Tonight I watched The Apostle, a fascinating film that portrays American religion. The film (1997 / PG-13) stars Robert Duvall, who also wrote, directed, and financed it. Duvall plays a Holiness preacher who, after fleeing Texas because he killed his wife’s lover, starts a new congregation in a backwater Louisiana town. The plot is pretty thin, but Duvall delivers a powerful performance as the ecstatic preacher and religious entrepreneur Sonny, or “the Apostle E.F.”

I intend to write a post or two about the film’s portrayal of American religion, and in particular how it might be useful in the classroom. If you wish, you can watch the film at Hulu, or embedded below.

You can also see the trailer at Youtube. (Don’t be disappointed by the trailer. Like most trailers, it emphasizes ploy and hype more than acting.)

Each year that July 4th falls on a Sunday, church leaders have to make a series of decisions. Sould we place an American flag on the podium? Should we sing God Bless America or My Country Tis of Thee during the worship service? Do we include a tribute to our military servicemen and servicewomen? Do we recite the Declaration of Independence? The manner in which churches celebrate July 4th depends in large part upon their understanding of American history. Clergy who believe that Revolutionary America was a Christian nation led by orthodox or evangelical founding fathers are far more likely to incorporate the pomp and circumstance of Independence Day celebrations into their congregational worship.

The subject of the Christian roots of America is a contentious issue today. Politicians invoke it in an attempt to curry favor with voters. Schoolboards fight over its inclusion in curricula. This blog has no intention of addressing the rights or wrongs of such a politicized topic.

Politicians and historians ask very different questions. For politicians history often becomes a tool for gaining cultural and political power. The past becomes the servant of the present. Politicized history is simplified history told in stark monochrome, a tale inhabited by clear heroes and obvious villains. But for historians, history comes in shades of grey; we seek to show historical events in their complexity. We try to understand the past on its own terms. Thus the politically-charged question, “Was America a Christian nation?” cannot be answered with a simple yes or a no.

If you’d like to explore the historical role of Christianity in the founding of America, I’d recommend The Search for Christian America. Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden approach the topic from a historian’s perspective. The Search for Christian America is a golden oldie by now (1983), but it remains the must-read book for understanding the role of Christianity in the founding of the United States. Noll, Hatch, and Marsden – each of whom is an evangelical Christian and a well regarded historian – carve out a middle ground between advocates of an essentially Christian America and those who believe that America was founded purely upon secular, Enlightenment ideals. Pick up a copy for your summer vacation reading list.

With this post, Religion in America welcomes its first guest author. Devin Thomas is a recent graduate of Messiah College and a soon-to-be graduate student at Temple University. He studies twentieth-century American religious history, primarily the history of the Brethren in Christ Church. This essay is reposted from his blog The Search for Piety and Obedience.

In his essay “The Holiness Churches: A Significant Ethical Tradition,” historian Donald W. Dayton identifies an essential difference between the holiness movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the fundamentalist and evangelical traditions of the same period:

“The Holiness movement differs from fundamentalism and evangelicalism in that it is more oriented to ethics and the spiritual life than to a defense of doctrinal orthodoxy. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the Holiness traditions is that they have tended to raise ethics to the status that fundamentalists have accorded doctrine.”

This orientation toward ethical living (and against doctrinal precision) was evident in the lives of many of members of the Brethren in Christ Church who embraced Wesleyan Holiness teaching at the turn of the century — though few embodied it more fully than Abraham L. Eisenhower, a veterinarian-turned-roving-evangelist-turned-orphanage-caretaker.

The son of a Brethren in Christ minister, Eisenhower received his “full salvation” — or entire sanctification, an essential experience for Holiness Christians — in 1892, during a Brethren in Christ tent revival in his native Abilene, Kans. The experience so profoundly affected him that he sold his (moderately successful) veterinary practice and joined with other members of the church to pioneer an experimental form of evangelism: the Gospel Wagon. Later, he and his wife Anna founded the Jabbok Faith Orphanage and Missionary Training Home, a venture they conducted without the financial support of the church for a decade.

