John Turner, who writes at the wonderful Anxious Bench blog, grew up in Rochester, New York. That’s part of what was once called the “burned-over district” — a nickname bestowed by Charles G. Finney, the great evangelist of the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s. Western and central upstate New York, Finney meant, had been so saturated with the gospel and the message of revival that it had no one left to evangelize. There was no untouched fuel left for the fires of revival to burn.
Finney was an enormously popular and successful evangelist. He was also an innovative one — introducing new techniques like the designation of the “anxious bench” or “anxious seat” down front, where those hesitant or undecided about conversion could be subjected to a harder sell — or, um, to the greater proximate power of the Holy Spirit. So in addition to naming the “burned-over district,” Finney also provided the name for Turner’s blog.
After the death of Billy Graham this winter, Turner wrote about his own personal experience “coming forward” at a Billy Graham event in the 1980s in Rochester:
I was a fourteen-year-old Christian. Two years before Graham’s visit, I had come forward to dedicate my life to Jesus Christ at a church revival. I was active in Young Life. By active, I mean that I encouraged my high school classmates to come to weekly YL meetings and come to the summer camps at which they would be asked to accept Jesus into their lives.
While most people probably think of Billy Graham as a crusader who sought to convert non-Christians, Graham mostly converted the already converted. More precisely, he persuaded nominal, lapsed, and lukewarm Christians to dedicate and rededicate their lives to Christ. Again and again.
And as others have commented, his methods were both shrewd and masterful. Graham’s message was simple but not simplistic. We all die, and we have to prepare for that inevitability. We all live, and we should live with purpose. We all sin, and we all need forgiveness. Christ gives us eternal life and purpose of life. Christ forgives our sins. Come. Now is the time. You come.
I think this captures a lot of what is misunderstood about the mass-evangelism epitomized by Billy Graham and practiced by hundreds of other evangelists and countless local pastors now. As Turner says, it mostly converts the already converted. And as Turner’s own example shows, this wasn’t restricted to the “nominal, lapsed, and lukewarm.”
Graham and his heirs developed a new trick that Finney thought was impossible or unnecessary: they learned to “evangelize” the burned-over districts of America.
“How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?” Paul writes in the book of Romans. But Finney didn’t see the point of sending a preacher to evangelize those who had already heard and already believed. Billy Graham did.
And he did it by, as Turner says, extending his invitation not just to new converts, but to the already converted, inviting them to “dedicate and rededicate” and to re-re-re-re-rededicate “their lives to Christ. Again and again.”
For Graham and his many imitators, the invitation starts with the unconverted. With every head bowed and every eye closed, the faithful are asked to pray as the not-yet-faithful are invited to come forward. But then the invitation expands outward. Or maybe it expands inward. Backsliders are invited to rededicate their lives to Christ, reigniting their burned-over, lukewarm faith. Then others are invited — those who may already be active and “on fire,” but not burning as bright perhaps as they once did. Then still others who are invited to come forward to express a newfound zeal for zealousness. And on and on.
Sometimes this will continue until everyone has come forward — whole congregations. It can be very moving, even if no one is entirely sure just what it means. From my personal experience of this, I can vouch for what Turner says, based on his personal experience, that it means something — something potentially important or lasting, if hard to define.
But even granting that such rituals of rededication and re-re-dedication can be meaningful, they’re still quite distinct from the conversion or “salvation” we think of as the primary goal and outcome of mass evangelism. It’s certainly some form of revivalism, but it doesn’t entail people “getting saved” or being “born again.” Yet this is rarely how we talk about the work these “evangelists” are doing. We talk about them as though they were missionaries newly arrived in some foreign land that had never before heard any word of the gospel — even when what they’re really doing is giving a pep talk to fire up devout Young Life members in the burned-over district.
Consider this recent headline from Christianity Today*: “Billy Graham’s Death Leads 10,000 to Pray for Salvation.” But that’s not what the story itself says:
More than 1.2 million have visited BillyGrahamMemorial.org in just a month, according to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). The online memorial features a link to a site with a clip of Graham inviting crowds at his crusades to make a decision for Christ, followed by a list of steps for online visitors who want to pray to accept Jesus as their Savior.
More than 113,000 have visited that site, StepstoPeace.org, in the month since Graham’s death, and 10,500 indicated they prayed to either profess faith for the first time or to renew lapsed faith, according to the BGEA.
“Renew lapsed faith” covers a lot of territory there. It may be someone reclaiming the faith they had completely abandoned years ago, but it also may be some unwaveringly devout Christian re-re-recommitting themselves as something like a New Year’s Resolution. Counting all of the latter as part of a ministry’s “soul-winning” tally is how we end up with those dubious statistics touting the success of all these evangelistic endeavors. Add up all the claims of all the evangelists and ministries proclaiming the gospel here in the U.S. and it seems the entire country gets converted every year — even as church attendance declines and the proportion of “nones” steadily rises.
This is why, as I mentioned the other day, I’m skeptical about references to a “Third Great Awakening,” and why I utterly reject the claim that Graham and other post-war 20th-century evangelists produced a Fourth.
The Third Great Awakening purportedly occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Maybe. That time did mark the arrival of some popular and influential revival movements — from Dwight L. Moody to the Azusa phenomenon that birthed 20th-century Pentecostalism. But claims for a third “awakening” tend to include more than that, sweeping in things like the Social Gospel movement. If we’re to view it that broadly, then how should we regard the backlash phenomenon of “The Fundamentals” — the intellectual manifesto of anti-intellectualism that launched the infamous fundamentalist/modernist controversy? Was that effort a part of this “Third Great Awakening” or was it a reaction against it? The answer would seem to be both — which is why I don’t find the construct of a third “awakening” very helpful.
As for the alleged Fourth Great Awakening, I simply can’t say that I remember it. I should — it supposedly occurred within my lifetime. But it seems that I, like most Americans — Christian and non-Christian alike — slumbered through it. And every attempt I’ve seen to point to any evidence of its aftermath — its bearing fruit — comes across as implausibly strained.
I think that’s due to what Turner describes as this “again and again” phenomenon with Graham and his contemporaries and heirs. Their efforts to rekindle the burned-over districts of American revivalism tended, more often, to produce mainly only brief sparks of re-re-dedication among the already converted. It awakened mainly only those who were already awake.
We could make a strong case for that same time period as a sort of Great Awakening, but only if we turn away from figures like Billy Graham or the charismatic revivalists of the era and look, instead, to the Baptist preacher who was assassinated 50 years ago this month. The Civil Rights Movement may have seen Christians revived and mobilized by a “Pillar of Fire,” but those Christians have never been the ones at the center of our historical narratives of revivalism. Fitting their struggle for justice and dignity into the rubric of Great Awakenings would require us to radically redefine and reimagine what we mean by “revival.”
We probably should do that — such a reimagined understanding of revival is desperately needed. But I don’t think we’re ready to do that. Our idea of what constitutes a Great Awakening just isn’t that woke.
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