Abstract
This article puts Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”—an interpretation of American history that held sway among historians and the general public from the late 1890s to the 1930s—in conversation with James F. White’s depiction of an American liturgical “frontier tradition”—an interpretation of evangelical worship that became popular in the 1990s and continues to hold sway in the twenty-first century. It analyzes both through the lens of contemporary critiques and proposes new lines of inquiry that will contribute to a more robust understanding of American evangelical worship.
1. Introduction
Many Americans today are reevaluating their nation’s origin story in the face of vexing political, racial, and economic challenges. An integral part of the American origin story has been the symbol of the frontier. “All nations have borders,” writes Yale historian Greg Grandin, “and many today even have walls. But only the United States has had a frontier.” The American frontier is a terrain that is as much metaphorical as it is geographic. In Grandin’s words, it “has served as a proxy for liberation, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life itself and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate.” 1
Originally, the word “frontier” did not hold emotional meaning in the American lexicon. Neither the first English dictionary published in the United States, in 1788, nor the first dictionary written by someone born in America, in 1798, even included the word “frontier.” 2 However, later in the 1800s, as the United States executed “removal” operations that drove Native Americans west and made their land available for settlers and speculators, “frontier” came to mean the line that separated Indian country from white settlement. In time, it became for the dominant white culture a symbol of endless promise: “a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration.” 3
The individual most responsible for transforming the frontier from a mappable place into an abstract idea was an historian named Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner argued in 1893 that American identity hinged upon the nation’s perpetual expansion: that in the ongoing and epic struggle between “civilization” and “savagery,” Americans learned to overcome their differences and forged a culture that encouraged self-sufficiency and a robust capitalist economy.
The symbol of the American frontier also caught the imagination of a generation of liturgical scholars, exemplified by the work of historian James F. White (1932–2004). This article places Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”—an interpretation of American history that held sway among historians and the general public from the late 1890s to the 1930s—in conversation with James F. White’s depiction of an American liturgical “frontier tradition”—an interpretation of evangelical worship that became popular in the 1990s, and continues to hold sway in the twenty-first century. As we shall see, White and Turner shared a genius for producing panoramic visions at the right cultural moment and an uncanny knack for combining disparate American experiences into a single classic formula.
Today, however, the symbol of the frontier has become problematic. American historians point out that a constant “fleeing forward” allowed Americans to avoid a true reckoning with their deep systemic social problems. Disputes between the rich and the landless, or between those who believed that human beings could be owned and those who disagreed, could always be pushed outwards to the west. The false underpinning of the frontier ideology was that there was no problem caused by expansion that could not be solved by more expansion. In what follows, I analyze Turner and White’s scholarship on “frontiers” through the lens of contemporary critiques and propose new lines of inquiry that will contribute to a more robust understanding of American evangelical worship.
2. Frederick Turner’s Frontier Thesis
On July 12, 1893, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) delivered an academic paper that would later become the most famous piece of historical analysis ever written by an American historian. It was a blisteringly hot day in Chicago, and a great crowd had gathered in the pavilions of the World’s Columbian Exposition to celebrate (albeit a year late) the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World. Over the course of the afternoon, the crowd divided in a way that felt symbolic of past and present. One group moved eastward, crowding around the shore of Lake Michigan to watch the arrival of a replica Viking ship from Europe. Others headed in the opposite direction to attend a performance of Buffalo Bill’s American Wild West Show. 4
That evening, a third group traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago in search of a deeper meaning for the event. A special meeting of the American Historical Association had been organized by Johns Hopkins professor Herbert Baxter Adams, who was especially interested in the European origins of American culture. The sweltering crowd sat through a procession of academic papers: “English Popular Uprisings in the Middle Ages,” “The Social Compact and Mr. Jefferson’s Adoption of It,” “The Relation of History to Politics,” and “Early Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin.” The last scholar on the program was Frederick Jackson Turner: an unknown thirty-one-year-old instructor at the University of Wisconsin, and Adams’ former student.
In a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner directly challenged the work of his teacher. Adams was an influential advocate of the “germ theory,” which held that the seed of democracy was born in medieval Germany, transported to Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, and spread to the New World via European immigrants. This theory was inspired by the late first-century Roman historian Tacitus, who drew a contrast between the corrupt and hedonistic citizens of Rome and the strong, energetic, and honest Germans who lived north of the Danube River. Unlike Roman society, in which a single autocratic leader possessed supreme political power, Tacitus suggested that Germans sat around campfires in Teutonic forests and arrived at community decisions through a democratic process. Adams made a similar claim in his book The Germanic Origin of New England Towns, arguing that American democratic institutions “were propagated in New England by Old English and Germanic ideas, brought over by the Pilgrims and Puritans.” According to Adams, democracy was like a crop: it was “just as improbable that free local institutions should spring up without a germ along American shores” as it was that “English wheat should have grown here without planting.” 5 The New England town meeting was simply a variant on the ancient tribal councils of the Black Forest.
