The Family (10 page)

His religion was radical, available to all classes and even to slaves, an inspiration to the nascent sense of individual liberty that would become the American Revolution, but his politics were warlike and controlling. Empire struck him as an ideal vessel for the Gospel. He preached often against envy, but named as envy only that feeling which filled those of lesser wealth, or lesser land, or lesser status, who determined to band together to wrest power from above. Such less-privileged men gathered in taverns—Northampton had three—and instead of contemplating Christian harmony, conspired in “party spirit” to reshape not their souls but their fields. The wealthiest few of the valley owned at least a quarter of its arable ground.

Sin fermented in such taverns, charged Edwards, listing a catalog of crimes of the spirit that might just as easily come from the mouth of a fundamentalist today. He railed against the common man’s propensity toward lawsuits, against young women who carried themselves like men and young men who dressed in an unmanly style. Pornography was another vice that preoccupied him. His downfall began when he rebuked a group of boys—converted Christians, no less—for stealing and reading midwives’ manuals and applying their studies with hands-on investigations, the science of groping. The boys got off, so to speak, because they were wealthy, but another story surfaces when we consider that the boys in turn rebuked the reverend. Don’t you point fingers, they said; we know where yours have been. Did you hold Abigail’s hand as she lay dying?

The spring of Northampton’s revival, Edwards spent much time counseling his uncle, Joseph Hawley, who under his nephew’s tutelage began to see secrets within himself, and worse—the meaninglessness of self, of “Joseph Hawley.” The hand of God dangled him over the pit by a spindly leg as if he was nothing but a spider. An angry God, yes, but what was worse—overlooked by historians who emphasize the wrath of Edwards’s sermons—He was also a loving God. “Majesty and meekness joined together,” wrote Edwards, “…an awful sweetness.” Edwards cared little for the Calvinism of his forebears when put next to the vision of God he seemed to most favor, that of a giant mouth awaiting your submission—waiting to swallow you, Edwards would write in his diaries, to make you one with everything. Which is to say—nothing. Only your sense of
being
kept this from happening
now, now
. Not hellfire but the temptations of self—what later generations of evangelicals would rage against as
secular humanism
—birthed Joseph Hawley’s despair.

Hawley stopped sleeping. He stayed up at night in the still of his home, “meditating on terror.” In March, another man in a similar state slit his own throat, but he was in such a hysteria—a man of such weak character—that he botched the job and survived, blocked from entering hell as well as heaven. Joseph Hawley was not such a fool. He was a seller of guns and tobacco, a man of substance in Northampton. But his nephew Jonathan revealed to him a deeper reality, in which substance itself became suspect. In May Edwards preached to the congregation as he might have spoken to Hawley in private settings: “You have seen the filthiness of toads…”
You,
declared Edwards with great and compelling certainty, are even lower. Next to the souls of the unchosen, even “putrefied flesh” smells sweet to God. Hawley, a man “of more than common understanding,” took the lesson. Using what must have been a sharp blade—he also sold knives—he opened beneath his firm chin a bright red smile.

The pious and the melancholy, those who were saved and those were waiting, those who did not care at all—every sort of person came now to Jonathan Edwards, knocking on the pastor’s door.
Can I come in? I heard something
…He knew what they’d heard. He’d been hearing it from them for days now, each testimony so much like the last that he must have forgotten who was giving voice to the words, man or woman, ancient or child, saying this:
I heard a strange voice in my mind; it seemed so compelling and right (like yours, Reverend Edwards)
.

Edwards recorded the data.
Cut your own throat
, the voice without a body whispered into the ears of his flock.
Cut your own throat! Now! Now!

He did not count the bodies of those who did so.

S
ALVATION WAS FOR
Edwards a science, worthy of careful record keeping. The twin shadows of righteousness and purity—hatred and self-loathing—he dismissed as undeserving of the scrutiny of his amazing mind. Or did he? “Remember,” he wrote to himself once, “to act according to Prov. 12:23, ‘A prudent man concealeth knowledge.’” He did as much in his
Faithful Narrative
, weaving a web of logic and argument beneath the surface of a story that attracted a popular audience drawn by its portrait of sin and tragic account of redemption. In so doing, Edwards staked out a political position as well as a spiritual one, a subtly elitist conception of knowledge as a property to be possessed in different portions according to a divine hierarchy. The wise man of Christ knows that only to some does God give a calling, the power to draw closer to Him and understand His grand plan.

