As Christian denominations spread throughout the colonies, sans the support or protection of any central government, they each found a way to gain a foothold while learning to tolerate one another. Within this new environment, and surrounded by unbelievers as they were, a series of revivals took place that led to two Great Awakenings. This in turn led to the birth of several new harlot daughters of Mystery Babylon.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 31: Awakenings and Disappointment
Christianity flourished in Europe for hundreds of years, becoming the de facto religion of peasant and noble alike, with the state itself maintaining Christian laws. Church and state were fused in an age-old union that saw corrupt popes steering moral affairs (and sometimes political ones) while Christian emperors handled secular business (and at times interfered in ecclesiastical matters). This often happy arrangement was disrupted by the Protestant Reformation, which was a great upheaval to longstanding Christian traditions as well as affairs of state. In the place of Catholic order, princes rose up in various regions and attempted to fuse the state of their given nation to new Protestant churches. New laws supported and empowered these churches, some of which became oppressive by foisting new religious obligations on their members.
When the way was opened to the new world, the prospect of new opportunities drew Protestants there in their thousands. A new Christian mode was developed in these new lands, but in time, attempts at establishing a central church on the order of the old model failed. Too many varying beliefs and distinct nationalities were present in the colonies to justify one established church. A case in point of this disparity would be New York, particularly the banks of the Hudson River, which, in 1646 was home to a host of people speaking no less than 18 different languages. All that these varying Christian groups had in common was their innate desire to obtain religious liberty and be allowed to freely proclaim their personal Christian viewpoint. But each Christian group was shoulder to shoulder with another that held a different belief. This meant that each had to learn to cooperate with and tolerate the other.
What is also crucial about this time is that Christianity on a whole existed without the support of any established state. No king or prince with their army of knights, warriors, or hired mercenaries were there to protect Christians in America. The various denominations, which had no states forcing their particular religious views on the public, were now on their own. This meant evangelists had to volunteer to go out and win converts to their church through sheer persuasion, and they had to foot their own bills since there was also no state budget allotted to the cause.
In this period, what is known as the first Great Awakening occurred.
“What historians call ‘the first Great Awakening’ can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s.”
Writes Professor Christine Leigh Heyrman for the National Humanities Center.
“That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.”
While Christianity permeated the colonies in various forms, and only church members could hold any office, which wasn’t subject to elections derived from voting, many remained unconverted to the religion and were considered destitute of faith. All such persons were deemed worthy of the fires of hell—hell itself being another misinterpretation of the Messianic Writings by Christians of the day.
The Great Awakening had its beginnings in America among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It was among them—and in those colonies—that early religious revivals were initiated in the 1730s, chiefly in the form of fiery sermons given by clergymen of the Tennent family, who were Scots-Irish immigrants. Much like wildfire, the religious fervor spread to the Puritans—or Congregationalists—and Baptists of New England.
“By the 1740s, the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that region, using the same strategy that had contributed to the success of the Tennents.”
Writes Professor Heyrman.
“In emotionally charged sermons, all the more powerful because they were delivered extemporaneously, preachers like Jonathan Edwards evoked vivid, terrifying images of the utter corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell.”
This was, let’s say, the first foray into fire and brimstone preaching, which would become wildly popular in future revivals. The first Great Awakening in America, meanwhile, continued to pick up steam with the entrance of George Whitefield, an ordained minister in the Church of England. Molly Worthen, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says of Whitefield:
“He had a charisma that electrified his listeners and he capitalized on that. He relied on public opinion, not the church hierarchy to make him a celebrity. He developed a sophisticated ad campaign, and when he planned to preach in a town, his advance men would be there ahead of time drumming up interest. More important, his revivals centered on the individual experience of the new birth. Whitefield's tactic was not to convince you to obey church authorities, but to persuade you that if you, the individual, would simply recognize your sins, and open yourself up to grace, you could be saved. He put aside that thorny problem of predestination. Wherever he went, he was controversial. Now he was not a social radical; his message was not pro-democracy or overtly political. He endorsed slavery, probably because he wanted to be able to preach in the south.”
Because of Whitefield and others, the preaching did extend well into the American South, where Separate Baptists began to emerge. Fear was used to draw tens of thousands to Christianity. Whitefield soon allied with John Wesley, a prominent English theologian and evangelist, in an attempt to reform the Church of England, but this resulted in a revival movement within the church that was led primarily by Wesley. It was known as methodism, and is the foundation for the Methodist church. So, the Methodist denomination is a branch of the Anglican Church, which itself is a direct offshoot of Catholicism, as seen in episode 28 of this podcast series. But all Christian denominations—each and every one of them—trace their roots back to Catholicism, as prophesied.