Turner turned his mentor’s “germ theory” on its head by reversing its origin and direction. Turner began his paper by acknowledging that “our early history is the study of European terms developing in an American environment.” But in the next sentence, he broke with “germist” scholars’ emphasis on America’s continuity with Europe: “Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors.” 6 American identity did not come from Europe, he argued, but rather was forged on the frontier, in the country’s interior. From there, it moved west as each new generation of settlers contributed to building up America’s distinctiveness. Three centuries of conquering an ever-moving western frontier—living in primitive conditions, fighting Indians, transforming raw wilderness into civilization—caused colonists to shed the cultural baggage of Europe and to emerge as new creatures. 7 Forced to shed the trappings of civilization and go back to first principles, the settlers rediscovered themselves and reinvented both their character and democracy in the process.
At the heart of Turner’s “frontier thesis” was his claim that the frontier was the spawning ground for many of the social and intellectual traits that distinguished Americans from Europeans. These included “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” a “practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients,” a “masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends,” “restless, nervous energy,” “dominant individualism, working for good and evil,” and, above all, “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” 8 These national virtues were bred into each generation of pioneers during the process of westward expansion.
Turner’s frontier thesis would eventually become the prevailing interpretation of US history in the twentieth century. After Turner, American historians increasingly deemphasized the idea that their institutions could be traced exclusively to European roots and, instead, began stressing the uniqueness of their New World experience. Turner’s vision evoked, in the words of historian Martin Ridge, “an American past as grand as that of England or any other continental power, an American landscape as spectacular as any in the world, and heroes, heroines, and myths equal to any in Europe.” 9 Turner’s creation myth would capture the popular imagination, influencing the portrayal of the West in art, literature, movies, and television.
But the frontier thesis represented the “before” of American history. On that hot Chicago night in 1893, Turner was also concerned with the “after.” The United States Bureau of the Census Report of 1890 had revealed that for the first time in one hundred years, the nation no longer possessed a distinct boundary line between the settled and unsettled portions of the West. With the frontier now closed, Turner anticipated a major shift in the national psychology. Never again would “such gifts of free land offer themselves.” Never again would westward expansion “furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Americans now needed to adjust their economy, their politics, and their daily lives to the “after” of a closed-space existence. “Four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone,” Turner declared, “and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” 10 Turner hoped that the experience of constructing civilization on the untamed wilderness would help the nation build a stable inward society rooted in the lessons of cooperation, progress, and equality learned on the American frontier. In Turner’s eyes, the closing of the frontier marked the start of a new chapter: one in which Americans would model democracy for the rest of the world. Turner’s thesis eventually gained such widespread acceptance that one scholar writing at the end of the twentieth century called it “the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history.” 11
3. The Frontier in Liturgical Studies
The effects of Turner’s 1893 paper extended all the way to the discipline of liturgical studies in the late twentieth century. In 1989, liturgical historian James F. White (1932–2004) produced a thorough and thoughtful taxonomy of Protestant worship. 12 White spoke of eight familiar traditions of Protestant worship: Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Quaker, Methodist, Separatist/Puritan, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal. White’s book was a departure from previous liturgical scholarship in at least two ways. First, White chose to emphasize each tradition’s ethos and enduring characteristics rather than its liturgical texts. Second, after observing that “the most prevalent worship tradition in American Protestantism (and maybe in American Christianity) lacks any recognized name” and “has been almost totally ignored in liturgical scholarship,” White created a new, ninth category of Protestant worship called the “frontier tradition.” It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of White’s work today. Methodist scholar Matthew Sigler recently noted that since the publication of Protestant Worship, the threefold liturgy of preliminaries, preaching and a harvest of converts “has become, for many, a standard way of speaking of Protestant worship traditions. In particular, [White’s] ‘frontier worship’ category has become a dominant lens through which many evaluate worship within the American context.” 13 Lester Ruth similarly suggests that in the twenty-first century, “the histories of contemporary worship produced by liturgical scholars have stagnated on the whole. No one has questioned the basic frontier framework although there has been some nuancing.” 14