In 1750, Edwards’s congregation purged him. Not for the blood that flowed from his revival, but simply as a result of the power he’d unleashed. To preserve the old Puritan order, Edwards had destroyed it; but he was ill prepared for what the new believers—fiercer in their faith than ever Puritans had been—would build from the ruins, not just in Northampton but across the colonies. Edwards’s books enflamed men to burn other books on town commons, his tale of Abigail Hutchinson gave license to women to tear at their dresses on the cobblestoned streets of cities, screaming for contact with a God as intimate as Edwards’s story. In Northampton, the believers turned against him not for the pain his religion drew forth but for shying away from the radicalism of the revolution he had inspired.

He went west—to an Indian mission in Stockbridge, a town even closer to the edge of British civilization than Northampton, itself a city considered by proper Bostonians still half-wild. Among the Mahican Indians he pondered the vicissitudes of the mood he had stoked, its brightness and its darkness, its hymnody and its screeching, the new birth it offered and the death’s-head that grinned alike on the saved and the damned. He was a man given to the study of oneness. Perhaps he recognized that the heart full of feeling and the calculating mind full of knowing, like the thunder and lightnings he so adored, were simply two expressions of the same phenomenon, an American religion, one so well suited to the brutal demands of the building of a new Jerusalem—conquest; unrestrained capital; the rights of men and women to speak for themselves; and the rights of stronger men to command their submission for the greater cause—that it would still insist, two and a half centuries later, that all the world is a frontier, in dire need of revival, and a new chosen people.

T
HE MYTH PERSISTS
,”
WROTE
the historian Timothy L. Smith several decades ago, “that revivalism is but a half-breed child of the Protestant faith, born on the crude frontier, where Christianity was taken captive by the wilderness.”
¹
Like all myths, it is almost true. But the captive taken was wilderness itself, and the captor was the American religion. Jonathan Edwards—and, later, Charles Grandison Finney—did not so much tame the wilderness of the American mind as tap its secret power. Nearly a hundred years after Edwards awakened Northampton, Finney would lead a series of revivals across the Northeast and Britain that would win for his populist vision of evangelicalism not the hundreds who were converted under Edwards, but uncounted multitudes. In what was then the heart of Manhattan he built the Broadway Tabernacle, the country’s first megachurch. It seated 2,500, and often close to twice that number crowded into the sanctuary—a pillared theater in the round like a Roman stadium—for Finney’s orchestrations of scripture and sentiment, moralism and sensation. Crowds fell like wheat before his beautiful, terrifying, consoling voice. Most receptive to his message were the new little big men of the nation, the petit bourgeoisie, physicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, self-made men and their wives, wealthier than the old Puritan aristocracy. “Under my preaching,” Finney boasted of just one of his many revivals in the new city of Rochester, “judges and lawyers and educated men were converted by the scores.”
²

Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, extended the vote to men without property. Charles Grandison Finney, whose early career strangely mirrored Jackson’s presidency, extended the passionate God of the frontier, the pious morality of hellfire and certainty, to the men and women who would lay the foundations of the Gilded Age. Here we find the origins of evangelicalism as we know it: the marriage of new money and “new life” that would stoke the furnaces of industrial empire. It was a different expression of democracy than Jackson’s, but just as potent. And, overlooked by the successive generations of evangelicals and fundamentalists who study Finney’s revivals to this day—Billy Graham insists that “no one can read [Finney] without being challenged by his passion for evangelism”
³
—we find also an intimacy, a love of secret feelings that Edwards would have understood and that we can recognize in the blend of masculinity and sentiment, muscle and tender self-regard, that suffuses fundamentalism even now.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of October 7, 1821, after yet another church service that left him bored, Charles Grandison Finney decided to settle the question of God. “A splendid pagan of a man,” in his grandson’s description, he was, at twenty-nine, six-two, thick-chested, could wrestle any challenger to the ground.
⁴
Women thought him the most elegant dancer in Adams, a farming hamlet on the rough western edge of New York. His sandy hair was thin on top but given to a rakish curl, and his violet eyes were so bright they leap out even from black-and-white photographs, “intense, fixating, electrifying, madly prophetic eyes,” wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, “the most impressive eyes—except perhaps for John C. Calhoun’s—in the portrait gallery of nineteenth-century America.”
⁵

Finney led the Presbyterian church choir, and he enjoyed discussing theology with his pastor, but until that October day in 1821, he’d had little use for and less belief in the Lord. Long set in the pride of his own intellect, he was past the usual age of such inquiries. As a young man he’d hoped to find a way to Yale, but instead he became a schoolteacher and now he was a lawyer, and many people believed that soon he’d be a politician, perhaps a senator one day. If that was to come to pass, he decided, he’d better get his inner life in order. That Sunday in October, he cleared his schedule for Monday and Tuesday and resolved to decide by Wednesday whether he was a man of God.

