The Family (11 page)

Finney’s law partner, Wright, a respectable man with connections to the coming political powers of the state, thought he could accept the latter without the former. Swept up in the townwide revival that followed in the wake of Finney’s conversion, Wright determined to settle his accounts with the new Jesus. But “he thought that
he
had a
parlor
to pray in,” and he would not go to the forest like Finney’s other soldiers. Wright prayed in his parlor for days and nights. Jesus would not answer. He prayed out loud into the early morning. Jesus would not answer. Because Jesus had chosen a place shadowed by trees for their meeting.
I’m not proud!
Wright wept, but he could not receive the wave of Jesus-love of which Finney had spoken, the power without which he was certain he would die. He took from his pocket a small knife, weighed it in his hand, imagined its bite. Relief. He was not proud; he would prove it with blood.

But he
was
proud, and he threw the knife away, “as far as he could,” said Finney, because Lawyer Wright knew he was too petty to resist temptation. For weeks he struggled. One night he collapsed in the muddy street, kneeling in puddles. See? I am not proud! But he was. He would not accept the Christ waiting for him among the trees.

“One afternoon I was sitting in our office,” recalled Finney, when the shoemaker’s universalist, now a “Christian,” burst into the room. “Esquire Wright is converted!” he shouted. He had been up in the woods himself, there to pray, when he heard from a neighboring valley the echoes of shouting. He had climbed a hill for a view and spotted Wright in the distance. Wright was a fat man, heavy, not athletic like Finney, but there he was in the wild, marching and shouting. Like a soldier on watch, pivoting and turning, pivoting and turning, to and fro. He’d stop, wind back his arms like wings and clap “with his full strength and shout ‘
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!
’”

As the man told the story, Finney heard shouting, looked up, and saw Lawyer Wright marching down the hill. The big man intercepted old Father Tucker on the edge of town and lifted him off the ground and squeezed him, dropped him, marched. Stopped, clapped, barked, “I’ve got it!” Wright fell to his knees before Finney and told him that he had been saved. He’d had a choice: suicide or the trees.

J
ONATHAN
E
DWARDS HAD
been a scientist of religion, maybe a mad one. Finney—nothing if not sane, his language plain, “colloquial and Saxon”—became its promoter, its mass distributor, a pious variation on his better-remembered contemporary, Phineas Taylor Barnum. He favored raw emotion as his medium but practiced religion like a country lawyer, an American exhorter. “I came right forth from a law office to the pulpit, and talked to the people as I would have talked to the jury.” Old churchmen shivered at his vulgar words. “Of course,” he said of that crowd, “to them I was a speckled bird.”

Theologians of that time and historians of ours parse Finney’s words to discover whether he broke with Edwards or continued his tradition. They take a typical Finney proclamation such as this—“Knowing your duty, you have but one thing to do, PERFORM IT”—and consider it in light of debates over Calvinism and, if they’re bold, the politics of Andrew Jackson. But they give little credence to the words Finney felt must be capitalized.
PERFORM IT.
Finney’s was a faith of action, a fact commonly noted. He was an abolitionist, a temperance man. Less considered is the emphasis of the action that bridged the theological isms and the politics of the day: performance. The subtle delights and terrors of spectacle that link Finney’s revivals to those of our present megachurch nation.
⁷

For Edwards, revival had been a strange and wonderful phenomenon, a displacement of ordinary air by the immaterial body of the Holy Ghost. But it was delicate, revival, neither a force to be directed nor one that would abide exploitation. Its politics were implicit. For Finney, a self-taught preacher declaring a frontier Christ for the industrial age, revival was a machine made up of “new measures”: “powerful preaching,” a well-timed hymn, the “protracted meeting”—movements of the Spirit scheduled on a daily basis for weeks at a time. Its politics were as plain as the public confessions of sinners called to grease the gears of Finney’s cleverest innovation, the
anxious bench,
the titillation of which P. T. Barnum would never rival.
⁸

Finney was recently married when he conceived of the anxious bench, but not much drawn to his wife. He left her alone for most of the first six months of their marriage while he wandered from church to meetinghouse to schoolhouse to parlor in the little towns of western New York, preaching wherever he could find a pulpit or a room full of people. His reputation was growing, as the tall young man who spoke hellfire, who called sinners
blistered
and
skinned
and
broken down
. And what’s more, called them by name. Not for Finney abstractions of theology and tics of old English that distanced the man in the pulpit from the men and women—mostly women—who filled the pews. Finney said “you.” And he stared at you. And if he found out your name, he’d call
you
a sinner. It was thrilling.

