The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  Finney led the Presbyterian church choir, and he enjoyed discussing theology with his pastor, but until that October day in 1821, he’d had little use for and less belief in the Lord. Long set in the pride of his own intellect, he was past the usual age of such inquiries. As a young man he’d hoped to find a way to Yale, but instead he became a schoolteacher and now he was a lawyer, and many people believed that soon he’d be a politician, perhaps a senator one day. If that was to come to pass, he decided, he’d better get his inner life in order. That Sunday in October, he cleared his schedule for Monday and Tuesday and resolved to decide by Wednesday whether he was a man of God.

  The truth was that religion had been creeping up on him. As a boy he had witnessed powerful Baptist preaching, the stomping, shouting, Holy Ghost power kind, but as a man he had remained immune to the revivals that swept the region so often that it would later be called the “Burned Over District” for the intensity of its spiritual fires.6 Then, one day, he bought a Bible. For his law library, he said, and everyone believed him. Finney preferred it that way. He took to shutting his office door, clogging the keyhole with a rag lest anyone peep on him, and praying in whispers. When the Bible had been just one more big book among the tomes of law in his library, he’d read it openly. Now, it became a secret companion.

  He had a reputation to uphold; his very name was in Adams the standard of Logic and Reason. “If religion is true,” one man demanded of his wife, “why don’t you convert Finney? If you Christians can convert Finney, I will believe in religion.”

  But no one could convert Finney. “I had not much regard for the opinions of others,” he’d confessed. As he sought God from Sunday night through Monday and Tuesday, it seemed as if his heart grew harder. “I could not shed a tear; I could not pray.” On Tuesday night, terror struck him. He thought he would die. “I knew that if I did, I should sink down to hell.” He wanted to scream. He braced himself in bed and waited for dawn.

  As soon as light broke, he dressed and hurried to his office, to return to the Bible that taunted him. The town was already awake. He nodded and smiled at farmers and ladies, quickening his pace to avoid unbearable conversation. And then, he froze. Stopped and stood dead still in the middle of the dirt road that was the town’s main street. Creaky wagon wheels rolled left and right, their drivers cursing. Women may or may not have spoken to him. Good day, Mr. Finney. Mr. Finney? Oh, dear. He doesn’t hear. Quite unlike him! Just how long he stood still, he’d never be able to say. There was only one sentence among his thoughts, but it seemed to come from elsewhere, spoken in vibrating, terrifying tones that did not correspond to the seconds and sounds of the material world.

  Will. You. Accept. It. Now. Today?

  He bolted. Walking fast, smiling at passersby so they wouldn’t notice his distress, a cold, clammy feeling overtaking him. He aimed himself for a piece of woods over a hill on the north side of the village, but he charted an indirect path, because he did not want anyone to know where he was going. “I skulked along under the fence, til I got so far out of sight that no one from the village could see me. I then penetrated into the woods.” He found himself a closet of trees, fallen timber crisscrossing to create a mossy fort open to the sky. He crawled in on a damp bed of pine needles and fire-red oak leaves and knelt. There, he determined, he would Accept It Now Today, and if he did not he would not return to the world. He waited for prayer. For “relief.” But he could find none. When he opened his mouth, he heard only the rustle of leaves. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. Somewhere close by, a twig snapped. Finney started, opened his eyes, began to rise, blood flushing his cheeks. Had he been discovered? Openmouthed like a fish flopped down among the trees, the knees of his lawyer’s suit brown with dirt like those of a farmer? Had they seen his knobby knuckles knitted together like those of a schoolboy? Would they laugh? Would God?

  Then Finney broke. He screamed. “What!” he bellowed. What! His voice lowered and quickened and heaved on a sea of gulping air and grief and shame. “Such-a-degraded-sinner-as-I-am, on my knees, confessing my sins to the great and holy God, and ashamed to have any human being, and a sinner like myself know it, and find me on my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!”

