Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 1

Spirituality Column #189
June 22, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 1
By Bob Walters

It’s funny what people do with freedom.

Among the topics covered today in standard U.S. History high school text books is the Second Great Awakening, the Evangelical Christian movement in America’s first 50 years or so from the late 1700s into the mid-1800s.

Remembering that the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and took full effect in 1789, it’s interesting to note that historians typically date the start of the Second Great Awakening as 1790.

FYI, the “First Great Awakening” in America was circa 1740, led by philosopher and scientist Jonathan Edwards. His phenomenal grasp of Christian intellectual and spiritual pursuits, and his prolific writing, are often overshadowed by one exceptionally famous yet (for him) highly atypical sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

That sermon has been used ever since, oxymoronically it seems, to scare people into the secure and loving arms of Jesus Christ. Christ didn’t die because God was mad at us; Christ died because God loved us (John 3:16), and Edwards knew that. It’s more illuminating to read Edwards’ less famous works (15 volumes worth), but I digress.

Back to 1790, the Second Great Awakening, and a new government created by “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Perhaps the first full, free cultural expression of America’s newly ordained citizenry was to get God into the act.

For all the hue and cry and debate about whether the United States of America is a “Christian Country,” at its founding (1770s and 1780s) only a small minority, perhaps only 10 percent, of the Colonial population belonged to a mainline Protestant church –the Anglicans, the Puritan Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc.

The organized Protestant churches, remember, were part of the British tyranny and European establishment from which the Colonies were trying to free themselves.

Belonging to a church, we infer, was not the fashion. Believing in God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, however, was demonstrably pervasive in American culture.

To that point, it is telling that the U.S. Constitution’s “We the people” Preamble quoted above, included the action phrase, “and [to] secure the blessings of Liberty on ourselves and our Posterity.”

America thus began, and an awakened, free people understood Liberty to be a blessing from God. Political and cultural freedom, united with personal faith in God, proceeded to storm across the American landscape.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) contemplates America and has no doubt “God shed His grace on thee.” More next week.