One warm spring day, Finney walked three miles through a pine forest to a church in the town of Rutland. The first to arrive, he took a seat in the pews. He carried no sermon. A crowd began to gather, but nobody recognized him. In walked a woman, slender and lovely, “decidedly” so, graceful, wearing a bonnet adorned with plumes. “She came as it were sailing around, and up the broad aisle toward where I sat, mincing as she came.” She sat right behind him. He could feel her close to him. He shifted his hips, threw an elbow over the back of his chair. Watched her watching him. Two beautiful creatures, a delight to behold. His violet eyes consumed her, “from her feet up to her bonnet and then down again. He was not secret in his glances.

She blushed. Hello, stranger.

His lips were thick and wide, set in a strange, calm smile, brown like his skin from the sun. But he did not look like a farmer. There were those Finney eyes, giant and glowing. When he opened his mouth, his voice was low, not tender.

“Don’t you believe that God thinks you look pretty?”

What?

“Don’t you think all the people will think you look so very nice?”

The blood must have drained from her cheeks.

His voice dropped lower. “Did you come here to divide the worship of God’s house?”

This, Finney noted, made the pretty, proud thing “writhe.”

“I followed her up in a voice so low that nobody else heard me, but I made her hear me distinctly.”

Vanity, “insufferable vanity.”

The woman was trembling, “her plumes were all in a shake.” At last, Finney was ready to preach. He ascended to the pulpit and revealed himself as the man the congregation had been waiting for. The woman must have gasped; she began to shake.

He preached to a full house that followed him deep into the literal gospel. They saw what he had done to the woman and wanted him to slay them also, to convict them, to
crush
them. Such words were part of his new measures. Then—“I did what I do not know I had ever done before.” He called on those who would be saved to rise from their seats and come to the front of the hall, there to stand exposed in their sin. Of course the woman rose, the first to respond. She fell out into the aisle. “Shrieked,” remembered Finney.

Her squeal excited the crowd. They too surged forward, moaning and stumbling and screaming, eager to feel, as the shrieking woman had, the intensity of conversion. The machine was working, electrified by the anxious bench, Finney’s most thrilling invention.

“T
HE
S
PIRITUALITY
OF
Christians does not lie in
secret Whispers
, or
audible Voices,
” wrote an eighteenth-century New England divine who was firmly opposed to revivalism—its God-chosen men, its shouters and fainters and falling-down people.
⁹
True religion, he believed, did not depend on special revelations for the self-anointed nor the noisiness of a crowd shaking with Holy Ghost electricity.

Perhaps not. But power requires both, whispers and voices, the intimacy of the grove and the public outcry of the anxious bench. Finney’s revival machine made use of both, and more important, made them interchangeable: private experience became public religion’s badge of authenticity, and public religion’s pulsing current gave to Finney’s inner piety the intensity of a collective, a movement, a multitude. “The church,” Finney would declare of the community of believers years after he’d left the upstate wilds, “was designed to make aggressive movements in every direction.” Finney meant this politically—believers were “bound to exert their influence to secure a legislation that is in accordance with the law of God”—but also as a matter of performance.
¹⁰
“The church” was not bricks and mortar, nor even simply the sum of
Bible-Christians,
Finney’s term for followers of his protofundamentalism. The church, to Finney, was the individual’s encounter with Jesus in the wilderness, the mass contagion of the anxious bench; and it was the chemical reaction that occurred when the certainty of the former combined with the jolt of the latter to force the issue of Finney’s American Christ onto the nation.

T
HE
I
DEA
, P
ART
1

A
FAMILIAR TABLEAU
:
A MAN
on his knees before dawn, praying secret prayers for guidance. Only now it’s the 1920s, and the heir to the title of First Revivalist is Billy Sunday, a former ballplayer who worked the stage as if he was covering second base and calling the game at the same time, dashing back and forth between velvet curtains, winding up for a big throw and hollering at the batter. Sinner! was Sunday’s cry. He railed against reds and women’s libbers and tippling bohemians. Christ he considered a man of action and then some. Jesus, he preached, was a boxer, a brawler, a two-fisted man’s man who was also God. A twofer! Gone was the Jesus of Jonathan Edwards, austere and intellectual. And fading, too, was Finney’s Christ, an idea of the divine that reflected Finney’s own raw, native vision. Sunday preached a prosperity gospel—God loves the wealthy—and lived it as well. He was not a crook but a hustler, milking the masses with his holy-rolling vaudeville routines. Preoccupied with fame, he revived the nation again but left it largely unaltered. He did not advance the theocratic project, was not the next key man of American fundamentalism.

That honor goes to our man kneeling in the dim blue of predawn Seattle, murmuring prayers in a foreign tongue. The man is a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, known to most as Abram, a preacher who has found in America the stature and respectability—by way of a prestigious pulpit—that eluded him in his native Norway. Still, something is beyond his grasp. He wants the peace he’s certain God has promised him, yet suffering, in the abstract, distracts him. Abram is immune to despair by this point in his life, but it bothers him, and he wishes it wouldn’t.

He is a big man—fit and square in the shoulders and in the jaw, his face broad, severe, and intensely handsome—and a bighearted man, too, and intelligent, but also simple, and glad to be so. He likes things to be in their places: God in His heavens, Abram by his Bible, men working where God puts them, all content with their calling. So it is clear something is wrong with the world: the poor. They are, it seems plain to him, out of place. Literally out of order. Something has gone wrong. God promised us we would be happy when we reached the Promised Land, and what, if not that, is America?

So what does God have in mind? Abram has not yet found an answer. He keeps praying.

This morning, 4:30 a.m., he prays alone but he is not alone. His son, Warren, is watching. He has newspapers to deliver. He moves quietly through the darkened house, pulling on socks and dungarees and tiptoeing down the back stairs so as not to wake his mother, so often ill, restricted to bed but never resting easy. Just before the last step, Warren hears a noise—a sudden intake of breath followed by an exhalation. Like laughter, only it’s followed by a moan. Then Warren hears a voice coming from the kitchen. Perched on his step like a mouse, not making a sound, Warren listens to his father’s deep murmur, still thick with the accent of the fjords. Abram’s voice sounds strange—not the way it does when he speaks to Warren or Warren’s mother or to the big men he counts as his friends. This morning he sounds as if he is talking to someone he loves and respects and of whom he is just a little bit afraid.

“Do you want me, Lord, to go as Thy Ambassador?”

Silence. Abram’s shoulders seem to settle. Maybe he smiles. He has received instructions.

“It is done,” Abram says, and Warren takes advantage of his father’s moment of serenity to slip out into the early morning, leaving Abram alone with his God.
¹

A
BRAM PRAYED LIKE
this for years, and the years grew darker, the poor poorer, the world more broken, until one day in April of 1935 he received not just instructions for the day before him but a vision for the decades; God’s hand moving His people in an entirely new direction. The revelation God gave him was simple:
To the big man went strength, to the little man went need. Only the big man was capable of mending the world
. But who would help the big man? Who would console him when he, as Abram did sometimes, wept in the early mornings? That the big men of society wept Abram never doubted. He thought that powerful people, so clearly blessed by God, must surely possess equally great reserves of compassion and love that they wished to shower down on the weak, if only someone would show them how.

Abram would show them how. This was his vision. His life thus far—in 1935, he was forty-nine, his once-dark brow gray like a North Pacific breaker—had followed an arc, he believed, but it had taken him a long time to see it. His ministry, he now realized, was not “among those who have had the bottom knocked out of life, its derelicts, its failures,” as a friend would write years later, “but, ultimately, among those even more in need, who live dangerously in high places.”

