‘Woodstock’ for Christians: Revival Draws Thousands to Kentucky Town

Over two weeks, more than 50,000 people descended on a small campus chapel to experience the nation's first major spiritual revival in decades — one driven by Gen Z... nyt

This is not the first Kentucky "Woodstock" revival, see Kurt Andersen in Fantasyland on  Cane Ridge in the 19th century:

"…By reputation, Presbyterian ministers were stiff-necked boors—Methodists did the arousing. But it was a young Presbyterian whose North Carolina preaching provoked less godly locals to burn his pulpit and deliver a death threat written in blood. He moved six hundred miles to the far western reaches of Kentucky. On the frontier, nobody much objected to one more freak. Everyone was a newcomer, so there were no established churches. And his sermons rocked. They were the only regularly scheduled entertainment within a day's ride. 

Like an ambitious show business impresario, the Kentucky minister decided to expand. In the summer of 1800 he turned his regular annual communion-feast weekend into a regional festival of supercharged preaching and conversion. Hundreds came to his Red River Meeting House to watch and hear a half-dozen different preachers preach, including a Methodist. People shouted, people cried, people freaked out. "The power of God was strong upon me," the Methodist recalled afterward. "I turned again and, losing sight of the fear of man, I went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy, and the floor was soon covered with the slain"—that is, individuals on the floor, experiencing improvised fits of hysteria.

Something huge had been unleashed, and everyone realized it immediately. It was crazier than what Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield had incited in their grandparents' day. God had entered people. They were not just enthusiastic, they were living the dream. "On Monday," the organizer wrote, "multitudes were struck down under awful conviction; the cries of the distressed filled the whole house…. There you might see little children of ten, eleven and twelve years of age, praying and crying for redemption, in the blood of Jesus, in agonies of distress." His young friend and fellow Presbyterian minister was astonished too. "Many, very many… continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state…. After lying there for hours… they would rise, shouting deliverance." 

The fantasy had been contagious. At the repeat performance organized the next month at a nearby church, people camped out, and the contagion erupted again. Hundreds gathered. Dozens were "slain." 

A year after the astonishing prototypes, the two entrepreneurial pastors decided to go even bigger. For the 1801 event at the second minister's church in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, they booked dozens of ministers to preach, Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists. Like the first extravaganza, it was scheduled around an annual Holy Fair, the first weekend in August. Cane Ridge was in the more populous eastern part of the state, only a day's ride from the booming little city of Lexington (pop. 1,759), so maybe they would attract not just hundreds of people but a thousand or two thousand. No more than five hundred, tops, could fit into the bamboo-covered meetinghouse, so they erected a tent and outdoor stage as well. 

They were overwhelmed. Instead of three days, it continued for nearly a week. As many as twenty thousand people arrived and stayed to hear the gospel, to be saved, to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime human carnival, an unprecedented lollapalooza. For a few days, Cane Ridge was among the several most populous places in America, bigger than Providence, as big as Charleston. 

Things really got rolling twenty-four hours in, as Saturday afternoon turned to dusk. Campfires and bonfires burned. Darkness descended. Preachers preached from trees and wagons, several at once. Dozens of ordinary people—women, children, anyone moved by the Holy Spirit—were self-appointed "exhorters," shouting the truth of the gospel as they believed or felt or imagined or otherwise knew it. People screamed uncontrollably. People ran and leaped, barked and sang uncontrollably. People laughed and sobbed uncontrollably. Hundreds were overcome by "the jerks," convulsive seizures of limbs and necks and torsos that sometimes resolved into a kind of dance. And of course, hundreds or thousands of sinners found Christ and repented—including one of the gang of drunken local blasphemers who had ridden into the throng at full speed to make trouble, fell from his white horse, knocked himself out, and finally awakened more than a day later, smiling… saved. The wonder and chaos ebbed and flowed as dawn broke and the sun rose and set again, but it never stopped, day and night after August day and night. 

An equivalent American gathering today, as a fraction of the U.S. population, would be more than a million people. As the Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin and Harold Bloom of Yale have both noted, Cane Ridge was the Woodstock for American Christianity, an anarchic, unprecedented August moment of mass spectacle that crystallized and symbolized a new way of thinking and acting, a permanent new subculture. "The drunk, sexually aroused communicants at Cane Ridge," Bloom writes in The American Religion, "like their drugged and aroused Woodstockian descendants, participated in a kind of orgiastic individualism." The improvised acting-out at Cane Ridge and subsequent camp meetings apparently descended from the religious fringes, such as those of African-American Baptists. 

More Baptist and Methodist preachers organized more camp meetings all over the country, but especially in the South, and more mobs of people assembled to go over the top and out of their minds. It had gone viral. As a mass-market phenomenon in the 1800s, widespread and frequent, it was unique to America. A new and fully American Christianity had been invented, more fantastic and unsubtle than any other, strictly subjective and individual—as Bloom says, an "experiential faith that called itself Christianity while possessing features very unlike European or earlier American doctrinal formulations." The new mode quickly spread from the frontier back east to civilization. During the year after Cane Ridge, a third of the students at Yale were converted, born again. 

New, Cane Ridgier denominations were started. Along with the Baptists and Methodists, they committed to a version of Christianity more thrilling and magical right now, as well as a sure-thing payoff for eternity. Thus the new American way: it was awesome, it was democratic, you're a winner if you believe you're a winner. 

In the years after Cane Ridge, Methodism rode the wave, growing faster than any other denomination. Church attendance probably doubled during the first half of the century, and by the 1850s two-thirds of churchgoers were Methodists or Baptists, emotional and enthusiastic. Christianity became more and more synonymous with this evangelical Christianity: sinners walking to the altar to be saved and experience an all-consuming feeling of a personal relationship with Jesus. A generation after Cane Ridge, Christian emotionalism no longer seemed so kooky in America…"

— Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen