John Williamson Nevin was Presbyterian by birth, but as a result of the welcoming of revivalism in his tradition he transferred personal alliances to the German Reformed Church amidst his teaching tenures. He was suspicious, and with good reason, of revivalism’s antics sweeping the churches in mainline protestant denominations, especially the Presbyterian. In response to the movement he wrote the pamphlet The Anxious Bench as review for the purpose of exposing 19th century revivalism demonstrating its “newness”. Nevin located faith within the visible church where salvation belonged, where one was confirmed in the covenant by way of the sacraments, and by way of the catechism. It was here, not within the revivalist tradition that true religion was formed. His religious experience at college was the means for his criticizing of the “new” way of faith, namely the newly exciting revivalism. Having grown up in a rigorously Presbyterian home where he was confirmed as a child in the Presbyterian Church he was one of devout character and devout personal religion. His college experience challenged his Christian understanding so that he could not say he belonged in the family of God because he had not experienced the moment of “personal conversion.” Until the day when a “revival” was formulated, where upon he found himself at the "anxious meetings" in an attempt to procure his eternal salvation by that experience. His formal churchly Presbyterian up-bringing was sadly being replaced by the disseminating subjective revivalist teaching of personal religion. Later in life when he began reflecting on the new religious landscape and in coming to the realization that pietist Protestantism had won the day, he concluded that as a result a very new experience was to be had by the modern believer, one which replaced the church and one which turned toward the private individual as captain of his salvation. He became one of the most insightful of all critics of 19th century American Protestantism, especially the "new measures" of C.G. Finney.
A primary reason for the disbanding of the orderly and churchly and confessional was the folkish-fear of the evils of Rome. Anything Popish was cast aside in the new religious landscape. Some even when so far as abandoning churchly corporate repetition of the Creeds namely because they resembled a vestiges of Romanism and for that reason they ought to be done away. Though by today’s standards Nevin would be considered a "traitor," essentially because of his churchly devotion and churchly religion, Nevin was one who stood for a confessional Protestantism, against the newly fashioned and quirky revivalism that invaded the majority of American Protestantism.
Nevin’s religious heritage within the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tradition was labeled (during the revivalist era) the “Old Side” because of their skeptical and anti-revivalist views of the rapidly broadening evangelical pietist landscape. They were branded this because of their “Oldness” in doing church, where church was formal, liturgical, and creedal, where church was more than simply the gathering of the converted (and would-be converts) around the flamboyant sermons of fiery preachers whose minds were geared toward the “moment of decision” where ones eternal fate hung in the balance of that very moment. The “New Side” favored the revivalist “tradition” if it can even be rightly called a tradition. New Siders often congregated in the expanding cities of the northeast and especially religious colleges of which Princeton University was foremost in influence. Because of the popularity of the newly forming American Protestant successes promised in revivalism, the “Old Side” was viewed as illegitimate for the very sake of its “oldness” and its un-usefulness. The generally universal maxim holds true here as it does elsewhere that favorable superiority commonly favors the “new and improved.”
The immediate breakdown between the Old Side and the New Side Presbyterians was spurned on by the continuous disagreements between those who favored revivalism and those who opposed revivalism. Logically the minds of revivalists concluded that the dispute was ultimately between those converted and those unconverted. The New Side proffered that those who favored the Old Side were likely unconverted and on the broad road, thus the enemy’s children. The Old side viewed the New Side as frivolous with their novelty tending toward the disastrous end of disorganized religion and the depreciation of the Christian tradition. The New Side and Old Side also differed on the requirements for ordination. The Westminster Confession and the Longer and Shorter Catechism’s were agreed upon as the standard for ordination, but the degree of precision was never agreed upon. Not only did the prospective Ordainee need to demonstrate ascent to the Confession and Catechism’s, but the New Side demanded that they must also be able to declaim a specific conversion experience whereby they could confirm by verbal testimony a day where upon the Spirit brought them into a converted state. The famous sermon by Gilbert Tennet called The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry is testimony to the dispute. Interestingly, the approval of George Whitefield’s revivalist ministry was in the end a test of sure faith to the New Side. Those opposing Whitefield’s ministry were in a sense opposing God.
What Tennet’s sermon did to the relational aspects of the New Side and Old Side was detrimental to the possibility of a continued gentlemanly dialogue between the differing views. Rather Tennet proposed that if the Minister (and ultimately his ministry) did not live up to the peoples expectations, those persons had the right and privilege to simply sever all ties with the Church and form new ties else where. His scathing reference to Old Side ministers as “dead men” (pg. 37) who only promoted a form of religion broke down the common fraternity these men held as simply being Presbyterians. The mindset of Tennet’s sermon caused significant reverberation among the Old Side and New Side as it was unfairly questioning the character of ministers and encouraging the disruption that is caused by relocating membership in small communities.
