Messenger of the Lord

Religious Environment

It would be difficult to find any period in U.S. history that would come close to the religious ferment of the mid-nineteenth century. ²¹ MOL 47.6

“Revivalists and millennialists, communitarians and utopians, spiritualists and prophesiers, celibates and polygamists, perfectionists and transcendentalists” all were adding spice to the religious scene previously dominated by the conventional denominations. ²² MOL 47.7

Established churches were torn by controversy, especially the Old and New School Calvinists. The Wesleyan emphasis on free grace produced an astounding rise in the “primacy of religious experience.” New religious groups were springing up with astonishing success, but “nowhere were they produced in greater variety than in the heated seed plot of upstate New York.” ²³ MOL 47.8

Camp meetings, primarily Methodist, were spiritual hothouses where various stages of exuberance merged with the sense of “fresh revelation,” the possibility of holiness here and now, and the consciousness of participating in fulfilling “ancient millennial hopes.” ²⁴ The shouts of the distressed mingled with the shouts of praise and glory. The falling, the jerking, the barking, even the crawling on the ground, the rolling, the heavenly dancing, the laughing and the shouting of thousands at once, “creating such a volume of noise that the sound carried for miles” all became remarkable characteristics of those “slain by the Spirit.” ²⁵ MOL 47.9

The camp meeting “spirit” carried over into the weekly church services and city gospel tabernacles. Professional evangelists carried on the camp meeting legacy with high-voltage preaching; respect for the “old-time religion” was reflected in camp meeting songs that are still effective today. MOL 47.10

As one would expect, early Adventists (many of them former Methodists) often expressed their spiritual feelings as did other evangelical Protestants. “Shouting,” for a short while, was probably the most characteristic mode of public expression. ²⁶ MOL 47.11

The remarkable coincidence of the emergence of Mormonism, Christian Science, and modern Spiritualism with the rise of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the first half of the nineteenth century was noted in the previous chapter. MOL 47.12