I hang my hat on historical records as well:
Egyptian Darkness
Five years earlier, few would have predicted the Cane Ridge revival. Since the American Revolution, Christianity had been on the decline, especially on the frontier. Sporadic, scattered revivals—in Virginia in 178788, for example—dotted the landscape, but they were short-lived. Religious indifference seemed to be spreading.
On a trip to Tennessee in 1794, Methodist bishop Francis Asbury wrote anxiously about frontier settlers, “When I reflect that not one in a hundred came here to get religion, but rather to get plenty of good land, I think it will be well if some or many do not eventually lose their souls.”
Andrew Fulton, a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland, discovered in Nashville and in “all the newly formed towns in this western colony, there are few religious people.” The minutes of the frontier Transylvania Presbytery reveal deep concern about the “prevalence of vice & infidelity, the great apparent declension of true vital religion in too many places.”
Rampant alcoholism and avaricious land-grabbing were matched by the increasing popularity of both universalism (the doctrine that all will be saved) and deism (the belief that God is uninvolved in the world). Methodist James Smith, traveling near Lexington in the autumn of 1795 feared that “the universalists, joining with the Deists, had given Christianity a deadly stab hereabouts.”
Hyperbole, perhaps. Still, during the six years preceding 1800, the Methodist Church—most popular among the expanding middle and lower classes—declined in national membership from 67,643 to 61,351. In the 1790s the population of frontier Kentucky tripled, but the already meager Methodist membership decreased.
Churches and pastors did not merely wring their hands; they clasped them in prayer—at prayer meetings, at worship, and at national conventions. In 1798 the Presbyterian General Assembly asked that a day be set aside for fasting, humiliation, and prayer to redeem the frontier from “Egyptian darkness.”
Church discipline was thrown into high gear. Church minute books record those excluded from fellowship for alcoholism, profanity, mistreatment of slaves, and sexual immorality. Some congregations were so exacting, they decimated their ranks. No matter, they said; sinning had to be stopped in order that God might again bless.
Christian History Institute (CHI) provides church history resources and self-study material and publishes the quarterly Christian History Magazine. Our aim is to make Christian history enjoyable and applicable to the widest possible audience.
christianhistoryinstitute.org