Although he never mentioned Turner’s name in his writings, White’s “frontier tradition” was indebted to Turner’s “frontier hypothesis” in a number of ways. Like Turner, who believed that the frontier created a “new breed of man” by drawing people away from the East Coast and forcing them to return to primitive conditions, so too did White emphasize the importance of westward migration in the evolution of liturgy. People on the frontier “were different, even from those on the East Coast,” and “the special circumstances of ministering on the frontier to a people largely unchurched led to the development of a distinctive new tradition of worship.” 15 Turner noted that as the settlers moved west, they either abandoned their inherited culture (i.e., books and pianos) or simplified it (i.e., laws and religions). White makes a similar argument. Inherited European liturgical traditions also had to be abandoned or simplified: because they were “frequently uneducated and often illiterate,” people living on the frontier “were not about to adopt a prayer-book tradition for their worship, and even their hymns had to be simple so as to be readily memorized.” 16
When Turner credited Americans with “a practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients,” White named the defining characteristic of frontier worship as “a pragmatic bent to do whatever is needed . . . uninhibited by canons or service books.” 17 Turner observed that the American DNA carried a “buoyancy and exuberance that came with freedom.” White similarly heard echoes of “the buoyant optimism of the period of manifest destiny” in Charles Finney’s call for sinners “to change their own hearts.” 18 Turner portrayed the evolution of the American character in Darwinian terms: through epic struggles with nature, wilderness, and the indigenous population, the fittest prospered and the fulfillment of the American character was achieved. White similarly drew on the logic of “survival of the fittest” when explaining the enduring popularity of evangelical worship practices: “I would say the first criterion [we can use to pinpoint authentic Christian worship] is survival . . . If a form of worship survives more than the original generation, it must have some validity as a means of humans relating to God.” 19 In recent years, however, historians have critiqued Turner’s “frontier thesis” on a variety of fronts. Three of their critiques should serve as warnings to liturgical scholars who might be tempted to accept the historiography of White’s “frontier tradition” without question.
3.1 Oversimplification of Complexity
Turner presented the history of the frontier as a tale of triumph. It was “the border between something and nothing, between complex social organization and ‘free land.’” 20 At each stage of migration—from colonial expansion to the Appalachians, then Mississippi, then the arid plains and the Rocky Mountains and, finally, all the way to the Pacific—settlers advanced by “cutting into the forest, pushing back the Indian, and steadily widening the area of civilization in [their] rear.” 21
In liturgical studies, White similarly depicted the growth of the “frontier tradition” as a tale of evangelical triumph. In the last decade of the twentieth century, many mainline churches were worried about their flagging membership numbers. In a bid to attract attenders, including newcomers who might find organ-led hymnody stodgy and dull, many congregations overhauled their repertoire. Some mainline Protestants were happy to trade their choirs and organs for guitars and praise bands. Others, including White, were alarmed by the speed and scale of the changes and sensed “the Evangelical other” encroaching on their theological and denominational identity. 22 In White’s words, the frontier ordo Charles Finney had devised in the nineteenth century had become a “black hole” in the twentieth, pulling other liturgical traditions into its orbit and “swallowing up” their distinctive characteristics. In White’s estimation, change occurred in only one direction: “It may be a tribute to the vitality of [the frontier tradition] that it is able to avoid being influenced much by others.” 23
However, both Turner and White’s narratives of conquest are problematic. “One people’s frontier is usually another’s homeland,” writes poet and novelist Kathleen Norris, and the so-called “free land” of Turner’s West first belonged to diverse indigenous groups who had been inhabiting it since time immemorial.
24
Moreover, Turner’s binary logic of “savage” versus “civilized” oversimplified life on the frontier: a complex place where the lives of Europeans, immigrants, Hispanics, blacks, indigenous peoples, and others intertwined and overlapped. Religious studies scholar Amy Shevitz notes that on the frontier,
Previously distinct groups, coming into proximity, lived in zones of social and cultural interpenetration, where no single group was effectively in control. In North America, the struggle for control appeared in the different regions at different times: between English and Indians in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century; among British, French, and Americans in the trans-Appalachian West in the eighteenth century; between Mexicans and Americans in Texas in the early nineteenth century; between white Americans and Indians in the Rockies in the later nineteenth century. These conflicts were a result of intercultural contact and part of a complex process of mutual cultural exchange.
