At one period of time most religious denominations were quite tolerant of one another. Beginning with the so-called First Great American Awakening Quakers who had been united divided into four groups; among the New Lights of charismatics hundreds of splinter groups developed.
Predestination usually arises to prove that whatever our condition must be the will of God. For instance, early American settlers believed that they were ordained to live in and therefore dominate the American continent. Those who found themselves in power believed themselves to be the agents of God; to challenge the church leadership was to challenge God:
"In 1645, Winthrop delivered a speech setting out the ideology of this holy commonwealth and defining the limitation imposed by religion on the liberties of the people. Man, he insisted, had "a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest....
This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority, it is the same kind of liberty whereof Christ hath made us free....
If you stand for your natural corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in your own eyes, you will not endure the least weight of authority... but if you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and lawful liberties, such as Christ allows you,
then you will quietly and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you... for your good."
Winthrop defines the selection of officers:
"....for disposing and ordering the election of such of the said officers as shall be annual, etc., and for setting down forms of oaths and for ministering of them, etc., and for the directing, ruling, and disposing of all matters and things, whereby our said people inhabitants there, may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed, etc."
In several of the colonies, Baptists laboured under legal disabilities. The public whipping of Obadiah Holmes in 1651 for his refusal to pay a fine that had been imposed for holding an unlawful meeting in Lynn, Mass., caused John Clarke to write his News from New England (1652). Fourteen years later Baptists of Boston were fined, imprisoned, and denied the use of a meetinghouse they had erected.
Payment of taxes for support of the established church was a cause of continuing controversy in New England, while the necessity to secure licenses to preach became an inflammatory issue in Virginia.
This writer notes that: "The Puritans were a varied group of religious reformers who emerged within the Church of England during the middle of the sixteenth century. They shared a common Calvinist theology and common criticisms of the Anglican Church and English society and government.
"Their numbers and influence grew steadily, culminating in the English American Civil War of the 1640s and the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. With the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, Puritanism went into eclipse in England, largely because the movement was identified with the upheaval and radicalism of the American Civil War and Cromwell's tyrannical government, a virtual military dictatorship.
"But it persisted for much longer as a vital force in those parts of British North America colonized by two groups of Puritans who gradually cut their ties to the Church of England and formed separate denominations.
"One group, the Congregationalists, settled Plymouth in the 1620s and then Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the 1630s.
"Another group, the Presbyterians, who quickly came to dominate the religious life of Scotland and later migrated in large numbers to northern Ireland, also settled many communities in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century.
"Puritans in both Britain and British North America sought to cleanse the culture of what they regarded as corrupt, sinful practices.
They believed that the civil government should strictly enforce public morality by prohibiting vices like drunkenness, gambling, ostentatious dress, swearing, and Sabbath-breaking.
Religion was never a "private" matter. It was a public matter, because religious belief, society, and the state were inseparable. Government was not just a secular institution but a religious one, too. In 1682 William Penn in his Preface to the Frame of Government of Pennsylvania stated:
> "Government seems to me a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end... . It crushes the effects of evil and is as such (though lower yet) an emanation of the same divine power that is both author and object of pure religion, government itself being otherwise as capable of kindness, goodness, and charity as a more private society.
"It is important, I think, to grasp that these early settlements of English-speaking America were both individual and collective
contracts with God to set up a church-state,
not just a religious settlement. The earliest, the Mayflower Compact of 1620, reads:We, whose names are underwritten... having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together in a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.
"The church was formally constituted in exactly the same manner, as at Salem in 1629:
We covenant with the Lord and with one another; and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all His ways, according as He is pleased to reveal Himself unto us in His blessed word of truth.
> Hence the men who founded the English colonies in America drew no distinction between church and state: both were at one in enabling the City upon a Hill to be built.
But not all men were equal....
"It followed that the civil authority had the right to punish religious offenses as well as what we would call secular ones. In Winthrop's Massachusetts, all, whether freemen or not, had to swear an oath of loyalty to the government and undertake to submit to its authority, whether wielded in religious or in secular matters. The magistrates were officially described as "nursing fathers" (in a reference to Moses' self-description in Numbers); they were to tackle heresy, schism, and disobedience among the adult "children" of the colony, who were to be "restrained and punished by civil authority." And this was exerted in ruthless manner to uphold religious truth and public decorum.
"In August 1630, for instance, Governor Winthrop accused and convicted Thomas Morton of Boston of "erecting a maypole and reveling." Morton's house was burned down and he was put in the stocks while awaiting execution of sentence to be shipped back to England. The following June, Winthrop recorded in his journal that Philip Ratcliffe was whipped and had both his ears cut off for "most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government." Sir Christopher Gardiner was banished for what was described as "bigamy and papism." Debate
The "First Great Awakening" was a conscious attempt to control the lives of people. If people didn't conform to the will of the clergy then machinery must be established to prove that God was on the side of the manipulaters or facilitators:
"Horace M. Kallen, writing in July 1951 in the Saturday Review under the title "Democracy's True Religion," summarized the theory: "For the communicants of the democratic faith, it is the religion of and for religion. For being the religion of religions, all may freely come together in it." When in 1952 J. Paul Williams published What Americans Believe and How They Worship, he spelled out the ideology in more detail:
Americans must come to look upon the democratic ideal... as the Will of God, or, if they please, of Nature.... Americans must be brought to the conviction that democracy is the very Law of Life... government agencies must teach the democratic idea as religion.... Primary responsibility for teaching democracy might be given to the public school.... The churches deal effectively with but half the population, the government deals with all the population.... It is a misconception to equate separation of church and state with separation of religion and state.
The goal of unity of thought would not work without conditions. In fact all grand revivalistic schemes to exert political and religious conformity, results in many more sects. For instance, the united Quakers came out of the revival with at least four diverse groups. To the left of Jonathan Edwards, "C. C. Goen has identified 321 separations of one kind or another by these New SLights."
