U.S. Frontier Camp Meetings In The 1800s

Prof. Bernard A. Weisberger, They Gathered at the River

(Little, Brown and Co.; 1958)

ʻIt was natural for the frontier to get religion with a mighty roar.

Any other way would not have seemed homelike to people who, half in fun and half in sheer defensiveness, loved their brag, bluster, and bluff.

ʻYet it was not the unscrubbed vigour of the meetings that really bothered conservatives in the Presbyterian Church.

Their fundamental problem was in adjusting themselves and their faith to a new kind of democratic urge.

Enemies of the revivals did not like the success of emotional preaching.

What would happen to learning, and all that learning stood for, if a leather-lunged countryman with a gift for lurid word pictures could be a champion salvationist?

And what would happen what had happened to the doctrine of election when the revival preacher shouted “Repent!” at overwrought thousands, seeming to say that any Tom, Dick, or Harry who felt moved by the Spirit might be receiving the promise of eternal bliss?

Would mob enthusiasm replace God's careful winnowing of the flock to choose His lambs? The whole orderly scheme of life on earth, symbolized by a powerful church, an educated ministry, and a strait and narrow gate of salvation, stood in peril. . . .

ʻBy the closing years of the nineteenth century, however, the old campgrounds for the most part were slowly abandoned. Growing cities swallowed them up, and rapid transport destroyed the original reason for the prolonged camp-out. But the meetings were not dead. Mass revivalism had moved them indoors and made them a permanent part of American Protestantism.

'All of this cost something in religious depth, religious learning, religious dignity.

Yet there was not much choice.

The American churches lacked the support of an all-powerful state or of age-old traditions.

They had to move with the times.

That is why their history is so chequered with schismatic movements – symptoms of the struggle to get in step with the parade. Hence, if the West in 1800 could not ignore religion, the rest of the country, in succeeding years, could not ignore the western notion of religion.

One student of the camp meeting has said that it flourished “side by side with the militia muster, with the cabin raising and the political barbecue.”

That was true, and those institutions were already worked deeply into the American grain by 1840.

They reflected a spirit of democracy, optimism, and impatience that would sweep us across a continent, sweep us into industrialism, sweep us into a civil war. That spirit demanded some religious expression, some promise of a millennium in which all could share.

ʻThe camp meeting was part of that religious expression, part of the whole revival system that channelled American impulses into churchgoing ways. In the home of the brave, piety was organized so that Satan got no breathing spells. Neither, for that matter, did anyone else.ʼ

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