The truth was that religion had been creeping up on him. As a boy he had witnessed powerful Baptist preaching, the stomping, shouting, Holy Ghost power kind, but as a man he had remained immune to the revivals that swept the region so often that it would later be called the “Burned Over District” for the intensity of its spiritual fires.
⁶
Then, one day, he bought a Bible. For his law library, he said, and everyone believed him. Finney preferred it that way. He took to shutting his office door, clogging the keyhole with a rag lest anyone peep on him, and praying in whispers. When the Bible had been just one more big book among the tomes of law in his library, he’d read it openly. Now, it became a secret companion.

He had a reputation to uphold; his very name was in Adams the standard of Logic and Reason. “If religion is true,” one man demanded of his wife, “why don’t you convert Finney? If you Christians can convert Finney, I will believe in religion.”

But no one could convert Finney. “I had not much regard for the opinions of others,” he’d confessed. As he sought God from Sunday night through Monday and Tuesday, it seemed as if his heart grew harder. “I could not shed a tear; I could not pray.” On Tuesday night, terror struck him. He thought he would die. “I knew that if I did, I should sink down to hell.” He wanted to scream. He braced himself in bed and waited for dawn.

As soon as light broke, he dressed and hurried to his office, to return to the Bible that taunted him. The town was already awake. He nodded and smiled at farmers and ladies, quickening his pace to avoid unbearable conversation. And then, he froze. Stopped and stood dead still in the middle of the dirt road that was the town’s main street. Creaky wagon wheels rolled left and right, their drivers cursing. Women may or may not have spoken to him.
Good day, Mr. Finney. Mr. Finney? Oh, dear. He doesn’t hear. Quite unlike him!
Just how long he stood still, he’d never be able to say. There was only one sentence among his thoughts, but it seemed to come from elsewhere, spoken in vibrating, terrifying tones that did not correspond to the seconds and sounds of the material world.

Will. You. Accept. It. Now. Today?

He bolted. Walking fast, smiling at passersby so they wouldn’t notice his distress, a cold, clammy feeling overtaking him. He aimed himself for a piece of woods over a hill on the north side of the village, but he charted an indirect path, because he did not want anyone to know where he was going. “I skulked along under the fence, til I got so far out of sight that no one from the village could see me. I then penetrated into the woods.” He found himself a closet of trees, fallen timber crisscrossing to create a mossy fort open to the sky. He crawled in on a damp bed of pine needles and fire-red oak leaves and knelt. There, he determined, he would
Accept It Now Today
, and if he did not he would not return to the world. He waited for prayer. For “relief.” But he could find none. When he opened his mouth, he heard only the rustle of leaves. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. Somewhere close by, a twig snapped. Finney started, opened his eyes, began to rise, blood flushing his cheeks. Had he been discovered? Openmouthed like a fish flopped down among the trees, the knees of his lawyer’s suit brown with dirt like those of a farmer? Had they seen his knobby knuckles knitted together like those of a schoolboy? Would they laugh? Would God?

Then Finney broke. He screamed. “What!” he bellowed. What! His voice lowered and quickened and heaved on a sea of gulping air and grief and shame. “Such-a-degraded-sinner-as-I-am, on my knees, confessing my sins to the great and holy God, and ashamed to have any human being, and a sinner like myself know it, and find me on my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!”

He went on for hours, tears streaming, his hands and his faith brown with the dirt of the forest floor, his knees dark with mud, his body aching, “releasing” all his shame, all his pride. He had found his enemy at last. It was his own mind. God, he’d say, gave him promises and revealed to him truths too precious for words. “They did not seem so much to fall into my
intellect
as into my
heart.
” The mind, he realized, was nothing but a tool.

Finney rose and began walking, stumbling like a drunken man back to town, his feet tangling, but his mind so quiet “it seemed
as if all nature listened.”
He’d left before breakfast. By the time he returned, his law partner, Benjamin Wright, had gone home, but, he’d later say, Jesus Christ himself stood in the office, “
face to face
,” awaiting his deposition. Into the darkness came then the Holy Spirit. “
Like a wave of electricity
, going through and through me. Indeed it seemed to come in
waves
, and
waves of liquid love
.” Finney roared out loud, his shame dissolved in his fear and ecstasy. “I shall
die
if these waves continue to pass over me.” The waves kept rolling, and he dipped and bobbed in the spirit, the crests and the troughs of the ocean soaking one message into his bones, the idea-that-is-not-an-idea that he would take as his text for what would become the greatest revival since the days of Jonathan Edwards: before God, you are nothing.

