CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MORE CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM: INSIDE AMERICA’S SECOND GREAT AWAKENING

No spiritual revival lasts forever. If the church does not remain faithful in prayer and faithful to the Spirit-filled teaching of God’s Word, even the children and grandchildren of those who have been greatly awakened can find themselves drifting off to sleep. Unfortunately, after the American Revolution, after the long, hard fight against the British, many Americans began drifting again from the nation’s biblical moorings, and before long, the new democracy was experiencing a cultural crisis that threatened to unravel the fabric of the country.

Professor Mark Noll, the esteemed Christian historian who in 2005 was named by Time magazine as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,”[378] described post-Revolution America in his extensive and insightful book A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada.

The state of Christianity after the American Revolution was not good. The tide of warfare itself had disrupted many local congregations, particularly where the fighting had been most intense—in New Jersey, New York City, the Philadelphia area, and the Carolinas. The Revolution had dealt an especially hard blow to the Episcopal church, whose ties with England made it particularly suspect. . . . Interest in religion more generally also seemed on the decline. Concern for creating a new nation, for populating the open lands west of the Appalachians, for overcoming the ravages of inflation, and for avoiding foreign entanglements left little time for church. . . . [After the Revolution,] well under 10 percent of the population belonged formally to local congregations, and many on the frontier were entirely devoid of Christian influence.[379]

Fortunately, God chose to move in a very powerful way in America in the early 1800s, and we can learn much from what became known as the Second Great Awakening.

The Second Great Awakening (1800–1850s)

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I first became curious about this period in history back in the late 1990s, when I was working as a senior aide to Steve Forbes, editor in chief of the nation’s foremost business magazine and two-time presidential candidate. During the four years I worked for Steve (1996–2000), I had the opportunity to work closely with him on two books, a small paperback titled The Moral Basis of a Free Society and a hardcover titled A New Birth of Freedom. One of the things I appreciated so much about Steve was his command of American history and his great curiosity about the Second Great Awakening. He spoke of it frequently during his 1996 campaign.

Before I joined the campaign, I remember watching Steve on C-SPAN and other networks as he suggested to audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire that America had made positive, sweeping changes in the past and that we could do so again. Such talk captured my interest. It wasn’t often that I heard business leaders or presidential candidates talk about the vital importance of spiritual revivals in American history, much less our urgent need for more of them. I was impressed, and when I was asked to join his team as a communications advisor, I was honored to do so. I believed in his message and was eager to help more people hear it. I was particularly encouraged when Steve decided to embark on these two writing projects and asked me to do more research on the Second Great Awakening.

What we found—drawing on the work of Professor Noll and a range of other Christian and secular historians—was fascinating.

Following the Revolutionary War, America experienced a period of moral decline. . . . Spiritual devotion waned, and social problems proliferated. From the late 1770s until the late 1820s, per capita consumption of alcohol in America rose dramatically, to about four or five times what it is today. Everybody took a swig from the jug—teachers, preachers, children. They called it “hard cider,” but it was nothing like the cider we buy at the grocery store today. In those days, it seemed everyone was in a haze by noontime. . . . The social consequences were predictable.

“Illegitimate births were rampant. . . . Thomas Paine was proclaiming that Christianity was dead—and certainly the body of faith appeared to be in a coma. Yet even as church rolls were shrinking and greed, sensuality, and family breakdown were becoming more widespread, America was about to experience a great spiritual revival.”

Slowly at first, then building over the next several decades, one wave of spiritual renewal and religious rededication after another swept the country, in what historians now call America’s “Second Great Awakening.” In one community after another, people began to wake up from their moral and spiritual slumber as though saying, “If we’re going to have a self-governing nation, it must be occupied by self-governing people.” The first public health movement in America was launched not by government but by citizens such as Lyman Beecher, the founder of the American Bible Society and a pastor who went on to form the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance in 1826. This enterprise became known as the Temperance Movement—and it worked. Within one generation alcoholic consumption in America fell by two-thirds.

Soon pastors and community leaders were opening elementary and secondary schools (this was before “public” education), founding colleges and universities, setting up orphanages and homes for abandoned children, creating shelters for the poor, building hospitals, and exhorting people to stop drinking and spend more time with their families.[380]

I learned a lot in the process of working on those projects. Since then I’ve taken the time to look even more closely at this remarkable period of American history. I’ve learned that in many ways the Second Great Awakening was even more powerful and impactful on American society in the nineteenth century than the First Great Awakening had been in the eighteenth. The more I learned, the more I found myself hoping that maybe, just maybe, the Lord will bless us with a third such sweeping spiritual awakening in our times.