However, when the unity demanded by the Witchcraft trials and the First Awakening did not destroy the diversity, "unity in diversity" was the next method of totalitarian rule by a minority clergy:
"The first was what might be termed a high level of religiosity in the nation. Religious enthusiasm must be continually replenished to make the ethical and moral ideology seem important. This was supplied by the American system of creedal plurality.
Having abandoned the advantages of unity, the Americans sensibly turned to exploiting the advantages of diversity-and these proved to be considerable. It was the very competitiveness of rival religions in the United States, acting by analogy to the free-enterprise system, which kept the demands of the spiritual life constantly before the people, producing an atmosphere of perpetual revival.
"This was especially true along the expanding frontier and in the areas of 19th-century settlement. The second Great Awakening, starting in the- 1790's, continued until the middle decades of the l9th century.
The Wesleyans and Baptists spawned multitudes of cults and subcults, and the camp meeting became, for several decades, the characteristic form of American religious experiment.... and the Americans by Paul Johnson
The proof of predestination--especially of the clergy--is described by Barton W. Stone:
For instance, there was the falling exercise: "The subject of this exercise would, generally with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth or mud, and appear as if dead." Then there were the jerks: "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." This led to the barking exercise: "A person affected by the jerk would often make a grunt or bark from the suddenness of the jerk. " Then there was the dancing exercise, or solo automative dancing, while "the smile of heaven shone in the countenance of the subject." The laughing exercise produced "loud, hearty laughter.... The subject appeared rapturously solemn, and his laughter excited solemnity in saints and sinners. It is truly indescribable." Then there was a running exercise and a singing exercise, "not from the mouth or nose but entirely in the breast,
the sounds issuing from thence-such music silenced everything."
There were hundreds of such politico-religious communities in l9th-century America. As Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle in l840: "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."
Among the Anglicans-Become Methodists-become "Christian Church" in Virginia, we see the strong Southern resistance to the Northern, Monarchist-dominated religions. In all of the "distinctly American religions" the South had to fight off the Northern "evangelistic" urge to bring everyone under political servitude to the civil government or religious societies.
"The Christian churches led in endeavours for racial integration, with the exception of those churches that maintained racial segregation from the beginning,
in deference to theological arguments deduced from the "order of the creation" and "predestination."
On the other hand, the ideologically and politically founded racial theory has been introduced into black churches in recent times. The demand for a black theology with a black Christ in its centre has been made and, just as much as a theologically and ideologically founded racial theory on the part of whites, aggravates the specifically Christian task of racial integration within the church. Britannica Members
It comes as no surprise that:
"The American Civil War can be described as the most characteristic religious episode in the whole of American history since its roots and causes were not political and economic so much as religious and moral.
It was a case of a moral principle tested to destruction,
not of the principle but of those who opposed it. And in the process Christianity itself was placed under almost intolerable strain .The movement which finally destroyed American slavery was religious in a number of different senses. It reflected a degree of extremism in the Northern Christian sects.
William Lloyd Garrison, a Baptist converted to activism by Quakers, who founded the Boston Public Liberator, wrote in its first issue:
"I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, to speak, or write, with moderation." Extremists on this issue had many links with revivalism, which gave it a nationwide platform and constituency.
Then, too, there was the theology of abolition which, as might be expected, was primarily a moral theology. In 1845 Edward Beecher published a series of articles on what he termed the nation's "organic sin" of slavery, which invested the abolitionist cause with a whole series of evangelical insights. The City Upon a Hill
The Revolution in the North
From 1831-1840 immigration was up to 600,000; from 1841-1850, 1,713,251; from 1851 to 1860 2,598,214. Therefore, there was a huge influx of cheap labor in the North to compete with cheaper labor in the South. "In St. Louis on the eve of the American Civil War, it became difficult even to hold elections as political tensions spilled over into overt rioting between Germans and native-born Americans. In the mid-1840's an iflux of famished Irish gave rise to fears of Catholics. In short, religious zealots found enemies everywhere and "if we can't convert you we will have to kill you."
Two other realities also set the teeth of southerners on edge. The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of slave revolts both in the West Indies and in North America. The Denmark Vesey plot in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 and the Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, nine years later served as symbolic reminders that even the most obedient and religious slave might become a fierce avenger.
The parallel rise in militant abolitionism, which the South viewed as inciting such revolts, raised tensions yet another notch. If abolitionist literature could permeate the South through the U.S. mail, any reading slave became a potential incendiary.
Not all of this took place in the South. For instance, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and editor of the St Louis Observer, believed tha slavery was a sin. First calling for gradual emancipation, he later became an abolitionist, but in the violent climate of 1830s St. Louis, neither stand was tolerated by slavery's proponents. Although threatened, Lovejoy insisted on the public's right to "Hear both sides and let the right triumph." Seeking safety, he moved to Alton, Illinois, but mobs there smashed three presses. Defending a fourth Observer press in 1837, Lovejoy was murdered, shocking the nation. In giving his life for freedom of the press, Elijah Lovejoy gave us a better knowledge of its value.
While politically plotting the demise of the "wealth" from slavery in the South, most of the Southen "brethren" were not living in mansions. The photo below is one of three such mansions which this writer lived in because no ex-slave would live in it. These buildings were standing and occupied by whites while the Northern moneyed societies were spending their time and money attempting the forced conversion to missionary societies -- signing up even youth as "life members" and trying to force the use of an organ which most churches could not afford without going hungry. This "religious imperialism" which sprang up in the freedom of America most often resulted in armed conflict around the world and, in the end, the loss of any Christian influence.
Just up the hill. the house which became field hospital was still stained by the blood of men who died for the sins of their religious "fathers." Down below on a gift Victrola (still in my possession) we listened to the Fisk University Male Quartet singing
A man riding a horse and leading a mule laden with strips of hickory, ash or oak would sit in the shade and weave you a basket of any description. And a man riding a horse would entertain you with a wind-up Victrola by letting you hear a sermon from a Jehovah's Witness. Over yonder the charismatics built a brush arbor and "got it on" usually so violently that the sheriff had to be called. Oh, what went on in the woods a little child could not see.