A.L. Eisenhower (pictured above, with wife Anna) was a 19th-century Brethren in Christ evangelist -- and a prominent voice for the kind of ethicism that kept the denomination from fully embracing fundamentalism. (Photo courtesy of BIC Historical Library and Archives)

Eisenhower’s “baptism in the Spirit” (as the experience is also known) had other effects, too — including instilling in him the long-held conviction that “we do not need more theology, but men who will spend their time on their knees in fasting and prayer until they get the pentecost baptism.”

As Eisenhower demonstrates in an 1907 Evangelical Visitor article, doctrinal accuracy was not a vital concern for those who’d experienced “the pentecost baptism.” Reacting to The Fundamentals — a four-volume series, penned by leading conservative Protestant theologians, that rigorously defends the five orthodoxies that would come to define the movement known as Christian fundamentalism — Eisenhower wittily contends:

“I find that the terms used by these [writers] . . . are of such a kind that in order that anyone might comprehend how to receive pardon or stand justified, he would need to be a Philadelphia lawyer. . . . If they would preach to a congregation with such language they would not bring a horse-thief or harlot under conviction, neither would it make a believer hungry or bring him under conviction for the experience of holiness.”¹

Eisenhower isn’t scrutinizing the central thesis of The Fundamentals, nor is he critiquing its intellectual rigor or its philosophical acumen. In fact, he’s not really reviewing the book at all. He’s reviewing the book’s authors — and finds them lacking.

His approach here is telling. For Eisenhower, as for many other Brethren in Christ of his day, a minister’s theological sophistication is immaterial: what matters is his ability to stir souls toward true conversion, a 180-degree turn from sin to Kingdom living.

Luke Keefer has identified a few key elements of the Brethren in Christ identity that kept them from fully embracing the fundamentalist cause in the early twentieth century: their system of self-trained ministry kept them out of the seminaries where the anti-modernist conflict raged; their allegiance to Anabaptist practices like pacifism, nonconformity in dress, and feet washing naturally distanced them from the Calvinistic doctrines of many fundamentalists.² Now we can add to his list another characteristic: their skepticism of “such dead theology.”³

1. “A.L. Eisenhower Scores ‘Fundamentals,’” Evangelical Visitor, October 31, 1910, 7.
2. “‘Inerrancy’ and the Brethren in Christ View of Scripture,” in Reflections on a Heritage: Defining the Brethren in Christ, ed. E. Morris Sider, 214 (Grantham, Pa.: Brethren in Christ Historical Society, 1999).
3. Eisenhower, 7.

Prominent religion professor Stephen Prothero has begun blogging for CNN. In a recent post he reported on a speech given by Justice David Souter. At the 2010 Harvard commencement, Souter called into question the “Originalist” reading of the US Constitution. He accused originalism of being overly facile, taking the text at face value without accounting for the document’s internal contradictions. Souter used the example of the Pentagon Papers to argue that the First Amendment right to freedom of expression was contradicted by the federal government’s constitutional responsibilities to provide for the national defense and to manage foreign policy.

Souter believes that the language of the Constitution is clear, but it remains internally inconsistent because it “embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty.  And we want not only liberty but equality as well.” This inherent ambiguity alarms Originalists who seek to make the Constitution self-consistent out of a “longing for a world without ambiguity, and for the stability of something unchangeable in human institutions.”

The clash between Originalist justices (eg, Antonin Scalia) and those like David Souter is a matter of epistemology, the question of how they determine what is true. They have adopted different hermeneutics of truth. Prothero notes that the tension between Living Constitutionalists and Originalists is similar to that between fundamentalists and liberal Protestants. Like Originalists, fundamentalists believe in a founding document –  the Bible – which is internally consistent and which has immutable, proscriptive power over human action. Prothero argues that Souter, a liberal member of the Episcopal Church (he once planned to become an Episcopal priest), holds both the Bible and the Constitution in similar regard. He believes that both the Constitution and the Bible are a “pantheon of values,” not inspired or internally consistent, but written by a group of men over time. Both should be interpreted in each generation as living documents, unbound by authorial intent.

