Evan Jones, a Baptist missionary to the Cherokee Indians, was one of the most steadfast missionaries in American history. Though largely forgotten today, the legacy of his labors through incredible turmoil and danger deserves a place among the annals of Baptist missionaries.

Born in Wales in 1788, Jones spent his early years as part of the Methodist Church. In 1821, however, he immigrated to Philadelphia, and soon after his arrival, he adopted Baptist principles and eventually became a teacher at a Baptist mission school among the Cherokees in North Carolina.

Inspired by the work of British Baptist missionary William Carey in India and the American Baptist Adoniram Judson in Burma, Baptists and other evangelicals began sending substantial numbers of missionaries to Native American groups in the 1810s and ’20s. Missionaries focused especially on tribes such as the Cherokees who showed interest in English-language education.

Jones took up this missionary endeavor, in 1824 becoming the leader of the Baptist mission to the Cherokees, a position he would hold for forty years. He soon found, however, that ministry to the Cherokees was complicated by cultural and political conflicts between the US and Indian tribes.

Friend of the Cherokees

Jones and his coworkers were appalled at the violent racism of whites in North Carolina and Georgia toward the Cherokees. Many local whites vehemently opposed efforts to educate or evangelize Indians, believing that Native Americans were incorrigibly dishonest and brutal. Typical of the era, Baptist missionaries had their own cultural biases. They often assumed that the Cherokees needed not only the gospel of salvation through Christ, but also “civilizing” in order to live decently as Christians.

Many southern whites opposed the mere notion of Indians becoming Christians. Jones claimed that some whites went so far as to tell Cherokees that the gospel of Christ was untrue and had nothing to do with Indians. Whites spread horrible rumors about Jones and his family whenever possible. Jones also met resistance from traditional Indian “conjurers” who warned the Cherokees not to betray their traditional animistic beliefs and rituals.

In contrast to his white detractors, Jones showed exceptional confidence in Cherokee assistants. Cherokees who became Christians helped him translate sermons and the Bible. Some of them became licensed Baptist preachers themselves. A key Cherokee pastor was Jesse Bushyhead, who converted to the Christian faith in 1829. Bushyhead, fluent in both Cherokee and English, became the pastor of a Cherokee Baptist church in 1831. In 1832, Jones met Bushyhead and was highly impressed with his aptitude for ministry. Jones convinced the national Baptist mission board to put Bushyhead on a regular salary as a missionary and evangelist.

Against Jackson

The conflicts between the US and the Cherokees culminated in the 1830s. In 1830, Baptists and all denominations serving among Native Americans began to confront the threat of Indian removal. President Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, had fought Indians in the southern states as a military leader in the 1810s. He was determined to have all the remaining tribes in the southeast removed beyond the Mississippi. Proponents of Indian removal, including a number of white Baptist leaders, argued that whites and Indians could never live in peace, so it was better for everyone if Native Americans were moved to Indian territory (in Arkansas or Oklahoma).

The expansion of the southern Cotton Kingdom increased pressure to make all farmland in the Deep South open to white farmers and their enslaved African-American laborers. Most leaders of the Cherokees, headed by Principal Chief John Ross, opposed removal. Ross, Bushyhead, and Jones became close allies through the removal crisis. But even some Christian (though not Baptist) Cherokees believed that removal was inevitable, and that it was better to cooperate with the Jackson administration rather than risk violent removal.

Jones adamantly opposed the Jackson administration’s schemes. As a matter of Christian conviction and simple fairness, he believed that the Cherokees had a right to stay on their land. The number of Cherokee Baptists was growing rapidly in the early 1830s. Most white missionaries to Native Americans had seen only a few converts, but the Baptists saw the total of Cherokee converts grow from 90 to over 500 between 1830 and 1838. Jones not only worried about the physical danger to the Cherokees posed by removal, but he feared that it could devastate the burgeoning Cherokee churches.