John Wesley also disagreed with Martin Luther and John Calvin on the subject of Christian conversion. While he believed in what theologians called justification by faith, he did not believe in predestination. He believed and taught that any sinner could receive the grace of Elohim, not just the elect. But Wesley put a Methodist spin on what theologians called sanctification, and made it his own.
“After conversion, he taught that a born-again Christian experiences a process called sanctification.”
Says Professor Worthen.
“This gradually brings them to a state of ‘Christian perfection,’ and their sinful urges are suppressed. Calvin and the Puritans believed in a sanctification process too, but the emphasis on ‘Christian perfection’ was distinctly Methodist. Wesley even said that in some people this sanctification could be almost instantaneous. And some of his followers came to believe that this so-called ‘second blessing’ could make you perfectly holy and totally eradicate any trace of original sin.”
That said, a widespread revival along the lines of the first Great Awakening was possible in part because Protestant Christianity was not subject to the control of any government, and this led to a mutual co-existence between various denominations that created something on the order of a common faith. This was something that had not been seen before in the splintered, Protestant arm of the movement. Professor Worthen sums it up wonderfully in stating:
“The eighteenth century was the period when Puritanism, Scots Presbyterianism, and other traditions merged into a common religious culture that we can call American evangelicalism. Something new and different happened here. Revival movements placed a new stress on individual connection with the divine. They questioned the old established state church model, and they involved a jostling of multiple groups in a new pluralistic context.”
On the strength of the success of the first Great Awakening, a second swept the United States between the 1790s and 1840s. The second Great Awakening in effect transformed the country’s religious landscape, and Christianity itself was altered, no longer resembling the lackluster version handed down from the papal past. This shift is evident in the statistics left to us from the era. During the start of the American Revolution, Congregationalists—who were the eighteenth-century descendants of the Puritan churches—along with Anglicans (who later renamed themselves Episcopalians), and Quakers were essentially the largest denominations. However, by 1800, the Methodists and Baptists, became the fastest-growing denominations in America.
The second Great Awakening built on the foundation of the one that preceded it, and Protestants, who could all be considered evangelicals at the time, enjoyed something close to an empire, in that they dominated many cultural institutions in the U.S., and even founded schools like Brown University and Dartmouth College. Indeed, evangelicals gained a degree of political power as well, but some of their reform efforts split the movement, such as the abolition of slavery, which spawned the Southern Baptist Convention, since Baptists in the South were against abolition and black civil rights. At any rate, Christianity seemed to reach its full height in America during this period.
“The second Great Awakening had huge consequences for Christianity in the West, especially in the young American Republic.”
Says Professor Worthen.
“During the Revolutionary era, the American colonies were a minister’s worst nightmare; only a tiny minority of Americans went to church. It’s during the second Great Awakening that America really became Christian.”
It was in this period that church planting expanded across the western American frontier, with Baptists leading the way. In fact, the first generation of black leaders, or ministers, came out of the revival movement. The first black Baptist churches in South Carolina and Georgia were built during the height of the Revolution. And while the British still occupied Charleston and Savannah, black Baptists were springing up in the hundreds—sensational numbers would come after the Civil War, and emancipation, as we mentioned in episode 29 of this podcast series. During the second Great Awakening, leaders of new Christian denominations also emerged, leading to branches of the Babylonian arm that include the Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Pentecostal movement.
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
While America was opening up and the country expanded westward, many Christians flooded west in search of opportunity on those new frontiers. When Joseph Smith established the LDS church, many of his followers flocked west in response to his purported revelations, and following his death, thousands more migrated to the Rocky Mountains to populate his proposed Zion on Earth.
Joseph Smith was born in Vermont in 1805, during the second Great Awakening. The Smiths were a hardscrabble farming family that was frequently on the move during his youth. Following major crop failures in 1816, the Smiths moved to western New York in search of better prospects. Joseph Smith, at the time, was swept up in the religious fervor that was prevalent at camp meetings, where Methodist and Baptist pastors delivered their most sensational fire and brimstone sermons. Wherever the people were, be it in the most remote regions, there Methodist preachers and Baptist ministers descended, and both movements grew tremendously as a result. Western New York was one locale these preachers frequented. According to the Joseph Smith Papers:
“Western New York was particularly noted for revivalism and acquired a reputation as the ‘burned-over district’ because the fires of revivalism and social activism had swept through so often.”
Presbyterian ministers tried to keep up, and it was amidst the religious jostling of these groups that Joseph Smith first entered the Christian arena at age twelve, when he developed an interest in such matters. His entire family had been swept into the revival movement, and both his parents and grandparents allegedly had visions and dreams they claimed were from the Most High. Smith, who practiced Christian folk magic—which was popular at the time—eventually started having strange visions of his own. While Smith seemed to lean more toward Methodism, he was not entirely sold on any of the Christian movements operating in his day. Besides Christian folk magic, however, Smith added other things to his religious background, all of which informed his particular theology.
