Transcript: Whitney Cross' The Burned-Over District, Deep Dive
Episode available on Apple and Spotify.
“I have felt great sympathy with all true-hearted Second Advent believers in their great disappointment at the non-appearance of their Lord and Master . . . [but] it was not necessary that Christ should be visible to our fleshly eyes, in order that he should reign in the world. . . Who cannot see and feel that we have entered upon a new era. Truth… is finding its way into the most secret recesses of Church and State and is most surely working the overthrow of both” Angelina Grimke Weld, January 1845 (286)
--- General Remarks (00:00:51)
--- The Context of the Burned-Over District (00:08:57)
--- New Measures (00:27:17)
--- Apocalypticism and Heaven on Earth (00:56:05)
--- General Remarks (00:00:51)
· Podcast comments
o Deep dives are where I add my two cents, reflect on the ideas or themes I found most interesting in the book, or spend a little more time developing things only referenced in the book briefs
o Book briefs are meant to convey the main argument of the book and motivate it for you, but not just be a Wikipedia article. May have aimed too far away from summarizing the book which means I may not have motivated the book for you as much as I would liked. So I’m going to spend some time doing that today, rather than critiquing Cross, because I don’t really have any criticisms of Cross. And I’m certainly not going to spend years of my life in dusty libraries on college campuses across the Northeast trying to find any. I’m going to trust Cross’ scholarship
o plugging Girard next. Evaluating a theory: how simple is it? How powerful is it?
· Outline
o Elaborating and clarifying just what the Burned-Over District was
o Articulate the positive argument Cross is making with the book, rather than just the negative or cautious conclusion that we can’t say for sure what caused the enthusiasm of the time to sweep through that part of New York state
o Then I’m going to talk about the New Measures developed by preachers at the time, practices that could leave BOD residents convulsing on the church floor well into the morning hours
o I will then end this deep dive discussing the apocalypticism of the time and how it connects to our modern worldview today here in the United States. Specifically, both our deep down desire to see the end of this age we feel trapped in, as well as parallels to what divides today, which is not democrat vs republican but rather just how much we believe we can create heaven on earth.
--- The Context of the Burned-Over District (00:08:57)
· BOD Context, labeling the Burned-Over District
§ “ACROSS the rolling hills of western New York and along the line of DeWitt Clinton's famed canal, there stretched in the second quarter of the nineteenth century a "psychic highway." Upon this broad belt of land congregated a people extraordinarily given to unusual religious beliefs, peculiarly devoted to crusades aimed at the perfection of mankind and the attainment of millennial happiness. Few of the enthusiasms or eccentricities of this generation of Americans failed to find exponents here. Most of them gained rather greater support here than elsewhere. Several originated in the region. Some folk called it the "infected district," thinking mainly of the Antimasonic agitation which centered west of Cayuga Lake. Critics chiefly concerned with the habitual revivalism occurring in a much wider area came to call it the "Burnt" or "Burned-over District," adopting the prevailing western analogy between the fires of the forest and those of the spirit. Charles Grandson Finney, the greatest evangelist of the day, helped give the term its customary usage when he applied it to localities between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks where early Methodist circuit riders had, he thought, left souls hardened against proper religious tutelage.? Yet these very people proved in fact thoroughly adaptable to his own exhortations, as did others farther afield” (3).
§ Cross’ grandparents could have lived during this time
o So he was removed, but not by much
o And while it was not created by him, his book defends it as a thing
· Circumstances *do* matter
o “none [of the regional eccentricities] became large-scale movements before 1824. After that date, when the frontier days were fairly closed, the region earned its reputation for peculiar innovations. The distinction must be clearly made between the occasional unexplainable eccentricity of a single or a few minds, happening at any time or place without integral connection to a particular society, and the kind of general upheaval which could take place when one of these isolated phenomena coincided with a cultural situation which made it catch on, gain wide support, and flourish for a respectable length of time. The latter type of movement grew out of western New York only when its civilization had passed early youth” (40).
o If Finney had went to Rochestor 10 years earlier, he wouldn’t have been received the same
o The canal was a gamechanger (like the railroads were for the newest cities being established to the west)
· Book layout is both chronological and thematic
o Culminating in discussion of the Millerities and the apocalypticism of the time, which marked the transition from the enthusiasm of the BOD to something else
o David M. Ludlum, historian of the enthusiastic movements in Vermont, aptly describes the Millerite flurry as ‘the summation. of all the reforms of the age’” (317).
· Interplay between environment and humanity, feedback loop, not a closed system
o “psychic highway”
o Cars and highways, trains and canals
o Music: hymns from a few hundred years ago, rock and electric amps and speakers, modern music with streaming and ability for anyone to make music
--- New Measures (00:27:17)
· Actual Practices
o The Baptists generally in this Western Country . .. are of the opinion, that Ministers should take no thought how, or what they should speak . . . for it is not they that speak, but the Spirit which speaketh in them. And one of the Ministers told me that "I must let the Holy Ghost study my sermons for me" -DAVID RATHBONE, SCIPIO, MAY, 1812, TO JOHN WILLIAMS (2).
o Finney wanted to “build among his hearers a ‘present obligation.’ Illustrations were parables derived from the common habits of farmers, mechanics, and housewives. Above all, sermons must be extemporaneous. The folk of the north country, at least, had been prejudiced against prepared discourses for years. Writing also occupied time better used for. more preaching, while the speaker could better utilize his hearers reactions when not bound to a manuscript. ‘We must have exciting, powerful preaching, or the devil will have the people…’” (173).
o “Pulpit manners matched the burden of the address. The imitator of Finney and Nash ‘must throw himself back and forward just as far as they did; and must if strong enough, smite as hard upon his chair, besides imitating their wonderful drawl and familiarity with God.’ Hand clapping, wild gesticulation, and the shift of voice from shout to whisper added visual and auditory sensations to a theatrical performance” (175).
