the circuit riding ministry:

1. Is this man truly converted?

2. Does he know and keep our rules?

3. Can he preach acceptably?

4. Has he a horse?

Methodist circuit riders were also book distributors. Their commission on sales provided some of them with the only cash they ever saw. This helped spread Bibles, hymnbooks, and other religious literature throughout the frontier.

Peter Cartwright, long-time circuit rider in Illinois, was twice elected to the Illinois legislature. His one defeat was in the congressional race of 1846, when he lost to a lanky opponent by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

Beef or venison jerky was the circuit rider’s staple food because it would not spoil easily.

Riding a circuit was demanding on those who undertook this grueling ministry—half died before reaching age 33. Yet many ministers thrived on the rigors of the circuit. Peter Cartwright likely held the record for endurance: he enjoyed 71 years as an itinerant.

A circuit rider was expected to take good care of his horse. The First Discipline of the Methodist church said, “Be merciful to your Beast. Not only ride moderately, but see with your own eyes that your horse is rubbed and fed.”

When Francis Asbury came to the colonies in 1771, there were only 600 American Methodists. When he died 45 years later, there were 200,000 American Methodists. The number had grown from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 40 of the total population of the country, largely because of camp meetings and circuit riders.

Timothy K. Beougher is assistnat professor of evangelism at the Wheaton Graduate School and associate director for education programs at the Institute of Evangelism at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

By the late 1830s, camp meetings had become formalized—as the very existence of this printing shows. Sing Sing, now Ossining, New York (just north of New York City, on the Hudson River) was a major Methodist camp-meeting site in the early 1800s. This commemorative, which was given to participants afterward, reveals a great deal about camp meetings of this period.

This meeting was well planned by a large general committee, and was both a spiritual and social occasion—note the list of New York participants (the Joseph Smith named is not the one of Mormon fame). Between the morning, afternoon, and evening preaching times, men talked politics, women shared recipes, and young people courted.

At the same time, camp meetings were a segregated affair. Tents here are arranged by church, city, and region. During the meetings, men and women sat on different aisles; if there were African-Americans in attendance, they would have met separately. In addition, the benches around the stand—an area called “the pen”—were set off by a rail and reserved for mourners, those seeking salvation.

The police committee is also noted. They watched for thieves and vandals, and they enforced the camp-meeting rules. The rules came from years of experience and attempted to foil sexual escapades and anything else that would detract from things spiritual.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

In 1802, 26-year-old Jacob Young began a new Methodist preaching circuit along the Green River, a vast and growing region of central Kentucky. Knowing he could count on little help from his supervising elder (a millwright who divided his time between his craft and itinerant preaching), Young devised his own strategy for evangelizing the region:

“I concluded to travel five miles, as nearly as I could guess, then stop, reconnoiter the neighborhood, and find some kind person who would let me preach in his log cabin, and so on till I had performed the entire round.”

Near the end of one dreary day, Young came upon a solitary cabin in the woods. He spotted a woman in the doorway and asked for lodging, but the woman refused. Desperate, Young exclaimed, “I am a Methodist preacher, sent by Bishop Asbury to try to form a circuit.”

“This information appeared to electrify her,” recalled Young. “Her countenance changed, and her eyes fairly sparkled. She stood for some time without speaking, and then exclaimed, ‘La, me! Has a Methodist preacher come at last?’”

The family were North Carolina Methodists recently migrated to Kentucky. Their home soon became a regular preaching appointment on Young’s circuit.

This eager reception of a Methodist circuit rider was repeated over and over again in the late 1700s and early 1800s, so much so that Methodism experienced remarkable growth.

Early circuit riders were a different kind of clergy than had ever been seen in America, serving a rapidly expanding and spiritually hungry nation. They pursued their calling with remarkable zeal, forever changing the style and tone of American religion.

What was a circuit rider’s life like? And what was their collective impact?