F
INNEY TITLED THE
first postconversion chapter of his memoirs “I Begin My Work With Immediate Success.” Not for him Jonathan Edwards’s curiosity about the workings of the Holy Spirit he was so certain flowed through him like electric current. Finney’s was the faith of the industrial age. Whereas Edwards wondered if religion might, like light itself, be subject to natural laws, Finney hit a switch and expected the power to flow. Likewise their political understanding of evangelism: Edwards studied Locke and anguished over the democratic contradictions of revival. Finney read the law books of Blackstone and took his Bible unfiltered and applied what he learned with equal-opportunity fervor. By Finney’s reckoning, every citizen had the right—the obligation—to be as zealous as the man he called “President Edwards,” in honor of Edwards’s brief tenure as the head of Princeton University.

The night after Finney returned from his forest grotto a changed man, a member of the choir that old God-spurning Finney had led came to see him. The chorister found Finney in the dark. The lawyer’s shoulders were shaking. His breath was loud and heaving. “What ails you?” the visitor asked. Finney wiped away his tears. “I am so happy that I cannot live,” he answered.

But he did, into the dawn, at which point the Holy Spirit checked in on him. “Will you doubt? Will you doubt?” a voice demanded. Finney the lawyer knew the answer to that one. Same as a verdict, guilty or not guilty, black or white. “No! I
will not
doubt; I
cannot
doubt.” Satisfied with Finney’s reply, the Spirit “then cleared the subject up” in Finney’s mind, the subject being the question of his conversion and whether he was saved. He was.

If such instant grace is a commonplace of American fundamentalism today, it was an oddity to be doubted in Finney’s time. Saul had become Paul in a flash some eighteen hundred years previous, and there had been other miracles since, but not every country lawyer could call the voices in his head God’s and be believed. Not until then, anyway; American Christendom was changing fast. Finney’s epiphany contained in it the summation of two developing ideas of the times, ideas that would vastly expand Christ’s jurisdiction over America in the minds of believers: the radical notion that to perceive the divine is to accept divine
authority
, without question; and the mechanistic understanding of faith as instantaneous for all who want it. Sign here, and you’re a soldier in the army of God, ready for battle.

Finney sallied forth to his law office clad in his new spiritual armor and promptly began the war. Benjamin Wright passed by, and Finney threw off some remark. He did not pay enough attention to remember what it was, but such was the “efficacy” of his new religion that the remark he made pierced Wright “like a sword.” Next came a client, ready to go to court on a civil matter. Finney shook his head. He could not even offer an apology. He was, he said, an “enlisted” man now. He quit his life’s love, lawyering, on the spot and set about the cause of convicting souls. His method? Wander, argue, destroy. He was, if not the most educated man in the countryside, probably the brightest between Lake Erie and the Atlantic. Moreover he was a physical giant by the standards of the day, and his voice was deep, and there were those radiant eyes. Nobody could stand firm before his onslaught.

The first to fall was a young man in a shoemaker’s shop, afflicted by modern ideas,
universalism,
the awkward faith of those not-quite-secular citizens who styled themselves sophisticated. “The young man saw in a moment that I had demolished his argument” and immediately fled. To safety? To reprieve from insistent evangelists? Impossible. Finney had shown him by force of logic the absolute certainty of God’s total power. All that remained was for the man to conform his will. That was his only real choice: conform or be damned. Finney watched, pleased, as the broken universalist ran to the edge of town, hopped a fence, and made for the forest grotto. God would meet him in among the dark trees and fix his soul.

The grotto never failed. Finney’s faith was, in comparison to that of Edwards, almost mechanical; it was industrial. In the weeks that followed, Finney sent a procession of townspeople tromping into the woods, there to repeat the form of his own intimate encounter. The story of his forest salvation was the secret weapon of his crusade, the mythic ammunition behind his “arguments” for the undeniable authority of God, more persuasive in his raw country town than the principles of Blackstone, spiritualized. Or rather, the two narratives worked in tandem, offering the citizens of pastoral Adams, New York—adrift in the great in-between of America, no longer wilderness and not yet settled—both savagery and civilization, a weeping, screaming, singing forest god and a straightforward, law-based, citizen-Christ for the democratizing nation.