The breakdown forged itself out of what constituted as proper authentic or “genuine” religion. The New Side favored the results or “happenings” of religion as genuine whereas the Old Side favored the expression or “forms” of religion as a genuine mode. (pg. 37) Tennet and his associates did not value form as authentic religious experience, rather the happening in the soul would alone vouch for the truly religious in nature. The religious experience then, to the New Side, could logically do away with the presence of the Church (as a form) in the daily life of the believer. The Church was not completely necessary to healthy religious persons since genuine religion only took place in the heart rather than in rituals and liturgies of the Church. This newly formed idea dislocated authority from the Church and placed it into every individual as the authority for his or her own personal religion. Not only did Old Siders take issue with the disruption of Churchly order (recommendations to parish laity to change Ministers and Ministries), but they also took issue with the unwarranted questioning of the faith of a Minister who did not provide evidence of conversion according to the revivalist experience. Furthermore, as was previously discussed, the new demands for the would-be minister were to provide anecdotal evidence of his “conversion” experience to the end that he was able to prove his faith, not by way of agreement to the objectives of the Westminster Confession, but rather by the subjective happenings of intensely personal religious experience. John Thompson, an Old Side Presbyterian minister who opposed the newly forming movement, wrote concerning the subjective revivalist movement: “My dear friends, you may assure yourselves of it that you are not most edified or profited when you are most pleased. False Doctrine and mere Amusements do too often please an unskillful Auditory, to their Hurt.”
In 1741 there was a formal splintering in Presbyteries between the Old Side and the New Side, but in 1758 the two rejoined their efforts. The New Side saw this as a victory for the reason that the Old Side was so weak, but nevertheless the tensions between to two presented themselves as significant obstacles. Then as a result of the difficulty in union, those Old Siders who did not want to wrestle with the issues joined up with the Anglican church, an action which “demonstrated” the “disloyalty” of Old Siders to the Presbyterian Church. In the end, the compromise between the two during their effort to reunite demonstrated that the Old Side ways of churchly order and confessionalism would not mix well with the New Side ways of experiential religion through revivalism. The Old Side lost because their numbers were small, and as a result the power struggle favored revivalist Protestantism which would soon become synonymous will conservative Protestantism. Confessionalism as a legitimate Protestant expression of faith would be lost because it could not sustain itself against the novelty of revivalism.
Within the Lutheran denomination one encounters a similar but very different portrait. Because Lutheranism was already established to a degree prior to the Revolutionary War, Lutheranism experienced a very similar magnetism toward the revivalist forces. Except that for Lutheranism there was significant expansion due to German, Swedish, and Norwegian immigrants during the mid-19th century. Philip Schaff describes the Lutheran landscape by developing three categories of Lutherans in America during the 19th century. First were the “Neo-Lutherans” of which Samuel Schmucker was the leadings spokesmen. He developed a platform upon which Lutherans could unite with non-Lutherans in the name of a higher unity, but along with this endeavor came significant compromise whereby the Lutherans were forced to take upon a particular American spirit and American sentiment with regards to religion. This action would require Lutherans to become essentially non-Lutheran and replace it with pietist Protestantism. Then there were the Old Lutherans being essentially comprised of late migrants who neither spoke English nor took lightly their European cultural heritage. These would not budge in their cooperation with the American religious atmosphere, but remained dogmatically and exclusively Lutheran even to the point of closed communion. The third category assigned by Schaff was the Moderate’s of which William Mann was the leading spokesman. The Moderates maintained an open dialogue with the other communities of faith, but remained confessionally Lutheran primarily through their maintaining of the Augsburg Confession as the primary standard of faith and membership. He argued for specifically Lutheran traditions of baptism and the Lord’s table and maintained that the giving up of the confession along with their view on the sacraments in favor of the pragmatic pietism of the American revivalists and conversionists was simply to give up the Lutheran identity. What made life difficult for Mann and his sympathizers was the form recognition of the Lutheran liturgy by the revivalists and pietists as taking the form of Romanism. Given the high influx of Roman Catholics immigrants in the mid-19th century and equally intense reactions of pietists against the Roman Catholic influence, the Moderate Lutheran position was bound to fail simply because it reminded most evangelical conservative Protestants of Catholicism.
In summation Hart writes: “Protestant revivalism, with its pietist disregard of forms, teachings, and rites in favor of a religion that consisted of devout feelings and good intentions, had become so deeply ingrained in the American soul that Protestant confessionalism looked and sounded as foreign as Catholicism. To those whose piety revolved around the ceremonies and creeds of Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, however, revivalism was the foreign element in American Protestantism.”
The question is then raised at the conclusion of the chapter, which is the preferable way of “getting” religion? Either the confessionalist way through churchly order and worship, ministerial care, catechesis and teaching of doctrine or through the conversionists way of instantaneous faith based upon a subjective personal experience witnessed to only by the internal feelings of the heart created in artificial crisis environment with the help of methods such as the anxious bench? Hart argues that the former is to be preferred in the understanding that it demonstrates confirmation of faith over the period of several years and through quiet means, whereas the later demonstrates confirmation of faith instantaneously at a “time and place” through a crisis experience where the convert needs to know very little if any orthodox teaching save that he is a sinner and needs to “invite Jesus into his heart.”