25
In their studies of the American West, twenty-first-century historians have become increasingly willing to embrace complexity. Liturgical scholars must learn to do the same in their studies of American evangelicalism.
Some prominent evangelical megachurches follow White’s familiar narrative closely. But Finney’s frontier ordo is not the “black hole” that White suggests. Mainline liturgical traditions are not simply “swallowed up” by evangelical worship: they also help to shape it. Many evangelicals are disillusioned by seeker-sensitive techniques and desire more historically rooted worship practices. In my own ethnographic study, Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic, I have interviewed many individuals like the one who lamented, “There’s so much more in church history that can bring richness to worship.” This worshiper, like many others in the congregation, appreciated the fact that his nondenominational church was beginning to incorporate historical practices like the recitation of the creed into its weekly celebrations. In the last twenty years, many evangelicals have experienced liturgical renewal by adopting the practices of their mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic brethren. Another evangelical interviewee from the same nondenominational congregation summed up her feelings by declaring, “It sort of makes me angry to think about what I had missed growing up in a church tradition that was so closed to historical-liturgical stuff.” 26
Interestingly, ethnomusicologist Deborah Justice argues from the opposite direction, noting that particularly in areas of the United States with strong evangelical churches, many adult members of mainline denominations are turning to their childhood evangelical roots to find historical continuity. In her fieldwork among ten mainline Presbyterian congregations, Justice discovered that congregations sometimes sang “new old” evangelical hymns like “Standing on the Promises,” “To God Be the Glory,” “He Lives,” “I’ll Fly Away” and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” in special services designed to bridge the gap between separate “traditional” and “contemporary” worship. (The “new” in “new old” refers to the hymns’ instrumentation, which Justice describes as a “Mumford and Sons-esque banjo-driven folk rock.” 27 ) In contrast to those evangelical congregants who grieve the loss of historic liturgies in contemporary evangelicalism, the mainline clergy and laity in Justice’s study reported that evangelical hymns helped them connect “modern worship to a rich historical heritage of Christians praising God through the ages.” 28 Taken together, these narratives suggest that liturgical scholars need to move beyond simplistic descriptions of triumph and defeat. Congregational choices about worship are rarely “winner takes all” and more often about complex local negotiations and accommodations.
3.2 Corporatization and Commercial Interests
In 1861, the year Turner was born, America’s population was overwhelmingly rural. By the time Turner addressed the crowd at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, it had become nearly half urban. Turner’s remarks on the closing of the frontier were both nostalgic and foreboding. Historian Lacy K. Ford, Jr. points out that “as small-farm America disappeared, Turner, an affectionate son of the middle border, saw his worst nightmare realized: a cramped, crowded, ‘Europeanized’ America that was losing its distinctiveness.” Turner feared that the Jeffersonian ideals of the small family homestead would be “sacrificed on the altar of industrial capitalism by Wall Street’s high priests of finance.” 29 As the changes wrought by industrialization concentrated economic wealth into fewer and fewer hands, it seemed increasingly possible that democratic ideals might be destroyed.
But the truth is that corporatization and commercialization have always been significant factors in the settlement of the American West. The federal government paved the way for settlers to move west by dispatching agents to explore the area, armies to conquer it, and bureaucrats to administer it. The government provided support for the construction of railroads and dams. Federal agencies such as the General Land Office, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the Forest Service, controlled national resources. Federal marshals helped establish legal order. The frontier settlers of Turner’s thesis were rugged and self-reliant: they carved out their own destiny and were beholden to no one. But the irony, according to Richard White, is that “the American West, more than any other section of the United States, is a creation not so much of individual or local efforts, but of federal efforts. More than any other region, the West has been historically a dependency of the federal government.” 30
In liturgical studies, White’s work similarly overemphasizes the role of individuals in shaping evangelical worship. Although White nominates frontier revivalist Charles Finney as “the most influential liturgical reformer in American history,” cultural historians emphasize that the evangelical population is continually shaped through commercial enterprises. 31 For example, in his work, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America, Daniel Vaca traces the history of the evangelical book industry and its audience since the end of the nineteenth century, showing how evangelical ideas and identities have taken shape through commercial strategy and corporate initiative. Vaca notes that “between the 1980s and today, many of the world’s largest media conglomerates—such as Bertelsmann, Lagardère, and Amazon—have acquired or created their own religion divisions or imprints. For these corporations, ‘religion’ typically has meant ‘evangelicalism.’” 32 Furthermore, secular companies including EMI, Sony, and Warner bought out the largest Christian music labels in the 1990s, giving them the resources needed to access mass production and distribution and allowing them to target international markets. Evangelical supply-and-demand shapes industry, but the converse is also true: the commercial interests of corporations play a critical role in shaping the sound of evangelical music.