The Rise of Francis Asbury (1745–1816)

One of the most important figures in the Second Great Awakening was a man named Francis Asbury. Born near Birmingham, England, on August 20, 1745, as America’s First Great Awakening was in full swing, Asbury was raised in a strong Christian home by parents who had been heavily influenced by the teachings of John Wesley. In 1771, after Asbury had finished his schooling, he heard Wesley urge young people in Britain to become missionaries to America. The twenty-six-year-old Asbury quickly signed up.

He didn’t see much success at the beginning of his ministry. After all, the Revolutionary War was about to disrupt everything and make Americans extremely wary if not hostile toward anyone from England. In fact, soon after the war broke out, every single other Methodist missionary left America and returned to England. But not Asbury. He stayed put. He carefully navigated the dangerous political climate, built strong personal relationships with pastors throughout the colonies, faithfully planted the seeds of the Word of God, and preached the gospel. In so doing he laid the groundwork for a ministry that in time, he prayed, would bear much fruit, just as the Wesley brothers had taught him.

In reading various accounts of Asbury, several things moved me.

First, Asbury was a man deeply committed to Jesus Christ. He rose around four or five o’clock in the morning—obviously not to watch television or check his e-mail or engage in trivialities. Rather, Asbury spent at least an hour in prayer, pleading with God to give him strength and wisdom and to change the hearts of Americans wherever he preached.[381]

Second, Asbury was a man deeply committed to the Word of God. Asbury studied the Bible voraciously and read many other Christian books as well. Indeed, he wrote in his journal that his daily routine was to read at least a hundred pages to keep his mind and heart sharp and focused.[382]

Third, Asbury was a man deeply committed to preaching the gospel no matter what the cost. Over the course of his ministry as a Methodist church circuit rider, he logged more than three hundred thousand miles on his trusty horse, riding from town to town, village to village, state to state to spread the Word of God and try to save men’s souls. He is said to have crossed the Appalachian Mountains more than sixty times to find and reach Americans who had never heard the gospel before.[383] During all those travels—often through blistering heat or driving rain or freezing snow (conditions that frequently left him ill)—he preached more than ten thousand sermons.[384] Though he wasn’t known as a particularly fiery or charismatic speaker, he was convinced that living frugally, teaching the Bible simply, being out among the people, understanding their concerns, and communicating in a way they could understand would ultimately be effective. And it was. This life wasn’t easy for him or for his wife. But Asbury was determined to be found faithful to this high calling and let nothing distract him from his mission.

Fourth, Asbury was a man deeply committed to making disciples, recruiting and training new pastors, and planting new churches that were biblically based and theologically committed to solid, orthodox Christianity. He believed that Christ had given him—and all believers—the great commission not simply to go and preach the gospel but also to make disciples. So that’s what he did. He knew full well that the vast majority of towns and villages he traveled to and through didn’t have a church and couldn’t afford a preacher. He also knew that he couldn’t personally shepherd all the people he and his allies were helping lead to Christ. So he became determined to do more than simply preach the gospel in these areas. He also wanted to help the new Christians start their own congregations with pastors who could minister to them year-round. He held training meetings. He organized and taught at regional Bible conferences. Like the apostle Paul on his missionary journeys, Asbury returned to visit new pastors in various far-flung parts of the country time and again so he could answer their questions and encourage them and help them not feel isolated and alone. He proved to be an extraordinary organizer of men as he followed (and at times improved upon) the methods that Wesley had taught him in England, for which the Methodists became so well known in their early history. On top of all this, and again following the Wesleys’ lead, he dedicated himself to caring for the poor and needy and the disenfranchised in society, and he encouraged the men he trained to care for them as well.

The Impact of Francis Asbury

The impact of Asbury’s approach was nothing less than astounding. Inspired by the Wesley brothers to leave England and become a Methodist missionary in America, Asbury was the model disciple. He studied the Wesley model carefully, applied it tirelessly, prayed continuously, and by the grace of God saw tremendous fruit.

Yet what impresses me most about Asbury is his keen understanding that his objective should not simply be winning converts in the colonies, as wonderful as that would be. Rather, he saw his objective as identifying, recruiting, training, and mobilizing into action future pastors, evangelists, and disciple makers. Winning more souls to Christ, he determined, would simply be a ministry of addition—useful but shortsighted. Recruiting and training more soul winners and church planters, by contrast, would be a ministry of multiplication. If he did it right and did it well, relying upon the power of the Holy Spirit and not his own human effort, Asbury realized that a ministry of multiplication could help the Methodist church not simply expand but grow exponentially over time. That was the Wesleys’ theory. It was heartily embraced by Asbury. And they were right.

“Statistics can never tell a whole story,” Mark Noll wrote, “but when Francis Asbury came to America in 1771, four Methodist ministers were caring for about 300 laypeople. When he died in 1816, there were 2,000 ministers and over 200,000 Methodists in the States and several thousand more in Canada devoted, as he put it, to ‘the dear Redeemer . . . of precious souls.’”[385]

Many of those new Methodist pastors were saved through Asbury’s preaching and were recruited and trained in part by his efforts. Such men then followed his lead and saw extraordinary results.

• By 1830, there were over 500,000 followers of Christ who had become members of the Methodist church in the United States.

• By 1840, that number had climbed to over 890,000.

• By 1850, there were more than 1.2 million professing Methodists in the U.S.

• By 1900, that number had skyrocketed to more than 4.6 million.[386]

Can we say with absolute certainty that each and every one of those was a born-again believer? We cannot, though many certainly were, and there is a rich history of people being truly converted through the Methodist church during the nineteenth century and becoming mobilized to care for the poor and needy, to start schools and orphanages, and to impact their communities in other positive ways in the name of Jesus.

Sadly, in the twentieth century many Methodist congregations embraced liberal theology and distanced themselves from the orthodox teachings of their predecessors, but that cannot be held against the movement’s founders or early leaders. Indeed, we should pray for the Methodist church to experience another awakening today that would take it back to its solid biblical roots, that it might again have such a powerful effect on the American nation.

The Rise of Timothy Dwight (1752–1817)

In the last chapter, we noted the remarkable legacy of Jonathan Edwards’s descendants and the key roles many of them have played in American religious, social, and political life, as well as in overseas missions. Consider briefly the story of one of those descendants, an important but generally overlooked figure in the Second Great Awakening.

Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards on his mother’s side, was born on May 14, 1752, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Raised in a deeply devoted Christian home, he gave his life to Jesus Christ at a young age. He was a brilliant boy who was homeschooled by his mother (since there were no public schools at the time) and loved to study the Scriptures. “It didn’t take long for Mary Dwight to discover her eldest had an unusually quick mind,” one chronicler noted. “By age four, Dwight was reading the Bible, songbooks, books on prayer, and whatever else his mother gave him. At the age of six, the precocious Dwight would overhear Latin lessons given to older boys at a local grammar school, and then steal away on his own to go over Lily’s Latin Grammar. He had a remarkably absorbent mind and not infrequently surprised adults by recounting stories he had read, with all the minutiae included.”[387]

Dwight attended and graduated from Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut (later expanded into Yale University). Among other subjects, he studied theology and became an ordained minister, serving as a military chaplain during the Revolutionary War. After the war, he became the pastor of a congregation in Greenfield, Connecticut, started an elementary school, was twice elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and became an outspoken opponent of slavery. Committed as he was to impacting both the church and the newly free American nation for the cause of Christ, he was also determined to impact the world for Christ. Working toward this goal, he helped start three foreign missions societies to recruit, train, send, and support evangelists, pastors, and church planters to win souls in other countries.

Despite poor health and weak eyesight, Dwight read constantly, and he loved to write. He was a poet and penned a multi-book epic titled The Conquest of Canaan about the Jews conquering and settling the land of Israel.

For most men, such accomplishments would have been enough, but not for a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. For Dwight, this was merely preparation for how God was going to use him next. In 1795, Dwight was elected president of Yale College, his alma mater. He wasn’t entirely sure, however, that he wanted the assignment. Yale was not the school it had once been. Founded in 1701 by clergymen who wanted to train young men to make a difference for Christ, Yale had built an impressive legacy early on. Twenty-five of its graduates had served in the Continental Congress. Four had signed the Declaration of Independence. But since the end of the war, the prestigious school had drifted from its biblical moorings, and Dwight wasn’t convinced it could be turned around.

“Before [President Dwight] came college was in a most ungodly state,” a Yale student during this time later wrote. “The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and . . . intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common.”[388]

“Students found pleasure in nightly revelings that frequently included breaking tutors’ windows and smashing bottles,” another chronicler wrote. “Yale men regularly clashed with drunken townsmen in violent engagements where rocks flew and clubs flailed. Christian faith was unfashionable and reviled on campus.”[389]

From 1701 to 1744, records show that on average, half of Yale’s graduates went into full-time Christian ministry. By the late 1790s, however, most of the students attending Yale weren’t even professing Christians.[390] The year Timothy Dwight took office, barely one in ten of the 125 students enrolled at Yale would admit to being a Christian.[391]

“To build up a ruined college is a difficult task,” Dwight remarked upon being named Yale’s president.[392]

Nevertheless, that’s what he set out to do.

