into a uniquely American phenomenon. More specifically, it transformed the Old World church from an essential dispenser of grace to each person in a parish into a devotional center and voluntary society of like-minded individuals; it reshaped the pastoral ministry from a necessary ecclesiastical office with authority to maintain the faith and represent the church into a helpful ecclesiastical profession of persuasion without authority, except that granted by the populace.
Sidney Mead was one of the first historians to draw attention to the influence of republicanism on the American church. His discussion of “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America” describes how the general conception of the faith was transformed as the church adapted to the unprecedented challenges of religious freedom and the separation of Church and State:
Throughout the long process of institutional adaptation to the exigencies of a new world during which traditional churches and sects were metamorphosed into denominations and a kind of congregationalism came to prevail in every group as lay influence burgeoned, the spiritual and ideological apprehension of the faith itself was being transformed from one primarily ritualistic and sacerdotal to one primarily evangelical—a change that greatly affected the whole conception of the ministry.38
Through his research, Mead also discovered that the role of the pastor was transformed from a priestly model to an evangelical model. In other words, the function of the pastor changed from that of a minister of the means of grace to that of a minister to people with the fundamental task of winning support for the gospel, the church, and the pastoral office.
In his outstanding publication, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, Mark Noll affirms Mead’s thesis by persuasively arguing that American Christianity shifted “away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.” “By the early nineteenth century,” writes Noll, “a surprising synthesis had evolved: a compound of evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning.” Consequently, “it is not an exaggeration to claim that nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged.”39
In his landmark book, The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch confirms Noll’s interpretation while convincingly arguing that democratization is the key to understanding the development of American Christianity from 1780–1830. Through his research of religious leaders and popular movements, Hatch identifies three ways in which the democratic spirit profoundly shaped the structures of American Christianity. First, the beliefs flowing from the American Revolution “expanded the circle of people who considered themselves capable of thinking for themselves about issues of freedom, equality, sovereignty, and representation.”40 Second, this egalitarian attitude led to an erosion of respect for authority, tradition, station, and education. Third, as leadership was redefined in keeping with the values and priorities of ordinary people, the age-old distinction that set the clergy apart as a separate order of men was rejected:
As common people became significant actors on the religious scene, there was increasing confusion and angry debate over the purpose and function of the church. A style of religious leadership that the public deemed “untutored” and “irregular” as late as the First Great Awakening became overwhelmingly successful, even normative, in the first decades of the republic.41
D.G. Hart builds on the work of both Noll and Hatch by specifying the effect of republicanism on the daily life of church members. In his estimation, “The Americanization of Protestantism in the United States did more than recast theological discourse or establish a new relationship between clergy and laity.” It also “turned American Protestant piety from forms and routines orientated around the church and the ministry of its officers to religious practices geared toward the experience of the individual, the reformist activities of voluntary associations, and small groups of religious zealots.”42 In short,
American Protestantism entered a new phase during Nevin’s lifetime. It is not an overstatement or caricature to say that, since it was no longer regulated by the state and no longer administered by ordained officers, Protestant Christianity in the United States became a religion of the people, by the people, for the people.”43
Nevin challenged the developing revivalist view of the church and her pastoral ministry. He was convinced that American Protestantism had capitulated while adapting to republicanism and, thereby, compromised significant theological truths. In response, he attacked this emerging ecclesiastical republicanism from a number of different directions. He repeatedly challenged the right of private judgment. He confronted Charles Finney’s nineteenth-century form of American revivalism, a unique fruit of republicanism. Most importantly, he developed an alternative: an historical, biblical, and theological conception of the church and its ministry.
Rationalism
In his classic work America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character of the United States of North America, Philip Schaff (1819–1893) offered this comment on nineteenth-century American Christianity:
It is more Petrine than Johannean; more like Martha than like the pensive Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus. It expands more in breadth than in depth. It is often carried on like a secular business, and in a mechanical and utilitarian spirit. It lacks the beautiful enamel of deep fervor and heartiness, the true mysticism, an appreciation of history and the church; it wants the substratum of a profound and spiritual theology; and under the mask of orthodoxy it not unfrequently conceals, without intending or knowing it, the tendency to abstract intellectualism and superficial rationalism.”44
With those words Schaff acknowledged the pervasive influence in America of a “form of ethical reasoning,” one developed in Scotland by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1747) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796), and known by several names: the new moral philosophy, theistic mental sciences, and evangelical enlightenment. Brad Littlejohn offers this excellent summary of the core values of this new form of thinking:
Reid argued that there was no need to posit the existence of intermediate “ideas” which are the objectives of our knowledge, as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume had; rather, the mind “apprehends reality directly and unmediated.” The reliability of this knowledge is insured by the “common sense” all men share, which arises “from the constitution of the human mind itself.”45
“Generally considered,” adds Mark Noll, “this new moral philosophy promoted ‘common sense moral reasoning,’ or an approach to ethics self-consciously grounded upon universal human instincts.”46
The practical import of common sense realism into the life of the church was a shift from an affirmation of human inability to uninhibited confidence in the power of the mind to determine self-evident truths. That simple step had profound implications, one of which led pastors and lay people alike to embrace a populist hermeneutic in their approach to Scripture. Confident that they could understand the sacred texts without the help of pastors or traditions or creeds, each person exercised his or her right of private judgment. On the academic side of the church, scholars like Charles Hodge confidently approached their task of biblical interpretation as if they were scientists masterfully