Eerdman's Handbook to Christianity in America provides background to religious division prior to the American Civil War.
"The growth of abolitionism in the North --by 1838 the American Antislavery Society claimed 1,350 auxiliaries and 250,000 members -- was part of the acceleration of thought in Western nations toward a larger understanding of freedom and equality. In America the attack upon slavery took on the force of a campaign for the conscience.
It was a cause premised upon biblical argument and advocated with moral suasion.
"Although more radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) sought to work outside of the church,
perhaps the most effective reformers were those such as Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895), who had the explicit goal of converting people in much the same way as revivalists had done earlier. Weld's approach was to proclaim the sin of slavery. His most influential written work, Slavery As It ls: The Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839),
linked disclosures about slavery from southern newspapers to the biblical judgment, "Out of thine own mouth I condemn thee." The book in four months sold 22,000 copies.
1775-1863
In 1833, Beecher and his family moved to Cincinnati, where he became president of the Lane Theological Seminary, a training ground for the religious leaders of the abolition movement. Beecher's ability to carry religious principles into daily life deeply influenced his children, especially Catharine Beecher, who became a national voice for practical domestic management, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the best-selling author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The widespread fame of this virtuous family led a contemporary to joke, "This country is inhabited by saints, sinners, and Beechers."
from here http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/brady/gallery/05gal.html
An even greater sensation came in 1852 with the serial publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a phenomenal best-seller that one scholar has called "perhaps the most influential novel ever published ... a verbal earthquake, an ink-and paper tidal wave." The daughter of Lyman Beecher, sister of Henry Ward Beecher, and wife of an Old Testament professor, Harriet was a shrewd theologian in her own right,
and her ethical passion was perfectly in tune with the culture of northern evangelical Protestantism.
Again, Uncle Tom's Cabin itself had a background in religion and especially moral theology:
it was an improving tract as well as a piece of political propaganda.
"O, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times! Is not this power the spirit of HIM whose kingdom is yet to come, and whose will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven? But who may abide the day of his appearing? "For that day shall burn as an oven: and he shall appear as a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger in his right and he shall break in pieces the oppressor."
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE Uncle rloms Cabin, 1852
The common view was that Southern free labor competing with hired labor in the North was an evil which God would destroy but the sword would be in the hands of unsure men pushed by radical women and male religionists who saw political control as the will of God.
Eerdman's Handbook continues:
"American churches were even less capable of absorbing these tensions than were political institutions.
The three largest Protestant denominations, buffeted by heated debate over slavery, suffered serious division.Although the Presbyterians did not divide into northern and southern denominations until after secession,
the Old School-New School division of 1837 did reflect, along with a broad range of theological issues, the growing sectional tension.
The New School generally sympathized with the abolitionists while the Old School maintained that the church should not meddle in politics. Not unexpectedly, the latter had considerable support below the Mason-Dixon line.
However, these were the "Religious Right Extremists" of their day who saw their religion as God's authority for civil control even if a lot of innocent people had to suffer.
The issue of slavery was more central to the severing of Methodism in 1844 and the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The southerners chose to withdraw after the delegates at the General Conference
voted that Bishop James O. Andrew of Georgia, a slaveholder, desist from carrying out his ecclesiastical office.
Northern Methodists were attempting to remain true to the firm conviction of the entire denomination before 1800 that slavery was "contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature."
That twenty five thousand Methodist laypeople and some twelve hundred clergy in the South held slaves in 1844 is testimony not only to changes within southern Methodism but also to how entrenched this labor system had be come.
Methodist Rev. John T. Wightman, preaching at Yorkville, South Carolina: "The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South . . . This war is the servant of slavery." [The Glory of God, the Defence of the South (1861), cited in Eugene Genovese's Consuming Fire (1998).]
Similar tensions among Baptists surfaced in the one strong cooperative agency that these churches shared, the General Convention for Foreign Missions.
In 1844 this board refused to license missionaries who were slaveholders.
This action led churches in the South, who a generation before had decried slavery, to bring into existence the Southern Baptist Convention.
Religious domination of civil affairs has always led to the radicalization and hardening of views and never to Christian conversion.
American churches, thus, were unable to serve as instruments of compromise and moderation. In fact, they may have contributed to the hardening of attitudes, as churchmen played leading roles in the moral revolutions that swept North and South in opposite directions.
For twenty years before the American Civil War the churches shored up cultural positions with theological justifications. The resulting zeal for God and country gave both sides in the impending crisis great confidence that they belonged to a movement through which
God's truth was~marching on.
"When the cannons roared in Charleston harbor," Sydney Ahlstrom has written,
"two divinely authorized crusades were set in motion, each of them absolutizing a given social and political order. The pulpits resounded with a vehemence and absence of restraint never equaled in American history."
"There was little internal opposition to slavery among white Southern Christians, and a notable closing of ranks after the black preacher Nat Turner led the Virginia slave revolt of 1831, in which 57 whites were killed.
Revivalism, which in the North strengthened the cause of abolition,
was put to exactly the opposite use in the South, where it was, if anything, even more powerful."The South Carolina Baptist Association produced a biblical defense of slavery in 1822, and in 1844 John England, Bishop of Charleston, provided a similar one for Southern white Catholics. There were standard biblical texts on alleged Negro inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude, and St. Paul on obedience to masters. Both North and South could and did hurl texts at each other.
"Having split, the churches promptly went to battle on opposing sides when the war actually came.
Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana, entered the Confederate army as a major-general and announced: "It is for constitutional liberty, which seems to us to have fled for refuge, for our hearthstones and our altars that we strike."
Thomas March, Bishop of Rhode Island, preached to the militia on the other side: "It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist....God is with us ... the Lord of Hosts is on our side."
"To judge by the hundreds of sermons and specially-composed church prayers which have survived on both sides,
ministers were among the most fanatical of the combatants from beginning to end.
The churches played a major role in dividing the nation, and it is probably true that it was the splits in the churches which made a final split in the nation inevitable.