Trail of Tears

A small group of compliant Cherokees signed the notorious Treaty of New Echota in 1835, committing the Cherokee nation to removal. Jones saw the treaty as a fraud, and he was briefly arrested for refusing to cooperate with federal officials sent to the Cherokee nation to arrange for removal. Jones and Bushyhead kept preaching to the Cherokees and baptizing dozens of new converts, even as government agents and militia moved in to orchestrate the deportation.

By spring of 1838, it was clear that forced removal was going to happen. John Ross reluctantly began to divide Cherokees up into regiments to make the deadly trek west. He chose Jesse Bushyhead to lead one of the contingents and made Jones the assistant commander of another. In June 1838, Jones wrote that government troops had dragged Cherokees from their houses, had rounded them up at detention camps, and had given them no opportunity to take anything but the clothes they wore.

Jones also reported that Cherokee believers were going on with their “labor of love to dying sinners,” continuing to baptize new Christians on the eve of deportation. Jones estimated that 175 Cherokees received baptism at the pre-march detention camps alone. The Baptist Missionary Magazine related that due to a “sudden outpouring of the Spirit,” Jones and Bushyhead baptized 55 converts on just one day during this scourging time.

Jones was one of a few white missionaries who accompanied the Cherokees on the forced trek to Oklahoma, which became known as the Trail of Tears. Bushyhead and Jones kept track of the Baptist Cherokees along the march and did their best to hold regular worship services. The fifteen thousand Cherokees forced to move to Oklahoma had disastrously poor supplies, and more than four thousand of them died on the Trail of Tears.

Scripture in Cherokee

In 1839, federal officials expelled Jones from Indian Territory due to renewed complaints and rumors about him spread by pro-removal Cherokees. But the indefatigable Jones successfully petitioned to return to the Cherokees after a two-year absence. Jones proved to be one of the most successful white missionaries ever to work among Native Americans, with some two thousand Cherokees joining Baptist churches under his ministry across the decades.

Bible translation into native dialects had long been a hallmark of Protestant missions. Jones and his son John translated the Bible into Cherokee using the new Cherokee alphabet developed by the linguist Sequoyah in 1821. As the Bible translation developed, Jones insisted on using the Cherokee version instead of the King James Bible in his mission schools, despite some opposition from Baptist missionary officials who thought it better for Cherokees to learn the Christian faith in English.

This openness to the Cherokee language was a key reason for Jones’s success. His translation of the Bible into Cherokee was a landmark of Cherokee linguistics and evangelization. John Jones had sufficiently mastered Hebrew and Greek to be able to translate the Bible directly from those languages into Cherokee, which removed much of the influence of English prose on their Cherokee translation. The Joneses also sought input from Cherokees to use Cherokee terms that best captured the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew words. Unsurprisingly, most Cherokee Christians were delighted with this work.

Bearer of Light

The last great controversy of Evan Jones’s career was over slavery and the Civil War. The Joneses came from the generally antislavery milieu of Northern Baptist life. In the 1850s, they appealed to Cherokee Baptists to oppose slavery and, where applicable, to free their slaves. (A number of wealthy Cherokees owned African-American laborers.)

Slave-owning Cherokees came to see the Jones family as troublemaking abolitionists, and they had John Jones expelled from Cherokee territory. Evan Jones, fearing for his safety, eventually left the Oklahoma territory again for the friendlier climes of Kansas. The Cherokees split over the Civil War, and the Joneses worked to support pro-Union Cherokees. Astoundingly, despite failing health and limited financial means, Evan Jones came back yet again to the shattered Cherokee nation once the war was over, laboring to restore and strengthen Cherokee Baptist churches.