Prothero believes that “one way of reading this commencement speech, which argues against piecemeal interpretations of Constitutional passages, is as an application of those liberal Protestant principles to questions of Constitutional law.” Prothero deserves praise for adroitly comparing Souter’s religious and judicial beliefs, showing that theology and political philosophy are intertwined.

Prothero’s observation should resonate with religious historians. We often create a (false) dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. We pretend as if theology and political philosophy can be compartmentalized apart from one another. But the concepts and even the very language of religion and politics are conjoined.

For example, Lincoln has studied the use of Jeremiads in American culture. The term is a Biblical reference, but the concept applies to secular discourse as well. Likewise, civil religion is the label we give the blending of faith and the State. My own thesis involves the reaction of a Cold War era preacher, Carl McIntire, to the denominational politics of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, a reaction that had profound consequences for both his theology and his politics.

Souter is the perfect example of the way in which the sacred and the secular are combined. In his address, Souter describes one of the fundamental tenets of his faith, that he abides “in an indeterminate world I cannot control.” But despite the absence of the Constitutional certainty that Originalists find so comforting, he still trusts “that a way will be found leading through the uncertain future.” This is the unifying theme of both Souter’s faith and political philosophy. They cannot be isolated from one another.

We religious historians like to think of our specialization as a field or a topic of study. We study a thing called religion, it’s structures, adherents, and beliefs. But I believe that religion is something far more fundamental. It is not only a topic; it is a category of analysis like race, class, and gender. Indeed, someone can even use religious modes of expression without adhering to any formal religion. (Religion being just a name for the systematization of faith, the structures that we construct around our presuppositional beliefs.)

I hope that religious historians will engage topics beyond their traditional preserves of churches, seminaries, and ministers. Likewise, historians in traditionally secular fields should explore the role of religion in social, cultural, and political history. For example, why hasn’t a religious historian examined the impact of John Foster Dulles’s theological liberalism on his foreign policy? Why has no one written a political history of fundamentalism?

First we must discard the Enlightenment categorization of the secular as something apart from the sacred.

To the Christian, there is no difference between the secular and the sacred: every bush is a ‘burning bush’ and all ground is ‘holy ground.’

Bob Jones Sr. (1883-1968)

This evening at my church a missionary preparing to go to Cambodia noted the distinction between Cambodia’s official religion, Buddhism, and the daily faith of Cambodians, animism. Animists believe in multitudinous spirits and demons which have the power to bless those who respect them and curse those who do not. Animists make sacrifices to appease the spirits’ wrath and request their protection. Buddhism may shape the religious rhetoric used by Cambodian animists, but by and large it is a veneer covering a deep rooted folk tradition.

It is easy to think of syncretic relationships between folk religion and established religions in the developing world (e.g. Santa Muerte (“Saint Death“) in Mexico and Vodou in Haiti). But can we locate folk religion in American religious history? The question is complicated by the nature of animism, which appears to be defined in contrast with an established religion (à la Cambodian Buddhism and Mexican Catholicism). Can syncretistic folk religion exist in a country without a legal religious establishment?

Historians have found plenty of evidence of animistic practices from a time and place when America did have an established church: Puritan New England. Richard Godbeer’s The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England examines the practice of folk magic in New England and the role it may have played in the Salem witchcraft trials. (Keith Thomas did the same for Old England in Religion and the Decline of Magic.)

It seems clear that religious historians studying colonial America need to develop an understanding of folk religion, magic, and animism. But should folk religion change the way that scholars of religion in the United States perceive lived religion? Can we find evidence of folk religion and animism in nineteenth and twentieth century American Protestantism and Catholicism?

When I got on the bus to Cambridge today, I was reading David Harrington Watt’s A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism. Watt begins his book with an essay that is a close reading of a pamphlet titled “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” Written in 1965 by Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade, the pamphlet explains how to be converted. Bright’s four spiritual laws are these:

1. “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.”
2. “Man is sinful and separated from God.”
3. “Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin.”
4. “We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.”

