This morning’s New York Times had a long story coming from Kansas City having to do with the ultimate in revivals. It described a “perpetual religious revival” which seems to be attracting a large number of followers.
Unfortunately the sponsors of the perpetual revival entitled their efforts as the International House of Prayer. For this they have been taken to court because of the play on words involving the International House of Pancakes. If I had my way, I would vote for the pancake people.
The revival phenomenon seems to be confined to the Protestant faith. As you may recall, I spent my first thirteen years being dragged to church services – the Baptist, the Pentecostal, the Evangelical, and, finally, a branch of the Baptist faith which eschewed all kinds of musical accompaniment. Needless to say, I loathed every hour that I spent listening to the blatherings of those Protestant preachers. The end of the line approached while I was attending the “Free Will Baptist” Church. The preacher asked that I join a children’s choir singing, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” I decided that this was the end of my association with religion and informed my parents and the preacher. This did not go over particularly well, but the preacher and my parents accepted it as inevitable.
Before continuing with the subject of revivals, there needs to be some differentiation among the variety of Protestant faiths. In some branches of the Protestant faith, revivals are an important segment of the worship service. In the more sophisticated circles of Protestantism, such as the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, revivals are largely unheard of.
Now in the Protestant faith, there is more than one definition of revival. There are those who believe that at the end of time, Jesus will revisit the Earth and people will leave the graveyards and flock to his side. The report in The New York Times about the International House of Prayer group in Kansas City subscribes to this belief. They are preaching the philosophy that prayer will lead to the end times which they hope will occur rapidly. They believe that Jesus will return to the Earth resulting in the depopulation of our graveyards.
I do not subscribe to this apocalyptic view. I had thought that this view was scores of years out of date. But according to the story in the Times of this morning, apparently there are those who believe that with prayer, the end of the world will occur and Jesus will return. At that point, people will leave their graves.
As I have said, I do not believe in that view at all. On the other hand, there is a second definition of revival which involves periodic revitalization of the faith. Apparently going to church every week is not enough for those worshipers with religious fervor. From time to time, in the evangelistic branches of Protestantism, revivals are held. It usually is one week in length.
Now I have seen the results of revivals and I will try to give you a view that is as unprejudiced as I can make it. In the Protestant faith there are a collection of preachers who style themselves as the “evangelistic preachers.” They go from one revival to another. Their sermons preach an apocalyptic view of why we must all be saved.
In the churches that I attended and which I loathe, for a revival, churches were decorated. When the revival started, the ordinary preacher who usually presided over ceremonies introduced the evangelistic preacher with great ceremony. At that point the preacher would take a back seat and leave the proceedings to the evangelistic preacher. The evangelist preacher generally was a master at exciting the crowds. By the time he had finished his sermon, there were people standing in the aisles praising Jesus. There were others who were so overcome by emotion that they lay on the floor. As a general rule, the evangelistic preachers would conduct their ceremonies over a one-week period. I might observe that at the end of that week, the religious fervor had tended to subside and it was time for the evangelistic preacher to go somewhere else.
W.C. Handy, the prominent composer of blues music, referred to this phenomenon. In one of his lyrics, probably in The Beale Street Blues, Mr. Handy said that “sinners would be sweating like a sinner on revival day.” I am at a loss to know what a sinner would be doing in a church service but that is what Mr. Handy wrote.
When the revival week was finished, the church would return to normal and the decorations would be removed. From time to time, people would comment on the wonderful revival that they had witnessed. But it has always baffled me that church goers attending weekly services would require a revival to make them shout in praise of the deities. In any case, the evangelistic preachers had a good thing going from town to town and eating chicken prepared by members of the congregations.
One of the most striking episodes came when an evangelistic preacher, accompanied by a woman, appeared at a church that I was attending at the time. The woman asserted that she had in fact visited Hell and took perhaps 30 minutes to describe the horrors that it contained. I was nine or ten years old and I rejected the thought out of hand.
It now appears that the International House of Prayer is a logical successor to the evangelistic preachers who travelled from town to town. In hindsight, I must say that I admired the ability of the evangelists to excite a crowd but I was unmoved by their appeals for piety on my behalf. I have no view on the end of times except to denounce it as a complete fraud. If the preachers want to engage in perpetual prayer, that is alright with me because it will keep them out of trouble. But I must say before the end of this essay, that I hope the lawsuit by the International House of Pancakes has a happy ending.
E. E. CARR
July 10, 2011
Essay 563
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Kevin’s commentary: When it comes to end-of-the-world philosophies, I’ve always found this wikipedia article particularly fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events. Looks like we’ve got a bit of a reprieve — despite eleven predictions of the end of the world since 2010, there are zero at time of press for 2013. Sigh. I always feel kinda bad for the people who really buy into that garbage, and sell their homes and stuff. And all the general hysteria of the past few years seems to be culminating in a breed of Americans called the “preppers” who make it their main concern to always be prepared for the apocalypse. They have meetings and forums and stores and folk heroes and the whole shebang. I think there’s even a reality show now. This should surprise no one.