"In the North, such a charge was often willingly accepted. Granville Moddy, a Northern Methodist, boasted in 1861:
"We are charged with having brought about the present contest. I believe it is true we did bring it about, and I glory in it, for it is a wreath of glory round our brow."
"Southern clergymen did not make the same boast, but it is true that of all the various elements in the South they did the most to make a secessionist state of mind possible.
Southern clergymen were also particularly responsible for prolonging the increasingly futile struggle.
Both sides claimed vast numbers of "conversions" among their troops and a tremendous increase in churchgoing and prayerfulness as a result of the fighting
The clerical interpretation of the war's progress was equally dogmatic and contradictory. The Southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney blamed what he termed
"the calculated malice" of the Northern Presbyterians and called on God for a "retributive providence" which would demolish the South.
When he could get his hands on new breech-loaded rifles, Henry Ward Beecher said:
"There is more moral power in one of these than a hundred bibles!"
And he therefore supplied the fanatic John Brown and his army with the new rifles in Kansas.
Henry Ward Beecher predicted that the Southern leaders would be "whirled aloft and plunged downward for ever and ever in an endless retribution."
The New Haven theologian Theodore Thornton Munger declared that
the Confederacy had been "in league with Hell," and the South was now "suffering for its sins" as a matter of "divine logic."
He worked out that General McClellan's much criticized vacillations were an example of God's masterful cunning since they made a quick Northern victory impossible and
so ensured that the South would be much more heavily punished in the end.
Abraham Lincoln declared himself "satisfied that when the Almighty wants me to do or not to do a particular thing, He finds a way of letting me know it." He thus waited, as the cabinet papers show, for providential guidance at certain critical points of the war. He never claimed to be the personal agent of God's will, as everyone else seemed to be doing. But he wrote:
If it were not for my firm belief in an overruling providence it would be difficult for me, in the midst of such complications of affairs, to keep my reason in its seat. But I am confident that the Almighty has His plans and will work them out; and... they will be the wisest and the best for us.
"The majority of Northern Christians took a more triumphalist view of events.
"The American Civil War was the prelude to anThey came to look upon the American Civil War not as a Christian defeat, in which the powerlessness and contradictions of the faith had been exposed,
but as an American Christian victory, in which Christian egalitarian teaching had been triumphantly vindicated against renegades and apostates.
Such a view fit neatly into a world vision of the Anglo-Saxon races raising up the benighted and ignorant dark millions, and bringing them, thanks to a "favoring providence,"
into the lighted circle of Christian truth; thus the universalist mission of Christ would be triumphantly completed.
..........enormous American missionary effort throughout what we now call the third world,
..........followed in due course by actual military intervention in some places.
"Leonard Woolsey Bacon's History of American Christianity, published in 1897 at the height of the era of imperialism noted:
By a prodigy of divine providence the secret of the ages [that a new world lay beyond the sea] had been kept from premature disclosure.... If the discovery of America had been achieved... even a single century earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the Western world would have been that of the Church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence [before being purged by the Reformation] .
So he saw "great providential preparations as for some `divine event' still hidden behind the curtain that is about to rise on our new century."
President McKinley justified the American occupation of the Philippines in Christian evangelical terms:
I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance that one night. And one night late it came to me this way.... There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.
Women And The Radicalization of Frontier Religion
"As religious fevor increased, two changes began of which Ann Randolph Page was a part of--the beginnings of feminism and the rise of anti-slavery sentiment. The first was the result of the temperence, missionary, and other societies formed in the wake of the revivals.
Women often moved into leadership roles within these groups. It was the first entrée many women had into leadership positions.
The anti-slavery sentiment, for many evangelicals, took the form of abolitionism or support for establishing a colony of free blacks in Liberia.
Ann Page slowly returned all of her slaves to Africa. ;-)
We need to look backward in time to see women's involvement in supplying the leadership which "hastened" the work of God to the point of destruction. It was women such as Anne Hutchinson who introduced radicalism into the early church. Because the clergy in Salem were in their perpetual battle to see "who is billy goat of the Hill," the Parris girls led the sorry episode of the Witchcraft trials. It was women who fed the lust for power in the early revivals across the land. And women were quite 'previous' in forcing the abolution of Slavery which would have died of its own weight without the reaction to virtual "invasion." Or, 250,00 members of the abolutionists "church" might have preached.
As background it will help to understand women's role in revivalist religion you may want to read Francis Trollope, an English Lady's views. And another article.
We noted above that Henry Ward Beecher predicted that the Southern leaders would be "whirled aloft and plunged downward for ever and ever in an endless retribution." The brother-sister act was rounded out by Harriet Beecher Stowe who radicalized the religious conversion process to include violence.
Addressing the dangerous mix of women and clergy, Richard Gooch in 1834 noted that:
It is a fact that the females of all classes of fanatics in America are under a complete state of subjection to their spiritual pastors, and that
they alone ought to be looked upon as their hearers & their supporters.
One would suppose from appearances that the American women were all fanatics, & the men all atheists-Indeed, I believe it to be near the truth.
I have been in many of their most crowded congregations, and amongst several thousands never saw above a hundred men present at the same time; in fact the disproportion of the sexes never fails to create surprise in strangers.
It is to the women all their appeals are addressed,
it is upon them all the baser purposes of fanatical preachers are made to operate.
After the War: Division Over Slavery - A Baptist Example
"The issue of slavery reached a peak in 1845 when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society determined that it could not appoint any candidate for service who held slaves and when the American Baptist Home Mission Society decided separate northern and southern conventions were necessary. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in response.
Northern Baptists remained organized as a group of societies until 1907, when the Northern Baptist Convention was formed to structure coordination of the societies' work while maintaining the autonomy of constituent churches.
The Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board, founded in 1913, was begun to meet medical, insurance and pension needs of ordained and lay church workers
"The unity achieved through these (Baptist Missionary) societies was disrupted by the slavery controversy. During the decade prior to 1845 various compromises between the proslavery and antislavery parties in the denomination were attempted, but they proved to be unsatisfactory.