At the end of the Civil War, Unionist Cherokee leaders took the unprecedented step of making Evan and John Jones full citizens of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees noted that the Jones family had served among the Cherokees for forty years. “When the Cherokees were poor and covered with darkness,” the Cherokees’ decree read, “light with regard to the other world was brought to us by Evan Jones.” Jones died in 1872, and was buried in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.1

Thomas Jefferson is one of the most studied figures in American history, and his biographers have characterized his religion in almost every conceivable way. Some have claimed he was a Christian, while others have labeled him a rationalist, a materialist, or a Deist. Some polemical writers on the left and right have even tried to portray him as an atheist or as an evangelical believer. (He was neither.) But perhaps one of the most accurate ways to describe Jefferson’s religious beliefs is that he was an anti-Calvinist. As Jefferson put it in a letter to Philadelphia pastor Ezra Stiles Ely in 1819, “You are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”1

How did Jefferson’s staunch anti-Calvinist views develop? He grew up in a fairly conventional Church of England environment in colonial Virginia. Historically, the Anglican Church definitely had its Calvinist stalwarts, including the revivalist George Whitefield of Great Awakening fame. By the time Jefferson studied at the College of William and Mary, however, he seems to have doubted or denied many basic Christian doctrines, such as the resurrection and divinity of Christ.

Still, Jefferson had a number of companions and political allies in Virginia who were evangelicals or Reformed Christians. He was a lifelong friend of Pastor Charles Clay, for example, and he donated to Clay’s “Calvinistical Reformed” church in Charlottesville during the Revolutionary War. (Jefferson regularly gave money to a range of churches, despite the growing disarray in his personal finances.) Jefferson was also an admirer of certain Calvinist political writers, including the English republican theorist Algernon Sidney, whom Jefferson used as a resource in the Declaration of Independence. In his treatise Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney had written that “nothing can be more evident, than that if many [men] had been created, they had been all equal.”2

“Perhaps one of the most accurate ways to describe Jefferson’s religious beliefs is that he was an anti-Calvinist.”

Thus, Jefferson was not predestined to become an anti-Calvinist (pun intended). So where did his revulsion against Calvinism come from? One factor was political, and the other was theological.

Calvinist Enemies

Politically, Jefferson found that many of his most hostile political adversaries were Calvinists, or at least they came out of a Calvinist milieu, usually in the northern states. Again, plenty of professing Christians supported Jefferson, but those Christians tended to be southerners. The northern Christians who backed Jefferson tended to be from outsider groups such as the Baptists, who still faced the threat of persecution in Congregationalist-dominated states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut. Evangelical Jeffersonians tended to focus more on the cause of religious liberty than on the preferred religious beliefs of a presidential candidate.

Reformed and Calvinist leaders in the North, conversely, prioritized the need for Americans to honor traditional Christian belief and culture. This disposition fed into support for the Federalist Party. For example, the Calvinist minister, Yale College president, and arch-Federalist Timothy Dwight (grandson of Jonathan Edwards) stated in 1800 that if the infidel Jefferson became president, it would “ruin the Republic.”

Jefferson thought that religious beliefs were irrelevant to one’s qualifications for public service. Federalists argued that electing someone of Jefferson’s well-known skepticism about Christian doctrine was inviting the wrath of God on the nation. As one Federalist ad in the 1800 presidential campaign put it, the choice before American voters was between “GOD — AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT [John Adams]” or “JEFFERSON — AND NO GOD.” (Yes, Americans used all caps before Twitter.) Jefferson seethed about the way his Federalist Christian enemies made his heterodox views an issue into the 1800 presidential election. He came to see such tactics as typical of Calvinists in politics.3

Jefferson’s Bible

Theologically, Jefferson would also undergo a major shift in the years from 1800 to 1803. He was stung by Federalist charges that he was an atheist. Also, in 1802 newspapers began printing allegations that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, allegations that Jefferson experts now generally regard as true. Jefferson would never confront those charges in public, but he was clearly becoming anxious to find a way to present himself to the voters and his family as a Christian, at least of a rationalist sort. This anxiety seems to have precipitated Jefferson’s decision to accept Unitarianism and its ethics-focused version of Christianity.4

