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.

We live in a world where everything “new” soon becomes old. New cars scratch and rust. New shoes wear out. Fresh bread gets stale. Today’s smartphones are outdated in a few years. New toys are eventually relegated to donation boxes or trash bins. Consumers still clamor for the trending product and the newest model, recognizing that the latest item will soon lose its luster. We purchase insurance and extended warranties to protect our investments and guard against loss.

The Scriptures offer a sober assessment of our world and our lives east of Eden: moth and rust destroy, thieves steal, everything is subject to decay, we are dust and return to the dust (Genesis 3:19; Psalm 90:3; Ecclesiastes 3:20; Matthew 6:19; Romans 8:21). Yet according to God’s promise we also long for a new world “in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

At the culmination of the biblical canon, the prophet John sees “a new heaven and a new earth” and “new Jerusalem” and hears God Almighty say, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:1–5). These statements draw deeply from the well of Old Testament prophecies, such as Isaiah 43:18–19 and 65:17–19. Revelation does not explain in detail how the old heaven and earth give way to the new; instead, this prophecy focuses on the reality of the Creator God’s purposes to renew, restore, and rectify everything.

Note that God does not merely make new things to replace what is old, broken, and obsolete; he makes all things to be new. This promise of new creation transcends our current categories of temporary newness, revealing a new kind of newness that never wears out or breaks down. The Alpha and Omega makes all things to be new and stay ever new.

Woes That Will End

Consider several aspects of this coming new creation to strengthen your resolve to endure this world’s troubles as we long for “a better country — a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16).1

No More Trouble

The fourfold emphasis on what is “new” in Revelation 21:1–5 contrasts with the “first” or “former things,” which “have passed away” and shall be “no more.” These former troubles include death, mourning, crying, and pain (21:4), all universal realities for humanity after sin and death entered the world in Genesis 3. This fulfills Old Testament promises such as Isaiah 25:8: “He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.”

No More Curse

Further, no longer will there be “any curse” in the new creation (Revelation 22:3 NIV). This alludes to Zechariah 14:11 (CSB): “Never again will there be a curse of complete destruction. So Jerusalem will dwell in security.” Zechariah 14:9–12 stresses the safety of God’s people when the Lord is king over all the earth and strikes all his foes. Revelation 22 closely links the removal of the curse to believers’ restored access to the tree of life, which signifies eternal life in fellowship with God. The tree’s leaves provide “healing of the nations,” who will walk by the Lamb’s light and bring their splendor into the holy city (Revelation 21:24; 22:2; cf. Isaiah 60:3; Zechariah 14:16). There will be no curse in the new Jerusalem because God will fully reverse humanity’s plight since our plummet into sin.

No More Threats

Finally, the prophet highlights the absence of the sea and of night from the new creation (Revelation 21:1; 22:5). Unlike death, tears, and curse that are passing away, the sea and night are present in God’s original good creation (Genesis 1:5, 10). However, within the book of Revelation the sea is consistently linked with evil power and ungodliness. The devil temporarily exerts his great wrath on the earth and the sea, which together represent the first creation (Revelation 12:12). The blasphemous beast arises from the sea and receives the dragon’s power (Revelation 13:1–2; cf. Daniel 7:3).

“The absence of sea in the new creation signifies that God will finally remove every threat to his redeemed people.”

The sea is also associated with the dead (Revelation 20:13) and with the idolatrous trade of the wicked city, Babylon the Great, which emulates the commercial powerhouse Tyre in the Old Testament (Revelation 18:17, 19; cf. Ezekiel 26–27). John’s reference to the sea may also recall the exodus, when the Lord parted the waters to allow Israel to pass safely then hurled Egypt’s army into the sea (Exodus 14:22, 27). The absence of sea in the new creation signifies that God will finally remove every threat to his redeemed people.