"As a result a Southern Baptist Convention was organized at Augusta, Ga., in 1845. Although its constitution provided for boards of home and foreign missions, education, and publication, its energies were devoted largely to foreign missions.
"Consequently, the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the
American Baptist Publication Society continued to operate in the South after the American Civil War.
In discussing the proliferation of musical instruments in New York churches, the New York Herald, 1868, said
"The Baptists only, as a great body, have held aloof and kept the letter of their original simplicity."
Later the Southern Baptist Convention began to develop its own home mission and publication work
and to protest the intrusion of the older societies in the South.
Today, attacks upon the conservatives of the American Restoration Movement also include an attack against the "Religious Right." However, it was the Religious Right which felt the need to make one grand, ecumenical body of churches in order to prop up the civil government. For instance,
"During the years between the inaugurations of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, historians see "evangelicalism emerging as a kind of national church or national religion."
The leaders and ordinary members of the "evangelical empire" of the nineteenth century were American patriots who subscribed to the views of the Founders that religion was a "necessary spring" for republican government; they believed, as a preacher in 1826 asserted, that there was "an association between Religion and Patriotism."
Converting their fellow citizens to Christianity was, for them, an act that simultaneously saved souls and saved the republic.
The American Home Missionary Society assured its supporters in 1826 that
"we are doing the work of patriotism no less than Christianity."
With the disappearance of efforts by government to create morality in the body politic (symbolized by the termination in 1833 of Massachusetts's tax support for churches) evangelical, benevolent societies assumed that role, bringing about what today might be called the privatization of the responsibility for forming a virtuous citizenry.
Among churches of Christ:
"David Lipscomb faced the war determined to stay aloof from it as far as possible. His preaching on the eve of the war largely emphasized what he considered to be the duty of all Christians to have no part in it... A man, standing in the doorway listening to him preach his views, roared out angrily that if twelve men would help him, he would hang David Lipscomb to the highest tree. (Gospel Advocate, 1892, p. 453)
David Lipscomb worked tirelessly to keep men out of the struggle. When the news came to the South that the American Christian Missionary Society had passed resolutions in the convention in October, 1863, against the South, many members of the church rushed out angrily and joined the Confederate army." (GA, 1866, pp. 170, 1)
The Britannica Notes that: Or Click Here
"Meanwhile, schism had begun to sunder the ranks, yet without shaking the confidence of the Disciples in their plea for union.
They had held together during the controversy over slavery and through the American Civil War, when major American denominations had divided.
In the succeeding era of bitterness, however, the Disciples also suffered schism.
New developments in response to growing urbanization and sophistication brought two sharply divergent responses.
The conservatives regarded such developments as unauthorized "innovations,"
while the progressives (pejoratively termed digressives) looked on them as permissible "expedients."The introduction of musical instruments (reed organs) into Christian worship led to many local disputes. Other innovations added occasion for controversy--the infringement of the "one-man pastoral system" on the local ministry of elders, introduction of selected choirs, use of the title Reverend, and lesser issues.
In 1889 several rural churches in Illinois issued the Sand Creek Declaration, withdrawing fellowship from those practicing "innovations and corruptions."
In 1904 a separate "preacher list" issued unofficially by some conservative leaders certified their preachers for discounts on railway tickets.
The Federal Religious Census of 1906 acknowledged the separation between Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ (who commonly used the name Christian Churches) even though many congregations did not decide which they were for some years.
Neo- Colonialism in the South
Following the war the Gospel Advocate resumed publication because:
"The fact that we had not a single paper known to us that Southern people could read without having their feelings wounded by political insinuations and slurs, had more to do with calling the Advocate into existence than all other circumstances combined (Ga, Vol VIII - No. 18, May 1, 1866, p. 273)
In a parallel sense among the American Restoration Movement:
STONE "We have just received an extraordinary account of about
30,000 Methodists in England, withdrawing from that church and connexion,
because the Conference disapproved of the introduction of instrumental music to the churches. The full account shall appear in our next.To us, backwoods Americans, this conduct of those seceders appears be the extreme of folly, and it argues that they have a greater taste for music, than they have for religion. Editor." (Barton Stone, Christian Messenger, vol. 3, No. 2, Dec. 1828, p. 48 in bound volume)
Contrary to the Carpet Bagger Reconstructionists who claim that churches of Christ became sectarian during the war based upon their views of slavery, common sense and the definition of sectarian or heresy must understand that those introducing instruments were the sectarians and heretics.
WEST: "Apostasy in music among 19th century churches that had endeavored to restore New Testament authority in worship and work
began, in the main, following the American Civil War'
In 1868, Ben Franklin guessed that there were ten thousand congregations
and not over fifty had used an instrument in worship." (Earl West, Search for the Ancient Order, Vol. 2, pp. 80, 81)
That is about 1/2 of 1%. So, it can hardly be that the Restoration Movement used Instrumental Music rather than the American Civil War as justification for division. In 1868 there was, statisticaly, no division over the use of instruments for many years.
Perhaps because there was no denominational structure in the South among churches of Christ there was no organizational division over slavery. However, the churches organized under a society felt that there was no unity unless all churches became "life members" of the Society. This allowed a small band of men to dominate missionary effort, preacher's pay and the selection or rejection of local preachers through a "network" of approval.
Following the American Civil War "Staunch supporters of the missionary society and instrumental music, the new look in styles of work and worship, had been predicting for years the early demise of the Advocate. It was unthinkable, as these men viewed the problem,
that even the people in the South would not want to keep up with the times.
Lipscomb's simple ways might have been condoned in the hills of Franklin County before the war,but the times were passing him by. It was only a question of time until the Advocate would fold up, and when it did, as these men gleefully envisioned, it would be a happy day." (Earl West, Life and Times of David Lipscomb, p. 166)
When the churches of Christ did not collapse under the domination of the Disciples the rumor was spread that David Lipscomb had amassed a farm valued at forty thousand dollars. Indeed, a grand plantation for the time. Lipscomb corrected them and confessed that the farm was worth, debt free, about five thousand dollars. Lipscomb had accumulated money because he was a vocational preacher consistent with the "restoration" of a non-professional clergy. Lipscomb noted:
"A preacher, like any other man who gets in debt and fails to pay, soon becomes demoralized, and indifferent about paying--becomes, indeed, dishonest.
