By the mid-20th century, altar calls had become a staple of evangelical and Baptist life in America, especially in the South. Many evangelical and Reformed-leaning churches in recent years have stopped doing altar calls, for a variety of reasons. Critics of altar calls have pointed out that they have no strong biblical basis, and that they were part of the “New Measures” introduced by Charles Finney in the later stages of the Second Great Awakening.
In his anti-revivalist tract The Anxious Bench (1843), theologian John Williamson Nevin admitted that Finney's “anxious bench” tactic was sometimes associated with real revivals.
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