Megachurch ministries also have become more powerful and influential than White could have imagined when he wrote about the frontier tradition at the end of the twentieth century. Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls draws attention to transnational “worship brands” like Passion (Atlanta, Georgia), Hillsong (Sydney, Australia), and Bethel (Redding, California), who create products for evangelical consumers. Through conferences, concerts, and social media, these worship brands bring spiritual and commercial interests into the same domain. They create “a large, diffuse network of congregants—whether avid church attenders, annual conference-goers, or occasional concert attendees—who feel connected to others in the network and have become stakeholders in the brand.” 33 Ingalls’ research suggests that for many evangelicals, sold-out conferences, social media posts from prominent musicians, and the latest recordings of popular worship bands hold greater sway over worshippers’ tastes and habits than do the practices of their local congregations. Liturgical scholars today must look beyond charismatic individuals and reckon with the fact that corporations, worship brands, and market interests now drive the sound of evangelical praise.
3.3 Rejuvenation through Expansion
Turner’s vision of America was unswervingly optimistic. He believed the closing of the frontier would, in Grandin’s summary, “reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. It would dilute other social problems as well, including poverty, inequality and extremism, teaching diverse people how to live together in peace.” 34 Grandin offers a more clear-eyed view of what actually happened next. Turner’s frontier thesis gave progressive politicians like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson an ideology suitable for empire. The American frontier was not closed: it would move ever outward across the oceans.
American presidents regularly invoked Turner’s language to bolster their international campaigns. Ronald Reagan pursued anti-Communist wars in Central America, which he called “our southern frontier.” 35 George H. W. Bush imagined “new markets for American products” after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, declaring that “in the frontiers ahead, there are no boundaries.” 36 When Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he proclaimed that “this new global economy is our new frontier.” 37 (One of Clinton’s cabinet members described NAFTA as “the moral equivalent of the frontier in the nineteenth century.” 38 ) George W. Bush drew upon the same logic to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq: “We will extend the frontiers of freedom,” he pledged in the summer of 2004. 39
White’s account of the evangelical worship “frontier” was as optimistic and forward-looking as Turner’s. White’s posture is understandable: for evangelicals, the biblical mandate to “go and make disciples of all nations” means that there will always be new missionary frontiers—domestic and international, digital and analog—awaiting further exploration. However, this futuristic orientation may prevent evangelicals (and their scholars) from attending to the movement’s internal conflicts, past and present.
Two recent examples illustrate the point. In her history of evangelical worship music, Ingalls describes a team of Nashville-based worship industry executives who traveled to the United Kingdom in the late 1990s. While abroad, they encountered a new musical sound and a possible way through the acrimonious “worship wars” plaguing American churches. The Nashville executives believed that British worship music was more “genuine” and “authentic” than its American counterpart because it had bypassed the celebrity scandals, complicated commercial infrastructure, and bottom-line-driven production methods that afflicted the American market. Sure enough, the new UK worship songs enjoyed explosive popularity in America: a phenomenon Ingalls calls the “British invasion” of American worship. 40 Ultimately, the Nashville executives’ discovery of an unexplored international music “frontier” helped the American industry paper over (and evade responsibility for) the domestic worship conflicts it had helped create.
The same thing can happen when American Christians look beyond the English-speaking world for worship inspiration. In her book, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, Melani McAlister, Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University, argues that twenty-first-century American evangelicals have adopted a posture she calls “enchanted internationalism.” 41 Enchanted internationalism is the mystical confidence that worshipers in Africa and the global South inhabit a world undisturbed by the temptations of modernity and practice a faith akin to that of the earliest Christian communities. For example, McAlister writes of a short-term missions trip leader who spoke blissfully about the opportunity to “luxuriate” in the “vibrant, healing worship of Africa,” given that worship in the modern West was “stale and dry.” 42 McAlister pinpoints the same problem noted above: speaking about people who live in Africa or Latin America as though their lack of education or material comforts somehow enhances their worship perhaps says more about Americans’ ambivalence toward their own wealth than it does about the human beings with whom they are actually dealing.