“And yes, Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a Freemason.”
Admits the LDS church itself in an official video release.
“Joseph Smith’s brother Hiram was also a mason, and a member of a lodge in Palmyra, New York. And their father, Joseph Smith, Sr., was also known to be a Master Mason in Canandaigua, New York as early as 1818. While prophet and president of the church, Joseph joined the Masonic lodge in Nauvoo, Illinois on March, 15, 1842, rising to the level of Master Mason just a day later under the recognized authority of the Grand Master of Illinois. Masonry wasn’t new to the thousands of Latter-day Saint converts already living in and around Nauvoo at the time. Although new to the faith, some members of the church, even those within the ranks of church leadership, were already masons. Eventually, over 1,500 members of the church were listed as Freemasons in Nauvoo alone, more than in all the rest of Illinois.”
They try to justify this by further stating:
“In towns across early America, many elected officials were masons: President George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and many signers of the Declaration of Independence were also masons.”
Seeing it was founded during the period of slavery, the LDS church and its many members were a racist and bigoted bunch, and still are to some degree according to several sources. Brigham Young, who took over leadership of the LDS church and founded Salt Lake City, is said to have viewed slaves, the descendants of Jacob—who are from the line of Shem—as being under the curse of Ham. According to the book Race and the Making of the Mormon People by Max Perry Mueller, Young was a firm supporter of slavery and believed that blacks “lacked the right to self-rule.” Mueller further wrote that “Young called on the legislature to enact a bill that would codify in the law books the truth already written in the Bible: ‘[African] slaves serve their masters’ in perpetuity.’”
Mueller, in an interview with The Atlantic, also said as follows:
“Whatever you want to say about the origins of the Book of Mormon, it fits its time period really well. It’s very American. It tells a story of racial schism and how it came to be, dividing the world into a hierarchy of races, and that’s a standard American story—especially the idea that people born to a so-called darker-skinned race could not be redeemed.”
William Miller was another prominent religious leader who emerged from the Great Awakenings. Like many others in his day, Miller was a farmer, but he also served as deputy chief and justice of the peace, which demonstrates how respected he was in his local community. He fought alongside the 30th Infantry during the War of 1812, where he held the rank of captain, and he was eventually drawn to the Scriptures, which he began to study in great detail. Several years passed and, in 1831, Miller, then a Baptist lay preacher, started preaching at camp meetings, claiming that everyone had a little over a decade left before the Messiah would return a second time, between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844, at which point the world would end. This Miller based on a false reading of Daniel 8:13 – 14, which speaks of a temple cleansing he believed referred to the earth being cleansed by a consuming fire. The word “cleansed” in the KJV is actually a mistranslation of wanisdaq, since its root, word H6663, refers to “being in the right,” in the sense of “being justified.”
In 1833, Miller started to publish his views in the form of a pamphlet. In 1836, a book of lectures followed. Two popular publications became the driving forces of the movement: The Signs of the Times and The Midnight Cry. Miller himself estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people believed in his report, but many more probably expected the end to come when he proposed it would. Expectations were raised after a comet was sighted one night in March 1843. But Alas, the prophesied time came and went and Miller was forced to admit his error. Though he left the movement he had started, all was not lost … yet. One of Miller’s followers, Simon Snow, proposed a new date for the Second Coming, October 22, 1844, based on an interpretative tweak. This was called the Second Advent or the Great Anticipation.
When the Messiah did not return on the new date, the failed event was renamed the Great Disappointment. Despite the Second Advent not coming to pass, William Miller made his mark by introducing new doctrines to the Christian movement; doctrines that were largely adopted by his followers, who convened the next year at the Mutual Conference of Adventists to hash out problematic details in his overall theology. This led to the formation of the Evangelical Adventists, which was the foundation on which all modern Adventist churches were established. Among those who attended the conference were Joseph Bates, a revivalist minister, and James White and his wife Ellen White, who learned from Bates that the Seventh-day Sabbath was still valid according to Scripture.
Ellen White’s great grandson, Charles White, says of this period:
“Following the disappointment, they were part of that company that banded together … and Ellen White was given a vision….”
Not unlike Joseph Smith. And that vision involved the “Advent people,” as Ellen White called them, who were walking along a narrow path….
“… with a light behind them which represented what had happened to them in the past as having value and importance….”
