Reforming Souls and Society: Revival and Reform in the American Evangelical Tradition

In 1822, an aging Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. What Thomas Paine called the “Age of Reason,” epitomized in Jefferson’s rationalistic, Bible-ripping Deism, was steadily overtaken by a rising tide of evangelicals, many of whom had voted Jefferson into office in 1800. In fact, as scholars have long noted, the antebellum generation was perhaps the most “evangelical” in American history. The United States was not a nation of Unitarians.

So, what happened? How could Jefferson have so badly misjudged the power and progress of evangelicalism? The answer is the Second Great Awakening. What made this event so seismic and landscape-altering is the fact that it had two heads: revival and reform. Once a revivalist preached the gospel in a local church (or from a stump), he typically did not immediately leave town. He started temperance societies, Bible societies, tract societies, anti-slavery societies, Sabbath schools, and more. Born-again Christians didn’t simply reform souls; they reformed society. What ensued has been called by historians “the benevolent empire,” a sweeping evangelical coalition of moral and social causes that sprang from the fires of revival.

Therefore, using the power of "moral suasion," the typical evangelical playbook in the early United States was to (1) preach the gospel, (2) then work for reform. And it was an effective blueprint for change. Rev. Lyman Beecher, the leading revivalist in New England in the 1820s, helped end the public menace of dueling and eventually became the foremost champion against drunkenness in America. Charles Finney, the most famous (or infamous) revivalist of the era, became an outspoken abolitionist. (Both Beecher and Finney became presidents at upstart colleges on the frontier) In 1835, Marius Robinson, a newspaper editor who established a school for African Americans in Cincinnati, wrote, “A revival here would be worth an age of labor even for their intellectual and social elevation.” Where there was revival, there was moral and mental uplift. The American evangelicalism we know today was forged by the two-headed monster of revival and reform, and by the singular idea that once God changed someone’s heart, he would change the way they lived. Revival bred reform. For this reason, historian David Bebbington has identified “activism” as one of the four distinguishing traits of evangelicalism, alongside biblicism, crucicentrism, and conversionism.

However, sometimes overlooked by historians is the fact that past evangelicals believed moral reform itself served to promote spiritual revival by strengthening the bonds of society and eliminating prejudices against the things of God. In short, while revival sparked reform, the reverse was also the case: reform fostered revival. In the West, for example, evangelicals founded schools that would serve as “revival seminaries,” engines for biblical education that could not only train up the next generation of preachers but could enlighten those who were previously blinded to the gospel. Administrators wanted professors of mathematics and moral philosophy, for instance, who were “Revival Men” — “Men fearing God and disregarding popular favor.” If the hearts of young people and backwoods farmers were not yet fertile soil for gospel seed, they could at least be shown a more excellent way by men and women of faith. Their hearts could be cultivated and softened by the truth.

If a father could overcome drunkenness, so our evangelical forbears thought, he could spend his time teaching the Bible to his children instead of skulking around at the local saloon. If he or she couldn’t read the whole Bible or didn’t have access to the Bible, they could read a gospel tract. If a family worked 6 days a week, they should at least have Sundays off to go to church and hearing the Word expounded. Moral and social reform was often motivated as a mean to evangelize. Slavery was more than a violation of human rights; it inhibited evangelism. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe records a slaveowner’s wife’s shock that her husband had ripped a slave family apart by selling a child down river: “I have talked with Eliza about her boy—her duty to him as a Christian mother, to watch over him, pray for him, and bring him up in a Christian way; and now, what can I say, if you tear him away, and sell him, soul and body, to a profane, unprincipled man, just to save a little money?” Uncle Tom himself “got religion” at a camp meeting. Revival bred reform, and reform promoted revival. Theodore Dwight Weld, the most successful agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, was confident of slavery’s eventual demise, “in this land of liberty, and light, and revivals of millennial glory — its days are numbered and well-nigh finished.”

While past evangelicals never conflated moral reform with spiritual awakening, they also never divorced the two. Reforming souls and reforming society have always gone hand-in-hand in the American evangelical tradition.