Despite his skeptical bent, Jefferson had a lifelong interest (sometimes bordering on an obsession) in the Bible and in the person of Jesus. In 1803 Jefferson read Socrates and Jesus Compared, a tract by the Unitarian minister and scientist Joseph Priestley. It represented a major philosophical pivot for the president. Priestley convinced Jefferson that Jesus’s moral teachings were not just significant, but the greatest the world had ever known. Jesus’s ethic of agape, or sacrificial neighborly love, placed him above the ancient Greek philosophers, whose teachings focused on a person’s interior life more than love for one’s neighbor. Jefferson felt that the Unitarian philosophy gave him a way to affirm Christian ethics, while setting aside doctrinal complexities such as the Trinity, tenets that Jefferson believed Christians had imposed on Jesus after his death.

“Jefferson literally cut out most of the supernatural content from the Gospels, including the resurrection of Christ.”

His Unitarian settlement also prompted Jefferson to compose the first version of the so-called Jefferson Bible. The Jefferson Bible (the second version of it, composed in the late 1810s, is the only version of the text that has survived) was Jefferson’s idiosyncratic compilation of the Gospels. It mostly featured Jesus’s moral teachings and parables. Jefferson literally cut out most of the supernatural content from the Gospels, including the resurrection of Christ.

Anti-Calvinist

Drawing upon his Unitarian convictions, by the time of his retirement in the 1810s, Jefferson increasingly cast his religious beliefs as anti-Calvinist. A number of the Congregationalist churches of New England (the old denomination of the Puritans) were turning Unitarian, and Harvard also appointed a Unitarian professor of divinity in 1805. All this elicited a ferocious print debate between the Unitarians and the traditional Calvinists, a debate Jefferson followed. Jefferson became increasingly adamant that Calvin and his followers had done terrible damage to the simple message of ancient Christian teachings.

Jefferson told New Hampshire congressman Salma Hale in 1818,

Calvinism has introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader [Jesus] had purged it of old ones. Our saviour did not come into the world to save metaphysicians only. . . . It is only by banishing [the] subtleties, which they have nick-named Christianity, and getting back to the plain and unsophisticated precepts of Christ, that we become real Christians.

Here Jefferson suggested that Calvinists were not “real” Christians. He also averred that the traditional Protestant view of salvation was wrongheaded. Jefferson’s view was “the reverse of Calvin’s” — namely, “that we are to be saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power.” Jefferson rarely spoke about the need for salvation, but he thought that if salvation was needed, it would be earned by good works.5

Cut-and-Paste Christianity

Even as the Second Great Awakening was turning American religion more evangelical than ever during his retirement, Jefferson was optimistic about the eventual triumph of Unitarian faith. “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die a Unitarian,” he wrote in 1822. This was laughably inaccurate. (We might argue, however, that pop versions of Unitarianism, and casual belief in salvation by works, command great appeal in America through the present day.)

His prediction also spoke to Jefferson’s naivete about the power of reason — defined by Enlightened men such as himself — to be the final arbiter of truth in politics and religion. Calvin, had he been alive to respond, would no doubt have cautioned Jefferson that while unaided reason has some value as part of God’s common grace, it is of secondary importance when understanding divine truth and the way of salvation. For such matters, we need an authoritative word from God, not a word that we cut and paste to suit our concept of what is reasonable.6

ABSTRACT: Some Christians presume the story of evangelicalism in America to be one of steady decline, from the robust faith of the founding generation to the increasing secularism of today. In fact, America was far more evangelical in 1860 than it was in 1776. The Second Great Awakening of the mid-1800s brought a surge of new members into the nation’s churches, especially its Methodist and Baptist churches, both of which sought to reach the masses on the frontiers and among the slave populations. Whether America on the eve of the Civil War can be called a “Christian nation” is doubtful; nevertheless, in 1860 the nation was more deeply influenced by evangelical faith than it ever had been before, or ever has been since.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Thomas Kidd, Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, to trace the development of evangelical faith from America’s founding through the Second Great Awakening.

