Before we get started, I have a little challenge for you. Read the quotes below and take your best guess as to their year of origin (and, if you’re feeling ambitious, the country they were spoken in):
“Without new measures it is impossible that the Church should succeed in gaining the attention of the world to religion…
The measures of politicians, of infidels, and heretics, the scrambling after wealth, the increase of luxury… will gain men’s attention, and turn them away from the sanctuary and from the altars of the Lord, unless we increase in wisdom and piety, and wisely adopt such new measures as are calculated to get the attention of men to the Gospel of Christ...
It is evident that we must have more arousing preaching, to meet the character and wants of the age. Ministers are generally beginning to find this out. And some of them complain of it … The character of the age is changed, but these men retain the same stiff, dry, prosing style of preaching, that answered half a century ago...
We must have powerful preaching, or the devil will have the people… Many ministers are finding out already, that a Methodist preacher, without the advantages of a liberal education, will draw a congregation around him which a Presbyterian minister, with perhaps ten times as much learning, cannot equal, because [the Presbyterian minister] has not the earnest manner of the other, and does not pour out fire upon his hearers when he preaches...”
Have you locked in your answer?
If you guessed the early 19th century USA, give yourself a gold star! More specifically, these arguments were made in 1834 by Charles Grandison Finney, an American pastor, at his New York church. While Finney certainly didn’t invent the concept of religious innovation, his words do, in my opinion, capture an important trend in modern Western Christianity. Let me explain.
The Enlightenment — a movement which pursued reason, knowledge, and freedom of thought, and which applied a blowtorch of intellectual scrutiny to both Catholicism and Protestantism — wasn’t the only cultural phenomenon making waves in the 18th century West. During the 1730s and 1740s, a new flavour of Christianity began to emerge in Britain and its American colonies. Spearheaded by preachers like John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield, the early days of ‘Revivalism’ were typified by urgent emotional appeals to personal repentance and devotion to God. Revival preachers travelled thousands of kilometres on heavily marketed speaking tours, delivering outdoor lectures to massive crowds.
A second religious ‘Awakening’ would come decades later, happening roughly during the period of 1795-1835. During this period, preachers in North America took Revival concepts even further. Communication and marketing strategies were carefully developed towards one goal: evangelising the world, and converting as many people to Christianity as possible.
Finney’s New Measures lectures are a good summary of these sorts of revival techniques. He criticised the “stiff” and “dry” traditions that were typical of Protestant churches, instead praising the style of personal, warm, exciting preaching found in “unlearned” movements like the Methodists. Innovation, not staleness, was what was needed; passion, and not musty, old theological sermons.
Not everyone was happy with Finney’s methods. Some ‘old-school’ revivalists were deeply concerned that Finney had watered his theology down, abandoning the strict religious beliefs of forerunners like Edwards and Whitefield (discussion of these beliefs will, unfortunately, have to wait for another time). Others sceptically believed that ‘New Measures’ led to short-term Christians who faded away from religious devotion once their initial excitement died down. Some revivalists, meanwhile, feared that too much innovation would cause disagreements amongst Christians, ultimately doing more harm than good.
As the world moved into the 20th century, new generations of travelling preachers continued to make Revivalism an important influence within American culture. Mass media (including radio, television, and film) opened up new avenues for evangelising the world, and technological advances in travel made worldwide speaking tours more accessible than ever before. America’s affluence and global impact meant that Revivalism continued to be a force to be reckoned with.
What might be called the ‘New Measures’ trend boils Christianity down to a single priority: making the number of Christians go up. Respect and authority is given to religious leaders who ‘make the numbers go up’. God is seen to be ‘at work’ in churches and ministries which ‘make the numbers go up’. The ‘Christian message’ is workshopped into catchy, ‘viral’ marketing slogans like “I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus“, “†=♥“, and, more recently, “He Gets Us“.
(I speak about this topic with a certain level of authority; in a previous career, I worked for a textbook ‘New Measures’ organisation — founded by an “unlearned” American businessman, comprised of ‘everyday’ men and women, and built upon cutting-edge communication strategies.)
Anyone who has spent time inside ‘New Measures’ Christianity, however, will be familiar with the scandals: the “sexually inappropriate behaviour” of Bill Hybels, founder of the business-meets-religion Global Leadership Network; the accusations of “sexting, unwanted touching, spiritual abuse, and rape” towards Ravi Zacharias, founder of the now-defunct apologetics organisation RZIM; the alleged fraud and bullying of Mark Driscoll, a former pastor with the flavour-of-the-month Mars Hill Church; the alleged concealing of his father’s “history of child sex abuse” by Brian Houston, founder of the global megachurch Hillsong. When it comes to the ‘New Measures’ style of Christianity, it would seem as though any number of sins can be ignored (for a decade or so, at least) as long as the golden rule is followed — ‘make the number go up’.
Now, as far as theories of the afterlife are concerned — because that is the topic of my book, after all — ‘New Measures’ Christianity could best be described as pragmatic. Ultra-conservative beliefs (such as belief in hell as a place of literal, never-ending flames and physical torture, as well as belief in the concept of predestination) go against the main priority of ‘making the number go up’; beliefs like these are just too uncomfortable to appeal to a wide audience. Alternative views, however, like belief in repentance after death, or belief in destruction and non-existence rather than hell, or belief in the eventual salvation of all people, are also generally eschewed. Deviating from the status quo is a threat, and is therefore unpalatable — just ask Rob Bell, another influential Mars Hill pastor, whose views on the afterlife turned him into an overnight pariah.
What’s left, then, is a nebulous concept of hell as a ‘never-ending separation from God’; an eternal, inescapable, conscious experience of psychological distress, but without any of that nasty fire. Perhaps such Christians could consider the words of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky:
“I think that if there were material flames, truly people would be glad to have them, for, as I fancy, in material torment they might forget, at least for a moment, their far more terrible spiritual torment.”
This is a modified excerpt from my as-yet-unreleased book, Decoding Gehenna: Hell and the Afterlife in the West. Subscribe or Follow Me for updates and more sneak-peek excerpts!