No More Night

The Scriptures regularly associate “night” with darkness, lamentation, sin, and judgment. For example, God sends plagues of darkness against Egypt and the beast’s kingdom (Exodus 10:21–22; Revelation 16:10), and there is darkness throughout the land when Jesus is crucified (Mark 15:33). There is no night in John’s vision of the new creation because the dazzling glory of God and the Lamb will so illumine the New Jerusalem that no other lights will be necessary — including the sun (Revelation 21:23; 22:5; cf. Isaiah 60:19). Moreover, the city’s gates remain open as a picture of comprehensive safety and security since no enemies remain to threaten God’s people under cover of darkness (Revelation 21:25; Isaiah 60:11).

God with Us

Central to the hope of the new creation is God’s enduring presence with the saints. Throughout the Old Testament, God promises to dwell with Israel. For example:

I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people. (Leviticus 26:11–12)

My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Ezekiel 37:27)

“Central to the hope of the new creation is God’s enduring presence with the saints.”

Revelation 21:3 announces the fulfillment of this promise: “Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God” (CSB). The phrase “his peoples” (plural) alters the customary reference to God’s singular “people,” perhaps reflecting the prophecy in Zechariah 2:11–12: “many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people. And I will dwell in your midst.”

The point is that God will not simply dwell among one ethnic group but among those from all peoples who are purchased and purified by the blood of the Lamb to declare his praises forever (Revelation 5:9). God’s “dwelling place” (ESV) or “tabernacle” (NASB) is finally, fully, and forever in the midst of his covenant people.

Revelation 21:9–27 describes the glorious new Jerusalem as God’s redeemed people — the Bride of the Lamb — and as the everlasting temple-city, the place where God lives among his people. This vision fulfills Old Testament prophecies about the glory of redeemed Zion (Isaiah 60) and the end-time temple of God (Ezekiel 40–48).

In the new creation, God will dwell among his people forever (Revelation 21:3; 22:1–5). God and the Lamb will supply the saints with everlasting life and continuous light. Every threat and impediment to perfect fellowship between God and his people will be removed, and we will behold his face and worship him forever as priestly kings.

Preview of Coming Attractions

This vision of new creation satisfies our longings for final salvation from the effects of Adam’s sin, for a lasting home in the holy city, and for a God-glorifying vocation as priests and rulers. Revelation’s picture of the renewed world is truly captivating not because of its golden streets or jeweled walls but because we will have the “one thing” that believers have always longed for: to dwell in God’s glorious presence, gazing on his beauty and seeking him in his temple that will fill the new Jerusalem (Psalm 27:4).

As Andrew Peterson sings, “Do you feel the world is broken? . . . Do you feel the shadows deepen? . . . Do you wish that you could see it all made new?” Indeed, we do. Or as Isaac Watts sang, we long to see God’s “blessings flow far as the curse is found.”

We long to see God’s kingdom come and his will done on earth as in heaven (Matthew 6:10). We long for the redemption of our bodies and the renovation of our world (Romans 8:21–23). Revelation strengthens our weary hearts with God’s sure promise, “I am making all things new.” New and ever new, with no more sin or sorrow, death or decay.

God will surely make all things new, and he has already begun that new creation work in his people: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Creator has shined saving light in our hearts so that we might see his glory in the face of Christ, and we now have this treasure in clay jars (2 Corinthians 4:6–7). In other words, we have an advance on the glories of the new Eden in the midst of the present world that is passing away, a preview of coming attractions. The renovation of the hearts and lives of God’s people now anticipates the coming renewal and restoration of all things. Lord, hasten the day when our faith will be sight.

A few years ago, a group of cognitive and behavioral psychologists took five hundred college students, split them into three groups, and gave them two tests. The groups were alike in every way except one: the placement of their phones. The first group had their phones screen-down on the table; the second had their phones in their pockets; the third didn’t have their phones at all. You probably can see where this is going.