Brilliant as he may have been as a writer, Thomas Jefferson was a lousy religious demographer. In 1822, he wrote to his friend Benjamin Waterhouse about the future of American religion, and his preference for a non-Trinitarian, naturalistic version of Christianity. After denouncing the “demoralizing dogmas of Calvin,” the former president issued a bold prediction: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.”1 If there were a list of the all-time worst religious predictions in American history, this would have to be at the top of it.

“By the eve of the Civil War, America was as deeply influenced by evangelical faith as it ever had been before.”

Even as Jefferson wrote — much to his chagrin — the Second Great Awakening was turning America into a heavily evangelical nation. By the eve of the Civil War, America was as deeply influenced by evangelical faith as it ever had been before, or ever has been since.

Scarce Among the Founders

Evangelical Christianity was not inconsequential at the time of the American founding, of course. For example, we can thank evangelical Christians, especially Baptists, for many of the Revolutionary-era gains in religious liberty. Non-evangelical politicians such as Jefferson and James Madison depended on rank-and-file Baptists to pressure state governments to drop their official state denominations, or “establishments” of religion. Virginia abolished its official tie to the Church of England (or Episcopal Church) in 1786, guaranteeing all Virginia citizens liberty of conscience. This created a veritable free market of religion in the state. Virginia’s move was a critical precedent for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with its prohibition on a national established denomination, and its promise of “free exercise of religion” for all. It was not only evangelicals who wanted full religious liberty, but it would be hard to imagine America achieving religious freedom to the extent that it did without the aid of evangelical Christians.

Yet evangelicals did not have anything like the dominant religious and cultural position in 1776 that they would enjoy by the 1850s. Among the major Founders, evangelicals were rare. To find clear examples of evangelical believers, one has to look to lesser-known leaders such as John Jay of New York, author of a few of the Federalist essays, and first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Then there’s the devout Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only person to have signed all four great state papers of the American founding: the Continental Association,2 the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Among the most recognizable Founders, there were moderate but deistic-leaning Anglicans such as George Washington, wandering and reticent figures such as Alexander Hamilton,3 Unitarians such as Jefferson and John Adams, and self-described deists such as Ben Franklin. Dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals were scarce.

Born out of the Great Awakening in the 1740s, the evangelical movement was growing across America in 1776, but it remained a minority within most segments of American Christianity. The dominant denominations in America prior to 1776, including Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, usually had a conflicted attitude toward the revivals and revivalists of the First Great Awakening. Church of England officials had an especially rocky relationship with George Whitefield, the leading evangelist of the Great Awakening, who died on his last visit to America in 1770. By the mid-1740s, many Congregationalist ministers in New England also had denounced Whitefield as a rabble-rouser. These “Old Light” Congregationalists had their counterpart in “Old Side” Presbyterians, who worried that revivalists would splinter the churches and bring established ministers into disrepute.

Even many of the pre–Great Awakening Baptist churches in America opposed the revivals. But the Separate Baptists changed that stance. The Separate Baptists were former Congregationalists who not only supported the revivals, but who questioned the validity of infant baptism. Separate Baptists started to become the most dynamic evangelical group in America during the mid-1740s. By the 1750s, they transported their fervor from New England, where they originated, to the southern colonies. This began the century-long transformation of the South into America’s “Bible Belt.”

Rise of Methodism

Arguably the key factor in the story of American evangelical ascendancy was Methodism. Going back to his student days, Whitefield was considered a type of Methodist, because of his association with John and Charles Wesley, and with the so-called Holy Club of pious students at Oxford. But the Wesleys spent little time in America, and John Wesley and George Whitefield had a terrible split during the Great Awakening, due to differences over their respective Arminian and Calvinist beliefs. For a quarter century, they would struggle even to get back on speaking terms. Thus, Wesleyan Methodism had almost no impact on American revivals until the 1760s, when Wesleyan preachers began to appear in Virginia and Maryland.

