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Only Christian Reform has the Power to Save the USA From Itself

Easter and the American Tradition of Revival--It Can Happen Again!



On Easter, the God of spiritual redemption and revival is celebrated. Coincidentally, no single factor has been more influential in the conception and formation of America, than Christian revivals in US history. The first colonial Americans were religious dissenters and reformers.
The first arrivals, the Pilgrims, wanted a new home in the New World to build a New Jerusalem for the return of Christ. The second wave English Puritans merely wanted to purify their Anglican church of non-biblical elements. They left when they decided this was no longer possible. So America was built upon this twin thread, the very foundation of revival and reformation. The formation of America was achieved by various religious groups, including the Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and others. It was through these anti-tyranny groups that the American vision was articulated. This vision was deeply influenced by the Great Awakening (1731-1755), and then four subsequent American revivals. Without revivals and awakenings, the colonists probably would not have developed the distinct liberty oriented theory of government which has become the hallmark of the USA. An excellent introduction to the topic of America and revival is Eddie Hyatt's America's Revival Heritage: How Christian Reformation & Spiritual Awakening Led to the Formation of the United States of America.

Message of Easter

The popular image of Easter is a silly cliche, oozing chocolate bunnies and hidden colored eggs. Yet the claims of the Bible, regarding Christ's death and Resurrection are a tremendous challenge to the secular and religious mind alike. The idea that God Himself chose to divest Glory and come to earth in the form of the Son, is mind-boggling. The claim of Christ's sinless existence, where He earned the right to die for all men's sins, is only excelled by the resurrection. Here, Jesus confronts death personally, and actually kills death in his own death, according to such luminous theologians as John Owen, in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

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Mark 16:1-8 describes the Resurrection of Christ:
When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought #, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?" And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back--it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, "Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you." And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
The ultimate message of Easter is that Christ, and by extension of faith and belief--all of His followers have gained the right and privilege to confront death as a conquered foe. Or as the great poet and Anglican preacher John Donne wrote in Holy Sonnet X:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

America's Founding

From the seeds of the Puritan Revolution came much of what later would become distinctive in America--a constitutional, democratic republic built upon the rule of law, offering freedoms of speech, association, press, religion, self-protection and commerce. All these ideas had been suggested by such groups as the English Protestant non-conformers known as the Levellers. America's first colonists, the Settlers at New Plymouth, wrote drafted a covenant aboard their ship, the Mayflower Compact of 1620:
IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God...Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.
William Bradford, a leader of that first Pilgrim group on the Mayflower, wrote about the experience of setting foot in America:
Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the fast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element. And no marvel if they were thus joyful, seeing wise Seneca was so affected with sailing a few miles on the coast of his own Italy, as he affirmed, that he had rather remain twenty years on his way by land than pass by sea to any place in a short time, so tedious and dreadful was the same unto him.
America has always been a nation obsessed with biblical religion, repentance and revival. And this is not the first time that religious leaders have considered the US to be on the verge of apostasy and utter collapse. And so on Easter it is certainly apropos to question whether America can ever surmount the pinnacles of greatness again? The answer to this must lie in the possibility of America undergoing another revival, since this is what made the USA great, to begin with.