Though the phones of all three groups were on silent, and though few students said they felt distracted by their phones, the test scores followed an inverse relationship to the nearness of the device. On average, the closer the phone, the lower the grade. Nicholas Carr, who discusses this study in the 2020 afterword to his book The Shallows, summarizes the psychologists’ troubling conclusion:

Smartphones have become so tied up in our lives that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check a phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking. (230)

The finding — corroborated by similar studies — gives clear expression to the vague sense many feel: our phones shape us not only, perhaps not even mainly, by the content they deliver to us, but also by the mere presence of something so pleasing, so undemanding, so endlessly interesting. Smartphones, though small, exert a (subconscious) gravitational pull on our attention, drawing our thoughts and feelings into their orbit, even when their screens are dark.

“Smartphones, though small, exert a gravitational pull on our attention, even when their screens are dark.”

Which means, if Christians are going to heed the summons of Romans 12:2 in a smartphone age — “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — we will need to do more than resist the false content on our phones. We will need to resist the false gravitational presence our phones so subtly exert upon us.

And to that end, we might find help from an ancient practice: Sabbath.

Our Intimate Companion

Before considering what the Sabbath might mean for our screens, take fresh stock of where we are. The smartphone entered the world in 2007; by 2011, most of us had one. Now, just over a decade later, most of us have a hard time remembering life without one. Screens have become ubiquitous, seemingly inescapable — digital Alexanders who conquered our consciousness overnight.

For many, our phones are the first face we see in the morning, the last at night, and by far the most frequent in between. We have become a sea of bent heads and sore thumbs, adept at navigating sidewalks and store aisles with our peripheral vision. Phones have become so thoroughly embedded with mind and body that many feel phantom vibrations and find their hand repeatedly twitching, unbidden, toward the pocket. As of two years ago, the average American spends at least half his waking hours on a screen (The Shallows, 227).

Where shall we go from this digital spirit? Or where shall we flee from its presence? If we ascend to heaven, airplanes offer WiFi. If we make our bed in darkness, something buzzes on the nightstand. If we take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there 5G coverage will keep us within reach.

The stupendous prevalence of our phones may not be a problem if we knew a screen-saturated existence improved our quality of life and helped us follow Jesus more faithfully. Unfortunately, we have many reasons to think it doesn’t.

Digitized, Dehumanized

The irony has not escaped me that I am currently staring at a screen, and so (most likely) are you. Lest I saw off the branch I’m sitting on, let it be said: Our phones and other screens are gifts to thank God for. So much good can be done by them and through them. The need of the hour is not to shoot these wild stallions dead, but to tame them and harness their power.

But oh how they need taming. Jean Twenge, in her carefully researched book iGen, includes a graph that shows how much certain screen activities (like gaming, texting, and social networking) and certain nonscreen activities (like exercising, reading, and spending time with friends) contribute to teens’ happiness. She writes,

The results could not be clearer: teens who spend more time on screen activities . . . are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time on nonscreen activities . . . are more likely to be happy. There’s not a single exception: all screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. (77–78)

And as with happiness, so with other categories of mental health: “More screen time causes more anxiety, depression, loneliness, and less emotional connection” (112).

“Though phones may serve our discipleship to Jesus in some ways, they can do so at great cost.”

As Christians, can we not testify to a similar correlation between screens and the spiritual life? Though phones may serve our discipleship to Jesus in some ways (such as by giving us easy access to Scripture and Bible-study tools), they can do so at great cost. Rather than help us meditate, they often interrupt, draw our attention elsewhere, and cultivate habits of cursory reading. Rather than help us pray, they often fill the blank spaces of our days. Rather than help us evangelize, they often cast our gaze downward as we walk past our neighbors.

Those with a robust biblical anthropology look on unsurprised at our phones’ detrimental effects. Are we not social creatures, made for a fellowship that goes deeper than pen and ink, screen and key (2 John 12)? Are we not embodied creatures, made to feast upon God’s world with all five senses (Genesis 2:7; Psalm 104)? Are we not intellectual creatures, made to think deeply and not just on the surface of things (2 Timothy 2:7)? And are we not, first and foremost, Godward creatures, made to live coram Deo (Colossians 3:17) and not coram smartphone?

Perhaps, in such a digital world as ours, some Christians can protect and grow their social, embodied, intellectual, Godward nature apart from taking some extreme countermeasures. To me, that effort feels like trying to sleep with the lights on: possible, but harder than it needs to be.