In the early 1770s, John Wesley vociferously opposed the burgeoning American Patriot movement. The small numbers of Methodist preachers in America accordingly had to lay low, or return to Britain, during the American Revolution, for fear of Patriot reprisals. After the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) ended, Wesleyan Methodists came to the fore again. Wesley granted the American Methodists their functional independence in 1784, ensuring that the denomination would remain nimble and responsive to local American conditions. By the mid-1780s, the Methodists were seeing massive numbers of conversions and new church members, especially in the mid-Atlantic states.

One of the Methodists’ converts-turned-preachers was the former slave Richard Allen, who would go on to become one of Methodism’s most formidable leaders and the organizer of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Bethel was one of the founding churches of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African American–led denomination in the country. Few African Americans were affiliated with any churches at all during the American colonial period. By the 1780s, groups such as the Methodists and Baptists began to make great evangelistic inroads among African Americans. They were especially effective when these groups employed blacks such as Allen as preachers and evangelists. When most enslaved African people had arrived in America, they had no Christian background whatsoever. The Second Great Awakening represented a major pivot in the mass conversion of most of the African American population, at least nominally, to some kind of Protestant faith.

“The Second Great Awakening represented a major pivot in the mass conversion of most of the African American population.”

Before the Civil War, some of those African American Christians attended black-pastored churches such as Richard Allen’s. In the South, it was more common for black Christians to formally attend white-pastored congregations. There were also functionally independent (and often secret) “brush arbor” meetings, held by enslaved people in isolated groves on the plantations. We often think of early America as a time of pervasive Christian commitment, but that was decidedly not the case for the enslaved population of the colonies. But the Second Great Awakening began to change the religious character of the American enslaved population. By the 1840s, the evangelization of the African American population (free or slave) was hardly complete, but the church had already become the most important social institution in the African American community.4

Methodism experienced the most remarkable growth of any of the evangelical churches between the Revolution and the Civil War. Methodist organizers such as Allen, Francis Asbury, and countless other itinerants and “circuit riders” kept up with the breakneck pace of population growth in the early American republic. Their tireless evangelistic and church-planting efforts explain much of the Methodist surge during the era. By 1784, there were around 15,000 American Methodists. Within six years, that number had increased fourfold to 60,000; by 1810, there were some 150,000 Methodist adherents in the nation. By the 1840s, as the sectional crisis over slavery loomed, the Methodist Church had become the largest denomination in America.5

Revived Baptists

Were it not for the Methodists, we might regard the Baptists’ expansion before the Civil War as the most remarkable story of religious growth in American history. The Baptists had an older history in America than the Methodists did, dating back to the early colonial period. Some of the Regular Baptists did support the Great Awakening, at least tentatively, but the Separate Baptists put the denomination on a path of massive revivalist increases on the trans-Appalachian frontier. Baptists claimed about 35,000 members as of 1784, but grew to 170,000 by 1810. The Methodists soon exceeded Baptist membership, however, only to be overtaken again by the Southern Baptist Convention as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination during the mid-twentieth century.

As of 1800, almost all Baptists were moderate or strict Calvinists.6 The new Freewill Baptist denomination had begun to challenge Calvinism’s supremacy among the Baptists, however. By the 1820s, doctrinaire Calvinism waned among many mainstream Baptists. Hard Calvinist conviction became more characteristic of the Primitive Baptists, who also opposed newfangled national missionary societies, such as ones sponsored by the Baptists’ Triennial Convention. The Primitive Baptists regarded these missionary societies as unbiblical and elitist.7 Many Presbyterian and Congregationalist pastors remained Calvinists, though, and revivalist Christianity and Reformed theology found important institutional homes in new schools such as Andover Theological Seminary (1807) and Princeton Theological Seminary (1812). Older divinity schools such as Harvard’s came under the influence of Unitarian and Transcendentalist thought.

