I follow the Get Religion Blog online. This morning I read a post by Terry Mattingly in which he quoted research that indicates that while 29% of Americans identify as having no religion or spiritual affiliation, 63% of adult Americans affiliate as Christians. That's a more than two-to-one ratio. It sounds good until you read on and discover that in 2007, just 15 years ago, the ratio was five-to-one. Mattingly quotes Rod Dreher that "America continues to transition to its post-Christian reality. ...We in the churches still don't know what to do about it. We have never before faced a crisis like this..." (https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2022/1/7/two-think-pieces-on-changes-in-american-religious-life-with-a-few-political-twists?utm_source=GetReligion&utm_campaign=b1b369cc61-RSS+EMAIL+CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_782cfe9a54-b1b369cc61-240924845)
I dispute Dreher's statement that the church has never faced such a crisis based on information we have about the state of the church in late eighteenth century Kentucky. Dr. Robert Davidson, in his History of the Presbyterian Church, wrote the following in 1847: "By the close of the [18th] century, a decided majority of the people were reported to be infidels; and as infidelity is the prolific parent of vice, the whole country was remarkable for lawless vice and dissipation. A melancholy spectacle is presented. We behold infidelity and vice combined rolling their turbid tide over the land; while the Church, which should have been erecting barriers to arrest its progress, is either benumbed by worldliness or wasting her energies in frivolous disputes." (Quoted in "The Great Revival of 1800 First Camp Meeting" by Z.F. Smith in Register of Kentucky State Historical Society, May 1909.)
That was the climate in which the Second Great Awakening emerged, triggered by the camp meeting revivals, such as the most significant one in 1801 at Cane Ridge, not seven miles from our headquarters at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project in Paris, Kentucky.
The following year, Rev. George Baxter's letter to a colleague at the Hampton-Sidney College in Virginia related a sea-change. He wrote: "I think the revival in Kentucky among the most extraordinary that have ever visited the church of Christ; and all things considered, peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of that country... Something of an extraordinary nature seemed necessary to arrest the attention of a giddy people who were ready to conclude that Christianity was a fable and futurity a dream. This revival has undone it; it has confounded infidelity, awed vice into silence, and brought numbers beyond calculation under serious impressions." (First published in the Methodist Magazine of London in February 1803. Quoted in Charles A. Johnson. The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion's Harvest Time. Southern Methodist University Press. 1955, 1985.)
Other notable revivals were also preceded by such a "crisis" of "infidelity" and "vice". Perhaps the current "crisis" should be viewed as a red sky in the morning presaging a spiritual whirlwind that will upend and reshuffle everyone in its path with another great awakening to the urgency of our spiritual condition, impacting and redirecting a nation once again.
By Lesley Barker PhD, Director of the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project. The project creates educational resources about the Christian history of Kentucky.
