Barton W. Smith: Revivalist and Rethinking Denominationalism in Early American Christian Society
The Revivalist preacher Barton W.
Stone was born into a once affluent slaveholding family in Port Tobacco, Maryland,
alongside the Port Tobacco Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, in 1772. Following
his father’s death at age three, the Stone family soon moved to Virginia, into the
heart of Appalachia, where he would spend the rest of his adolescents. In modern
terms, Stone’s memory is considered somewhat controversial, but by and large,
people remembered Stone as a “cheerful and sometimes even facetious” man of “considerable
wit and humor.”[1]
Stone was one of many revivalists of the “Restoration Movement,” whose aim was
to restore Christian society through the renewal of Biblically-based beliefs
and practices of the New Testament. [2]
During the Revolutionary War and the
early years of the new republic, Christianity declined, but “one of the
practices that the American passion for liberty most affected was Bible
reading,” thereby reinvigorating Christian ideals and practices across the
new nation.[3]
The righteous cause of liberty that united the colonies against England
transcended politics into religion, giving Americans the “opportunity for
unfettered interpretation of scripture.”[4] Through this period,
Americans transformed their ideals of liberty, developed specific views of “Bible
only” practices, and established a distinct ideology of “no creed but the
Bible,” which led to a “democratic style of evangelization” across the new
nation.[5]
In those early years, America
experienced an “outburst of Christian Revival.”[6] The Old World Christian
practices carried to the New World by immigrants invigorated American theology
and practices but were limited on the western frontier by the lack of community-based
faith and the emerging denominational lines within populations. While the
various Christian denominations sprung out of this period of Revolutionary
revivals and went to great lengths to “distinguish” themselves, they were not “distinct.”[7] Most of the early American
denominations were passionately democratic and “spread rapidly” in their small
corners.[8] This period of the Restoration
Moment worked to re-idealize the American faith and church by “restor[ing] the
purity of primitive Christianity” across the nation.[9] The simple message of the
Restoration Movement was filled with the “American spirit” of liberty and
freedom that pictorially framed the new order of
the movement paralleled the plight of the Jewish flight out of Egypt, resulting
in the Passover chronicled in the Exodus.
It was at this time that the
revivalist Barton W. Stone took to the pulpit. Stone was a preacher on the western
frontier of early America, far from the developing cities of the east coast;
Appalachia offered a fertile ground of eager “unchurched” peoples ready to hear
the word of the Bible. (see Figure 1.) Life on the frontier frequently resulted
in a dilution of religious convictions with the absence of tight-knit
communities with the closest neighbors often residing miles apart. As Americans
began foraging further westward across the wilderness of Appalachia and later
across the open frontier, communities’ support dropped, atheism and lawlessness
decreased ethics and morality, all of which eventually led to a spiritual
awakening in the form of the Revivalist movement. Revivals across Appalachia bought
people from miles apart to hear the preaching of itinerate ministers.
As
a youth growing up in the “backwoods” of Appalachia, Stone “attended many
religious meetings and took a “particular interest” in hearing the testimonies
of converts.[10]
During this time, before he fully accepted Christ, he began “praying in secret.”[11] It was not until Stone
began his education at the Presbyterian pastor David Cladwell’s Guilford
Academy in 1790 that his religious yearnings were met with new ideas and
interpretations. The Guilford Academy was a “crucible of religious awakening, stirring
the students through prayers and sermons, and prompting many,” eventually
including Stone, to fully accept the Christian religion.[12] Stone’s initial “curiosity”
persuaded him to attend a “Presbyterian revival some fifty miles away” with his
Academy classmates, where he partook in his First Holy Communion, but the
passion of the preacher did not speak to him. Upon his return to Guilford, Stone
attended a sermon where the preacher William Hodge was speaking. Stone was said
to have been moved by Hodge’s words of “the Love of God to sinners,” saying
that it had “warmed” his heart toward God that changed the way he viewed the
Bible.[13] Through his conversion,
Stone relished in “a new spiritual sense” of self and an insatiable “desire to
preach the gospel.”[14] At twenty-three years old,
Stone took his passion for becoming a missionary across Appalachia. He began his
ministry, and he descended on Cane Ridge in 1797, where the congregation
invited him to stay and preach.
The revival at Cane Ridge in August
of 1801 brought eight ministers to Appalachia, where a large crowd had developed
and created the most extensive congregation of “interdenominational” faiths of its
time.[15] The crowds worshiped and
sang, forming small groups, including those of children “singing and shaking
hands,” while African American’s in attendance remained “segregated y choice” following the preaching
of an “enslaved Baptist preacher identified as Old Captain.”[16] The tone of antislavery was
prevalent during the Revival at Cane Ridge, not just amongst the “Presbyterians
but among Baptists and Methodists as well.”[17] Stone’s preaching was
described as “inflammatory, signaling a clean break with his own slaveholding
identity.”[18]
Stone, among the other revivalists at Cane Ridge, believed that the orthodox
beliefs of society had to change and believed that the individualistic rights
with which the Revolutionary War had also been fought applied to the right for
the individual to interpret Biblical scripture for oneself. Stone sought to
preach the Bible to all, not certain groups, nationalities, or races, but all
peoples. In doing so, Stone set Christianity to be more radical as an
individualistic journey and faith-based on Biblical teachings.[19]
Stone’s
religious convictions held a widespread sentiment that all Christians should
reunite under the convictions of the Bible and not be subjugated to separation by
political ideas or other affiliations, but united under the simple inherent belief
in the words of the Holy Bible.[20] Stone’s political
ideology developed at a time when “faith and politics” were very much “intertwined,”
but Stone “sought to keep them separate.”[21] Stone’s biblical
interpretation viewed the religious body of Christians to be the Church and to
beyond worldly ideas of politics and governments, making him an outspoken “religious
dissident.”[22]
As an evangelical and liberal, “not in the way the term is used today,” but
rather liberal in the period to which he preached radical ideals of faith and religion
based solely on the Bible.[23]
Bibliography
Dunnavant,
Anthony L. “From Persecutor of the Movement to Icon of Christian Unity:
Barton W. Stone in the Memory of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).”
Noll, Mark A. A
History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992.
Smith, Matthew
D. “Barton Warren Stone: Revisiting Revival in the Early Republic.” The
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 111, No. 2, Spring
2013: 161-197.
[1] Smith, Matthew D., “Barton Warren Stone: Revisiting
Revival in the Early Republic,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical
Society, Vol. 111, No. 2, (Spring 2013) 163.
[2] Noll, Mark A., A History of Christianity in The United States and Canada. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 1992, 151.
[3] Noll, 151.
[4] Noll, 151.
[5] Dunnavant, Anthony L., “From Persecutor of the
Movement to Icon of Christian Unity: Barton W. Stone in the Memory of the
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ),”
[6] Noll, 166.
[7] Noll, 192.
[8] Noll, 192.
[9] Noll, 151.
[10] Smith, 170.
[11] Smith, 170.
[12] Smith, 172.
[13] Smith, 174.
[14] Smith, 175.
[15] Smith, 177.
[16] Smith, 179.
[17] Smith, 181.
[18] Smith, 182
[19] Smith, 185-6.
[20] Smith, 165.
[21] Smith, 167.
[22] Smith, 169.
[23] Dunnavant, 15.
[24] Smith, 165-6.
[25] Smith, 166.
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