Arminian Popularity

Overall, evangelicals during the Second Great Awakening took a big step toward becoming more theologically Arminian, due especially to the increasing dominance of Wesleyan Methodism. This is an aspect of the Second Great Awakening that Reformed or Calvinist readers might well view with concern and ambivalence. The evangelical faith of the First Great Awakening in America (less so in Britain) was almost uniformly Calvinist. That of the Second Great Awakening was a mix of Calvinist and Arminian convictions. If Jonathan Edwards’s theology was representative of the First Great Awakening, John Wesley’s was more typical of the Second. Calvinist revivalism certainly retained an important place on the Anglo-American religious scene, but Calvinism’s former dominance was becoming increasingly contested by Arminian perspectives on free will, the atonement, and other doctrinal issues.

This turn toward popular Arminian theology was capped by the enormous success of Charles Finney in the northern states in the 1830s. Finney was not the most precise or consistent theologian, but there can be no doubt that his philosophy of revival was more human-centered than Edwards’s. It clashed with Edwards’s well-known emphasis on the sovereignty of God in conversions and awakenings. Finney’s wildly popular Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) reviled the notion that people needed to wait on God to do anything in revival. God had given churches and ministers all they needed to see revival happen; the only contingency was whether people would obey God by praying for and preaching revival. With Finney, the concept of a planned revival, foreign to Edwards’s view of the “surprising” nature of true awakening, became a standard feature of American evangelical culture. “Religion is the work of man,” Finney explained. “It is something for man to do.” Finney regarded the notion of the church waiting on God to send revival as devilish. Instead, God was waiting on the church to obey him in seeking revival.

Finney became famous (or notorious, in critics’ eyes) for his use of “new measures” to induce revival, such as protracted, multiday meetings. The characteristic new measure was the “anxious seat” or bench, where men or women wishing to break through to assurance of salvation could come to the front of a sanctuary and receive prayer and exhortations to believe. Finney also followed John Wesley in his emphasis on holiness, and the prospect that devout believers could achieve a virtual state of sinless perfection in this life. This state did not necessarily last forever, or render it impossible for the believer to sin. Yet Finney and his followers taught that God’s call to holiness was not impossible to meet. After conversion, there was an opportunity to consecrate one’s life entirely to God, and to live for stretches of time with no taint of sin at all.8

Women Leaders

The evangelical movement always had powerful female figures, such as Whitefield’s patron Selina Hastings, or Sarah Osborn, whose small home became the epicenter of a remarkable revival in Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1760s. Limited numbers of women were chosen as deaconesses or eldresses in certain Baptist congregations in the mid- to late 1700s. But virtually all evangelicals understood that there were biblical and historic limits on women’s formal authority in congregations. Most obviously, women were not permitted to become ordained ministers. The Arminian proponents of revivalist Christianity — again following the example of John Wesley — tended to be more open to informal speaking and offices for women than were traditional Calvinists. These roles even led occasionally to arguments for the legitimacy of women serving formally as pastors and preachers.

One such advocate for female preaching was Jarena Lee. Lee, born to free African American parents in New Jersey, worked as a domestic servant in Philadelphia, and experienced conversion under the preaching of Richard Allen. She was baptized in 1807. Lee was inclined toward charismatic piety, and she believed that God called her in a vision to become a preacher. She requested that Allen and the Methodists appoint her as an evangelist, a request that Allen denied. This did not stop her from becoming a sought-after exhorter and an independent Methodist itinerant. Allen later relented and ordained her in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Lee wrote, “If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one?”9 Despite such occasional protests, it remained far more common for evangelicals to adhere to limitations on women’s public teaching, guided by passages such as 1 Timothy 2:12 or 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.