The Impact of Timothy Dwight

After much prayer and analysis of the situation on campus, Dwight concluded that the only way to change Yale was to change the minds of the students and faculty who lived and worked there. The only way to change their minds was to change their hearts. And the only way to change their hearts was for God to do it himself by bringing about a revival.

Dwight knew revival was possible. As a boy he had seen the effects of the Great Awakening with his own eyes. He had heard his mother’s and grandfather’s stories with his own ears. He had read his grandfather’s books. He knew that in dark times Jonathan Edwards had trusted in the inerrancy of God’s Word and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Dwight couldn’t know for sure whether God would choose to send revival again or not. But he had faith in passages of Scripture like “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2, NIV) and “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16). What’s more, he believed that revivals would precede the second coming of Jesus Christ, and he wanted to be faithful in doing his part while praying for and expecting God to do his.

First, Dwight personally engaged the faculty and staff. He met with them and got to know them. He let them know who he was and where he was coming from, and he made it clear that under his leadership, Yale would now be returning to its biblical heritage. He suggested that those who supported this direction were welcome to stay, but for anyone who embraced theological heresy or European radicalism, it was time to leave. Some have suggested that Dwight unleashed a purge at Yale, firing numerous professors who refused to boldly profess their Christian faith.[393] While I have not found sufficient evidence to back up such broad claims, there is no question that Dwight did let at least one faculty member go—Josiah Meigs, professor of mathematics, who was a supporter of the antireligious elements of the French Revolution and who clashed repeatedly with Dwight on a range of issues.[394]

Second, Dwight personally engaged the students. He didn’t hide from their skepticism and cynicism but directly answered them. In a class he taught to seniors, he asked the students to give him a list of all the tough questions they wanted answered that semester. “When the senior class decided to test their new instructor by suggesting they debate the question, ‘Are the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament the Word of God?’ Dwight, to their utter amazement, picked up the gauntlet,” one chronicler noted. “With academic rigor he refuted the popular arguments against the reliability of Scripture and submitted his reasons for believing it to be the revelation of God. With a rhetorical knife sharpened by faith and years of diligent study, he cut through the seductive abstractions of the French philosophies and demonstrated to their devotees the unreasonableness of what they had embraced.”[395]

Third, Dwight powerfully taught the Word of God day in and day out. In the classroom and in the college chapel, he did what few, if any, members of the faculty or administration at Yale had done in quite some time—he opened the Bible and made it the centerpiece of the students’ instruction. He also began “preaching six solid months on the question of biblical authority and accuracy.”[396]

Students could not refute Dwight’s deep understanding of Scripture or his deconstruction of all manner of philosophical and religious heresies. He spent time with the students one-on-one and in small groups. They were generating lots of questions, but Dwight patiently answered them all. A man once asked him whether he allowed his children to read “the books of infidels.” “Yes,” Dwight replied, “for they must become acquainted with them sooner or later, and while I am living I can confute the arguments they use. . . . I should be unwilling to have them find these arguments unawares, with nobody to meet them.”[397]

Indeed, Dwight treated his students with the same love and respect that he afforded his own children. The approach startled everyone at first, but eventually it began to work. In 1796, barely one in ten students at Yale claimed to be followers of Jesus Christ. But God was beginning to answer Dwight’s prayers. “Signs of revival began to emerge as early as 1797, when a group of twenty-five students founded the Moral Society of Yale College. Members of this secret society pledged to hold one another accountable in small groups similar to the Wesleys’ Holy Clubs at Oxford. . . . This stirring foreshadowed bigger outpourings to come.”[398]

Dwight kept faithfully praying and teaching the Word. One by one, students were giving their lives to Christ. Dwight thanked God for each soul, but he was praying for something more dramatic. And then, suddenly, the dam broke. During the 1801–1802 school year, a true revival broke out on campus. Fully one-third of students enrolled in Yale—about 80 out of 230—prayed to receive Christ. Thirty-five of them decided to enter full-time Christian ministry. Benjamin Silliman, a student at the time, wrote to his mother to say that Yale College had become “a little temple: prayer and praise seem to be the delight of the greater part of the students, while those who are still unfeeling are awed into respectful silence.”[399] Heman Humphrey, then a freshman, wrote, “The whole college was shaken. It seemed for a time as if the whole mass of the students would press into the kingdom. It was the Lord’s doing, and marvelous in all eyes. Oh, what a blessed change! . . . It was a glorious reformation. It put a new face upon the college.”[400]