When I got off the bus coming back to Waltham, I accepted a pamphlet from a woman at the bus stop. The pamphlet was titled “How Do I Begin a Relationship with God?” Other than the name of the church—Waltham Haitian Church of the Nazarene—there was no author’s name. But sure enough, the main headings were the same as Bright’s four spiritual laws. While the rest of the text had been changed (but not improved), there was only one change in the laws themselves: number 2 had been reworded to be gender neutral.

Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1971. 499 pages. ISBN: 0394469674.

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005. 740 pages. ISBN: 1400042704.

As part of a reading list to teach me about how biographies are written, I recently read two noted biographies about Joseph Smith. The two biographies were Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Joseph Smith was, of course, a nineteenth century visionary, author or translator of the Book of Mormon, and the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Any historian who handles Smith must deal with the supernatural occurrences and claims that pervaded his life. The question I put to myself as I was reading was this: How should a historian treat supernatural? How should a historian write about alleged visions and miracles and prophecies?

Like many historians of religion, Brodie and Bushman have personal connections to their subject. Fawn Brodie was born into the LDS church as the daughter of a bishop and the niece of an apostle and president. While in graduate school at the University of Chicago, she lost her faith. She then wrote her critical biography of Smith, for which the LDS Church excommunicated her. Richard Bushman, on the other hand, is a professional historian who has retained his Mormon faith. Many of Bushman’s works (one of which won the Bancroft prize) deal with early American history, but his biography of Smith has received perhaps the widest discussion.

Because of their different conclusions on Mormonism, Brodie and Bushman wrote very different biographies of Joseph Smith. These differences might be summed up in the way they treat Smith’s visions. Brodie plainly thinks that Smith was a charlatan and a hoax. She is almost mean-spirited in the way that she goes about debunking Smith and the Book of Mormon. I wished at times that she would simply report what Smith did or said, rather than taxing my patience by repeatedly explaining the obvious. The effect is to make Smith a flat character. In Brodie’s telling, he is always the adolescent trickster with scarcely any room to develop into a man who believed his own message.

Bushman, on the other hand, finds believable most, if not all, of what Smith claimed. Consequently, he writes as if Moroni had actually appeared to Smith, as if he had actually translated the golden plates, and if he had actually received revelations. This is not so problematic; as Bushman points out in his preface, a historian can scarcely be expected to add the words alleged or purportedly before every such statement. More problematic is the way Bushman structures his materials. For example, Bushman reports very little about Smith’s treasure seeking until after he discovers the golden plates. The effect, at least to this reader, was that Bushman presented a Joseph Smith whose mind or inner life was much more believable than Brodie’s, at the expense of leaving what actually happened much less certain.

As for style, both Brodie and Bushman have written good biographies, though neither is the summit of the biographer’s art. Brodie’s is much the better story. Where Bushman’s narrative is often interrupted by tedious justifications of Smith, Brodie’s book is well-crafted with an unswerving narrative. Bushman’s biography, though, is far better at explaining Joseph Smith’s teachings. One can read Brodie’s nearly five hundred pages and learn surprisingly little about what Smith thought or taught. The differences in style between Brodie and Bushman is not simply a result of the commonly invoked dichotomy between narration and explanation. Rather, the difference is due at least in part to the way they treat the supernatural. Brodie is able to dismiss Smith’s experiences as hoaxes and his teaching as nonsense, and so she can get on with her story. Bushman is obligated both to treat them as genuine and to provide scholarly explanations, so he sometimes gets bogged down in justifications.

My sympathies lie with both authors. Like Brodie, I have not a shred of faith in what Joseph Smith taught, and so I find her narrative of Smith’s life more compelling than Bushman’s. But like Bushman, I am a believing historian who writes about the history of religion and faith. As such, I would like to think it is possible to write about religious history, even supernatural occurrences, in a way that is different from unbelievers but that is still rigorously scholarly. Despite their admirable work, I think that neither Brodie nor Bushman has quite succeeded in the way they treat the supernatural.