Splits and Sects

Biblicism was a defining mark of the evangelical movement, but as seen in Jarena Lee’s struggle to preach, or in Wesley and Whitefield’s feud over Calvinism, biblicism did not end disagreements among evangelicals regarding what the Bible taught. This problem became more acute during the Second Great Awakening. American evangelicals grew more individualistic, and confident about the power of reason to interpret Scripture, without the aid of creeds, confessions, or church tradition. This kind of populist biblicism led to an incredible proliferation of new denominations and sectarian movements in the first half of the nineteenth century. The end of established state churches also fueled the centrifugal trend within evangelicalism. Before the Revolution, the established Church of England, and the Congregationalist churches in New England, kept a lid on disruptive church practices or aberrant theology, and they could employ the force of the state to suppress dissent. Now, the same freedom that allowed for the phenomenal growth of the Baptists and Methodists led to the virtually unchecked work of other new religious movements, prophets, exhorters, and visionaries.

Some of these movements developed jarringly innovative theology, and in the case of the Mormons, entirely new scriptures. Other movements, such as the Churches of Christ, would go on to become standard fixtures of the American Protestant landscape. The Churches of Christ, led by figures such as Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell, were the ultimate products of the evangelical “Bible alone” ethos. Stone and Campbell imagined that through an unaided, plain reading of Scripture, they could take their movement back to the simple purity of the New Testament church. This effort led to distinctive priorities such as prohibiting the use of musical instruments in worship services. Not even members of the Churches of Christ could agree whether such strictures were truly biblical, however, leading to a split that divided the Churches of Christ from the Disciples of Christ in the late nineteenth century.10 Evangelicals were finding that sola scriptura, while an indisputable first principle of Protestants, was more difficult to practice in a unifying fashion when it was unmoored from Christian history and creedal traditions.

Reaching the Masses

For better or worse, then, the Second Great Awakening was arguably more formative than the First in American religious and cultural history. The first reason for its massive impact is that by the mid-1800s, white and black Americans were far more “churched” than they had been in 1776. In 1776, church life in America was more urban-centered and exclusively white than it was by 1860, when evangelical churches had made much progress in reaching frontier white populations and the African American community, both free and enslaved. Whites remained the leaders of most churches and denominations, yet African Americans not only were surging into Baptist and Methodist congregations but sometimes led their own churches and even denominations, as Richard Allen did. The vast church-planting initiative led by Baptists and Methodists not only facilitated the conversion of untold thousands of Americans, but it also provided basic social structure to the burgeoning frontier. For many frontier settlers or enslaved people on plantations, the church was the only social support outlet they had.

“The Second Great Awakening was arguably more formative than the First in American religious and cultural history.”

The second reason that the Second Great Awakening was so consequential was that it led to a range of ambitious missionary and moral reform initiatives. The formal evangelical missionary movement had begun in Britain in the 1790s, but American evangelicals readily adapted to missions too, initiating evangelistic works in city slums, in Native American villages, and to the ends of the earth. Through agencies such as the American Bible Society (founded in 1816), evangelicals made physical copies of the Bible nearly ubiquitous in American homes. Finally, Christians in the Second Great Awakening era took on moral reform causes, such as ministering to the homeless and to prostitutes, curbing alcohol abuse, and opening countless schools and colleges. Some evangelicals engaged in antislavery activism, too, though their influence among evangelical whites was exceeded by proslavery sentiment, especially in the South.

Christian America?

To conclude, let’s return to Jefferson’s faulty prediction. Unitarianism may have been growing in 1822, but on the broader American religious landscape, it was hardly the main event. Americans, especially devout Protestants, tend to recall the American founding as a time of intense Christian fervor, and maybe even evangelical dominance. Sometimes they imply that American history has been a story of decline and decay from that idyllic origin of 1776. As usual, the historical truth is more complicated. America was far more churched and more evangelical in 1860 than it was in 1776.

Did this mean that America was a “Christian nation” by 1860? The brutal nature of chattel slavery, and the ruthless expropriation of Native American lands, should give us pause about making unequivocal claims to Christian identity for the nation, even by 1860. In terms of religious adherence, however, America on the eve of the Civil War was probably as Christian as it ever has been in its history. Indeed, the era of the Second Great Awakening demonstrates the incredible capacity of churches focused on the Great Commission to transform the religious character of a nation.