Screen Sabbaths

Enter the Sabbath. From the exodus onward, Israel’s Sabbath served as a weekly reminder of Reality. And not just a reminder of Reality (as if the Sabbath were merely a mental exercise), but a felt sense of it. God revealed himself as Israel’s restful Creator (Exodus 20:11) and rest-giving Redeemer (Deuteronomy 5:15). But given how deeply they had been shaped by work-obsessed Egypt, and given the bent of their own hearts toward restlessness, they needed a practice that would work their confession down into the nerves and sinews of the soul.

And so, God gave them the Sabbath, a day that shifted the gravitational center away from Egypt with its restless Pharaoh and toward Reality with its restful God, trading a seven-day workweek for God’s own six-and-one pattern (Genesis 2:1–3). As such, the Sabbath takes its place alongside Israel’s festivals and feasts, the psalmist’s day-and-night meditation (Psalm 1:1–2), Daniel’s kneeling prayer (Daniel 6:10), and Jesus’s morning solitude (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16) as a practice of disciplined resistance against the atmospheric influence of the world.

Now, how might we apply the Sabbath principle to our screen-addled, digitally saturated selves? The proposal is neither complicated nor novel: in order to resist the tug of your digital devices and live as a more present follower of Jesus, take a break from screens one day a week. Whether for a full 24 hours or for some other protected time, turn off the phone, close the computer, and plunge yourself into God’s created world, embodied and attentive to the people and places nearby. Call it a screen Sabbath.

The idea may sound extreme or impractical in a world where screens mediate so much of life. (No texts, emails, directions, podcasts, or camera?) Consider, however, not simply what you might lose on such a day, but also all you might gain.

Life off the Grid

What might happen if, for one day a week, you silenced the hum and darkened the glow of every device? If you knew you would hear no ding and feel no vibration? If every impulse to text, check, or divert were thwarted by an empty pocket? What might happen on such a day?

You might pull aside the curtains to a different glow, watching as the sun begins his morning run (Psalm 19:5). You might hear again voices so often drowned in the digital buzz: a cardinal singing from fencepost to branch, a hidden chorus of crickets, the meow of a neighbor’s stretching cat. Instead of drifting bodiless through the digital ether, you might dig your hands into the dirt or pound the paths of your allotted dwelling place (Acts 17:26).

Or maybe you would see your gruff neighbor, or the impatient parent at the park, as more than a two-dimensional stick figure, and instead begin to imagine the hopes and fears beating in their breast. Maybe such seeing would lead to speaking, and speaking to befriending, and befriending to praying and witnessing. Later, you might sit across the table from spouse, friend, or child and find the kind of undistracted inner quiet that plays host to quick hearing, slow speech (James 1:19).

Or you might discover new patience for Bible reading and prayer. Instead of glancing over the surface of a passage, maybe you would carefully turn over some of its stones, meditating like the blessed man and finding yourself blessed (Psalm 1:1–3). You might slow down as you respond to God’s words, perhaps for the first time in a long time laying your cares before him one by one (1 Peter 5:6–7). You might feel an exhale of the soul.

And when the time comes to turn the phone back on, you might find that you have carried some of this seventh-day rest with you.

Spirit of the Seventh Day

We should be wary of idealism, of course. A day without screens is still a day in a fallen world, a day when our flesh refuses to rest and we sometimes find, to our dismay, our attention scattered and our devotion to God shallow. Surely in ancient Israel the godly sometimes left the Sabbath day still restless. Over time, however, the weekly Sabbath did something to those who received it by faith: it slowly recalibrated them toward God-centered Reality, sending the restful spirit of the seventh day into the following six.

And so might a screen Sabbath. Taking disciplined time away from screens may not be the only way to live in the digital world without being conformed to it, but it is one good way. Over time, the gravitational pull of our phones may grow weaker, and we may find ourselves drawn into a different, far better orbit: the bright, life-giving sun of God himself.