Meaning that the Great Disappointment should be looked at another way. And so the early Advent believers did. Bates and the Whites agreed with Miller’s date for the temple cleansing, only they reestablished a basis for the date, saying that it was not the earth that was to be cleansed by a Second Coming of the Messiah, but the temple in heaven was being cleansed in an unseen act that involved an investigative judgment of mankind. After borrowing many of Miller’s teachings, and drawing many conclusions that he first drew, the largest proponent of the Advent believers adopted the Seventh-day as their day of worship, and, continuing in the spirit of William Miller, formed the Seventh-day Adventist church in 1863, with Ellen White as its prophet. Charles White goes on to say that, all told:
“Ellen White wrote over a hundred thousand pages … by hand—twenty-five million words—mostly with a quill pen. She wrote more books in more languages, circulated further than any other woman in history.”
That said, it has long come to light that—according to ex-Adventist, Walter T. Rea, a former pastor and author—between 80 and 90% of those prolific writings of White’s were plagiarized. Research for his book The White Lie reveals that White borrowed from about 75 books of other religious authors to write her own material.
Not all Adventist movements accepted Ellen White as their prophet. One group, which later became the Evangelical Adventist Church, ceased to exist by 1916, but two groups that later became the Advent Christian Church, exist to this day as a first-day denomination. Another group calling itself the Church of God (Seventh Day) split off from those who held to Ellen White, but two other groups split off again, one of which became the Worldwide Church of God, headed by the infamous Herbert Armstrong. Armstrong went so far as to sanction the Levitical feast days in addition to the Sabbath, but many of his other views were controversial and he was suspected of misappropriating church funds. For making predictions that never came to pass and holding to questionable doctrines, Armstrong’s writings were withdrawn from print by his own church (now known as Grace Communion International) and he was labeled a false prophet and heretic.
The second major church to emerge from the Millerite movement was the International Bible Students Association, which not only borrowed heavily from Miller, but from Adventists as well. It was founded by Pastor Charles Taze Russell in 1872, and after splitting into various groups following a series of internal controversies, the most well-known among them has come down to us as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The movement is known for its many false predictions of the Second Coming and other events, which failed in the years: 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, 1925, and 1975. Various problems have since plagued the organization, from racial discrimination to rampant child abuse, which the JW elders—according a former elder—consider a sin but not necessarily a crime, thus these matters are kept as quiet as possible.
But in short, the so-called Great Awakenings spawned many of the various denominations we see today, all of which are the polluted offspring of the mother harlot, Roman Catholicism, by way of other Protestant churches. The same is true of one of their most recent and popular entries, Pentecostalism, the charismatic religious movement that constitute denominations that sprang from the early Methodist and Baptist Holiness churches. Characterized by emotional religious expressionism, enthusiastic singing, spontaneous testimonies, and spirited sermons, Pentecostals regard Spirit baptism perhaps highest of all, signified of course by their misapplied “speaking in tongues.” They completely miss the point of Acts 2, which details Israelites who convened in one place but spoke different languages, in which case the Spirit of Yah allowed Peter to be heard in the languages they each understood, thus making his message discernable to all. This was a miracle of Yah. Pentecostals twist this to their detriment, speaking indiscernible gibberish as a sign of receiving or being filled with the Ruach.
While they claim to trace their roots to the Israelite emissaries of the first century, Pentecostals emerged during the Great Awakenings. The contemporary Pentecostal movement, however, with its emphasis on conversion, speaking in tongues, faith healing, and other beliefs, gained a foothold in the early twentieth century at a small religious school in Topeka, Kansas known as the Bethel Bible College. There, Charles Fox Parham—who was only one of many ministers fanning the flames of the contemporary Holiness movement—encouraged his students to undergo an Acts 2 experience by engaging in fasting and rigorous Scripture study.
On January 1, 1901, one of his students, Agnes Oznam, was the first to utter the now well-known glossolalia heard in Pentecostal churches. Other students were soon speaking nonsensical gibberish as well, and Parham chalked this up to a sign of the students having received the Spirit. He engaged in supposed faith healing shortly thereafter and, with these events, the flame of modern Pentecostalism was sparked. William Seymour, a holiness pastor and leader of the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, continued the trend. He was the man behind the Azusa Street revival that started in 1906. Seymour had been exposed to Parham’s teachings at a Houston Bible school and, continuing in his footsteps, he encouraged his congregants to practice speaking in tongues. Before long, rich and poor, white, black, Latino, and even preachers of other languishing ministries embraced the Pentecostal conversion experience.
After a time, a host of new Pentecostal church members were awaiting the latter rain prophesied by the Prophet Joel in the form of a full outpouring of the Spirit in preparation for the final judgment. It never came. Thus, history’s pages were filled with yet another false prophet entry, together with another leavened Christian movement. And so it shall be until the ultimate collapse of Babylon.
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: the great awakening, age of enlightenment, age of faith, Tennent family, puritans, Congregationalists, Methodists, Separate Baptists, John Wesley, Johnathan Edwards, Christian denominations trace their roots back to Catholicism, Episcopalians, Quakers, LDS Church, Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, SDA, Pentecostalism, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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