Each year, of course, some of the spiritually strongest students would graduate, and new skeptics and cynics would arrive. But Dwight was undeterred. He kept praying and preaching and answering questions, and he saw another revival sweep the campus in 1808. Then another during the 1812–1813 academic year when nearly half the student body accepted Christ. A fourth revival came in the spring of 1815, “this one sparked by a group of students who gathered at 3:30 every morning to pray for the campus.”[401]

Dwight, however, was not content simply to lead students to the Lord. He discipled them and endeavored to equip them to preach the gospel and teach the Word to the rest of the country and the world. And the Lord rewarded those efforts. Newly converted students shared the gospel with fellow students, leading many to the Lord. They gathered for prayer and Bible study. And they encouraged one another to think beyond their time at Yale on how the Lord might use them to further advance the Kingdom of God. Over the course of his tenure at Yale, Dwight saw an average of one in five graduates enter full-time Christian ministry, often as pastors or missionaries.[402]

One of his earliest converts, from the class of 1797, became one of his most fruitful disciples. Lyman Beecher, who considered Dwight his mentor, not only trusted Christ under Dwight’s preaching but stayed on at Yale for another year to study theology. Upon leaving Yale, Beecher went on to become an ordained pastor, a renowned Bible teacher, an evangelist, the president of a seminary, a trainer of missionaries to reach the American West, an outspoken abolitionist, and a key figure in the Second Great Awakening. A tireless organizer seemingly cut from the same cloth as John Wesley, Beecher launched one new ministry after another. He helped found and build the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Tract Society, and the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.[403]

When Dwight died on January 11, 1817, he had not seen all the fruit his ministry would eventually bear, but he had surely proven faithful to his task. “It would be impossible to adequately describe the legacy he left behind at Yale and beyond,” two church historians noted. “Revival spread from Yale to Dartmouth and Princeton, though Harvard continued its slide toward Unitarianism. Yale continued to experience revival long after Dwight’s death. The largest revival came in 1831, when 104 students became members of the college church, and 900 others in New Haven were converted.”[404]

The Rise of Charles Finney (1792–1875)

While Timothy Dwight’s influence during the Second Great Awakening was primarily in New England, and Francis Asbury’s influence was primarily in the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and over the Appalachian Mountains, God also raised up men in New York State—the most populous state in the union in the 1800s and thus one of the most influential—to preach the gospel to the lost and revive the existing churches. One of the most prominent—and at times controversial—of these men was Charles Grandison Finney.

Charles Finney was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on August 29, 1792, but his family soon moved to Oneida County in central New York and later to the southern shores of Lake Ontario, near a town called Sackett’s Harbor. “Neither of my parents were professing Christians, and among our neighbors there were very few religious people,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I seldom heard a sermon, unless it was an occasional one from some traveling minister.”[405]

The first time Finney became interested in the Bible was while studying to become a lawyer in the town of Adams, New York, in Jefferson County, not far from the Adirondack Mountains. Noticing how often the law of Moses or other Scriptures were cited in his law books, he bought his first copy of the Bible and began to read it eagerly, though he understood little of it at first. What bothered Finney and kept him from the faith for some time was the dullness and lethargy and even hypocrisy that he saw in the churches he attended. He met numerous ministers, for example, who didn’t seem to truly believe the very Scriptures they were teaching. This troubled him greatly, and rightly so.

But there were also occasions when he misread the hearts and motives and sincerity of genuine believers, for he was not yet one himself. For a period of time, Finney attended a weekly prayer meeting that he concluded had no purpose and no impact. “On one occasion when I was in one of the prayer meetings, I was asked if I did not desire that they should pray for me,” he wrote. “I told them no, because I did not see that God answered their prayers. I said, ‘I suppose I need to be prayed for, for I am conscious that I am a sinner, but I do not see that it will do any good for you to pray for me, for you are continually asking, but you do not receive. You have been praying for a revival ever since I have been in Adams, and yet you do not have it. You have been praying for the Holy Spirit to descend upon you, and yet complaining of your leanness.”[406]

Little did Finney know that God was about to answer the prayers of those nameless but faithful saints—and the prayers of many others like them around the Northeast. Indeed, a sweeping revival was coming there, too, and the Lord was going to use Finney as one of the key agents of change.

