The Sermon: Political Media Power

The Centrality of the Sermon

It’s hard to believe, but Christians in our country once were “the media.” And when we were, we were more powerful than all our present-day media put together. As Harry S. Stout, Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, tells it is his book

The New England Soul: Preaching And Religious Culture In Colonial New England (Oxford, 1986), in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a medium of communication, the topical range and social influence of the New England sermon was so powerful in shaping cultural values, meanings, and a sense of corporate purpose that even the clout of modern television pales in comparison. He writes: “Unlike modern mass media, the sermon stood alone in local New England contexts as the only regular (at least weekly) medium of public communication. As a channel of information, it combined religious, educational, and journalistic functions, and supplied all the key terms necessary to understand existence in this world and the next. As the only event in public assembly that regularly brought the entire community together, it also represented the central ritual of social order and control. Seldom, if ever before, did so many people hear the same message of purpose and direction over so long a period of time as did the New England ‘Puritans.’

“The seventeenth-century founders of New England set out to create a unique and self-perpetuating ‘people of the Word,’ and by extending the sermon to all significant facts of life — social and political, as well as religious — they achieved exactly that. Throughout the colonial era the regular ‘planting’ of churches in most towns kept pace with the growth of the population so that by the time of the Revolution there were 720 Congregational churches in New England. In like manner the number of college-educated, ordained ministers grew with the population, resulting in a constant ratio of preachers to the general population that was among the lowest — if the not the lowest — in the Protestant world.

“Twice on Sunday and often once during the week, every minister in New England delivered sermons lasting between one and two hours in length. Collectively over the entire span of the colonial period, sermons totaled over 5,000,000 separate messages in a society whose population never exceeded 500,000 and whose principal city never grew beyond 17,000. The average weekly churchgoer in New England (and there were far more churchgoers than church members) listened to something like 7,000 sermons in a lifetime, totaling somewhere around 15,000 hours of concentrated listening. These striking statistics become even more significant when it is recalled that until the last decade of the colonial era there were at the local level few, if any, competing public speakers offering alternative messages. For all intents and purposes, the sermon was the only regular voice of authority.”

The Religious Vision of Politics

Stout says that the implications of the power of the preached Word are especially important for understanding the “meaning of America” as it unfolded in the Revolutionary era. By 1776, Congregational ministers were preaching over 2,000 discourses weekly and publishing them at an unprecedented rate that outnumbered secular pamphlets from all the colonies by a ratio of more than four-to-one.

Indeed, Stout points out that the more one reads these sermons (and he spent nine years reading more than 2,000 of them!), “the more one finds unsatisfactory the suggestion that ideas of secular ‘republicanism,’ ‘civil millennialism,’ or class conscious ‘popular ideology’ were the primary ideological triggers of radical resistance and violence in the Revolution.” Instead, he says, in Revolutionary New England, “ministers continued to monopolize public communications, and the terms they most often employed to justify resistance and to instill hope emanated from the Scriptures and from New England’s enduring identity as an embattled people of the Word who were commissioned to uphold a sacred and exclusive covenant between themselves and God. The idea of a national covenant supplied the “liberties” New Englanders would die protecting, as well as the “conditions” that promised deliverance and victory over all enemies. It also provided the innermost impulsion toward radical thought and violent resistance to British ‘tyranny’ in New England.” And in a passage that should warm the respective hearts of all those who, by God’s grace, are Reformed, Stout observes: “Covenant theology as it evolved over five generations of New World preaching comprised a view of history and corporate identity that could best be labeled ‘providential.’ In this view God entered into covenants with nations, as well as with individuals, and promised that He would uphold them by His providential might if they would acknowledge no other sovereign and observe the terms of obedience contained in His Word.

“Covenanted peoples like those of ancient Israel and New England were the hub around which sacred (i.e., real) history revolved. Such peoples might be ignored or reviled by the world and figure insignificantly in the great empires of profane history, but viewed through the sacred lens of providential history they were seen as God’s special instruments entrusted with the task of preparing the way for Messianic deliverance. As Israel witnessed to God’s active involvement with nations in ancient times and brought forth the Christ, so New England’s experience confirmed God’s continuing involvement with nations that would persist until Christ’s return to earth, when history itself would cease and be swallowed up in eternity.