Virtual Miracle

Along with the Baptists, the Methodists were among the fastest growing churches in post-Revolutionary America. Between 1770 and 1820, American Methodists achieved a virtual miracle of growth, rising from fewer than 1,000 members to more than 250,000. In 1775, fewer than one out of every 800 Americans was a Methodist; by 1812, Methodists numbered one out of every 36 Americans. At mid-century, American Methodism was almost ten times the size of the Congregationalists, America’s largest denomination in 1776.

Key to the Methodist success was a dedicated contingent of itinerant preachers, or circuit riders. In this era, most Americans lived on widely scattered farms or in tiny, often remote villages. In 1795, 95 percent of Americans lived in places with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants; by 1830 this proportion was still 91 percent. Itinerant ministry provided preaching, the sacraments, and church structure to communities that would not otherwise have been able to attract or afford a minister.

In 1790, the Methodist preacher Freeborn Garrettson noted that in New York, thousands “in the back settlements, who were not able to give an hundred [pounds] a year to a minister … may now hear a sermon at least once in two weeks; sometimes oftener”—thanks to the presence of Methodist circuit riders.

In many areas, the pace of settlement simply outran the resources of the older denominations. In 1770, the territories that would eventually become Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee contained only about 40,000 people of European or African descent. By 1810, the combined population of these same regions was over 1 million. In many of these rapidly growing regions, the Methodists held the only religious services for miles around.

The Methodist Difference

In contrast to the mobility of the Methodist itinerants, New England clergy traditionally held lifetime tenure in a single parish. Of the 550 graduates of Yale College who entered the Congregationalist ministry between 1702 and 1794, a remarkable 71 percent ministered for their entire career in only one church. In colonial New England, both pastor and people saw ordination as a long-term commitment to a single congregation. Nothing could have been more foreign to the Methodist concept of an itinerant ministry.

Educationally and socially, the early Methodist preachers were cut from the same fabric as the farm and artisan families who made up the bulk of their audiences. Unlike their college-educated Congregationalist, and Presbyterian counterparts, the early circuit riders began ministry with a natural social affinity with their listeners.

The typical circuit rider was a young, single man who hailed from an artisan background, who himself had already moved several times from one village or town to the next, but whose life had been abruptly transformed by a dramatic conversion experience. Before turning to preaching, Bishop Francis Asbury (Methodism’s most influential early leader) had been a blacksmith, and most of the other preachers had been carpenters, shoemakers, hatters, tanners, millers, shopkeepers, school teachers, sailors, and so on.

In many cases, the only real distinction between a Methodist preacher and his audience was which side of the pulpit each was on. Almost none of the first- or second-generation itinerants had anything more than a common school education. Up to 1800, even a full-time itinerant’s salary was limited to a paltry $64 a year. In that year, it was increased to $80 a year for an unmarried preacher. By comparison, the average annual income of a Congregationalist minister in 1800 was $400.

Ministry on the Move

A typical Methodist itinerant was responsible for a predominantly rural circuit, 200 to 500 miles in circumference. He was expected to complete this circuit every two to six weeks, with the standard being a four weeks’ circuit. His partner, if he had one, usually did not travel with him, but either followed or preceded him on the circuit. Hence, on a four weeks’ circuit, the people could expect preaching about every two weeks, but only rarely from a circuit rider on a Sunday.

On rural circuits, the itinerants made preaching appointments for nearly every day of the week, sometimes both morning and evening, with only a few days per month allotted for rest, reflection, and letter writing. Circuit riders were urged to preach at 5:00 a.m. in the summer and 6:00 a.m. in the winter.

The itinerants usually met and examined the classes (weekly small-group gatherings of one or two dozen people) at each appointment—all of which could take three to four hours a day, apart from traveling. Quarterly meetings, held at a centralized location, added variety to this routine, and beginning in the early 1800s, camp meetings often replaced one of the quarterly meetings.