· Form vs content
o “But no individual or school of thought could equal experience as Finney's teacher. His doctrine, in fact, grew out of actions which met the pragmatic test; success could be measured only in numbers of converts and in the apparent intensity of their convictions. Thus it was that Finney's chief contribution in the New York campaigns was not a theology but a set of practices, These devices met effectively the demand for larger revivals, and served to popularize and vitalize the New Haven theology” (160).
· Anxiety for one’s soul
o “... tools for rousing a community-wide anxiety over the inhabitants' spiritual state” (181).
o “Finney, in turn, began to realize that anxiety for one's soul, the preliminary state to conversion, might be engendered even more effectively by dwelling upon the specific sins of men in society than by extravagant language and heated denunciations” (165)
§ “The minister should not let his audience off by discussing sinners in the third person but should heighten their own awareness by saying ‘you’” (173).
o “Like the Catholic confessional, mutual criticism apparently utilized as a religious ordinance an inborn need for release from the conscience, placing upon a perpetual basis the satisfied feeling of redemption which orthodox Protestantism had to realize irregularly in periodic revivals. One member, who in the process ‘felt as though he were being dissected with a knife’ testified, ‘These things are all true, but they are gone, they are washed away’" (23).
· The Spirit
o “Finney's relatively sane popularizing tendency grew among his emulators into a mania. More than one itinerant may have claimed to be ‘recipient and channel of a sensible divine emanation, which he caused to pass from him by a perceptible in-fuence, as electricity passes from one body to another’” (175).
o Knapp, another prominent preacher at the time said “the greatest preaching he ever heard came from the lips of a Presbyterian minister crazed by revival engineering, at the times when he bordered ‘on the verge of insanity’” (197).
o Where it can go wrong
§ “With a reputation for wholesale success to be maintained and a community expectation to be met, the ordinary itinerant may have roused more excitement than piety and mistaken the outward sign for the inward change” (182).
§ And indeed, “the farther along the path the crowd went, the more it suffered the disorganizing influence of the discordant individual inspirations which inevitably accompanied rising enthusiasm” (206).’
--- Apocalypticism and Heaven on Earth (00:56:05)
· Miller and the Millerites
o “Probably well over fifty thousand people in the United States became convinced that time would run out in 1844, while a million or more of their fellows were skeptically expectant. This most sensational movement in Burned-over District history happened not to originate in the region and was at no time a peculiarly localized phenomenon. It began and expanded during the thirties in northeastern New York, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Only when it reached Boston in 1839, did it receive general publicity, and it achieved epidemic proportions in New England before it did elsewhere” (287).
o William Miller’s Dad was a Baptist preacher. A young Miller turned to Deism and then was brought back to a more spiritual religious belief through a local revival.
o “Feeling a necessity to justify his new belief by logical analysis he set out to demonstrate to his own satisfaction that the entire Bible was pure revelation. The test would be its absolute consistency, showing one authorship through a multitude of scribes. He proceeded to an exhaustive study of Scripture, guided by nothing but a concordance and the fervent desire to prove his pi conceived conclusion by resolving all apparent contradictions. I labored constantly for fourteen years” (290).
o By 1839, Miller had gave over 800 sermons
o There were the Millerites (who became 7th day Adventists) and then all the curiosity that they sparked by proximate sects
· The psychology of apocalypticism in general
o “An immediate judgment day was the shortest possible cut to millennial perfection, the boldest panacea of the era. Such a simple solution to all earthly problems could have appeared only among a people bred to a buoyant optimism. But that is not the whole story. The movement developed in a specific atmosphere of deep pessimism. While it aimed at the final accomplishment of all reform in a single stroke, it was actually the compensatory dream of persons who had abandoned lesser re. forms in despair. An escape mechanism, it negated the more. broadly popular idea of positive action to solve contemporary difficulties” (317).
· Failed predictions
o “Fragmentary Adventist churches survived the debacle and achieved some degree of stability by skillful retreats from the apex of their positions. But the majority of those who had sought the very narrow path of perfect logic fell off the precipice. For them, this was the end of enthusiastic religion. The road out of ultraism to the right thus terminated abruptly; but the one to the left continued some distance farther” (321).
· Heaven on earth - Individual vs social
o “The group traveling to the right sought an escapist's short cut to the millennium, looking to supernatural forces for miraculous change. The crowd going left, having departed from the literal rendition of their religious tradition, could make a somewhat more realistic approach to the problems of this world. In their view, too, the millennium would come immediately, but it would be a Utopia built by mortal hand and brain, of earthly materials, established in the midst of contemporary society” (322).
o “The major weakness of the religious radicals was their exaggerated concern for the individual soul. They came to believe that all evil must reside there, rather than in the environment, and they could consequently comprehend no wrong which required social amelioration. So the tremendous energy of ultraism went largely into channels where conservatives wanted it to go, safely distant from economic reforms which might raise the multitude and lower the few in this world” (271).
“’What if there is not another bright spot in the wide world, and what if this is a very small eon? Turn your eye toward it when you are tired of looking into chaos, and you will catch a glimpse of a better world’” - John Noyes to G. W. Robinson (340).