Thoreau's Axe by Caleb Smith

Author:Caleb Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

In this serpentine passage from Religion in America, Robert Baird brings “mental science” to bear on the problem of religious conversion. He asks: Why is the progress of conviction so slow, even for those who find themselves moved and affected, briefly at least, in church on Sundays? Why does the divine truth not take a more lasting hold? What psychic conditions make it so hard for people to reckon with their own spiritual wretchedness and turn to God? The science of attention provides some answers to these questions.24

The trouble, Baird thinks, has to do with something called impressions. The mind is a receptive thing, open to various influences. The objects it observes and the messages it receives leave marks (impressions) on the mind, sculpting its character. The way to form a self—or to convert one—is therefore to control these forces, protecting the vulnerable mind from bad influences and ensuring that the right things make the strongest impressions. If preachers are failing to convert their congregants to an enduring, life-transforming faith, their ministry must be making fleeting, shallow impressions. So feebly grasped, the people will backslide.

Religion, Baird acknowledges, is “repulsive to the natural heart.” We creatures of desiring flesh and tainted blood are quick to turn away from its demands. Its objects are so vast and so remote that they make weak claims on our interest. Worldly things impress themselves on us more easily, with quicker pleasure. We are given to distraction, naturally.

Missionaries therefore have to develop the art of “deepening the impressions”; the “impressions produced” on sabbath days have to be “followed up and deepened during the subsequent week.” How will this effect be obtained?

Baird finds the secret in “the power of fixed and continuous attention.” The crucial task is to grasp and direct this power. But since religion exerts such meager attraction on the natural heart, since it is a disadvantaged competitor for people’s attention, it cannot accomplish its mission within the space of just a few hours on Sundays. It has to change the whole environment, transforming the attention economy where it conducts its business.

Baird comes with good news: by improvising and experimenting, evangelicals have devised a mechanism for reordering religious space and time. It gives them the power to hold minds in steady, prolonged attention, and to deepen good impressions. The mechanism is called a revival.

By the time he wrote Religion in America, Baird had seen his share of camp meetings and conversions. He was a graduate of Princeton Theological seminary who became a prominent Presbyterian minister and missionary. As an agent of the American Sunday School Union, he had distributed religious pamphlets among the poor. As an activist for education reform, he had helped to modernize Pennsylvania’s schools. As an itinerant preacher, he had traveled over New England and into the South, organizing churches and gathering in souls. Along the way, he learned about nineteenth-century America’s attention economy.

In the early 1840s, Baird was living in Geneva, one of Protestantism’s capital cities, discussing ministry with European preachers and scholars who looked skeptically on the American scene.

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