Boiling Hot Religion

Early Methodist sermons emphasized the practical, the immediate, and the dramatic. “People love the preacher who makes them feel,” observed Methodist preacher Thomas Ware. The typical circuit rider preached from a basic set of Scripture texts embellished with anecdotes and analogies from everyday life. The few expository skills he used were largely gleaned from the sermons of colleagues. But he also learned to preach with what the itinerant Henry Smith referred to as an irresistible “holy ‘knock-’em-down’ power.”

Nothing would have been more anathema to Methodist itinerants than the dispassionate reading of a prepared sermon. They preached extemporaneously, without notes or manuscript. As Bishop Asbury once urged one of his preachers, “Feel for the power; feel for the power, brother.”

Circuit riders were both familiar and frightening, homespun heralds of a gospel that was attuned to everyday life yet unsettling in its larger implications. This approach led one contemporary to call early Methodism “a boiling hot religion.”

The preaching of John A. Granade is an extreme but telling example. Born in North Carolina about the time of the American Revolution, as a young man Granade became “perfectly reckless,” rambling through Kentucky and the Cumberland country (an Appalachian region in Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee) before settling in South Carolina to teach school. Distressed over his spiritual condition, Granade made his way to Tennessee, where for two years he was plagued by “voices” and “tormenting whispers.”

Day and night, through snow and rain, during the winter and spring of 1797–1798, Granade wandered about the woods “howling, praying, and roaring in such a manner that he was generally reputed to be crazy.” Throughout the western states he was known as the “wild man.”

Finally converted at a camp meeting, Granade immediately channeled his spiritual energy into preaching. “I would sing a song or pray or exhort a few minutes,” Granade later recalled, “and the fire would break out among the people, and the slain of the Lord everywhere were many.” Crowds began to follow him from place to place, “singing and shouting all along the road.” Some claimed Granade had a secret powder that he threw over the people to enchant them, and others believed he worked “some secret trick by which he threw them down.” At one meeting, so many people fainted and “lay in such heaps that it was feared they would suffocate.”

Baptizing Common Places

American Methodists soon redefined sacred space. By 1785, only 60 Methodist chapels had been purchased or built, but there were more than 800 recognized preaching places. Meetings were held in homes (where the majority of weekday sermons were delivered), courthouses, schoolhouses, the meeting houses of other denominations, barns, or in the open.

While riding the St. Lawrence circuit in 1813, Benjamin Paddock regularly preached in a dry goods store in Potsdam, New York. Likewise, Robert R. Roberts once preached in a tavern in northwestern Pennsylvania, though not without difficulty. Partway through Roberts’s discourse, a drunkard in the audience awoke, calling out, “Landlord, give me a grog!” When Roberts protested granting the man’s request, the tavern owner replied, “Mr. Roberts, you appear to be doing well; I would thank you to mind your own business, and I will mine.”

Grueling Pace

The early circuit riders preached and traveled at a grueling pace. John Brooks, for example, labored so intensely during his first three years in the itinerancy that he reported, “I lost my health and broke a noble constitution.” During one tempestuous revival, Brooks lay “sick in bed,” but the people “literally forced me out, and made me preach.”

In 1799, itinerant Billy Hibbard rode the Cambridge, New York, circuit, a 500-mile, four-week circuit with up to 63 preaching appointments, in addition to the responsibility of meeting the classes. In one year on the Flanders, New Jersey, circuit, Thomas Smith estimated he traveled 4,200 miles, preached 324 times, exhorted 64 times, and met classes 287 times. Indeed, in many parts of the new nation, Methodist preachers suddenly seemed to be everywhere, leading one New Yorker to exclaim in 1788, “I know not from whence they all come, unless from the clouds.”

Circuit riders also frequently had to contend with poor or uncertain lodging. Most often the itinerants stayed with sympathetic families along their routes, though they sometimes lodged at inns or slept in the open.

