Pastor Wes Shortridge presents a short history of the astounding revival that occurred on both sides of the American Civil War and how it impacted the nation for decades.

Introduction

America in 1861 presents a painful and complex chapter in history. God, however, had a plan for the American people, and God remained present during the painful chapter. God appears most in this period in the soldiers fighting the Civil War. Along the banks of the Rappahannock River in 1863, both armies faced one another in battle; however, both armies also faced a revival of religion. The paradox of revival in two armies facing one another presents an example of God’s ability to use revival to accomplish His purposes in spite of human conflict.

“Prayer in ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s Camp” (1866).
Drawn by F. Kramer, Engraved by J. C. Buttre.

The Circumstances of the Revival

Pre 1861 America While many modern interpreters of the American situation before the Civil War view the war as a simple moral war in which one party supported slavery and the other party arose as a benevolent deliverer of an oppressed people, the actual situation in America proved much more complex. Americans, from both North and South, had sanctioned or at least ignored slavery for nearly a century. White men ruled the country, and obvious examples of misogyny and racism rarely arose as issues in a land that voiced the values of liberty and equality. The powerful elites from both North and South worked to protect the prominent position of the light-skinned and masculine. The first and second Great Awakenings had revived religion in America, but paternalistic racism remained unaddressed. Religion focused mostly on benevolence within the paternalistic system rather than valuing or empowering all humans.

Slavery in America found support in the hermeneutical principles of American religion in both the North and the South. Mark A. Noll describes the unique hermeneutic of America:

Americans held to a hermeneutic that was distinctly American. The reason they held it so implicitly was precisely that this hermeneutic—compounded of a distinctly Reformed approach to the scope of biblical authority (“every direction contained in its pages as applicable at all times to all men”) and a distinctly American intuition that privileged commonsense readings of scriptural texts (“a literal interpretation of the Bible”)—had functioned as the vehicle through which the Bible was unleashed in the creation of the American civilization.[1]

Her death didn’t grab headlines like Coretta Scott King’s did. But Elsie Mason and her late husband captured heaven’s attention.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Last week, just one day before Coretta Scott King’s funeral was aired from an Atlanta megachurch, a lesser-known black woman named Elsie Louise Washington Mason was buried quietly in Memphis. She was the widow of Bishop C.H. Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the nation’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

Mrs. Mason’s funeral was not aired on CNN. No U.S. presidents attended. Her body was not displayed in any government rotundas. Oprah did not walk past her casket.

But Elsie Mason’s life deserved national recognition.

She died at Memphis’ Methodist University Hospital on Jan. 31 at the age of 98. Although her memory had begun to fade, she was still a living scrapbook of the civil rights era—and of the Christian spirituality that undergirded it.

When she was born, Teddy Roosevelt was president, women wore floor-length skirts and only rich people had telephones. Blacks could not vote, and rarely were they allowed to worship with whites.

The radical message that Elsie and her husband preached would change that.

C.H. Mason helped dismantle institutionalized racism long before Martin Luther King Jr. preached his first sermon. Mason did this not by staging nonviolent protests or by organizing political rallies. Instead he invited blacks and whites to gather at the foot of the cross, where he believed all human beings found equality.

A Baptist at first, Mason visited the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, became a Pentecostal and began to spread the message of the Holy Spirit’s power throughout the South. His black Baptist colleagues rejected his message, which included a belief in speaking in tongues, healing and miracles.

After Mason organized COGIC in 1907, both blacks and whites attended his meetings—sometimes sparking race riots. Mason’s influence grew to the point that he ordained dozens of white Pentecostal ministers at a time when all other Christian denominations were separated by race.

During an interview with Charisma in 1996, at age 88, Elsie recalled the early days of Pentecostal revivals in black communities in the South. In Texas, she said, Mason would attract huge crowds.

“Crutches were lined up against the walls because the people didn’t need them anymore,” she said. “In Memphis, a lady took sick during our convocation, and at that time doctors weren’t as prevalent as they are today, and there were hardly any hospitals for Negroes. So they sent for Bishop Mason, and he prayed until the Lord raised her.”

During her younger years, Elsie edited COGIC’s newspaper The Whole Truth and worked as a secretary in the denomination’s missions department. She even served as a missionary in Haiti and founded an orphanage.