What, then, is the proper way for a historian to handle visions and dreams and prophecies? The extreme of skepticism assumes there is nothing supernatural. The extreme of credulity treats such occurrences uncritically. My method, which is admittedly ad hoc, strikes what I hope is a balance between those extremes. I frankly distinguish between what I believe is supernatural and what I believe is not, leaving room for what is doubtful. After all, not every spiritual claim is true, and life is too short to give every opinion an equal hearing. But at the same time, I try to treat all religious beliefs as genuinely held, in order to give them their due influence in the lives of those who hold them.

Is there a better way?

James Kurth, a retired political scientist from Swarthmore College, is perhaps best known for his variation on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. In the early ’90s Huntington proposed that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of a global contest between people groups and nations that would be predicated upon cultural and religious cleavages. Huntington’s idea became de rigueur with the rise of global Islamic terrorism. But whereas Huntington’s clash was a matter for foreign policy, Kurth believed that the greatest crisis would surface in domestic affairs as a battle between liberal multiculturalism and the Judeo-Christian inflected Western tradition.

Significantly, Kurth rooted both opposing streams of American culture in America’s Protestant heritage. As an evangelical (he’s a deacon at Proclamation Presbyterian Church pastored by Peter Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary), Kurth argues that theologically liberal Protestantism has morphed into a psuedo-religious secular multiculturalism. This is the “Protestant Deformation.”

Kurth begins by positing that the anti-hierarchical and anti-communitarian emphases of the Protestant Reformation bled over into the secular realm. Thus American Protestants were historically supporters of free markets and liberal democracy, secular corollaries to religious individualism and egalitarianism.

But over time, these emphases changed. Kurth lists six stages of Protestant declension: salvation by grace, grace evidenced through good works, salvation by works, the Unitarian Transformation, the American Creed, and universal human rights. Historic Protestantism believed that eternal salvation was ensured by grace alone, God’s unmerited favor towards desperate sinners. But as Protestant communities grew, it became hard to distinguish the nonbelievers from the elect. So, as observed by Max Weber, works became a litmus test for the saved community.

Eventually, the theological concept of grace lost favor in some Protestant circles, creating a de facto belief in salvation by works. This works-based theology transformed into Unitarianism, a deemphasis of the person and work of Jesus Christ. A personal savior had been replaced by a distant Supreme Being. Over time, even that abstract, remote idea of god was relinquished, creating the secular American Creed. This Creed was no longer distinctly Protestant, but “it was clearly the product of a Protestant culture and was a sort of secularized version of Protestantism.” Finally, the American Creed became universalized and reformulated as a belief in human rights.

Kurth’s “Protestant Deformation” is a pretty convincing explanation of the development of American civil religion from an evangelical perspective. It also speaks to historians in a wide variety of fields, like diplomatic, religious, and political history.

Do you find the “Protestant Deformation” convincing? Why or why not?

Bonus: I particularly like this article by Kurth. I sympathize with his politics, including his opposition to the idea of American exceptionalism and his isolationism. I suspect that he is a fellow confessional libertarian in the mold of Gresham Machen.

Lorenzo Dow

In the antebellum United States, more children were named after Lorenzo Dow than any other person. It is likely that more people heard Dow speak in person than any one else. His writings were so widely read and reprinted that Dow made a small fortune. In an age known for religious eccentricity, Dow could give any eccentric a run for his money. But despite his eccentricities, or because of them, Dow was a representative of American religion after the Revolution—a prophet of democracy. ¹

Dow was a child of the Revolution, born in Connecticut in 1777. He was converted in his early teens and began itinerant preaching when he was nineteen. Dow was frequently at odds with the Methodist conferences and bishops that were the authorities within the denomination. At first his age, and soon his idiosyncratic preaching and prophet-like personality made other Methodist ministers reluctant to support Dow. They licensed Dow to preach, but he was never ordained. In the 1790s and especially in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Dow preached at camp meetings throughout the United States, including some of the western territories. He also made three trips to Great Britain, in 1798–1801, in 1805–1807, and in 1818–1820. Dow cultivated his reputation as an American John the Baptist. He wore disheveled clothes, long hair, and a beard. In his preaching, he used the types of antics that are normally associated with later evangelists like Billy Sunday.²