At the end of one weary day in the North Carolina back country, the itinerant Thomas Ware sought shelter at the isolated cabin of a young couple.

“The man gave me to understand, at once, that I could not stay there,” recounted Ware. “I looked at him, and smiling, said, that would depend upon our comparative strength.” Unwilling to wrestle the Methodist preacher, the couple relented—and in the morning Ware baptized their children.

Bishop Francis Asbury set the standard for all early Methodist itinerants and left little doubt as to what he expected from his charges. During his 45-year career, Asbury, who never married, rode more than a quarter of a million miles on horseback and crossed the Allegheny Mountains some 60 times. He visited nearly every state once a year. One biographer estimates that Asbury stayed in 10,000 households and preached 17,000 sermons.

Common Heroes

Following Asbury’s example, the Methodist circuit riders transformed religious life on the early American frontier.

After devising a strategy for evangelizing central Kentucky, for example, youthful Jacob Young set out. On most days, he managed to find a place to preach. On one occasion, Young preached in a bar room. Several times he found groups already gathered, eagerly awaiting the rumored appearance of a preacher. Wherever possible, Young established weekly class meetings to carry on in his absence.

At a place called Fishing Creek, Young discovered a Methodist society under the leadership of an African-American slave named Jacob. With the assistance of several local women, Jacob preached regularly and had organized a class meeting. Young was impressed with what he saw. Though Jacob was illiterate, Young noted that he “could preach a pretty good sermon,” and that “his society [was] in excellent order.”

Within three weeks, Young had forged enough appointments for a four weeks’ circuit. By the end of the conference year, Young had taken in 301 new members, receiving all of $30 for his labors.

Once after Jacob had preached, a man began shouting at the top of his voice, “Young Whitefield! Young Whitefield!”—comparing him to the great eighteenth-century evangelist.

Recalled Young, “I thought I was one of the happiest mortals that breathed vital air.”

And so were the many families he ministered to—those for whom Methodism became a pillar of their lives.

John H. Wigger is assistant professor of history at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

A Soul’s Solemn Struggle

Peter Cartwright (1785–1872) was famous for his camp-meeting exploits even before he wrote his 1857 Autobiography—but afterward, even more so. In it he recounts his long and flamboyant ministry on the frontier. Whether in person or in print, he was a magnificent storyteller.

His Autobiography tells us not only about Cartwright, but also about his era. For example, his lengthy, anguished conversion was not untypical; it illustrates how spiritual matters were of grave concern in his day. An excerpt:

Camp-meeting conversion. In 1801, Presbyterians of southern Kentucky organized a “Communion.” “To this meeting I repaired,” wrote Peter Cartwright, “a guilty, wretched sinner.” But before it was through, “unspeakable joy sprung up in my soul.”

Gloomy thoughts of wretchedness

In 1801, when I was in my sixteenth year, my father, my eldest half-brother, and [I] attended a wedding about five miles from home, where there was a great deal of drinking and dancing, which was very common at marriages in those days. I drank little or nothing; my delight was in dancing. After a late hour in the night, we mounted our horses and started for home. I was riding my racehorse.

A few minutes after we had put up the horses and were sitting by the fire, I began to reflect on the manner in which I had spent the day and evening. I felt guilty and condemned. I rose and walked the floor. My mother was in bed. It seemed to me, all of a sudden, my blood rushed to my head, my heart palpitated, in a few minutes I turned blind; an awful impression rested on my mind that death had come, and I was unprepared to die. I fell on my knees and began to ask God to have mercy on me.

My mother sprang from her bed, and was soon on her knees by my side, praying for me, and exhorting me to look to Christ for mercy, and then and there I promised the Lord that if he would spare me, I would seek and serve him. My mother prayed for me a long time. At length we lay down, but there was little sleep for me.

