Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought

Abstract

'For the purposes of this paper, designates both a cluster of religious convictions (a high view of the Bible, stress on the need for experiencing God's grace, and a commitment to the divine nature of Christ's saving work) and the groups in American history that have been most vocal in promoting them. More specifically, I use the term for those theologically conservative descendents of English-speaking Protestant denominations of the Early National period who have appropriated the term self-consciously for themselves, as, for example, the antebellum evangelical united front, the nineteenth-century Alliance, or the postfundamentalist new evangelicals. Other legitimate uses of the term, atuned more closely to continental or British definitions, or stressing more the Wesleyan-Holiness strands of American religious history, play a secondary role in this paper. For more careful consideration of the thorny issues involved in defining evangelicalism, see George M. Marsden, Evangelical Denomination, in Evangelicalism and Modern America, 1930-1980, ed. Marsden (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984). Many of the contributions to this book expand upon themes considered in my essay, especially David F. Wells, An American Evangelical Theology. 2Notable examples of this work include Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1957); William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald, 1959); James F. Findlay, DwightL. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1889 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969); Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970); David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, eds., The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They are Changing, expanded ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1977), which contains essays by those outside as well as inside the movement; and George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980). Examples of more recent social scientific assessment are James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983); and Robert Booth Fowler, A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966-1976 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982).