If Dow was a preacher of the gospel, he was also a preacher of American democracy. Democracy was the root of Dow’s beliefs about how people obtain salvation. Dow rejected the Calvinism of his upbringing. Salvation, he preached, was not a matter of God’s election but of man’s choice to choose or reject Christ. Nor could salvation be judged by church authorities, but only by the immediate apprehension of the believer. Dow was not unique in these doctrines, for many Christians contemporary with him were moving away from Calvinism towards the revivalism epitomized by Charles Grandison Finney a few decades later. What made Dow important was that he explicitly connected this change in preaching salvation to the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy: “If all men are ‘BORN EQUAL,’ and endowed with unalienable RIGHTS by their CREATOR, in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—then there can be no just reason, as a cause, why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.” Dow was clear that politics were driving his theology. ³

The second way in which Dow mixed democracy and religion was by his constant resistance against ecclesiastical authority. Some of this resistance must be attributed to Dow’s naturally contrary personality. But much of it was principled, as can be seen in his tract on “Strictures on Church Government.” In that tract, Dow rejected the notion that episcopal succession was the source of Methodist authority. That argument justified Anglicans, or even the tyrannical Catholics, better than it justified Methodists. Rather, Dow argued, the only legitimate authority for the church was the sovereignty of the people. And Dow was willing to take the principle of democratic egalitarianism much farther than most contemporaries, even to include other races. The main example that Dow used to justify his ideas of church government was the case of Richard Allen, a black laymen who had founded his own Methodist church, of which he eventually became a bishop. Even Dow’s editor, though reluctantly admitting that Dow was too sharp in his opinions on church government, thought that tract and others “evince a mind deeply imbued with the spirit of Democracy.”⁴

The key to Dow’s experience were the visions and dreams that he saw throughout his life. These visions guided Dow’s decisions and informed his theology. For example, Dow had two visions of John Wesley that led to his conversion and his call to preach. Perhaps visions are key to more than just Dow’s experience. Historians have noted that democratized religion in the United States was at once extraordinarily open and extraordinarily authoritarian. People were free to pick the denomination, sect, or clergyman of their choice, and they exercised that freedom frequently. Yet people tended to pick leaders who were authoritarian. Christian democracy was not so much inside any particular church as it was among the churches. Perhaps visions and dreams are part of the explanation for this paradox. ⁵

The Protestant teaching that every person could read the Bible for himself can lead to egalitarianism in religion. If people are permitted to understand God’s word for themselves, and to correct their ministers from the Bible, then the Bible has a leveling effect. Reading the Bible can also lead to religious mobility, as laymen look for a church that matches their interpretation, or else found their own. An example contemporary with Dow are the Christians and Disciples of Christ of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone, who founded new denominations to return to the primitive Christianity of the Bible. Visions and dreams, though, can have a more complex effect. In Dow’s case, visions convinced him to disregard the authority of the Methodist bishops and conferences, and thus to influence Methodism towards increased openness. But visions also gave Dow the authority to preach in a way that was right in Dow’s own eyes. Those visions were necessarily anti-democratic, because they were accessible only to Dow and not to his followers, and because visions are so intensely personal that they are nonnegotiable. It is not much of a leap from Dow’s visions to those of other innovative but authoritarian religious leaders of the same period. For example, both Joseph Smith and Robert Matthews (later Matthias) claimed visions as their basis for establishing very authoritarian sects. ⁶

Though Dow was the prophet of American democracy, Dow also typifies the international characteristic of evangelicalism in early America. Dow had visions of John Wesley at both his conversion and his call to preach. He traveled to Ireland and England first for his health and then to preach, where he made connections with British Methodists and also Quakers. Like many revivalists, from George Whitefield to D. L. Moody to Billy Graham, Dow made his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Dow was not necessarily well-received in Britain, for the American camp meeting style was far less appealing to British Christians than, say, Moody’s Victorian morality and sentimentality would be a half-century later, but Dow spent nearly as much time preaching in Britain as he did America. Perhaps the most important clue to Dow’s transatlantic identity is the curious term that Dow chose for himself, “Cosmopolite.” This term often stands in for Dow’s name, as in the title of Dow’s published journal, The History of Cosmopolite; Or, Lorenzo’s Journal. Dow titled one particularly bizarre segment of his journal “A Short Account of ‘Eccentric Cosmopolite.’” These sections are clearly autobiographical, but Dow writes about himself in the third person without using his name. The meaning of the term cosmopolite—“citizen of the world”—is plain enough, but precisely what Dow meant by it is more difficult to know. Perhaps Dow meant that though he was a citizen of the United States and an advocate for its democracy, yet he was not bound by the confines of one nation. Neither Methodism nor the United States could hold Dow, though he typified them both. ⁷