It began on October 10, 1821, when Finney himself was miraculously saved. After many months of searching the Scriptures and imploring God for insight, one night Finney’s eyes were opened. “Right there the revelation of my pride was distinctly shown to me as the great difficulty that stood in the way,” Finney wrote. He wept on his knees, deeply struck by “an overwhelming sense of my wickedness.” Yet at that moment, a passage of Scripture he had been reading (Jeremiah 29:12-13) “seemed to drop into my mind with a flood of light,” and he sensed the Lord saying directly to him, “Then shall you go and pray unto me, and I will hearken to you. Then shall you seek me and find me when you shall search for me with all your heart.”[407]

What happened next stunned Finney. “I instantly seized hold of this with my heart. I had intellectually believed the Bible before, but never had the truth been in my mind that faith was a voluntary trust instead of an intellectual state. . . . I seized hold of [God’s promises] with the grasp of a drowning man. . . . I remembered saying with great emphasis, ‘If I am ever converted, I will preach the Gospel.’”[408]

Finney was not only saved to his great joy and relief, but he was true to his word, and the Lord used him to great effect. Immediately, acquaintances could see a change in his countenance and asked him what had changed. He told them of his salvation, and others began trusting Christ from that first day. The more people with whom Finney shared the gospel and his own experience, the more people were struck deeply by their own need for salvation, and they, too, prayed to receive Christ.

Soon Finney was leading so many people to the Lord that he decided he could no longer do the work of a lawyer but had to preach the gospel with all of his time. He realized that he had decided to become a lawyer before coming to Christ. He had never made the decision with God’s wisdom or direction. Therefore, he concluded after prayer, the career wasn’t from the Lord. He became convinced that he had the spiritual gift of an evangelist as described by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:11 and thus had to obey Paul’s admonition in 2 Timothy 4:5 to “do the work of an evangelist, [and] fulfill your ministry.”

The Impact of Charles Finney

Word spread rapidly that something extraordinary was happening. The power and favor of Christ was upon Finney’s life, and people could see it and sense it and were moved by it. Though he had no formal training in theology, he understood the basics of the gospel, and when he shared these truths, people said yes to Jesus. “The work spread among all classes and extended itself not only through the village but also out of the village in every direction,” Finney recalled. “My heart was so full that for more than a week I did not feel at all inclined to sleep or eat.”[409]

Finney’s parents were soon converted after he shared the message of Christ with them. Ministers began to ask him to preach, and he accepted many of those invitations. Floods of people were converted through his proclamation of the gospel.

Pastors who thought they had already been saved realized they had never truly been born again and were dramatically converted. Soon they, too, began preaching the gospel with new sincerity and conviction. People who had attended church for years but had never really believed now trusted Christ and began sharing the gospel with family, friends, and neighbors. Time after time, skeptics and cynics came to Finney’s meetings to mock the young preacher, but time after time they shortly fell to their knees, weeping and begging Christ for mercy.

Finney realized that he desperately needed to know as much of the Bible as he possibly could. He later wrote, “I read my Bible on my knees a great deal during those days . . . beseeching the Lord to teach me his own mind.”[410]

Finney also wrote, “I used to spend a great deal of time in prayer, sometimes literally praying ‘without ceasing.’ I also found it very profitable, and felt very much inclined to hold frequent days of private fasting. On those days I would seek to be entirely alone with God—and would generally wander off into the woods, or get into the meeting house [church] or somewhere away entirely by myself. . . . Whenever I fasted and let the Spirit take his course with me, and gave myself up to let him lead and instruct me, I always found it in the highest degree useful. I found I could not live without enjoying the presence of God.”[411]

God heard Finney’s prayers and used him even more mightily in the years ahead. Sometimes Finney would show up at a completely packed church to preach (he often spoke for up to two hours at a time) only to find that the moment he stood up to speak, people began crying and publicly confessing their sins and rededicating their lives to Jesus Christ before Finney said a word. People were not only receiving Christ as their Savior and Lord but were intensely moved by their own sinfulness and their desperate need for God’s mercy and forgiveness.

