Chesterton was half-right: America is a “nation with the soul of a church.” The other half of the truth is that many of our churches lack basic features of historic churchiness: sacraments, liturgical forms, settled creeds, authority. Like America itself, the American church seems a novus ordo seclorum. Our churchy national soul weirdly inhabits a body of peculiar, borderline-heretical actual churches.
In some respects, our unchurchy churchiness is no surprise. We’re Protestant, and Protestants have always been, as Alec Ryrie writes, radicals, lovers, and fighters, restlessly carrying on a centuries-long “open-ended, ill-disciplined argument,” churning out new ideas and rehabilitating old ones with “a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability.” A “self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning,” the Protestant churches have been “one of the engines driving modern history.”
America was founded as a post-Christendom Christian nation. Christian, yes, profoundly so, but never Christian in the way Europe was Christian. Europe became Christian century after plodding century. We started out Christian. The Reformation battered and splintered European Christendom. Colonists brought their European splits with them, and proceeded to split even more. The church was the unifying reality of medieval Europe; after the Reformation, most European nations established one or another variety of national church. Free church Christianity was a late development in Europe. Free church Christianity is American Christianity. States retained established churches into the early nineteenth century, but that was a long time ago. Our default ecclesiology is Lockean and Baptist.
Protestantism kicked into hyper-gear in what Ryrie calls the “wild west” of America, and revivalism was the rocket fuel. Other nations have experienced revivals, sometimes profound, but nowhere else has revivalism so fundamentally shaped the shape of the church. Methodist, Baptist, and offshoot movements like the Disciples of Christ, Adventists, and Seventh Day Adventists, which are the most characteristically American forms of Christianity, took off during our early revivals. Harold Bloom considered Mormonism the most American of religions, which originated in the “burnt-over district” of western New York, named for the number of “burning” revivals during the Second Great Awakening.
In my judgment, revivalism has done untold harm to the church. As Alan Heimert argued long ago in his book Religion and the American Mind, the First Awakening destroyed whatever unity the church still possessed, leaving a vacuum of communal passion to be filled by nationalist Revolutionary fervor. The Second Awakening sowed even more chaos, promoted as it was by bombastic itinerant preachers who entertained the masses who crammed into tents with shameless, gimmicky appeals. Churches that incorporated revivalism’s individualism, rebelliousness, and rollicking inventiveness grew fastest, institutionalizing the ethos of the Awakenings. Staid Presbyterians stayed staid; they have their place in the American story, but New Light Presbyterianism represented the wave of America’s future. If you’re looking for specifically American culprits for the “moralistic therapeutic deism” that functions as our established faith, revivalism must be in the lineup. American Christianity needs an infusion of churchy churchiness.
And yet. In my review of Janós Zoltán Csák’s splendid book The Genius of America, I noted his Augustinian insight that the splendor and viciousness of our great civilization grow from the same root. The same is true of our Christianity. Our unique ecclesial experience has given the American church an unpredictable power, a flexibility and capacity for reinvention, that European Christianity largely lacks. Warts and all, American Christianity—America herself—is one of the many splendors of the church’s history.
American Christianity combines centuries of maturation with the adolescent frenzy of an African Independent Church. We may be more adolescent than adult, but that’s our redeeming charm—as well as the source of our strengths. Revivalism is the main source of the uniquely vibrant social activism of American Christianity. Temperance, urban renewal, prison ministry, abolitionism, and education reform were all energized by awakenings (see Timothy L. Smith’s classic, Revivalism and Social Reform). Thanks to revivalism, Americans donate a larger portion of their money to charities than any other people on the planet. Without revivalistic Christianity, there’d be no anti-abortion movement, no Moral Majority or populist New Right, no Civil Rights Movement or BLM or Antifa for that matter. Without revivalist Christianity, America would have rolled over and succumbed to secularism long ago. Without the unchurchy American church, we’d be so much more like Europe.
The world looks on in baffled awe, sometimes fear. We know the secret sauce. American Christianity wasn’t born at an ancient font in a soaring cathedral. Our national soul got itself saved when it walked the sawdust trail at a camp meeting. For all our glaring political and ecclesial flaws, there’s been nothing like America because there’s been nothing like the American church. There is nothing like America because there’s nothing like American Christianity.