"We have never been willing, when not actively engaged in preaching to sit around on our professional dignity, but have labored at whatever work presented itself to make a living." (West, p. 167)
In the fall of 1882 Harding attended the annual meetiong of the missionary societies at Lexington, Kentucky. Isaac Errett presided. Errettt, bent upon raising money for the organization appealed for "life memberships." When he appealed for children to become life members, Harding had enough. (West, p. 171)
At the end of Alexander Campbell's life the missionary society had grasped rights to Campbell's song book. Campbell believed that he was putting the ownership into the hands of a committee of brethren.
"Isaac Errett who influenced Campbell to sign over (extorted?) his copyright, had argued that it
was absolutely necessary to the unity of the church to have unity of worship,
and the latter could not be maintained
unless the brethren all used one hymn book--Campbell's.Accordingly, the Standard and the Society opposed vigorously the publication of any other hymn book. Lipscomb by selling a hymn book printed in Canada had been visited by some of the ire of these men." (West, p. 171)
Against the notion that:
7. "Well, the churches generally are going into it, and it is 'a foregone conclusion that they will have and use the organ,' and it is useless to stand against it."
..........No "the churches generally" are not gone into it, nor are they going that way.
..........We do not know the number of churches in the United States;
..........but doubt not that six thousand would be a low enough estimate.How many of them use the organ in worship? We do not know this with certainty, but probably not more than from [431] one hundred and fifty to two hundred, and certainly not five hundred. [1877]
The organ party is yet small, and would amount to but little, had it not found way into a few places of note and prominence. There are still whole States that have not an organ in the Church.
We think there is not one in use in Canada, not one in Virginia, Tennessee, nor Texas, that we have heard of; scarcely any in Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and many other States. The organ is still the exception, not the rule; and the party is small. The main body are true to the great principles of reformation--to the divine purpose of returning to and maintaining, the original practice in all things.
There had been no specific song book as long as the Restoration Movement moved along congregational lines. However, if there was going to be a song book the Disciples in the North insisted that everyone sing the same songs or you simply were not "united."
In the same way, instruments were added without authority. The "organizational mind" needed for everyone to use instruments and those who refused to change their age-old practices to be under "one umbrella" of the man-run organization were accused of being divisive and sectarian.
Just as many saw the South as ripe for its plucking because the North had broken down all institutions, the spirit of the Missionary Society saw the southern churches as "backward" and in need of northern reconstruction. Additional benefits would be for every church and every member to join the Missionary Society. A grand modern-sounding method of even making children "life members" would fill the coffers of the Society which had control of every preacher. See our notes on James O'Kelly and the Anglican-Methodist domination scheme which derived from the King as God's annointed and not from the more modest Methodists in England.
Choate/Woodson
note that like
David Lipscomb, E. G. Sewell worked for the Gospel Advocate to earn a living
and preached for the Woodland Street Church in Nashville. He received little for his preaching. A new building was constructed in 1880 and Sewell was asked to preach there longer and devote more time.
"From the North, where the Society system was deeply imbedded in the churches, people moved into Nashville and many filled the Woodland Street church. By the end of 1882, a woman from Kentucky asked Sewell about forming an auxiliary society to the Christian Woman's Board of Missions. Sewel objected, and gave his reasons.
But as always, when a group in a congregation wants something, and the preacher stands in their way, there is only one thing to do: dismiss the preacher. Sewell was ousted and at the beginning of 1883, W. J. Loos, son of C. L. Loos, president of the Foreign Society, was hired. In the fall of that year young Loos attended the annual convention at Cincinatti, telling them with some embarassment that he was ashamed to admit he was from Tennessee for the churches of his state were doing nothing."
When he returned, Sewell refuted the false charges about Tennessee churches. Loos was check-mated and was replaced later by R. M. Giddens who "fanned the flames of Societyism.""The women were soon busily at work to form an auxiliary society. Sewell's pleas to Giddens went unheeded. During the following summer,
the women wrote letters to the churches of the state
asking funds be sent to them
so they could hire a State Evangelist. Before long, plans were laid
to secure the services of A. I. Myhr."Lipscomb had agreed to publish information in the Advocate after being assured that evangelism was the goal. However, Giddens failed to get the work under the Woodland Street elders. J. C. McQuiddy who had helped raise the money and Sewell who was an elder were not consulted about Myhr.
Myhr made his goals clear about promoting the Society and Instrumental music
even though it would divide the churches. Myhr's goal, Lipscome believed, was to
"ostracize, boycott, and starve every preacher that does not APPROVE the society."
J. E. Choate and Adron Doran in The Christian Scholar note that:
In 1890 the first convention was called at Chattanooga to organize the state society. The only churches in the state of Tennessee were those who had already adopted the organ in their worship. The Christian Standard pumped up the news and "it is reported that the brethren in Nashville, Tennessee are desirous of entertaining our National Convention next year."
This of course was just two congregations. A survey showed that out of 2500 members in Nashville, less than one hundred wanted the society.
Lipscomb noted that among the Society people "the Bible is as popular as last year's almanac."
"The supporters of the missionary society organized the Tennessee State Missionary Convention on October 6, 1890, with one purpose in mind, as stated by J. H. Garrison. He said at that time:
"We will take Tennessee for organized mission work...within five years."
David King kept a watchful eye upon all their movements and published reports, and for some years published an occasional "Extra" of his Ecclesiastical Observer, the pages of which he utilised for strong criticism of the new efforts. In the first year's Extra, 1879, he pointed out three innovations in the Southampton Mission, all of which he considered to be wrong:- the use of instrumental music in the worship; open collections; and a choir not confined to the membership.56 Commenting on the Chester Mission, which claimed to have 96 members after one year, he marked, "We dare not do evil that good may come."57A. I. Myhr was dispatched to Tennessee to head the new state society despite the protestation of David Lipscomb that Tennessee was not a destitute mission territory. Myhr and his supporters moved resolutely ahead to accomplish their mission.