1. The assertion about children being named after Dow is taken from Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 281, n.27. There is no recent biography of Lorenzo Dow. The best secondary sources on his life are American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Charles Coleman Sellers, Lorenzo Dow, the Bearer of the Word (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1928); Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. Dow also appears in Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 610. This paper is drawn from those sources, and from a collection of Dow’s works, Lorenzo Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or The Four Volumes of Lorenzo’s Journal, Concentrated in One: Containing His Experience and Travels, from Childhood to 1815, Being Upwards of Thirty-Seven Years. Also, His Polemical Writings . . ., 6th ed. (Wheeling, Virginia, 1849).
2. American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Dow, History of Cosmopolite.
3. Quoted in American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo.”
4. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, v, 543-58.
5. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28.
6. An account of Campbell, Stone, and Smith can be found in Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). For Matthews, see Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
7. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28, 78-94, 253-303. The OED reports that the term cosmopolite was revived in the nineteenth century “and often contrasted with patriot, and so either reproachful or complimentary”; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “cosmopolite.” Two works which stress the international aspects of evangelicalism in this period are Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).

While reading William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, I came across several sentences that caught my eye. Inboden dedicated a chapter of his book to a discussion of US Senator H. Alexander Smith, a prominent anti-Communist and ardent prayer warrior. Inboden was interested in Smith’s epistemology, the source of his certainty that God had told him how to fight the Cold War. The senator spent much time each day in prayer asking for divine intervention in his own personal struggles as well as for guidance in Congress. Thankfully, Smith journaled about his prayer life. Representative of the quotes that Inboden included was Smith’s prayer asking God to “make me true to thine principles which are true and guided by thee and not those which are merely expedient or vote-getting.” Commendable, but not extraordinary.

But these quotations grabbed my attention: “God is with me and will guide me or I will make a failure in a big [illegible]. Of course God will not fail me but I must be consecrated” (Inboden 196).

A little bit later: ‘“I have had bad days because I am tired and I need God. I have been smoking my pipe which I do enjoy, but I wonder if it has meant that I am not getting that feeling of guidance that I so much need.” A couple of months later he complained of “not being up to my normal spiritual vigor” and noted “it comes to me to make an experiment: Does my smoking keep me from God’s guidance? I will try for this week and see what the effect is” (Inboden 196).

Where had I heard language like this before? Boom, it suddenly hit me…these are Keswickian ideas!

Several months ago I read an article-length version of Andy Naselli’s dissertation on Keswick theology. Andy is a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and D. A. Carson’s research assistant. (I heartily recommend the article for anyone interested in Protestant theology or modern church history; indeed, I myself was astounded at the influence of Keswickian thought on my own upbringing.)

In summary, Keswick theologians taught that there were three categories of people: unbelievers (those who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior), carnal Christians (those who were saved, but who had not defeated their sinful natures), and consecrated Christians (those who had surrendered known sin to God and acknowledged Christ as Lord of their life). It is the distinction between carnal and consecrated Christians that concerns us here.

Keswickians are often associated with the phrase, “Let go, and let God.” Carnal Christians needed to exercise their free will by confessing sin in an act of consecration. This was the letting go. The Spirit of God would then sanctify the believer, counteracting their sin nature. Now these consecrated Christians were empowered for service, confident that they were in the center of God’s will.

Logically following from this concept of consecration was the Keswickian’s constant search for known sin. If sin had not been discovered and confessed, then God could not consecrate that believer. So Keswickians earnestly dredged their souls looking for sins that might be holding them back .