Next morning I rose feeling wretched beyond expression. I tried to read in the Testament and retired many times to secret prayer through the day but found no relief. I gave up my racehorse to my father and requested him to sell him. I went and brought my pack of cards and gave them to Mother, who threw them into the fire, and they were consumed. I fasted, watched, and prayed, and engaged in regular reading of the Testament. I was so distressed and miserable that I was incapable of any regular business.

My father was greatly distressed on my account, thinking I must die and he would lose his only son. He bade me retire altogether from business and take care of myself.

Soon it was noised abroad that I was distracted, and many of my associates in wickedness came to see me, to try and divert my mind from those gloomy thoughts of my wretchedness, but all in vain. I exhorted them to desist from the course of wickedness which we had been guilty of together.

The class-leader and local preacher were sent for. They tried to point me to the bleeding Lamb; they prayed for me most fervently. Still I found no comfort, and although I had never believed in the doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation, I was sorely tempted to believe I was a reprobate and doomed and lost eternally, without any chance of salvation.

Flashes of light

At length one day, I retired to the horse-lot and was walking and wringing my hands in great anguish, trying to pray, on the borders of utter despair. It appeared to me that I heard a voice from heaven, saying, “Peter, look at me.” A feeling of relief flashed over me as quick as an electric shock.

It gave me hopeful feeling, and some encouragement to seek mercy, but still my load of guilt remained. I repaired to the house, and told my mother what had happened to me in the horse-lot. Instantly she seemed to understand it and told me the Lord had done this to encourage me to hope for mercy, and exhorted me to take encouragement and seek on, and God would bless me with the pardon of my sins at another time.

Some days after this, I retired to a cave on my father’s farm to pray in secret. My soul was in an agony; I wept, I prayed, and said, “Now, Lord, if there is mercy for me, let me find it,” and it really seemed to me that I could almost lay hold of the Savior, and realize a reconciled God.

All of a sudden, such a fear of the Devil fell upon me that it really appeared to me that he was surely personally there, to seize and drag me down to hell, soul and body, and such a horror fell on me that I sprang to my feet and ran to my mother at the house. My mother told me this was a device of Satan to prevent me from finding the blessing then. Three months rolled away, and still I did not find the blessing of the pardon of my sins.

In the spring, Mr. McGready, a minister of the Presbyterian church, who had a congregation and meetinghouse about three miles north of my father’s house, appointed a sacramental meeting in this congregation. As there was a great waking up among the churches from the revival that had broken out, many flocked to [such meetings]. The church would not hold the tenth part of the congregation. Accordingly the officers of the church erected a stand in a contiguous shady grove and prepared seats for a large congregation.

The people crowded to this meeting from far and near. They came in their large wagons, with victuals mostly prepared. The women slept in the wagons, and the men under them. Many stayed on the ground night and day for a number of nights and days together. Others were provided for among the neighbors around. The power of God was wonderfully displayed; scores of sinners fell under the preaching, like men slain in mighty battle; Christians shouted aloud for joy.

To this meeting I repaired—a guilty, wretched sinner. On the Saturday evening, I went with weeping multitudes and bowed before the stand and earnestly prayed for mercy. In the midst of a solemn struggle of soul, an impression was made on my mind, as though a voice said to me, “Thy sins are all forgiven thee.” Divine light flashed all round me, unspeakable joy sprung up in my soul.

I rose to my feet, opened my eyes, and it really seemed as if I was in heaven—the trees, the leaves on them, and everything, I really thought, were praising God. My mother raised the shout, my Christian friends crowded around me and joined me in praising God. And though I have been since then, in many instances, unfaithful, yet I have never, for one moment, doubted that the Lord did, then and there, forgive my sins and give me religion.

Driving Off the Mormons

Cartwright was the prototype of the rough, battling circuit rider, as this excerpt shows. It also shows the frontier as a religious free market, where dynamic leaders and groups—Baptists, Shakers, Mormons, among others—competed fiercely for souls.