"Their efforts met with some success and the intent was clear. Myhr was aggressive and abrasive in his operations. His actions were of such a nature, in promoting the missionary society, that he came under the direct attack of E. G. Sewel and David Lipscomb. And as later event proved, Myhr was no match for Lipscomb and the Gospel Advocate.
Of course, division was brought about by men trying to move churches out of the South's atmosphere and into the Christian Church and Disciples of Christ which had already organized itself into a Reconstruction Society. Of course, when you organize, those who refuse to join are defacto put out of fellowship:
"As early as 1882, Sewell and Harding were urging that a separation be brought about to identify that part of the Christian Church fellowship which supported the organ and the society. Lipscomb, at the time, rebuffed his brethren who called for such division. He sought no compromise, but hoped that the church would not suffer division."
"By 1897, Lipscomb was reconciled to the fact that division had already occurred and the supporters of the innovations would be satisfied with nothing less than a complete take-over of the churches... (Adron Doran, J.E.Choate, The Christian Scholar, p. 59
In 1902 the church at Newbern was taken over by society and organ people. The church, against Lipscomb's advice, sued to retain the property. Of course the society could muster a majority and won the lawsuit. The decision was handed down in 1905 that the trouble did not warrant the intrusion of the courts:
"The pro-organ party had said during the trial that
..........when the organ was used as a part of the worship, it was sinful;
..........but they defended it on the ground that it was an aid to worship.Lipscomb, on the other hand, had insisted that it was a distinct service,
..........and when persisted in always supersedes and destroys congregational singing."The court, passing on this phase of the question,
..........said that the claim that the organ was not a part of the worship was untenable
..........and it could not be considered as merely an aid to worship."
The premise of the pro-organ people that the organ in worship and the Judge's decision that it was part of the worship had the court defining the action as sinful but not a court problem. By defining the instrumental music as "not worship" they looked silly but to do otherwise would have been self-condemnation to a terrible sin.
Of course, men like J. H. Garrison did not see the Restoration Movement as a way to restore the simplicity of the local church.
He saw the need for unquestioning loyalty. He notes that:
"But there are other ways in which some have been disloyal to this high ideal."
That is, once the Restoration Movement ideal had taken place the only way to be loyal to the ideal and to Christ was for all churches to come under the same form of religious - political control.
"The most distinguishing feature of the movement, and one which entitles it to rank as a Christian union movement, is the distinction it has always drawn betweenfaith, which is personal confidence and trust in a personal Saviour,
and matters of opinion or inference, as we have already pointed out.But, strange to say, it has been just at this point where there have been most frequent failures to live up to the high ideal.
Instances of this failure are to be seen in the fierce opposition that was at one time waged against the use of instrumental music in public worship.
This custom was held by some good brethren to be a violation of the principle that "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent." This was of course to confound mere matters of method, or of expediency,
with matters of faith and loyalty to Jesus Christ.
[Note that Garrison does not recognize "the faith" as the objective faith of the Christian religion. Rather, faith is ones personal faith. To that personal faith, one is allowed to add only "loyalty to Jesus Christ."
Like most "scholars" Garrison limits PROOF to a passage or two which defines TEACHING THE WORD as MUSIC.]
To conceive of the New Testament as a Christian law book, entering into the minutiae of worship and of service, is to misconceive the very spirit and genius of Christianity, and to ignore the wide gulf which separates it from Judaism; and yet one of the strong points of the movement has been to
emphasize the dispensational lines, and to bring every item of Christian faith and practice to the test of the Christian dispensation!
It is an illustration of how people sometimes fail to follow out their own premises to their legitimate conclusions.
[All of this makes sense only if you see obedience to a command of Jesus Christ as equivalent to a Law of Moses. Why would Paul not be allowed to add "minutiae" about worship and Garrison be allowed to make additions knowing beforehand that it would divide the group he wants to submerge under central headquarters?]
J. H. Garrison defines the instrument as "matters of opinion" but if you don't share his opinion then you are disloyal to the "progressive" movement and to Christ. Furthermore, to allow Paul's instructions about singing in church to govern one's worship practices is equivalent to falling back under the Law of Moses. With that in mind it is easy to see how division was necessary.
"The same erroneous method of reasoning has been applied to the Sunday-school, to missionary organizations.
THE LATEST STEP TOWARD CHRISTIAN UNION.
"We come now to the consideration of the very latest of these efforts to give visible and tangible expression to the growing unity of the Church, for the double purpose ofutilizing this unity in the service of our common Master, and of
promoting a still closer unification of the religious forces of Christendom.
Interpreted, this meant: "First, we will organize all of the Restoration Movement but our goal is to organize every church and every denomination under one large political organization." All of Christendom must be organized in a society in order for the will of Christ to be accomplished: the Scriptures are just legalisms but this plan is sure to accomplish God's will for Him.
This began with state branches which would grow up to a "federation movement" of the world. Garrison established a set of rules to be followed in 1905. The first meeting was to occur in 1908 and "unity" was based on the high standard of 2/3 vote of the "in" members.
"In case this plan of federation is approved by two-thirds of the proposed constituent bodies the executive committee of the National Federation of Churches and Christian Workers, which has called this conference, is requested to call the Federal Council to meet at a fitting place in December, 1908.
By having a huge, federal organization of which Lipscomb warned, to be a "Christian Workers Labor union" the watching world would see the grand "unity in diversity" meetings and just naturally want to become "life members" of the church and society.
Churches which refused to join were disloyal and guilty of sectarianism.
Just as poor Southern sharecroppers must be violently put to death because they were also caught up in the system of slavery, the ongoing predestinated purpose of God to bring about total political and religious domination of a world-wide society even when it was known beforehand that all such efforts from the Witchcraft trials to the Great Awakenings had never produced unity but had always divided the peacable churches into waring factions. Garrison continues:
"What is the meaning of these facts if it be not that God is calling us to ultimate unity through the method of co-operation in all things wherein we are agreed?