But, like all believers, Keswickians often struggled with doubts and feelings of inadequacy. Keswickians interpreted these struggles as signs of unconfessed sin in their lives. They knew something was wrong, and they knew it wasn’t God’s fault, so they urgently looked for as yet unconfessed sins.

To use Senator Smith’s smoking as an example of Keswickian thought in action, the Senator noticed a lack of “normal spiritual vigor.” This indicated to him that some specific, unconfessed sin must be separating him God’s guidance. Smith believed that he needed to find the sin responsible for his condition, confess it, and then God would consecrate him.

Inboden describes Smith’s thought process this way: “Nothing seems to have bothered Smith more than the feeling that he might be alienated from divine counsel and comfort, and when such feelings overtook him he tried frantically to diagnose the cause, be it smoking or stress or political complications” (Inboden 197).

Speaking more broadly, I believe that Smith frequent mood swings – described by Inboden as “periodic bouts of guilt and self-doubt” (Inboden 197) – fit into a pattern of behavior that Naselli diagnoses as common among Keswickians. When the consecrated believer is on an emotional high following their confession of sin, they are empowered by the Spirit and woe be to all who might question their authority or opinions. But when the cycle reverses, depression is the understandable result of frantically searching for any sin that might be debilitating the Spirit’s work.

Thus it is significant that Inboden, who never mentions Keswick theology, writes, “Alternatively triumphant and timid, Smith saw himself playing the part of a prophet or even an oracle. The content of the message originated with God, not with him, and yet Smith had to maintain a certain standard of personal piety in order to hear and communicate this divine mandate.” (It is easy to see the interplay between Pentecostalism and Keswick theology. Pentecostals and Keswickians alike emphasize the work of the Spirit and speak of the Spirit’s empowerment as an event that is distinct from justification.)

So what, you ask? H. Alexander Smith spoke like a Keswickian. Big deal. Paul, how do you even know that Smith got these ideas from Keswick theology, that the overlap of ideas is not just a coincidence?

Here’s where it gets good. H. Alexander Smith was an adherent of a group called Moral Re-Armament (MRA, also known as “the Oxford Group”). Although it sounds more like a think tank than a religious group, MRA was founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister. Buchman hoped that the group’s international network of politicians and businessmen would help usher in God’s kingdom on earth. MRA’s members were encouraged to spend time praying and listening to God’s direct commands (Inboden 192).

So what is the connection between MRA and Keswick theology? Frank Buchman was consecrated at the 1908 Keswick Convention. He wrote after hearing Jessie Penn-Lewis speak, “I don’t know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God in Christ…. I was the centre of my own life. That big “I” had to be crossed out. I saw my resentments against those men standing out like tombstones in my heart. I asked God to change me and He told me to put things right with them. It produced in me a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me and afterwards a dazed sense of a great spiritual shaking-up.”

Buchman then went to work for the YMCA and was influenced by another prominent Keswickian, Baptist preacher F. B. Meyer. Meyer encouraged Buchman to spend more time each day opening himself up to the Spirit of God. Doing so would allow God to guide Buchman. Buchman followed Meyer’s advice and eventually began to encourage other men to do likewise. It was from these contacts that Buchman eventually formed MRA, which subsequently shaped H. Alexander Smith’s theology.

So why does all this stuff about Smith, Buchman, MRA, and Keswick matter? For political historians it shows the real world consequences of religious belief. Smith’s beliefs shaped his views of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Ideology is not just a cover for national self-interest.

For religious historians it is a reminder that ideas are messy. We should not think of theology as merely a formal system of doctrines. Theology can influence movements and people not normally associated with the theology proper.

For me it is a reminder to keep my eyes pealed no matter what I’m reading. I thought I was just reading a book about the influence of religion on American foreign policy makers during the Cold War. I had no clue that I’d end up learning about Keswick theology and MRA!

PS –Fun tidbit: an offshoot of “the Oxford Group” is Alcoholic’s Anonymous.

PPS – Ironically, D. A. Carson is speaking at next year’s Keswick Convention. Good thing that the organizers don’t know what Carson’s student has been up to! ;-)