“It fell to my lot to become acquainted with Joe Smith personally,” Cartwright says, speaking of the Mormon founder. He then recounts their meeting.

Great debate

I found him to be a very illiterate and impudent desperado in morals, but, at the same time, he had a vast fund of low cunning.

In the first place, he made his onset on me by flattery, and he laid on the soft sodder thick and fast. He expressed great and almost unbounded pleasure in the high privilege of becoming acquainted with me, one of whom he had heard so many great and good things. And he had no doubt I was one among God’s noblest creatures, an honest man.

He believed that among all the churches in the world the Methodist was the nearest right, and that, as far as they went, they were right. But they had stopped short by not claiming the gift of tongues, of prophecy, and of miracles, and then quoted a batch of Scripture to prove his positions correct.

Upon the whole, he did pretty well for clumsy Joe. I gave him rope, as the sailors say, and, indeed, I seemed to lay this plattering unction pleasurably to my soul.

“Indeed,” said Joe, “if the Methodists would only advance a step or two further, they would take the world. And if you would come in and go with us, we could sweep not only the Methodist church, but all others, and you would be looked up to as one of the Lord’s greatest prophets. You would be honored by countless thousands, and have of the good things of this world all that heart could wish.”

I then began to inquire into some of the tenets of the Latter-Day Saints. He explained. I criticized his explanations till, unfortunately, we got into high debate.

The next pass he made at me was to move upon my fears. He said that in all ages of the world, the good and right way was evil spoken of, and that it was an awful thing to fight against God.

“Now,” said he, “if you will go with me to Nauvoo, I will show you many living witnesses that will testify that they were, by the saints, cured of blindness, lameness, deafness, dumbness, and all the diseases that human flesh is heir to. And I will show you,” said he, “that we have the gift of tongues, and can speak in unknown languages, and that the saints can drink any deadly poison, and it will not hurt them.” [He] closed by saying, “The idle stories you hear about us are nothing but sheer persecution.”

“This is my camp meeting”

I then gave him the following history of an encounter I had at a camp meeting in Morgan County, some time before, with some of his Mormons, and assured him I could prove all I said by thousands that were present.

The camp meeting was numerously attended, and we had a good and gracious work of religion going on among the people. On Saturday there came some 20 or 30 Mormons to the meeting. During the intermission after the 11:00 sermon, they collected in one corner of the encampment and began to sing, and they sang well. As fast as the people rose from their dinners, they drew up to hear the singing, until a large company surrounded them.

At length (according, I have no doubt, to a preconcerted plan) an old lady Mormon began to shout, and after shouting a while, she swooned away and fell into the arms of her husband. The old man proclaimed that his wife had gone into a trance, and that when she came to, she would speak in an unknown tongue and he would interpret. This proclamation produced considerable excitement, and the multitude crowded thick around. Presently the old lady arose and began to speak in an unknown tongue, sure enough.

Just then my attention was called to the matter. I saw in one moment that the whole maneuver was intended to bring the Mormons into notice and break up the good of our meeting.

I advanced instantly toward the crowd and asked the people to give way and let me in to this old lady, who was then being held in the arms of her husband. I came right up to them and took hold of her arm, and ordered her peremptorily to hush that gibberish, that I would have no more of it, that it was presumptuous and blasphemous nonsense. I stopped very suddenly her unknown tongue.

She opened her eyes, took me by the hand, and said, “My dear friend, I have a message directly from God to you.”

I stopped her short and said, “I will have none of your message. If God can speak through no better medium than an old, hypocritical, lying woman, I will hear nothing of it!”

Her husband, who was to be the interpreter of her message, flew into a mighty rage, and said, “Sir, this is my wife, and I will defend her at the risk of my life!”

I replied, “Sir, this is my camp meeting, and I will maintain the good order of it at the risk of my life. If this is your wife, take her off from here, and clear yourselves in five minutes, or I will have you under guard.”

