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Larry Witham - Washington D.C. Metro Area | Professional Profile ...

Today and tomorrow, I am interviewing Larry Witham, author of several books, including The Measure of God, Where Darwin Meets the Bible, and A City Upon a Hill: How Sermons Changed the Course of American History (see my review posted yesterday). We will be discussing the development of preaching in the United States.

Trevin Wax: Who do you consider to be the most important (in terms of influence) preacher in American history and why?

Larry Witham: This is a great question, but perhaps impossible to answer – unless we can think about types of influence.

In terms of quantity, there is no doubt that Billy Graham has preached to the most people on earth, and in the U.S. He laid the foundation for 20th century evangelicalism, which is now a major cultural force.

But when we think of influence, it often is best to go back to the “first” innovators. The British Anglican George Whitefield pioneered itinerant evangelical preaching in the American colonies. He was the first American celebrity, and by dint of his “marketing” campaign, colonists first began to speak about the collective experience of being “American.” Just before the Civil War, the Presbyterian Charles Finney innovated urban evangelism. In short, Graham built on two hundred years of tradition.

Historians often count as “most” influential those preachers who left behind great documents that we study again and again. In this context, the colonial Calvinist Jonathan Edwards was the great stylist (see “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”) The first great textbook on preaching was composed by the Baptist statesman John Broadus, a post-Civil War figure. In that same period, the Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher was called “the most famous man in America,” and he stands for the start of modern Protestant liberalism.

In modern times, preachers such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale combined psychology with preaching. Reinhold Niebuhr was a preacher for urban intellectuals. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was the first famous Catholic preacher by having the most popular religious TV show in the 1950s.

Since before the Civil War, there have also been female pioneers in preaching, and those who promoted Pentecostalism. To close on evangelicalism, Charles Fuller (the namesake of Fuller Theological Seminary) was a Baptist who, in the 1940s, had the most listened-to radio show in the United States.

Trevin Wax: What do you consider to be the most important (in terms of influence) sermon in American history and why?

Larry Witham: We’d probably want to look at sermons that came early in our history, and that were therefore discussed at great length since then. So again – I’ll opt for three!

  1. Massachusetts colony Governor John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” (1630) sermon – actually about “Christian charity” – is seen by many as a charter for the founding of America.
  2. A century later, Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners” sermon is viewed as the most eloquent of all Calvinist arguments (and Calvinism played an immense role in U.S. mental culture until the Civil War).
  3. Finally, to think a bit secularly, Abraham Lincoln’s two addresses – at Gettysburg and especially his Second Inaugural – have been extensively read, asserting great influence on how we see religious-type oratory in the nation.
  4. Well, now I’m going to say four “most important”! This allows me to include Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream,” which spurred a great social change and, by being on television, first introduced Americans broadly to the cadences of black preaching.

Trevin Wax: What is the content of America’s “civil religion?” How does current preaching fuel this mindset?

Larry Witham: From its first days, American preaching has been bound up in the political order. Separation of church and state did not come until the U.S. Constitution in the 1790s, and then in steps: no state paid clergy after the 1830s, and no state-funded prayer and Bible reading in school after the 1960s.

Still, religious oratory and political rhetoric have continued to mingle, and this has produced the idea of a “civil religion.” Ben Franklin spoke of a “public religion” – basic biblical theism as the national belief. In colonial Massachusetts, clergy gave the annual “election day sermon,” and this, some would say, it the origin of the presidential inaugural.

The first inaugural was given (actually just written) by George Washington. But every inaugural since has cited God, the Great Author, the Divine Governor, and Providence, etc., to explain the nation’s origins and purposes. The scholars have called this our “civil religion.”

Others speak of a “civil piety” – a general atmosphere where religion is respected as woven into national culture. As the polls show, for example, it would be impossible for an atheist to be elected U.S. president. To be sure, most sermons are “saving sermons” given by the millions every Sabbath to a particular group in a specific sanctuary.

But still, civil religion infuses presidential inaugurals, other great public speeches (often ending in “God bless America”), and a significant number of famous and historical sermons that were given during times of great political change or social ferment.

To take just two recent examples: Billy Graham’s gave national sermons after the terrorist bombings at both Oklahoma City in 1995 and the “9/11” attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. In these, Graham declared that evil is a “mystery,” but God is sovereign – and national religious revival is always recommended.

Tomorrow, I will be asking Larry a few questions about the history of preaching in America.

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