These examples from Ingalls and McAlister underscore the need for American evangelicals to reckon with the legacy of Donald McGavran, a missiologist and third-generation missionary born in India, who made the now-controversial claim that “people become Christian fastest when least change of race or clan is involved.” 43 McGavran saw society as made of “homogeneous units” in which all members have some characteristic—a language group, a caste, a political unit, a geographical location—in common. Because people prefer to associate with others like themselves—or in McGavran’s words, since “men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers”—homogenous churches will be the ones most likely to grow. 44 Together with his best-known student, Peter Wagner (professor of Church Growth at the Fuller School of World Missions), McGavran played a significant role in shaping the identity of twentieth-century American evangelicalism.
But as Robert Hunt, director of Global Theological Education at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, points out, the problem with McGavran’s homogenous unit principle was that it “focused on saving souls, not changing a discriminatory society.” McGavran “didn’t understand that the business of the church is to witness to God’s reign, which in no way looks like an ethnically homogenous conclave of the saved.”
45
In a June 14, 2020, op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, Hunt reflected on this legacy:
In the protests and riots taking place across the United States as I write, we’re seeing the results of centuries of this kind of utilitarian segregation and exclusion by race . . . [It is] the justifiable rage of the permanently excluded that comes when an abstract affirmation of diversity papers over the reality of deeply ingrained racism and segregation.
46
Many evangelicals are deeply concerned about race relations in America and desire to contribute to the spiritual work of reconciliation. At the same time, many are also adamant that corporate worship should be kept “apolitical.” Political scientist Nancy Wadsworth is skeptical of this strategy. In her book, Ambivalent Miracles: Evangelicals and the Politics of Racial Healing, Wadsworth asks pointed and timely questions:
Do [evangelicals] really want to claim that religiously driven “heart change” will somehow magically transform broad-scale racial injustice person by person, without Christians having to take public stances in the world consistent with their stated values, and to do that in the name of protecting the gospel? Can evangelicals possibly remain so stubborn, or is political ambivalence a way to keep certain people among them, like white conservatives unwilling to alter their political ideologies or party alliances, comfortable? At any rate, are they willing to allow that to appear to be the case?
47
Evangelicals will continue to debate where the line between racial reconciliation and political activism lies, and whether or not it runs through worship. Accordingly, liturgical scholars must pay attention not only to the “frontiers” (technological innovations and missionary initiatives) that evangelicals seek to advance but also to the simmering internal conflicts that myths of infinite progress may help them evade.
4. Beyond the Frontier?
I offered several constructive proposals for modifying White’s analysis of the “frontier tradition.” Liturgical scholars must pay more sustained attention to the ways evangelical and mainline congregations mutually influence one another, to the rise and commercialization of popular worship “brands,” and to internal evangelical disputes that narratives of unmitigated progress help paper over or conceal. But there is an even more radical prospect that must be addressed: eliminating the frontier thesis as irredeemable.
Even as James White was championing the category of the “frontier tradition” to liturgical scholars, a group of historians including Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster were declaring their independence from Turner, arguing that his ideas had outlasted their period of usefulness. “Turner was, to put it mildly, ethnocentric and nationalistic,” Limerick wrote in The Legacy of Conquest—the book that launched an outpouring of revisionist histories in the late 1980s. “English-speaking white men were the stars of his story; Indians, Hispanics, French Canadians, and Asians were at best supporting actors and at worst invisible. Nearly as invisible were women of all ethnicities.” 48 Scholars of the New Western History sought to demythologize the story of the region. Rather than heralding the “heroic pioneers [who] brought civilization to a savage wilderness,” 49 they championed the perspectives of those who had been oppressed, colonized, and conquered. As Limerick forcefully insisted on behalf of her colleagues, “We do not want another Turner; we want many Turners, many Turners with many different perspectives but all with his courage in putting his ideas forward.” 50
The same is true in liturgical studies: a field where James White’s influential “frontier tradition” has overstayed its period of usefulness. Lester Ruth has demonstrated that much of what White associates with the “frontier” actually emerged on the eastern seaboard during the Second Great Awakening, and that many of the exuberant expressions White associates with this form of worship were integral to American Methodists prior to being associated with the frontier format. 51
The solution is not simply to replace the revivalist pattern of “preliminaries, sermon, harvest of converts” with a new evangelical ordo for the twenty-first century. Instead, echoing Limerick, I want many scholars, with many different perspectives, to follow White’s lead by putting forward new constructive interpretations. These new interpretations may challenge, contradict, or complexify White’s widely accepted origin myth of the frontier tradition. However, a robust understanding of American evangelical worship in the twenty-first century demands nothing less.
