Overview:
The Churches of mainstream Protestantism had begun in North America with a commitment to evangelical themes and ends. To "evangelize" meant to spread the New Testament Word, and the drive to spread knowledge of the Bible was for them the fruit of a deep personal experience of "new birth." Conversion, in short, bred a need to keep converting.
With this commitment providing the basic structure of religious experience, mainstream protestants built and evangelical culture that by the mid-eighteenth century found primary subjects for conversion close to home. Christianizing relative, friend, and neighbor became the goal of a series of revivals that were recurring features of teh American religious landscape. Beginning with the preaching of George Whitefield and jonathan Edwards in the First Great Awakening, revivals brought community and intense religious individualism, sincere conversion and thoroughgoing hostility. Whitefield's itinerancey and open-air preaching proved important innovations for later revival technique. Others in the nineteenth entury continued to perfect the technique, with Charles Grandison Finney openly pointing to the human role in revivals and employing 'protracted meetings" and the "anxious bench." After the civil war, Dwight L. Moody promoted revivals in the cities and adapted big-bisiness practices to ensure success. Meanwhile, revivals were transformed from teh intensely emotional and physical experiences of western camp meetings earlier in the century to teh relatively restrained gatherings of Moody's urban tabernacles, with their altar calls at the end of services.
Twentieth-century revivalism brought, in some cases--like that of Billy Sunshine--histrionic preachers and, in others, an evangelical religion-as-usual. Pentecostals, too, conducted revivals as memorable, like the one at Asuza Street in Los Angeles. But the revivals' cycles had long been buttressed by other, more stable structures for accomplishing the work urged by the mission mind. These structures were the denominations and the vast network of supporting institutions they built: schools and colleges, publishing houses for periodicals, and voluntary societies for accomplishing evangelical goals.
Among denominations, the Methodists built so strong a religious organization that it gave its name to an era. Methodist circuit riders and conferences, class meetings and love feasts became the staples of an evangelical culture on the Anglo-American frontier and elsewhere during the first half of the nineteenth century. Methodist perfectionism put its premium on human agency in winning others to Christianity, and it also meant a commitment to restore the New testament gospel. A series of new denominations, however, took up the restoration theme more explicitly and self-consciously, most prominent among them the Disciples of Christ. These New Testament "Christians" looked as much to the millennium, when they believed Jesus would return, as to the biblical past. Indeed, they sought to restore the past to prepare the way to the future.
Other older denominations shared the restorationist impulse, among them the Baptists. In their Landmark movement, restorationists became a major force in the Southern Baptist Convention during the second half of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, inherited restorationist themes were bolstered by the movement of premillennial dispensationalism, which gained more and more adherents. Dispensationalists watched for the imminent arrival of Jesus and then the final dispensation, or age, of the millennium. But they turned as much to biblical beginnings, with their doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture. Moreover, dispensationalism became a leading formative factor in the growth of fundamentalism and of the holiness-pentecostal movmement.
Fundamentalism itself formed gradually from sources that included, in addition to dispensationalism, a rationalist theology from Princeton Theological Seminary and revival-born ideas and attitudes, including holiness views. By the 1920s fundamentalism had come into its own as a militantly antimodernist movement of Protestant evangelicals. By this time, too, a separate holiness movement had long crystallized from methodist and Reformed elements, and a series of pentecostal churches had formed, adding to holiness doctrine an experiential emphasis on tongues speaking, faith healing, and other prophetic gifts.
The mainstream mission mind, though, did not rest content with rituals and institutions designed to save those near and dear. Instead, it urged the conversion of "strangers" at home, beginning with Native Americans and then turning to African Americans and, by the mid-nineteenth century, to immigrants. After initial hesitation about the goal, numbers of missions to convert Indian peoples and blacks were launched with varying degrees of success. Native Americas were slow to convert, and Puritan--and later--missionary efforts were, in general, less than enthusiastic. Among African Americans, initial resistance gave way, but by the eve of the Civil War the great majority of blacks were also not church members. Still, for the numbers of African Americans who belonged, Methodist and Baptist churches were the preferred denominations.
Conversion of the stranger at home led, seemingly inevitably, to attempts to convert the stranger abroad. Fed by the cultural expansionism that was a strong feature of American life in the nineteenth century, mainstream Protestant missionaries began to evangelize other nations. They worried, as they did so, about whether they needed to westernize and, as they understood the matter, "civilize" before they could introduce a scriptural foundation. American foreign-mission history stands as a record of that debate. Moreover, as the twentieth century brought firm lines of separation between liberals and conservatives, evangelical mission work passed largely from liberal hands and became, for the most part, the property of the conservative wing.
Still, for all that, mainstream Protestants had not been the only evangelical Christians with a dominant role in American religious history. Some Protestants had been happy neither with the ordinary character of American Protestantism nor with the extraordinary manifestations of the evangelical mission mind. Nor, finally, had they been happy with the character of American culture. A nation within the Protestant nation, these people also spilled over its borders, remembering their separate past and wondering if they would also have a separate future. These Americans had African roots, and, like the Indians before then and the Jews, their religion and nationhood were closely blended. African Americans, like others among the many, had their own religious center.