What was the pietist movement in America that arose in the 1820s?

0:00Christianity then is revived in the early 20th century United States and also in Europe, like I'm making dramatic pronouncements about Europe, by pietism, which is a new form of Christianity, I mean brand new, through the revival movements, which we're now fairly familiar with, in those days it was a big new thing, where you arrive at Christianity through a mystical experience, through emotional, mystical conversion, with revival meetings and rolling on the floor, speaking in tongues and so forth and so on. We are born again, we need not just a regular baptism, but another baptism, a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and so a second baptism becomes necessary. At any rate, with this new form of post-millennial priatism, swept Protestantism, almost taking over, almost completely, especially in the North, especially in the Yankee country.

0:48I define Yankees as being a cultural group who originated in rural New England, not so much Boston or the city, but rural New England, rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, et cetera, and then emigrating or big migrants, emigrating westward into upstate New York, western New York, northern Ohio, the famous western reserve area, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, northern Illinois. Okay, this is Yankee country. And the Yankees were always compulsory conformists, one historian called Yankee imperialists. In other words, they wanted to crush all dissent, one form or another. It was the Yankees who originated the public school system in the United States, for example, The Yankees took this like a duck takes the water, this new form of priatism. And essentially the priatism was as follows, creeds are not important, whether you're a Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, it doesn't make any difference, as long as you're a Christian.

1:43Creeds are not important. Law is not important. The Bible is not important. The key thing is the sort of personal relation with God. And this is by the way the origin of the YMCA movement, all these inter-denominational movements Because the visions between Protestant churches are unimportant, each individual then is sort of naked to his creator, in other words, his personal relationship with God and man, and the church is unimportant too, and whether you're a church member is really unimportant, or which church you belong to is unimportant. In the Yankee wing, which is called evangelical quietism, different from the southern, southern quietists became sort of quietist types, you just, you try to achieve your born-again conversion and that's it, you don't bother anybody, it has no political implications. Evangelical quietists believe, as part of the quietism, that you can't be saved unless you maximize the salvation of everybody else.

2:31And so very quickly, of course, they became big statists because they used the government In the 1830s until the 1920s, a whole 19th century had a situation where all these guys were constantly spending their time trying to outlaw sin on a local and state level in the United States, meaning anything which interferes with your theological free will.

3:23These are the theological free willers, so that anything which clouds your mind, so to speak, and interferes with free will, should be outlawed.