Can any religious body justify its holding aloof from this step toward unity on the ground that it has received special light on the subject of union and occupies more advanced ground than others?
"To refuse assent to, and co-operation with, this movement toward unity on the plea that it is not the ideal unity of the New Testament,
would be to ignore the whole law of progressive development in the kingdom of God.
"We lay this down as an axiomatic truth: It is as much our duty to manifest and put to some practical use the unity which already exists, as it is to labor and pray for an ideal unity that is yet far in the future. Indeed the way to hasten the ideal unity is to put to practical use the unity which we already have. "To him that hath shall be given, and to him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath," is a universal law in the kingdom of grace.
"We are bound, therefore, by every consideration of loyalty to Jesus Christ, and by every regard for our future growth and development, to co-operate to the fullest extent possible,--which would be in different degrees, no doubt, in different places--
with all who love and serve our Lord Jesus Christ for the advancement of his kingdom among men.
This is what the federation movement means, and as such, it is the next logical step--the next inevitable step--toward the complete unity of Christians.
Of course, as the spiritual and political superiority of the North which came ready made with the predestination of Salem Witchcraft, the First Great American Awakening, the Second Great American Awakening and the unAmerican Civil War, and the grand but failed sweep with carpet bags in hands into the "decadent" South to rescue everyone by installing organs and a Federal Religious Unity Organization, led ultimately to the further fractionating of the Christian Churches and Disciples of Christ with many moving totally out of the Restoration Movement ideal and into true denominationalism.
The rejection of churches of Christ of a labor organization of Christendom, a Missionary Society and instrumental music leading to total division was repeated in most groups.
Musical Instruments Among the Baptists
Division over human organizations and music divided most religious groups at one time or another.
BENEDICT "In my earliest intercourse among this people, congregational singing generally prevailed among them. . . . The Introduction Of The Organ Among The Baptist. This instrument, which from time immemorial has been associated with cathedral pomp and prelatical power, and has always been the peculiar favorite of great national churches, at length found its way into Baptist sanctuaries, and the first one ever employed by the denomination in this country, and probably in any other, might have been standing in the singing gallery of the Old Baptist meeting house in Pawtucket, about forty years ago, where I then officiated as pastor (1840) ... Staunch old Baptists in former times would as soon tolerated the Pope of Rome in their pulpits as an organ in their galleries, and yet the instrument has gradually found its way among them.... How far this modern organ fever will extend among our people, and whether it will on the whole work a RE- formation or DE- formation in their singing service, time will more fully develop." (Benedict, Baptist historian, Fifty Years Among Baptist, page 204-207)
"Men still living can remember the time when organs were very seldom found outside the Church of England.
The Methodist, Independents, and Baptists rarely had them and by the Presbyterians they were stoutly opposed. But since these bodies began to introduce organs, the adoption of them has been unchecked. Even the Presbyterians are giving away, and if we read the future by the past, we can hardly doubt that in a few years, unaccompanied singing will very seldom be heard. Yet, even in the church of England itself, organs did not obtain admission without much opposition." (John Spencer Curwen, Studies in Worship Music, p. 179, In 1880).
ISN'T IT VILE RACISM TO ATTRIBUTE RACISM TO JUST YOUR MORTAL ENEMY?
The Britannica reports that:
"The final separation between Baptists of South and North was formalized in 1907 by the organization of the Northern Baptist Convention (in 1950 renamed the American Baptist Convention and after 1972 called the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.), which brought together the older societies and
accepted a regional allocation of territory between the Northern and Southern conventions.
"Southern Baptist Convention largest Baptist group in the United States, organized at Augusta, Ga., in 1845
by Southern Baptists who disagreed with the antislavery attitudes and activities of Northern Baptists.
"Like Baptists in the North, Baptists in the South trace their history back to the Baptist churches established in the American colonies in the 17th century.
"In the 19th century, the Baptist churches and associations in the North and South cooperated in organizing national organizations concerned with foreign and home missions and religious publications.
"The slavery question, however, soon caused disagreements between Southern and Northern Baptists, and in 1845 the Southern Baptists set up their own organization. About 300 churches joined the new group.
"In a historic reversal, the convention adopted a resolution in 1995 denouncing racism and repudiating its past defense of slavery and opposition to the civil rights movement. The Southern Baptist Convention has become a national rather than a regional church,
IT IS A WELL KNOWN FACT THAT ALL SLAVES GO ON TO DEFEAT THE SLAVE MASTERS: OUR CULTURE ESPECIALLY MUSIC AND "RELIGION" IS SLAVERY: ONLY THE FIELD BOSSES HAVE CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY.
During the A.D. 2000 Prayer Track apologizing for religious atrocities:
"On the national scene during October and November, also under the auspices of the A.D. 2000 United Prayer Track, intercessors involved in Operation Restoration will retrace General Sherman's path through the South, apologizing and asking God's forgiveness for the corporate sins of the "UnAmerican Civil War." Was the American Civil War an immoral war?
Was there a peaceful way to deal with the issue of human slavery? Genesis 9:5,6 requires human governments to punish evildoers and to protect society by putting to death those who shed innocent blood. However, according to promoters of this march,
God has not forgiven the United States for its violent solution of the slave issue:
"The war atrocities committed by the U.S. and the bitterness and hatred nursed in Southern homes for over a century have never been the subjects of widescale repentanceÉIt's time to ask the Lord's forgiveness for these corporate sins and petition Him to clear another obstacle to nationwide revival and spiritual awakening."
Radical reconstruction is still going on by the religious carpetbaggers who blame faithfulness to the non-ritual, non-musical in spirit worship commanded by Christ for their steadfast refusal to "take the oath of allegiance" to the innovative, "high church" rituals, confess their sin of being sectarian and be again sworn in as minimal humans and marginal Christians.
Even Kentucky felt righteousness enough to try to reconstruct Tennessee. This table shows where the slaves, transported and sold by Northern merchants, were held and the percentage of families owning slaves.