Primitivism in America

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bowman
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
American History ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Original Version ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Individual Capacity ◽  
Historical Authority

Historians most often use the term primitivism to refer to the attempt to reconstruct a religious tradition’s original theology, structure, or beliefs. Primitivists believe that the earliest expressions of the faith are the most efficacious, powerful, and valid, and hence they attempt to recapture them in as complete a form as it is possible for them to imagine. Thus, they frequently dissent from established religious traditions, believing that those constructed under the primitive impulse achieve superior purity. Of course, these attempts are normally incomplete or inaccurate, reflecting the desires or needs of the group doing the restoring more than the original version of whatever faith is involved. Primitivism has taken on a number of forms throughout American history. This essay follows a chronological approach, but uses Richard Hughes’s designations of “ethical,” “ecclesiastical,” and “experiential” primitivism to distinguish among various movements and provide some order to the narrative. These are common impulses in American religion, particularly in the years immediately following the American Revolution commonly called the Second Great Awakening. The language of primitivism has provided Americans with the weight of historical authority, often invoked to overturn established hierarchies and replace them with forms of religious practice deemed, alternately, more democratic, more biblical, more conducive to religious experience, or more ethically demanding. Whatever the case, primitivism has spoken to the American impulse toward reform, resistance to institution, and individual capacity.

A Prohibited History of Pentecostal Social Engagement

Pneuma ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-305
Author(s):  
Joseph Florez
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Community Conflict ◽  
History Of ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article explores the dynamic intersection of community, conflict, and personal faith among a small group of Pentecostals during Chile’s military dictatorship (1973–1990). It argues that Pentecostal religious experience did not occur only within the framework of prescribed religious traditions and dogma. It seeped deep into the shadows of a powerful military state bent on a radical reordering of the economy and society; one that was willing to reach unthinkable levels of violence to do so. It concludes that we must examine less emblematic manifestations of pentecostal religiosity to fully understand the forms religion and religious practice took as they were folded into the limitations and complications of quotidian life, recognizing, moreover, that devotional and practical improvisations were not always understood as impious or immoral lapses. They were often necessary religious innovations used by believers to find meaning in the difficult circumstances of life under military rule.

Alexander Crummell and the Anti-Slavery Dilemma of the Episcopal Church

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 767-784
Author(s):  
THOMAS STRANGE
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church

Alexander Crummell's application to enter the General Theological Seminary in 1839 was problematic for the Episcopal Church. Admitting the African American abolitionist would have exacerbated divisions over slavery within a denomination still recovering from the American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. The Church's increasing financial dependence on its upper-class members was a further complication. In Northern states the social elite supported anti-abolitionist violence, whilst in the South support for the Church came predominantly from slaveholders, who opposed any form of abolitionism. In order to safeguard the Episcopal Church's future, the denomination had to reject Crummell's application.

The Consequences of Liberty: Barton W. Stone's Democratized Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-308
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Overton
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Confessional Unity

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

Presbyterians and Ethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 525-537
Author(s):  
Mark Douglas
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.

scholarly journals Immigration and Multiculturalism in Italy: The Religious Experience of the Peruvian Community in the Eternal City

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 478
Author(s):  
Verónica Roldán
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Popular Religiosity

The present study on the religious experience of the Peruvian community in Rome belongs to the area of studies on immigration, multiculturalism, and religion in Italy. In this article, I analyze the devotion of the Peruvian community in Rome to “the Lord of Miracles”. This pious tradition, which venerates the image of Christ crucified—painted by an Angolan slave—began in 1651 in Lima, during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Today, the sacred image is venerated in countries all over the world that host Peruvian immigrant communities that have set up branches of the Confraternity of the Lord of Miracles. I examine, in particular, the cult of el Señor de los Milagros in Rome in terms of Peruvian popular religiosity and national identity experienced within a transnational context. This essay serves two purposes: The first is to analyze the significance that this religious experience acquires in a foreign environment while maintaining links with its country of origin and its cultural traditions in a multilocal environment. The second aim is to examine the integration of the Peruvian community into Italian society, beginning with religious practice, in this case Roman Catholicism. This kind of religiosity seems not only to favor the encounter between the two cultures but also to render Italian Roman Catholicism multicultural.

The Welsh Evangelical Community and ‘Finney's Revival’

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Pressure ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Public Commitment ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Spiritual State

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

scholarly journals Religion in the structures and forms of manifestation of everyday life

2016 ◽  
pp. 6-10
Author(s):  
Yuri Boreyko
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Community Patterns ◽  
Ordinary Consciousness

The article analyzes the structure and manifestations of everyday life as the sphere of the empirical life of the individual believer and the religious community. Patterns of everyday life are not confined to certain  universal conceptual or value systems, as there is no ready-made standards and rules of their formation. Everyday life is intersubjective space of social relations in which religious individuals, communities, institutions self-identified based on form of reproduction of sociality. Religious everyday life determined by ordinary consciousness, practices, social aspects of life in the religious community, which are constituted by communication. The main religious structures of everyday life is mental cut ordinary religious consciousness, religious practice, religious experience, religious communication, religious stereotypes. Everyday life is the sphere of interaction between the social and the transcendental worlds, in which religious practices are an integral social relationships and the objectification of religious experience through the prism of individual membership to a specific religion, a means of inclusion of transcendence in the context of everyday life. Religious practices reflect understanding of a religious individual objects of the supernatural world, which is achieved through social experience, intersubjective interaction, experience of transcendental reality. The everyday life of the believing personality is formed in the dynamics of tradition and innovation, the mechanism of interaction of which affects the space of social existence. It exists within the private and public space and time, differing openness within the life-world. Continuous modification of everyday life, change its fundamental structures is determined by the process of modern social and technical transformation of society

“In Our Nature”: The Kenotic Christology of Charles Chauncy

1992 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-233
Author(s):  
Norman B. Gibbs ◽  
Lee W. Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening

Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), for more than sixty years the pastor of the influential First (“Old Brick”) Church in Boston, was a leading participant in many of the greatest controversies of his century. Best known for his opposition both to Jonathan Edwards and to what he regarded as the emotional excesses of the Great Awakening, he is also well remembered for his vigorous protest against Anglican efforts to establish bishops in America. He became such an ardent champion of the colonists in their struggle for a free and independent nation that above all others he deserves the title “theologian of the American Revolution.”

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