For nearly 2,000 years, Abram concluded, Christianity—that is, the religion, the rituals, the stuff of men with their weak, sinful minds—had bent all its energies toward the poor, the sick, the starving. The “down and out.” Christianity gave them fishes when it could and hope when it had nothing else to offer. But what good had it done? What had been accomplished between Calvary and 1935?

Just look at Seattle, Abram’s adopted hometown: nearly half the city was on relief, and the other half was dark-eyed, eyeing the blessings of the “top men” with envy, which is a blight on a man’s soul. A rich man may have little hope of getting into heaven, but an envious man could turn to violence and lose all hope for this world or the next. Abram had to help such creatures, the derelicts, the failures. How? By helping those who could help them—the high and the mighty—that they might distribute the Lord’s blessings to the little men, whose envy would be soothed, violence averted, disorder controlled.

Thereafter, Abram would spend his days arranging the spiritual affairs of the wealthy. It would be another decade—ten years spent cultivating not just Seattle’s big men but those of the nation—before Abram would coin a phrase for his vision: the “new world order.” By then, 1945, he’d moved to Washington, D.C., and he cut a different figure than he had as a preacher. He wore double-breasted suits with lapels like wings, polka-dotted bow ties, and wide-brimmed fedoras. He was often seen with his dark overcoat thrown over his shoulders like a cape. Other men considered him a spectacular dresser; those who knew him well considered his stylishness itself a minor miracle, since Abram was not wealthy. But God provided. As a young itinerant preacher, he’d traveled on horseback with a six-gun and a Bible, traveling from farmer to farmer. Now, he carried a silk handkerchief instead of a pistol, and he moved from rich man to rich man. He stayed in the best hotels and clubs—the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Union League in Chicago, Hotel Washington in the nation’s capital—as the guest of friends, and he traveled over the years in the best cars (God led a rich man to give him the use of a twenty-thousand-dollar Duesenberg), on private planes, in Pullman cars especially reserved for his use.

When as a young preacher out West he had once faced a pressing debt of twenty-five dollars and had no hope of paying it, a woman unknown to him squeezed twenty-five dollars into his hand. She told him, he claimed, that she had been moved by God to give him cash; had set out for his church with five dollars; had been stopped by the Lord at the threshold and been given to understand that Abram required more of her; had plucked another twenty dollars from her purse; and had floated toward the beautiful preacher, her money—the equivalent today of hundreds of dollars—pressed, through no will of her own, from her hand to his.

His hands were enormous, his fingers long. His face was granite—a straight, lipless line of a mouth and a jaw so square it could’ve been used in a geometry class. His eyes, set deep and serious beneath long dark lashes and craggy brows, looked like pale ice. They were the eyes not of a seducer but a persuader, a gaze men more than women remembered. “God gave him a majestic figure,” his eldest son, Warren, would recall. Like all those entranced by his father, Warren believed that God had granted Abram his manly appearance for a purpose: to win powerful men to his cause.

Abram would become an exponent of a religion for the elite—the “up and out,” as he called them—for the rest of his life. He termed this trickle-down faith
the Idea,
and it was really the only idea he ever had—the only one, he believed, God gave him. In one sense, it was nothing more than a defense of the status quo. It neither challenged power nor asked for anything from the powerful but their good intentions. In another, it was the most ambitious theocratic project of the American century, “every Christian a leader, every leader a Christian,” and this ruling class of Christ-committed men bound in a fellowship of the anointed, the chosen, key men in a voluntary dictatorship of the divine.