The old lady slipped out and was off quickly. The old man stayed a little and began to pour a tirade of abuse on me. I stopped him short and said, “Not another word of abuse from you, sir. I have no doubt you are an old thief, and if your back was examined, no doubt you carry the marks of the cowhide for your villainy.”

And sure enough, as if I had spoken by inspiration, he, in some of the old states, had been lashed to the whipping post for stealing. To cap the climax, a young gentleman stepped up and said he had no doubt all I said of this old man was true, and much more, for he had caught him stealing corn out of his father’s crib.

By this time, such was the old man’s excitement that great drops of sweat ran down his face, and he called out, “Don’t crowd me, gentlemen; it is mighty warm.”

Said I, “Open the way, gentlemen, and let him out.” When the way was opened, I cried, “Now start, and don’t show your face here again, nor one of the Mormons. If you do, you will get Lynch’s law.”

They all disappeared, and our meeting went on prosperously; a great many were converted to God.

Wrath boiled over

My friend Joe Smith became very restive before I got through with my narrative. And when I closed, his wrath boiled over, and he cursed me in the name of his God and said, “I will show you, sir, that I will raise up a government in these United States which will overturn the present government, and I will raise up a new religion that will overturn every other form of religion in this country!”

“Yes,” said I, “Uncle Joe; but my Bible tells me ‘the bloody and deceitful man shall not live out half his days,’ and I expect the Lord will send the Devil after you some of these days and take you out of the way.”

“No, sir,” said he; “I shall live and prosper, while you will die in your sins.”

“Well, sir,” said I, “if you live and prosper, you must quit your stealing and abominable whor*doms!”

Thus we parted, to meet no more on earth; for in a few years after this, an outraged and deeply injured people took the law into their own hands and killed him, and drove the Mormons from the state.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Over his lifetime, Barton Stone witnessed the many bodily “exercises” of frontier revivals. In his 1847 autobiography, he described the forms that religious ecstasy took. A condensed excerpt:

Falling

The falling exercise was very common among all classes, the saints and sinners of every age and every grade, from the philosopher to the clown. The subject of this exercise would, generally, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth, or mud, and appear as dead.

At a meeting, two gay young ladies, sisters, both fell, with a shriek of distress, and lay for more than an hour apparently in a lifeless state. At length they began to exhibit symptoms of life, by crying fervently for mercy, and then relapsed into the same death-like state, with an awful gloom on their countenances. After awhile, the gloom on the face of one was succeeded by a heavenly smile, and she cried out, “Precious Jesus!” and rose up and spoke of the love of God.

The Jerks

Sometimes the subject of the jerks would be affected in some one member of the body, and sometimes in the whole system. When the head alone was affected, it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen the person stand in one place, and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before.

Dancing

The dancing exercise generally began with the jerks, then the jerks would cease. The smile of heaven shone on the countenance of the subject, and assimilated to angels appeared the whole person. Sometimes the motion was quick and sometimes slow. Thus they continued to move forward and backward in the same track or alley till nature seemed exhausted, and they would fall prostrate on the floor or earth.

Barking

The barking exercise (as opposers contemptuously called it) was nothing but the jerks. A person affected with the jerks would often make a grunt, or bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk.

Laughing

It was a loud, hearty laughter, but one [that] excited laughter in none else. The subject appeared rapturously solemn, and his laughter excited solemnity in saints and sinners. It is truly indescribable.

Running

The running exercise was nothing more than that persons [who,] feeling something of these bodily agitations, through fear, attempted to run away and thus escape from them. But it commonly happened that they ran not far before they fell or became so greatly agitated that they could proceed no farther.

Singing

The singing exercise is more unaccountable than anything else I ever saw. The subject in a very happy state of mind would sing most melodiously, not from the mouth or nose, but entirely in the breast, the sounds issuing thence. Such music silenced everything, and attracted the attention of all. It was most heavenly. None could ever be tired of hearing it.

Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.