John Williamson Nevin and the Revival of the Evangelical Mind

In many ways, Finney represented the culmination of pietistic trends working their way through the various Protestant sects. Pietism was a movement that originated in Germany in the 17th century with the publication of Pia Desideria by Jacob Spener and emphasized introspection and a turning away from the formal rituals of the institutional church. It was a reaction against scholasticism that marginalized formal worship in favor of small groups called “conventicles” and that saw no need for, or at least made secondary, the confessional standards of the Protestant churches. Pietism was effectively a way of doing religion on the fly, with personal conviction and feeling leading the way. As Daryl G. Hart details it in The Lost Soul of American Protestantism, the legacy of the Second Great Awakening and its pietist leanings is an anti-creedal, anti-clerical, and anti-ritual bias seen in much of evangelicalism today.