  He went on for hours, tears streaming, his hands and his faith brown with the dirt of the forest floor, his knees dark with mud, his body aching, “releasing” all his shame, all his pride. He had found his enemy at last. It was his own mind. God, he’d say, gave him promises and revealed to him truths too precious for words. “They did not seem so much to fall into my intellect as into my heart.” The mind, he realized, was nothing but a tool.

  Finney rose and began walking, stumbling like a drunken man back to town, his feet tangling, but his mind so quiet “it seemed as if all nature listened.” He’d left before breakfast. By the time he returned, his law partner, Benjamin Wright, had gone home, but, he’d later say, Jesus Christ himself stood in the office, “face to face,” awaiting his deposition. Into the darkness came then the Holy Spirit. “Like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed it seemed to come in waves, and waves of liquid love.” Finney roared out loud, his shame dissolved in his fear and ecstasy. “I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.” The waves kept rolling, and he dipped and bobbed in the spirit, the crests and the troughs of the ocean soaking one message into his bones, the idea-that-is-not-an-idea that he would take as his text for what would become the greatest revival since the days of Jonathan Edwards: before God, you are nothing.

  FINNEY TITLED THE first postconversion chapter of his memoirs “I Begin My Work With Immediate Success.” Not for him Jonathan Edwards’s curiosity about the workings of the Holy Spirit he was so certain flowed through him like electric current. Finney’s was the faith of the industrial age. Whereas Edwards wondered if religion might, like light itself, be subject to natural laws, Finney hit a switch and expected the power to flow. Likewise their political understanding of evangelism: Edwards studied Locke and anguished over the democratic contradictions of revival. Finney read the law books of Blackstone and took his Bible unfiltered and applied what he learned with equal-opportunity fervor. By Finney’s reckoning, every citizen had the right—the obligation—to be as zealous as the man he called “President Edwards,” in honor of Edwards’s brief tenure as the head of Princeton University.

  The night after Finney returned from his forest grotto a changed man, a member of the choir that old God-spurning Finney had led came to see him. The chorister found Finney in the dark. The lawyer’s shoulders were shaking. His breath was loud and heaving. “What ails you?” the visitor asked. Finney wiped away his tears. “I am so happy that I cannot live,” he answered.

  But he did, into the dawn, at which point the Holy Spirit checked in on him. “Will you doubt? Will you doubt?” a voice demanded. Finney the lawyer knew the answer to that one. Same as a verdict, guilty or not guilty, black or white. “No! I will not doubt; I cannot doubt.” Satisfied with Finney’s reply, the Spirit “then cleared the subject up” in Finney’s mind, the subject being the question of his conversion and whether he was saved. He was.

  If such instant grace is a commonplace of American fundamentalism today, it was an oddity to be doubted in Finney’s time. Saul had become Paul in a flash some eighteen hundred years previous, and there had been other miracles since, but not every country lawyer could call the voices in his head God’s and be believed. Not until then, anyway; American Christendom was changing fast. Finney’s epiphany contained in it the summation of two developing ideas of the times, ideas that would vastly expand Christ’s jurisdiction over America in the minds of believers: the radical notion that to perceive the divine is to accept divine authority, without question; and the mechanistic understanding of faith as instantaneous for all who want it. Sign here, and you’re a soldier in the army of God, ready for battle.

  Finney sallied forth to his law office clad in his new spiritual armor and promptly began the war. Ben
jamin Wright passed by, and Finney threw off some remark. He did not pay enough attention to remember what it was, but such was the “efficacy” of his new religion that the remark he made pierced Wright “like a sword.” Next came a client, ready to go to court on a civil matter. Finney shook his head. He could not even offer an apology. He was, he said, an “enlisted” man now. He quit his life’s love, lawyering, on the spot and set about the cause of convicting souls. His method? Wander, argue, destroy. He was, if not the most educated man in the countryside, probably the brightest between Lake Erie and the Atlantic. Moreover he was a physical giant by the standards of the day, and his voice was deep, and there were those radiant eyes. Nobody could stand firm before his onslaught.

