"Fitted to Receive the Word of God": Emotions and Scientific Naturalism in the Religious Revivals of the 1830S (Charles Grandison Finney )

Charles Grandison Finney opened his series of weekly Lectures on Revivals of Religion that he delivered in New York in 1835 by asserting that, employing the "laws of nature," a religious revival could be induced among a group of people with the same certainty as one might cultivate a crop of grain. As the foremost figure in a wave of early nineteenth-century religious revivals commonly referred to as the Second Great Awakening, Finney played a key role in formalizing both the theology and the tactics of the movement. Like many other social reformers and religious revivalists of the day, Finney employed the language of "science" to support his views. Likewise, many opponents of this new revival style, particularly Hosea Faxon Ballou, utilized this language of scientific naturalism to support their views. Both Finney and Ballou provide a means of gaining greater insight into what role emotions played in the broad shift in American culture toward viewing human beings as part of the natural world, and thus explain their behavior according to its laws. Accordingly, this article situates the study of conceptual frameworks within the context of specific people, institutions, and events, examining the particular ways in which different groups appropriated the notion that natural laws dictated moral norms and social practices. Such a method of inquiry allows one to avoid the extremes of sweeping abstractions about revivals, per se, on the one hand, and antiquarian specificity, on the other. By studying specific appropriations of scientific naturalism one can arrive at two valuable conclusions. First, building on the historical scholarship that has demonstrated that antebellum Americans did not consider science and religion to be in opposition, one can demonstrate that emotions formed a key component of both spiritual and scientific thinking. This claim calls into question many of the oppositions between rational and affective faculties, between "head" and "heart," that have guided much of the social scientific analysis of the dynamic between science and religion. Secondly, the dynamics of nineteenth-century debates on the interplay of emotions and scientific naturalism can shed some light on the present-day renaissance of interest among social scientists in a variety of fields in the role of emotions. Then, as now, the variety of positions regarding the role of emotions is due to the various appropriations of the language of affect and of naturalism, and not due to any fundamental opposition between them.