From Seattle, Abram traveled the world with the Idea, winning to its self-satisfied simplicity the allegiance of senators, ambassadors, business executives, and generals. Every president beginning with Eisenhower has attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast Abram founded in 1953. He never achieved his dream—the United States is no more a theocracy today than it was in Charles Finney’s lifetime—but in his pursuit of it he stood at the vanguard of an elite fundamentalism that shaped the last half century of American and world politics in ways only now becoming visible. Abram, observed two approving evangelical writers in a 1975 study,
Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power
, “personally influenced thousands of community, national, and world leaders, who in turn influenced countless others, a remarkable chain reaction…Many of them have never heard of [Abram], much less seen him. But his shadow is upon them.”
²

Shadow
is indeed the word for Abram’s legacy. In 2005,
Time
magazine labeled Abram’s successor, Doug Coe, the
stealth persuader,
a term that might just as easily have fit his mentor. Abram’s upper-crust faith was not a conspiracy, but it was not meant for the masses, either. Until recently, those masses—fundamentalist as well as secular—barely knew it existed.3

A
BRAM HEARD HIS
own peculiar God for the first time in Norway, one June morning in 1895 when as an eight-year-old boy he was taking his father’s cattle to pasture in the high cold fields of the Norwegian village from which Abram’s family took their surname. In later life, Abram would often insist that he had been born poor, but among the white houses and red barns of the one-thousand-year-old village of Vereide, his family’s home—close to the church and surrounded by oak trees—was far from the humblest. The inlet near the village was narrow enough to resemble a river, and over it loomed two mountains, the peaks of which were perfect triangles of black and white, laced with snow even in June. In between stretched farmland, the future that awaited Abram if he remained. His father was a foreman of sorts for land owned by the crown. But Abram was restless, a popular boy yet angry and given to fighting.

His mother had died shortly before the June day on which he first heard God’s voice, and her last prayers had been for a calming of her boy’s temper. That June morning, he took those prayers with him into the fields. As he closed the gate behind him, his grief combined with his anger into a cloud of guilt and regret, of longing for his mother and for the good son he believed he should have been. He couldn’t bear himself: he ran. He abandoned the cows. He hid in a grove of elder trees, crying and shivering despite the sun that crept through the leaves. A brook burbled, and the air smelled of cow dung. He wanted to pray, but he didn’t know how. He’d never paid attention to his mother’s prayers. Then, into his mind came words:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee and called thee by name, thou art mine.

Abram would later say that at the time he had not yet read the Book of Isaiah, from which those words came. Perhaps he
had
read the verse, or heard it spoken by his mother, or maybe it was as he’d come to believe years later, in America: a supernatural call to the divine. Whichever the case, those words were the first intimations of what would become Abram’s theology. They resolved the age-old question of theodicy—why does God let bad things happen to good people?—by ignoring the fact that they had happened at all. Rather than wrestle with grief and loss, as the best Christian thinking does so profoundly, Abram found in the grove the seeds of a faith that he’d thereafter use as a shield against even the awareness of pain, of doubt, of the danger of despair and the hard, precious hope won from that knowledge. This was the birth of Abram’s “positive” Christianity: the censorship of suffering.

Ten years later, eighteen years old and educated to that point but with no prospects in Norway other than a life in the field, Abram left for America, the “land of the Bible unchained,” as he dreamed of it. He arrived at Ellis Island after a stormy voyage, and very first thing a woman rushed up to him and said, “Welcome!” and pressed into his hands a New Testament. Abram thought her rude and wonderful, just like America. But her kindness added no advantage. Besides his new American Bible and a Norwegian copy, he had nothing. His clothes were homespun, stitched by his sisters; his shoes were goatskin, from a goat he had slaughtered; his suitcase was a leather box of his own devising. He had only the name of a countryman who would help to seek out in Butte, Montana, a boomtown run like a fiefdom by giant Anaconda Copper, and just enough money to get there, a hard journey of fifteen days.

His connection turned out to be a man in a shack by the railroad, but the old hand knew what to do with a new Norwegian. “Let’s go uptown and meet the boys,” he said, and took Abram past a row of brothels punctuated by whore-lined alleys to a saloon. At the saloon Abram’s guide sat him at a bar amid a gang of miners who sweated whiskey and copper, and all clinked glasses in his honor. He would not raise his glass. They called him a dumb greenhorn. He didn’t care. They cursed him. He stood up, broad-shouldered and straight-backed, his icy blue eyes set in handsome features, ruddy but clear, a rebuke to the scars hard labor and whoring had written across his companions. He frowned upon them, the whiskey, the cleavage of women, the stink of the men, the rumble of the bar, the land of mammon unchained.