“Within this historical covenant perspective, resistance to England was only secondarily about constitutional rights and political liberties. Ultimately, resistance became necessary the minute England declared the colonies’ duty of ‘unlimited submission’ in ‘all cases whatsoever’ and, in doing so, set itself alongside God’s Word as a competing sovereign. Such demands were ‘tyrannical’ and left New Englanders no choice but to resist unto death or forfeit their identity as a covenant people. As explained from the pulpit, New Englanders’ revolution was first and foremost a battle to preserve their historic identity and unique Messianic destiny.”

Stout adds: “Once we recognize and acknowledge the enduring hold of concepts like the covenant, Sola Scriptura, and providential mission on pulpit discourse and the public imagination, it is easier to understand the ease with which most New Englanders accepted the Revolution and its republican principles.... New Englanders... believed that in 1776 they were the same people of the Word that they had been in 1630, and their revolution was less a rejection than a fulfillment of the founders’ dream of creating a holy nation subject in every regard to the claim of God’s Word.”

Christians in Media Today

But, back to the role of Christians as “the media.”

Documenting his assertions in detail, Stout says that New Englanders, fed by the sermons they heard, “directed the flow of inter-colonial communications in the Revolutionary era so thoroughly that in almost all interchanges they were the ‘exporters’ of information that other colonies received. In local oratory, the message audiences heard most frequently was that the struggle with Parliament involved far more than the questions of home rule or even, for that matter, who should rule at home; the issues involved nothing less than the preservation of Sola Scriptura and New England’s privileged position at the center of redemptive history.”

Okay. So, what’s the point? So, there once was a time when Christians, in America, fed by solidly Biblical preaching from the pulpit, were “the media” and shaped, indeed, determined, public opinion. So what? Well, so we have to, again, play this role. But, I, alas, see no such thing on the horizon — though I am interested, and equipped, to try to start such an enterprise.

Today, though polls show millions of us are “Christians,” who spend billions and billions of dollars, there is no Biblical/Christian media. There is no Biblical/ Christian radio-TV network, no Biblical/Christian wire service, no such national news magazine (such as Time/ Newsweek). And those that purport to be such media are a joke, but not funny.

No area of our society is in greater need of redemption, of being Christianly, Biblically, reconstructed, than our media. And that’s where you and I come in.

In the age of computers and on-line services, I see God as having constructed an “information highway” over which can go the Gospel and solidly Biblical teaching regarding all areas of life. I have read, and believe, speculation that God used the roads built by the Romans to send His people out to spread the Gospel. And we must do the same thing with this electronic, computerized, worldwide “information highway.”

A Workable Plan

So, what to do, specifically? Well, I have e-mail, electronic mail, on the America Online service. My e-mail address is: [email protected]. For openers, I’d like to know if you have e-mail and, if so, please e-mail me your e-mail address. To begin with, for an agreed upon fee, I am willing to be your “Man In Washington,” too. With my computer, and e-mail, I’d like to be, to start, a one-man Christian/Biblical news bureau for you. This means that during the week, I will e-mail you information regarding what’s in the news and other things not in the news but which I think you should know about. And I will write about all of this from the same Biblical perspective you read here in the Chalcedon Report.

As your “Man In Washington” (full disclosure; I live midway between Washington DC and Baltimore, Maryland, actually), I could also serve you with exclusive interviews featuring questions from an explicitly Biblical viewpoint. If this thing gets up and going, I could even travel, covering events from a Biblical/Christian perspective.

As your “Man In Washington,” I would also be willing to take questions from you and try and answer them, or get them answered. I would also be very open to suggestions regarding subjects and individuals to be covered, and specific questions to be asked of certain individuals.

Our opportunities, with just myself and one computer, and e-mail, and a downloading capability for longer dispatches, are wide open. There is no longer any excuse for serious Christians having to rely on our enemies for our news. Pray, please, for this project idea. And e-mail me your address and comments right away. I’m waiting to serve the Lord here, and you.