Revivals swept through central and upstate New York in places like Syracuse, Rome, and Utica, and “a great revival in Rochester over the winter of 1830–31 catapulted him to national renown.”[412] Rochester was one of the larger cities in western New York, with a population of approximately ten thousand at the time. Finney not only preached three times on Sundays but held revival meetings at least three other times each week. In fact, in Rochester, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to save the unsaved and draw the already saved into a closer walk with Christ was so astounding that Finney’s meetings drew hundreds of thousands of people from all over the region. Dr. Lyman Beecher, who contemporaneously chronicled the impact of the Finney revivals, observed that the ministry in Rochester “was the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival that the world has ever seen in so short a time. One hundred thousand . . . were reported as having connected themselves with churches as the results of that great revival. This is unparalleled in the history of the church.”[413]

“The moral aspect of things [in Rochester] was greatly changed by this revival,” Finney observed. “It was a young city, full of thrift and enterprise, but also full of sin. The inhabitants were intelligent and enterprising in the highest degree, but as the revival swept through the town and converted the great mass of the most influential people, both men and women, the change in the order, sobriety, and morality of the city was wonderful.”[414]

Christianity Today has noted that “the zenith of Finney’s evangelistic career was reached at Rochester, New York, where he preached 98 sermons between September 10, 1830, and March 6, 1831. Shopkeepers closed their businesses, posting notices urging people to attend Finney’s meetings. . . . Crime dropped by two-thirds over the same period.”[415]

Better yet, one historian noted, “the revival spread far beyond Rochester as revivalists and pastors who visited the city carried its enthusiasm and message back to the surrounding towns” and “a wave of revivals broke out from New England to Ohio as the new divinity suddenly caught hold and new measures proved an effective method for advancing them.”[416] Finney preached the gospel all over the Northeast, including in New York City for a year. To train and equip pastors, evangelists, and laypeople, he also published books of his sermons and later his autobiography.

The Legacy of Charles Finney

Revival “is the renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners to God,” Finney wrote in his much-read and -discussed 1835 book, Lectures on Revival. “A revival of [true Christianity] is the arousing, quickening, and reclaiming of the more or less backslidden church and the more or less general awakening of all classes, and insuring attention to the claims of God. It presupposes that the church is sunk down in a backslidden state.”[417]

In order to train a future generation of pastors and lay leaders and affect the moral and spiritual climate of the entire nation, Finney accepted the position of president of Oberlin College in Ohio in 1851. Like Francis Asbury, Finney took a long-term view. He didn’t simply want to win souls; he wanted to win, build, and send pastors and fellow soul-winners throughout the United States. Also like Asbury, Finney cared deeply about the poor and needy in society, and he encouraged his students to do so as well. What’s more, he believed women should receive better education, and Oberlin was the first college in the U.S. to admit women into its classes.[418]

At Oberlin, Finney also became known for advocating the abolition of slavery. He and his students helped lay the groundwork for the North’s moral opposition to slavery that would change the future of the nation just nine years later. Tragically, the people of the South resisted such desperately needed moral changes as the abolition of slavery and the restoration of freedom and justice to African Americans. Southern states began to secede from the Union upon the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, eventually resulting in a war that brought tremendous devastation on the country. Neither Finney nor the other revivalists can be directly blamed for the Civil War. Their desire, shared by millions of other Americans in the North and the South, was to see a peaceful process of national reform and renewal.

Finney was not perfect, of course, and he was by no means everyone’s cup of tea. His critics have accused him, for example, of being too emotional and theatrical in his preaching in the early years of his ministry, and this is a fair criticism. That said, he seems to have matured over time and was somewhat less emotional in his later preaching and teaching, to the point where some later criticized him for not being passionate enough in his preaching.

As noted previously, Finney was not a trained theologian. But this should by no means be a disqualifier. Many men and women who have been used powerfully by the Lord have not had formal theological training. Yet some believed Finney was not careful enough with his theology and his teaching of the Scriptures. Others saw Finney as an outright heretic. Both charges he vehemently denied.

While there are a number of theological areas in which one could take issue with Finney, let me note one here, as it is particularly relevant to whether we will see a Third Great Awakening. While Finney spoke often about the power of the Holy Spirit and wrote extensively about the role of the Holy Spirit in changing lives, he firmly believed that employing certain methods of ministry could bring about a revival no matter what. Whereas the Wesleys and Asbury taught that ministers should use certain methods based on biblical principles with the hope that the Lord would unleash revivals, Finney taught with conviction that if believers followed certain principles and took certain steps, God would, in turn, pour out his Holy Spirit, and a revival would ensue. “[Revival] is not a miracle,” he argued vigorously, “or dependent on a miracle. . . . It consists entirely in the right exercise of the power of nature. It is just that, and nothing else. . . . It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means. There may be a miracle among its antecedent causes, or there may not. The apostles employed miracles, simply as a means by which they arrested attention to their message, and established its divine authority. But the miracle was not the revival.”[419]

I don’t believe this teaching is scripturally sound. Revivals and awakenings cannot be created by man. Only God can bring them about. There are certainly things that the Scriptures tell all believers to do to serve the Lord and seek to win a community and bless a nation. We’ll discuss these in the next chapter. Nowhere in Scripture, however, do we see that human actions guarantee a revival, much less a Great Awakening. Our test is our faithfulness to the Word, not the results that we see. Pastors and missionaries who faithfully preach the gospel in a community or a country for years but see little fruit will be rewarded in heaven for their faithful obedience to the Lord and his Word, not for their visible results. As the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth. Now he who plants and he who waters are one; but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor” (1 Corinthians 3:6-8). We do our part, God does his, and only he decides whether to cause much growth or a little, to unleash a revival or an awakening or not.