America's Great Awakening

The first, and most memorable American revival was called the Great Awakening. Historian Alan Heimert emphasized the importance of the Great Awakening upon the American Revolution and ideals of liberty and independence in Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Several events were attributed to the revival, one being a sermon, and the other, the labors of British evangelist George Whitfield. Here is one description:
What historians call "the first Great Awakening" can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.
Another site adds this:
The results in America were staggering. At least 50,000 souls were added to the churches of New England, out of a population of about 250,000. It had the same effect in the Middle States, ultimately affecting over one hundred towns. Hundreds of new churches were planted, the ranks of serving ministers swelled, Biblically-based schools and colleges multiplied, works of love and mercy abounded, missionary impetus transported the message trans-nationally--revival had come.
As to seminal figures, Jonathan Edwards is primary. Sacvan Bercovitch, in The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, describes Edwards as the first modern American in terms of transitioning from the old world understanding of man and God, to the New World. Yet he was still a committed Calvinist. His sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Enfield, Connecticut July 8, 1741) caused adults to shout and faint, such was its psychological power. Unregenerate humans were symbolized as a spider held over a fire, by the hand of an unhappy God:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.
In terms of mass connection to the ordinary colonists, no figure is more important than George Whitefield, the voluble evangelist who preached to crowds sometimes approaching 30,000 people in open fields in Britain and America. It is thought Whitefield preached to perhaps a quarter of the colonists. Said Whitefield, "I love those that thunder out the Word. The Christian World is in a dead sleep. Nothing but a loud voice can awaken them out of it." (One sermon example--The Seed of the Woman, and the Seed of the Serpent.) Whitefield was a model of the new evangelists who would later dominate Protestant America, according to The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Writes PBS:
Whitefield ignited the Great Awakening, a major religious revival that became the first major mass movement in American history. At its core, the Awakening changed the way that people experienced God. Instead of receiving religious instruction from their ministers, ordinary men and women unleashed their emotions to make an immediate, intense and personal connection with the divine. From New England to Georgia, the revival was marked by a broad populist tone -- small farmers, traders, artisans, servants and laborers were especially swept up by the preaching of Whitefield and his followers.
Many authors have commented upon how the Great Awakening prepared America for breaking free from Britain:
The Awakening's biggest significance was the way it prepared America for its War of Independence. In the decades before the war, revivalism taught people that they could be bold when confronting religious authority, and that when churches weren't living up to the believers' expectations, the people could break off and form new ones. Through the Awakening, the Colonists realized that religious power resided in their own hands, rather than in the hands of the Church of England, or any other religious authority. After a generation or two passed with this kind of mindset, the Colonists came to realize that political power did not reside in the hands of the English monarch, but in their own will for self-governance (consider the wording of the Declaration of Independence). By 1775, even though the Colonists did not all share the same theological beliefs, they did share a common vision of freedom from British control. Thus, the Great Awakening brought about a climate which made the American Revolution possible.
Historian Harris Starr explained how the Awakening readied America for the Revolution, in terms of political consciousness: "For the first time, the American people sought to limit ecclesiastical and political authority and advocated freedom of conscience and individual liberty." The Awakening dissolved the old social ties, and decreased church attendance because it emphasized the individual believer's connection to God. The church as a democratic unit took the model for the Declaration of Independence claim of God-given rights. Says one writer, "The American quest for liberty was fueled, disciplined, and restrained by the rule of law derived from the Higher Law of God's Word. New England pastor Solomon Paine declared, "God hath given to every Man an unalienable right...and hath blessed them that appeared to stand uprightly for the Liberties of Conscience." George McKenna, in The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism explains that religion and the Great Awakening had an enormous impact upon the Founder's view of politics and liberty. Kevin Phillips, in The Cousin's Wars, observed that when the Americans were fighting the British, "politics and religion remained inextricable."

America's Future?

Let's assume America desperately needs God's help to survive. Since American Christianity is moribund, and a wave of paganism and atheism is washing over the US, we need a revival. But what is revival, and what brings it? One Bible dictionary defines it as: "The soveriegn activity of God whereby he renews his people individually and corporately in vigour, affecting both sincerity of belief and quality of behaviour." A great deal of debate has raged over whether God, mankind, or both bring revival. The Puritans believed they could help hasten such if they assumed the right posture and implored God for help. Eddie Hyatt describes the atmosphere in America before the Great Awakening:
The general spiritual condition was so bleak that calls for special times of prayer and fasting were issued throughout the colonies by pastors and government officials. William Cooper, a pastor from New England, said that before the Awakening (1726) there was "a constant petition in our public prayers, from Sabbath to Sabbath, that God would pour out His Spirit upon us and revive his work in the midst of the years." He reported that most of the churches had "set apart days, wherein to seek the Lord by prayer and fasting." In addition, there were "annual fast days appointed by the government."

Conclusion

Jonathan Edwards himself was thought to have helped lay the foundation of the Great Awakening by unbelievable commitment to God, and specific prayer for revival. For America today to achieve the revival we so desperately need, a dedicated band of real believers needs to pray and fast in faith, believing that the God of revival will once again touch the US and heal our wounds. It can happen again.


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Kelly O'Connell -- Bio and Archives

Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.


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