Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800-1840

6. Conclusion

 Conclusion F ew historians have sought to understand the social environment in which Charles Finney experienced his conversion and in which he first formulated his beliefs. Because of the easier availability of records from urban areas, and because of a greater geographical and historical familiarity with cities such as Rochester and Utica than with Watertown and Evans Mills, historians have overlooked the significance of an obscure rural region. Moreover, because of the greater concern among Presbyterians for maintaining records, historians have ignored the encouragement of fervor coming from the Baptists and Methodists, whose records are meager. As a result of the oversight, historians have often mistaken a normal nineteenth-century expression of fervor for a response to disorder, and they have misidentified the fervor as a Presbyterian phenomenon. Fervor was for Jefferson County’s Baptists and Methodists, and probably for most rural Baptists and Methodists, until  normal and expected. Until the s, most Presbyterians in the north frowned on ecstatic revivalism as unseemly and impious. Instead they advocated strict moralism . Although socioeconomic factors, such as the different structures of communities in the northern, southern, and central sections of Jefferson County, did provide different environments for the expression of piety, it was less through the outside effect of disastrous social changes and more through the effect of decades of interaction that the formalist Presbyterians and antiformalist Baptists and Methodists grew more similar. Finney’s interaction with the groups sped, but did not cause, mutual assimilation. In both the northern and southern sections, the nonelites were willing to engage in fervid religious expression. After , Presbyterians partially through Finney’s influence began to consider planned, orderly revivals a sign of piety as long as the revivals engendered interest in improving the moral quality of the community. Thus, Presbyterians who had long viewed themselves as the bastion of  Conclusion moral rectitude did not develop an interest in moral reform as a result of a perfectionist impulse inherent in revivalism; they adopted revivalism as a new means of maintaining moral order. In the meantime, even the antiformalists could not maintain the excitements that drove genuinely intense revivalism. So by the s, revivalism became for them an expected and planned practice, much like the form the Presbyterians appropriated. However , the antiformalists maintained their interest in evangelism rather than moralism; they channeled their interests into missionary work and into efforts to uplift the oppressed rather than into societal moral improvement. Finney labored in Jefferson County from  to  in small, unconventionally structured communities, such as Evans Mills, Leraysville , and Antwerp. He brought to the Presbyterians of these communities, who had no settled ministers since the time of their establishments as communities, the expression of spontaneous piety common to Baptists and Methodists. Later when he traveled to Utica, New York, and Rochester, his attempts to formulate and codify the best means for encouraging the expression of piety created in his own theology the same routinization of the formerly spontaneous Baptist and Methodist expression of faith that northern Presbyterians in general experienced after . However, like the Baptists and Methodists, he continued to support evangelical reform rather than moral reform. Eventually Baptists and Methodists did evolve to the point that they joined the Presbyterians as formalist faiths, but antiformalism did not disappear. The antiformalist and formalist interaction that catalyzed the Second Great Awakening has continued into the twentieth century, while antiformalism continues to thrive without the impetus of disastrous outside forces. Since the formalization of revivals in the s, revivalism has not defined antiformalism. In the twentieth century, the same disorder and enthusiasm deriving from “Baptism by the Spirit” appears among Pentecostalists , who like nineteenth-century Baptists and Methodists, maintain more of an interest in evangelical reform than in moral reform. New Age groups are also antiformalist in their belief in an ill-defined cosmic force whose function resembles that of the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile, mainline Protestants—including Methodists and American Baptists, as well as Fundamentalists, chiefly Southern Baptists—are formalists in their maintenance of orderliness in their services and, especially among the Fundamentalists , in their easily apparent moral agendas. Turner, Bergson, and Durkheim provide useful terms for understanding modern religion, as they do for understanding nineteenth-  Conclusion century frontier religion. Antiformalists tend toward antistructure, and formalists tend toward structure. As in the nineteenth-century, antistructural religions do not represent a condition dependent on structure; in the twentieth century these too are open...