That said, I don’t think Finney should be condemned or dismissed for believing that his methods would always cause revivals. He took certain actions, and they did bear much fruit. Many people did come under the conviction of sin. Many people did repent and give their hearts, souls, and minds to Christ. Nearly everything Finney did seemed to result in revival. So perhaps he can be forgiven for believing that other believers in other times and places would see the same results if they took the same actions.

Not surprisingly, then, Finney is widely regarded by historians as one of the key players in the Second Great Awakening. In the end, an estimated half million souls were converted through his preaching.[420] Indeed, one historian has described Finney as having had “a greater impact on the public life of antebellum America than any of the nation’s politicians.”[421]

Bottom Line

Like the First Great Awakening before it, the Second Great Awakening was not a panacea. It did not save every soul or solve every social ill. No revival ever has or will. Men and women always have the freedom to reject the Word of God and the mighty demonstration of his Holy Spirit. Take Judas Iscariot, for example. The Bible describes Judas as walking with and serving alongside Jesus for years. He saw Christ heal the sick and raise the dead. Yet Judas never actually received Jesus as his Messiah and Savior but betrayed him instead. Sadly, it happens. People reject Christ for all sorts of reasons, even in the midst of Great Awakenings.

The good news is this: the historical evidence is clear and compelling that many Americans found salvation during these periods, and American society as a whole was dramatically impacted and improved by both of these revivals. One piece of observable evidence in this regard is the explosive growth in the number of church congregations that were established in the wake of both Great Awakenings. Thomas S. Kidd, the historian and author of The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, noted that “as part of the stunning evangelical Protestant boom during that period, the total number of Baptist churches in America rose from about 150 in 1770 to just more than 12,000 in 1860.”[422] Mark Noll, in his aforementioned book A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, wrote, “Particularly in the southern and new western states, Baptists became leaders in evangelizing the frontier population. By 1812, there were close to 200,000 Baptists in the United States. . . . By 1850, the total exceeded 1,000,000. By that time, nearly three-fourths of them were also cooperating in national missionary ventures.”[423] Likewise, Kidd’s research concluded that “in 1770, Methodists had a paltry 20 churches in America. By 1860, that number had swelled to just under 20,000.”[424]

And it wasn’t just white Americans who were coming to faith and filling the churches. African Americans were coming to Christ in unprecedented numbers during this same period as well.[425]

What’s more, Noll found that “the revivals of the Second Great Awakening increased interest in missionary outreach,” moving the Baptists to send out more than one hundred missionaries into foreign lands in the early years of the 1800s.[426]

At the same time, Christians during this period sought to put their faith into action to improve their neighborhoods and communities and the nation as a whole. They persuaded millions of children to enroll in Sunday school programs to learn about the Bible and pray for their nation. They opened orphanages and soup kitchens to care for the poor and needy. They started clinics and hospitals to care for the sick, elderly, and infirm. They founded elementary and secondary schools for girls as well as boys. They established colleges and universities dedicated to teaching both the Scriptures and the sciences. They led social campaigns to persuade Americans to stop drinking so much alcohol and to abolish the evil of slavery. These Christians didn’t expect the government to take care of them. They believed it was the church’s job to show the love of Christ to their neighbors in real and practical ways. They were right, and they made America a better place as a result—not perfect, but better.

“Asbury and Finney were representatives of the most visible religious movements between the Revolution and the Civil War,” Noll concluded in his history of American Christianity. “They were both charismatic figures. . . . They were both great communicators. . . . They both had broad visions of Christian society . . . defining Christian social responsibilities as clearly as they defined personal spiritual duties. Together with like-minded leaders of only slightly less influence, they established the revival and voluntary society as the foundations of American Protestant faith.”[427]

Such history is worth examining. I encourage you to study the leaders and dynamics of the Second Great Awakening more closely for yourself and discuss what you learn with family, friends, and neighbors. I think you will be deeply encouraged, as I have been, that God has shown tremendous grace and mercy to America during dark times in the past.