The Revivalists

...Moody's contributions to revivalism, however, were a genuine urbanization of the revival and the organization of big meetings on sound management techniques, the use of advance men, publicity, special music...

...Evangelical Christians are likely to see a great spiritual rebirth in a successful revival (the adjective is borrowed from revivalists), and conservative Christians are likely to see a vulgarization of their belief...

...A sense of the dramatic sometimes forces the author into contradictions (Edward N. Kirk has a formative influence on Moody on page 136 and no noticeable influence on page 179...

...Certainly the exchange between revivalism and the other popular manifestations of American culture are legion...

...It is a stimulating, sometimes an amusing book, but it has faults...

...Although Weisberger never makes the point directly, revivalism in the 19th century followed the path that led frontier radicalism to Populism and the other rural radical movements finally to isolationism and bigotry, a trip that was made most dramatically in the career of Georgia's Tom Watson...

...The book looks briefly over its shoulder at the "Great Awakening," the seaboard revival of the 1740s, but it is primarily concerned to describe the four great revivalist waves that Weisberger sees between the beginning of the 19th century and World War I. The first, which came at the turn of the 19th century, has been variously called the Western or Kentucky or Great Revival...

...A fancy for snappy lines ("It was not the opium, but the adrenaline, of the people") makes him turn phrases that had better been left unturned...

...Each of the revivals had its own color and its own appeal, but underlying all four of them was a basic quarrel between the evangelistic and the educated preacher, between the man who approached Jesus with an open heart and the one who drowned Him in learning...

...It was the same old quarrel between the man on the platform and the man in the study (American anti-intellectualism), but the basic stands had been reversed...

...Strangely, Weisberger's book has nothing to say about Billy Graham and the revivalism of today...

...Believers and non-believers alike are attracted or repelled by the phenomenon of revivalism...

...He is talking about Billy Graham, about Oral Roberts, even about Norman Vincent Peale and the other evangelists who work out of the best-seller lists, but he never says so...

...One of the latter is the historian Bernard A. Weisberger, whose They Gathered at the River is an attempt to map the pattern of revivalism in 19th-century America...

...Although the paths to soul-saving led the revivalists into conjunction with a variety of social and political movements, the emphasis was always primarily on salvation that looked toward heaven and not toward earthly betterment...

...The author has a final epilogue that mentions no names, that talks only in general terms, in which he suggests that as the revival leaders in 1800 took on the manner of the frontiersmen to whom they preached, that as Beecher and Finney adapted themselves to a growing business class and the Eastern farmers, that as Moody became a 19th-century business baron and Sunday a hoopla expert in a period of incipient boosterism, so the new revivalist might become a communicator, a reflection of a world made in the image of the adman...

...By Billy Sunday, the distrust of foreign ideas, like the distrust of in-tellectualism in general—an inheritance of the old frontier distrust of the East—led revivalism to become American with a broad "A...

...To reach the mass audience of the revival, the revivalist had to adapt his language and his theology...

...Both the frontier revival and that of 1830, although Presbyterians were the key figures in each, aimed—as evangelism must—at a liberalization of the stern doctrine of election, holding out the possibility of salvation in the face of a theology that supposed God had already decided the matter...

...Some are merely observers, a group that extends from the simple revival buffs who are amused and fascinated by the theatrical trappings, the diction and the decoration of the trade, to the historians and social scientists who are intent on relating the periodic swells of revivalism to the American social scene...

...By the time Moody became an important figure, the revival had become such a large-scale operation that it could be financed only by sympathetic businessmen and the revival had, in a sense, become a rival and not an ally of incipient movements like unionism...

...The neat pattern seems sometimes too neat, but that is the necessary evil in any cultural history...

...By Moody, however, the established churches had begun to adapt themselves and their theology to the twin prongs of Darwin and archeology, and Moody's simple Bible Christianity, like Sunday's slang version of the Bible stories forty years later, put revivalism on the conservative side of the theological differences...

...Billy Sunday, who said that when he got to heaven he was going "to rush up first and shake hands with Jesus," described how God turned away from the gates of heaven ministers who had not cooperated in Sunday revivals...

...The last revival that Weisberger describes is that of Billy Sunday, whose big success came immediately before World War I and who reduced (or advanced, depending on where you stand) Moody's kind of organization into the ballyhoo of show business, and the circus...

...he preached love more than hell-fire, certain salvation instead of the possibility...

...A sense of order leads him into the pedagogic bad habit of repetition, the tying of loose ends over and over...

...University of Pennsylvania One of the familiar overstatements in which there is a kernel of truth is that all American culture, especially all American literature, is a product, directly or by the logic of opposites, of New England Puritanism...

...This ideological journey is not an unfamiliar one...

...If the problems of radical or conservative theology, of liberal or fundamental Bible reading, is a problem that interests only a part of those whose eyes are on revivalism, the relation of the revivalist to American radicalism in general should be more widely interesting...

...They Gathered at the River is the kind of book that sets up more trains of thought than it can ride on...

...Apparently revivalism is still adapting itself to popular cultural ideas, still making and reflecting the idols of its time, and there is no real reason why Weisberger should not have said so in specific terms...

...Some see revivals as examples of cultural decadence, some as the evidence of an enthusiasm that might, under happier circumstances, be aimed at secular goals...

...The second wave—of which Lyman Beecher and Charles G. Finney are the two peaks—reached its height around 1830, bringing the revival from the frontier to the older and more settled East...

...The same kind of generalization might be made about revivalism in America...

...By the third wave, the one that Dwight L. Moody (with Sankey on the organ) made and rode in the 1870s, the liberalization was complete...

...it was marked by long camp meetings and lurid physical evidence of the struggle for redemption—shakes, leaps, catatonic seizures—that sound like pocket editions of the dancing plagues that swept Europe in the Middle Ages...

...Not that he invented the techniques, but he perfected them because, or so Weisberger suggests, he was in the business of saving souls and as much a 19th-century magnate as Rockefeller or Carnegie...

...Secular Americans are split in the same way...

...As a result, it is difficult for most Americans to be indifferent to revivalism, to keep from having an opinion about Billy Sunday yesterday and Billy Graham today...

...Still They Gathered at the River is a good and literate short history of an American phenomenon in action...

...In the first two revivals, the revivalists were essentially radicals who, sometimes inadvertently, loosened the tight bindings of predestination...

...Weisberger attempts to show the connection between the Kentucky Revival and frontier radicalism, between Finney and Beecher and the anti-slavery movement...