Slayed in the Spirit: Bethel Church and the Rise of Christian Supernaturalism
By: Joe Forrest
Tags: Spirituality, Christianity, Church, Faith, Religion

Revival Nation

Ever since the Puritans — a hyper-legalistic sect of Protestantism — landed ashore at Plymouth Rock in 1620, the United States has been a near-constant state of religious revival. And many of those early settlers believed the New World to be the New Jerusalem and themselves as God’s new “Chosen People.”

Modern missionaries in foreign countries often worry about syncretism, or the blending of old and new religious beliefs that create hybrid religions.

Back in 17th-century colonial America, syncretism wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Lacking theological gatekeepers and with an emphasis on “religious freedom,” the immigrant-friendly New World became a melting pot of conflicting spiritual ideologies.

In Fantasyland, historian Kurt Andersen writes,

“As Yale religious historian Jon Butler has written, the early United States was an ‘antebellum spiritual hothouse,’ Christian faith blending freely with folk magic — belief in the occult, clairvoyance, shamanic healing, and prophetic dreams, much of it old folk superstition no longer constrained by Puritan doctrine and order.”

As a result, new hybrid versions of Christianity that highlighted emotional spectacle, spiritual warfare, miraculous healings, and apocalyptic prophecy began to dominate the religious landscape.

Salem Witch Trials, 1692

Colonial America was also a deeply superstitious place. Witches, shapeshifters, changelings, and Native Americans (which some Protestant preachers described as “instruments of the devil” and “professed enemies of Christ Jesus”) prowled the wilderness of the new Promised Land. Therefore, it was important for Christianity to be more powerful than the demon-haunted world lurking outside the walls of the church.

For the various Protestant sects fleeing the Church of England and Roman Catholicism, religion finally became something it hadn’t been for a long time: Exciting.

And this was no more apparent than the First Great Awakening (1730–1755) and Second Great Awakening (1790–1840). Watershed moments in American history, both revivals forever altered the ways Americans interacted with Christianity: It was not enough to know the Holy Spirit; one had to experience the Holy Spirit.

The First Great Awakening

During the First Great Awakening, tens of thousands of American colonists flocked to hear preachers like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley deliver theatrical performances heavy on fear-based and emotional appeals in tents, pastures, and town squares. Prayer and worship gatherings became riotous displays of euphoric religious experientialism.

Congregations would faint, moan, convulse, weep, and collapse in fits of hysterical laughter and collective religious ecstasy. No one had ever seen or heard anything like it before.

During one sermon, Jonathan Edwards was so disturbed by the audience’s reaction (one observer remarked, “[there was] howling, screeching, groaning as of women in the pains of childbirth”), he wrote another sermon urging caution against emotionalism, saying emotional outbursts didn’t prove the legitimacy of a revival and “enthusiasm often spreads even when evangelists proclaim false doctrine.”

Forty years later, the Second Great Awakening was triggered by the Red River Meeting House, a religious camp meeting of several hundred people led by James McGready, a Presbyterian minister, in June 1800.

After observing a service at the Red River Meeting House, minister Barton Stone wrote, “It baffled description. Many, very many, fell down as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state.” In a letter to friend, minister McGready wrote, “There you might see little children of ten, eleven and twelve years of age, praying and crying for redemption, in the blood of Jesus, in agonies of distress.”

Another seminal event was the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801, an impromptu week-long religious festival in Kentucky that saw between 10,000 and 25,000 attendees — an absolutely massive turnout given the population density of early 19th-century America.

Cane Ridge Revival, 1801

At Cane Ridge, dozens of preachers erected make-shift stages and delivered fiery exhortations of the “true new Gospel” amid the glow of multiple bonfires. Participants laughed uncontrollably, collapsed, barked like dogs, and danced with wild abandon. Young women writhed on the ground and moaned in near-orgasmic bliss. Preachers found themselves drowned out by hundreds of people “spontaneously exhorting” their own divinely-inspired messages. And, while sitting on the shoulders of adults, children spouted apocalyptic prophecies.

According to one observer, Cane Ridge was filled with “Sinners dropping down on every hand, shrieking, groaning, crying for mercy, convoluted.” Another visitor commented on the untold number of attendees blessed by “the jerks,” or seizure-like convulsions: “Their heads would jerk back suddenly, frequently causing them to yelp…I have seen their heads fly back and forward so quickly that the hair of females would be made to crack like a carriage whip.”

Historian Paul Conkin called the Cane Ridge Revival “the most important religious gathering in all of American history.” For decades afterward, a common evangelical prayer at on the onset of any camp revival meeting was “Lord, make it like Cane Ridge.”

And, yet, the events at Red River Meeting House and Cane Ridge Revival have been shuffled to the annals of history. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists owe their denominations’ prevalence to the the First and Second Great Awakenings, but the sensational (and cringe-worthy) emotionalism have largely been stripped from the narrative.

When modern critics treat Bethel Church like an eccentric anomaly or evangelical outlier, they’re failing to take into account the wider context of America’s religious history. And therein lies an uncomfortable truth: Perhaps more than any other denomination, Bethel’s Christianity is America’s Christianity — emotional, attractional, and supernatural.