(RNS) — On the Sunday after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I sat in an evangelical Christian church in the upper Midwest thinking about the First Great Awakening.
This 18th-century religious revival, led by itinerant preachers such as George Whitefield and theologian-pastors such as Jonathan Edwards, swept up England’s 13 colonies. Americans, as many colonists would become, not only joined churches in large numbers, claiming to be “born again” by the power of the Holy Spirit, but also they were unified in their commitment (or recommitment) to God.
The Great Awakening also bred great division, as some preachers, notably a New Jersey Presbyterian pastor named Gilbert Tennent, exhorted preachers to identify fellow ministers who did not testify to an evangelical conversion experience.
This is what brought the Great Awakening to mind as I worshipped with Midwestern hosts a few weeks ago. The minister condemned political violence, lamented the current state of political polarization and spoke about the need for Christians to serve as agents of reconciliation in the world. But he did not mention Kirk by name.
According to some evangelical leaders, neither I nor the congregants around me should continue to attend this church. “If your church didn’t address the demonic murder of Charlie Kirk this weekend, the pastor is a coward and needs to repent or resign,” Arizona pastor Mark Driscoll wrote on Facebook on Sept. 16. Driscoll, the subject of Christianity Today’s wildly popular podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” believes Kirk was a martyr and that his murder has triggered an evangelical revival in America.
Eric Metaxas, an author and host of a daily talk show on the Salem Radio Network, had a similar message for recipients of his email newsletter: “If your church…didn’t mention Charlie Kirk BY NAME on Sunday, find a new church.” Metaxas added, “If you don’t leave any church that refused to openly condemn evil, YOU are yourself part of the larger problem. It’s time to wake up and get in the fight.”
Metaxas, too, believes spiritual revival is consuming America in the wake of Kirk’s murder: “There are times in history when you can see God’s hand more clearly. I believe that’s happening now, and that we are experiencing something that we haven’t seen before: REAL REVIVAL.”
Driscoll and Metaxas could take lessons from Tennent’s fate after fomenting religious conflict in the mid-1700s. In a sermon he preached in 1739, published as “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry” the following year, Tennent called on parishioners to leave their churches if their pastors could not testify to an evangelical conversion experience. They should seek out a minister who was preaching a message centered on the “New Birth.”
Church splits followed. In some villages, new meeting houses were erected for those who took Tennent’s advice and left their congregations. Colonial newspapers ran stories on their front pages about the controversy. Denominations broke up into Old Side (anti-revival) and New Side (pro-revival) factions.
The major difference between the First Great Awakening’s upheavals and those inspired by Charlie Kirk is that, in the 1700s, Christian leaders were arguing over spiritual matters. Today, Metaxas, Driscoll and others want people to leave their churches not because their pastor is unsaved, but because he or she did not sufficiently toe the MAGA line on Kirk’s murder. The division here is not over the proper way to get to heaven but evangelical Christians’ loyalty to the MAGA brand of GOP politics.
When politics and religion mix in religious communities, it is the spiritual health of congregations that suffers.
Tennent’s story, however, might offer the possibility of hope. Eventually acknowledging his divisiveness and repenting of most of the things he wrote in “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,” in February 1742, he sent a letter to Jonathan Dickinson, the prominent pastor of the First Presbyterian Church at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, apologizing for the “excessive heat of temper which has sometimes appeared in my conduct.”
Tennent claimed to have developed a “clear view of the danger of every thing which tends to enthusiasm and divisiveness in the visible church.” He expressed regret over the role he played in dividing churches and his “pernicious” practice of declaring fellow ministers unconverted. Over the next decades, he published essays and sermons with titles such as “The Danger of Spiritual Pride Represented,” “Brotherly Love Recommended,” and “Blessedness of Peacemakers Represented.”
There is “nothing more amiable,” Tennent wrote in one sermon, “than to see Brethren, who have been broken from one another by Division, and prejudiced against one another by angry Debate, seeking the Lord in UNION and Harmony.” He continued: “There is nothing more efficacious, to excite Mankind to embrace the Gospel than the mutual Love and Unity of the Professors of it.”
(John Fea is distinguished professor of history at Messiah University and a visiting fellow in history at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)