America's Prophet by Bruce Feiler Read Free Book Online

signed to the top of the cupola where the bell once hung.
    “To me, the story about the bell’s accidental rise to fame is really its most interesting aspect,” said Karie Diethorn, a historian and chief curator of Independence Hall, who agreed to take me to the top. “We can explain it academically, but you really have to feel it to understand it. Shall we go?”
     
    BEFORE SETTING OUT on this expedition, I had discovered that nearly everything I thought I knew about the Liberty Bell was wrong.For starters, it wasn’t called the Liberty Bell in 1776. The building where it hung was not called Independence Hall. It was not rung on the Fourth of July. The gap in its side did not come from a crack. And the most famous word inscribed on its face, LIBERTY , is a mistranslation.
    Oh, and it sounded horrible: tinny and meek.
    But it was connected to the intimate relationship among the colonies, the Bible, and freedom. Though it sounds counterintuitive today, colonial life in the early eighteenth century was actually becoming more English, not less. What historians refer to as an Anglicization was under way, the result of greater economic ties among the colonies, tighter political control, and increased prosperity. Religion shared in this English influence. In the early 1700s, churches were largely top-down, hierarchical institutions: God chose whom to bless, ministers enforced ecclesiastical law, and individuals had little role to play in their own salvation.
    But Americans were beginning to chafe under this system and were casting around for new ways of relating to power. The Puritan lament about the loss of piety, so powerful in the late seventeenth century, only accelerated in the early decades of the eighteenth century with the rise of commercialism, the migration of young people into godless frontiers, and the advent of Newtonian science. Cotton Mather said the faithful needed to “bring religion into the marketplace.” The religious revivals that blossomed in the 1730s, known as the Great Awakening, responded by introducing a new form of worship, one that became the foundation of an emerging American way of God. A new breed of charismatic preachers offered believers the opportunity to read the Bible themselves, hear the good news of salvation in a language that was inviting, and experience a “new birth.”
    Time and again, revivalists used the language of Exodus toencourage individuals to stand up to oppressive institutions, specifically the Anglican Church. Jonathan Edwards, the most intellectually potent of the Great Awakening preachers, preached that finding redemption in God meant coming out of “spiritual bondage” into a “new Canaan of liberty.” George Whitefield, the firebrand populist and cofounder of Methodism, said that Moses experienced a “new birth” at the burning bush and was a Methodist himself. Whitefield was an unlikely messenger for his message. He was short, mousy, histrionic, and cross-eyed. His nickname was “Dr. Squintum.” Beginning in 1739, he made more than a dozen trips up and down the eastern seaboard, speaking in parks, squares, and empty fields to the largest public gatherings North America had ever seen. In New England in 1840, he spoke to eight thousand people a day, every day for a month. In Philadelphia he attracted a crowd of thirty thousand. Historian Mark Noll called him “the single best-known religious leader in America of that century, and the most widely recognized figure of any sort in North America before George Washington.” Fans praised him as “another Moses.”
    Together, these Great Awakening preachers created the first intercolonial movement and a vital precursor to the Revolution. At a time when newspapers were rare and books expensive, the pulpit was still the dominant source of information. As one historian put it, “Ordinary people knew their Whitefield and Edwards better than they knew their Locke and Montesquieu.” The Great Awakening’s chief