  The first to fall was a young man in a shoemaker’s shop, afflicted by modern ideas, universalism, the awkward faith of those not-quite-secular citizens who styled themselves sophisticated. “The young man saw in a moment that I had demolished his argument” and immediately fled. To safety? To reprieve from insistent evangelists? Impossible. Finney had shown him by force of logic the absolute certainty of God’s total power. All that remained was for the man to conform his will. That was his only real choice: conform or be damned. Finney watched, pleased, as the broken universalist ran to the edge of town, hopped a fence, and made for the forest grotto. God would meet him in among the dark trees and fix his soul.

  The grotto never failed. Finney’s faith was, in comparison to that of Edwards, almost mechanical; it was industrial. In the weeks that followed, Finney sent a procession of townspeople tromping into the woods, there to repeat the form of his own intimate encounter. The story of his forest salvation was the secret weapon of his crusade, the mythic ammunition behind his “arguments” for the undeniable authority of God, more persuasive in his raw country town than the principles of Blackstone, spiritualized. Or rather, the two narratives worked in tandem, offering the citizens of pastoral Adams, New York—adrift in the great in-between of America, no longer wilderness and not yet settled—both savagery and civilization, a weeping, screaming, singing forest god and a straightforward, law-based, citizen-Christ for the democratizing nation.

  Finney’s law partner, Wright, a respectable man with connections to the coming political powers of the state, thought he could accept the latter without the former. Swept up in the townwide revival that followed in the wake of Finney’s conversion, Wright determined to settle his accounts with the new Jesus. But “he thought that he had a parlor to pray in,” and he would not go to the forest like Finney’s other soldiers. Wright prayed in his parlor for days and nights. Jesus would not answer. He prayed out loud into the early morning. Jesus would not answer. Because Jesus had chosen a place shadowed by trees for their meeting. I’m not proud! Wright wept, but he could not receive the wave of Jesus-love of which Finney had spoken, the power without which he was certain he would die. He took from his pocket a small knife, weighed it in his hand, imagined its bite. Relief. He was not proud; he would prove it with blood.

  But he was proud, and he threw the knife away, “as far as he could,” said Finney, because Lawyer Wright knew he was too petty to resist temptation. For weeks he struggled. One night he collapsed in the muddy street, kneeling in puddles. See? I am not proud! But he was. He would not accept the Christ waiting for him among the trees.

  “One afternoon I was sitting in our office,” recalled Finney, when the shoemaker’s universalist, now a “Christian,” burst into the room. “Esquire Wright is converted!” he shouted. He had been up in the woods himself, there to pray, when he heard from a neighboring valley the echoes of shouting. He had climbed a hill for a view and spotted Wright in the distance. Wright was a fat man, heavy, not athletic like Finney, but there he was in the wild, marching and shouting. Like a soldier on watch, pivoting and turning, pivoting and turning, to and fro. He’d stop, wind back his arms like wings and clap “with his full strength and shout ‘I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!’”

  As the man told the story, Finney heard shouting, looked up, and saw Lawyer Wright marching down the hill. The big man intercepted old Father Tucker on the edge of town and lifted him off the ground and squeezed him, dropped him, marched. Stopped, clapped, barked, “I’ve got it!” Wright fell to his knees before Finney and told him that he had been saved. He’d had a choice: suicide or the trees.

  JONATHAN EDWARDS HAD been a scientist of religion, maybe a mad one. Finney—nothing if not sane, his language plain, “colloquial and Saxon”—became its promoter, its mass distributor, a pious variation on his better-remembered contemporary, Phineas Taylor Barnum. He favored raw emotion as his medium but practiced religion like a country lawyer, an American exhorter. “I came right forth from a law office to the pulpit, and talked to the people as I would have talked to the jury.” Old churchmen shivered at his vulgar words. “Of course,” he said of that crowd, “to them I was a speckled bird.”

