Lewis' novel was denounced across the United States, and especially by Billy Sunday, the athlete-turned-evangelist whose life the character of Elmer Gantry followed a little too closely. The Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 in Cane Ridge, Kentucky is regarded as the first of these, and 125 years later Sinclair Lewis wrote the satirical novel Elmer Gantry to criticize such evangelists, famously made into a film in 1960 starring Burt Lancaster. Like these other entertainments, the tent revival was also a money-making venture, and eventually achieved infamy for fleecing the flock. The religious equivalent of a circus, vaudeville show, touring Shakespeare company or traveling medicine wagon, all of which were part of the rural American Nineteenth century cultural experience. Meetings provided novelty, music, and fiery speeches. The evangelist and his entourage would roll into town and set up shop, either in a building utilized by a host congregation or in their own tent, and stay for a week or more of nightly shows. On the other hand, they supplied entertainment. On the one hand, they promoted the Second Great Awakening values of individual conversion, charismatic experience and a sense of cultural/counter-cultural vitality.
Some might argue that we still see echoes of these tendencies in the American zeitgeist.Ĭamp meetings and tent revivals were a particularly fruitful endeavor, as they supplied two benefits for the price of one.
The more spread out Americans got, the more they looked for solutions that fit their particular contexts and values.
When the Nineteenth century began, Christianity in the United States was in the early stages of what would be called the "Second Great Awakening." This movement was expressly evangelistic, restorationist and personalistic, eschewing the established denominations for forms of religion that emphasized personal conversion, charismatic leaders, heightened emotionalism, and counter-culture radicalism, while dispensing with what they perceived as accumulated traditions, and expressed through ad hoc associations like "cults," camp meetings and tent revivals. Their success can be attributed in many respects to what was later described in Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis": an ethos of individualism and self-reliance that was responsive to the demands of frontier settlement, with a mistrust of the established, systemic authority of governments, aristocracies, the arts, churches and academics (including scientists and formal theologians).
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