  Theologians of that time and historians of ours parse Finney’s words to discover whether he broke with Edwards or continued his tradition. They take a typical Finney proclamation such as this—“Knowing your duty, you have but one thing to do, PERFORM IT”—and consider it in light of debates over Calvinism and, if they’re bold, the politics of Andrew Jackson. But they give little credence to the words Finney felt must be capitalized. PERFORM IT. Finney’s was a faith of action, a fact commonly noted. He was an abolitionist, a temperance man. Less considered is the emphasis of the action that bridged the theological isms and the politics of the day: performance. The subtle delights and terrors of spectacle that link Finney’s revivals to those of our present megachurch nation.7

  For Edwards, revival had been a strange and wonderful phenomenon, a displacement of ordinary air by the immaterial body of the Holy Ghost. But it was delicate, revival, neither a force to be directed nor one that would abide exploitation. Its politics were implicit. For Finney, a self-taught preacher declaring a frontier Christ for the industrial age, revival was a machine made up of “new measures”: “powerful preaching,” a well-timed hymn, the “protracted meeting”—movements of the Spirit scheduled on a daily basis for weeks at a time. Its politics were as plain as the public confessions of sinners called to grease the gears of Finney’s cleverest innovation, the anxious bench, the titillation of which P. T. Barnum would never rival.8

  Finney was recently married when he conceived of the anxious bench, but not much drawn to his wife. He left her alone for most of the first six months of their marriage while he wandered from church to meetinghouse to schoolhouse to parlor in the little towns of western New York, preaching wherever he could find a pulpit or a room full of people. His reputation was growing, as the tall young man who spoke hellfire, who called sinners blistered and skinned and broken down. And what’s more, called them by name. Not for Finney abstractions of theology and tics of old English that distanced the man in the pulpit from the men and women—mostly women—who filled the pews. Finney said “you.” And he stared at you. And if he found out your name, he’d call you a sinner. It was thrilling.

  One warm spring day, Finney walked three miles through a pine forest to a church in the town of Rutland. The first to arrive, he took a seat in the pews. He carried no sermon. A crowd began to gather, but nobody recognized him. In walked a woman, slender and lovely, “decidedly” so, graceful, wearing a bonnet adorned with plumes. “She came as it were sailing around, and up the broad aisle toward where I sat, mincing as she came.” She sat right behind him. He could feel her close to him. He shifted his hips, threw an elbow over the back of his chair. Watched her watching him. Two beautiful creatures, a delight to behold. His violet eyes consumed her, “from her feet up to her bonnet and then down again. He was not secret in his glances.

  She blushed. Hello, stranger.

  His lips were thick and wide, set in a strange, calm smile, brown like his skin from the sun. But he did not look like a farmer. There were those Finney eyes, giant and glowing. When he opened his mouth, his voice was low,
not tender.

  “Don’t you believe that God thinks you look pretty?”

  What?

  “Don’t you think all the people will think you look so very nice?”

  The blood must have drained from her cheeks.

  His voice dropped lower. “Did you come here to divide the worship of God’s house?”

  This, Finney noted, made the pretty, proud thing “writhe.”

  “I followed her up in a voice so low that nobody else heard me, but I made her hear me distinctly.”

  Vanity, “insufferable vanity.”

  The woman was trembling, “her plumes were all in a shake.” At last, Finney was ready to preach. He ascended to the pulpit and revealed himself as the man the congregation had been waiting for. The woman must have gasped; she began to shake.

  He preached to a full house that followed him deep into the literal gospel. They saw what he had done to the woman and wanted him to slay them also, to convict them, to crush them. Such words were part of his new measures. Then—“I did what I do not know I had ever done before.” He called on those who would be saved to rise from their seats and come to the front of the hall, there to stand exposed in their sin. Of course the woman rose, the first to respond. She fell out into the aisle. “Shrieked,” remembered Finney.

  Her squeal excited the crowd. They too surged forward, moaning and stumbling and screaming, eager to feel, as the shrieking woman had, the intensity of conversion. The machine was working, electrified by the anxious bench, Finney’s most thrilling invention.

  “THE SPIRITUALITY OF Christians does not lie in secret Whispers, or audible Voices,” wrote an eighteenth-century New England divine who was firmly opposed to revivalism—its God-chosen men, its shouters and fainters and falling-down people.9 True religion, he believed, did not depend on special revelations for the self-anointed nor the noisiness of a crowd shaking with Holy Ghost electricity.