by Joel Brown

In my previous installment of The Historian’s Corner, I suggested that the Cane Ridge Revival (1801) should be understood not only as a birthplace for Disciples but also as a turning point in American religious history. I want to press that claim a bit further here.

As we move toward the 225th anniversary of the Cane Ridge Revival this August, it may be helpful to situate the event within a wider shift in the American social imaginary. By this I mean the way a society imagines how individuals relate to the larger whole—how people understand themselves in relation to community, authority, institutions, and, not least, God. This is, I think, a more illuminating frame for interpreting both Cane Ridge and our present moment than the more familiar language of democratization or even the movement of ideas—say, the Enlightenment—important though those are.

Drawing here on Ted A. Smith’s book The End of Theological Education (Eerdmans, 2023), we might describe the broad movement of the American social imaginary in three overlapping “clumps”: the Standing Order, the age of Voluntary Associations, and our present era of Individualization. These are not airtight periods, of course. Historical periods are always messier than the categories we impose upon them. Still, the framework is helpful.

The North American world into which Barton Stone was born and Thomas and Alexander Campbell arrived was one in which the older Standing Order was beginning to come undone. In that world, church and society were tightly joined. Congregations functioned as something like public institutions. Ministers held a kind of quasi-civic authority. Theological education was largely embedded in general education. Religion was not one voluntary option among many, but part of the taken-for-granted fabric of social life.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, that world was coming undone. Disestablishment loosened the bonds between church and state. In the moment, this upheaval felt like a crisis, but it also provided the space for new things to emerge. Voluntary societies—missionary organizations, Bible societies, seminaries, denominations, and free congregations—rose to do what the older order no longer could provide. People increasingly related to the church by affiliation, which was, importantly, chosen; rather than by inheritance or legal establishment.

Cane Ridge occurred at precisely this hinge. As I discussed in the previous installment, it demonstrated that the structures of one world could no longer contain the religious energies of another.

The same could be said, I think, of the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804). We often speak of it as a founding document—that’s how we categorize it on our website, at least—and while it is that, it is, in terms of genre, a death notice, not a birth announcement. “We will,” the signers wrote, “that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large.” Titles and lawmaking powers are relinquished. Authority belongs with each community of the faithful gathered into congregations. Candidates for ministry are bound to Scripture and the call of God rather than to clerical hierarchy.

That is to say, the Last Will and Testament recognizes that the old had to die if something new was to be born.

This matters because the Stone-Campbell Movement both emerged in the age of Voluntary Associations, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) came of age there. Indeed, it was peculiarly suited to that world. Congregational polity, benevolent societies, educational institutions, missionary organizations, regional and general ministry structures—these are all marks of a movement that learned to swim in the waters of voluntarism. If Disciples have in some ways experienced a sharper-than-average sense of decline among the Protestant mainline, it may be because we were especially at home in this ecology, especially reliant upon it, and especially good at inhabiting it.

But that world, too, has been unraveling for some time now.

This is where Smith’s language of individualization seems to me particularly useful. I mean this descriptively, not normatively—not as a judgment on the present, but as a way of naming the conditions that now press upon us. It is, at the very least, more helpful than the language of secularization. Secularization suggests a story in which the modern world moves more or less straightforwardly from more religion to less. But that is not, in fact, what we are seeing. (On this point, I’d recommend Ryan Burge’s new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us [Brazos, 2026].) The problem is not disbelief, nor is it the disappearance of spiritual longing or the decline of religious practice. What is fraying is not “religion” in the abstract, but a particular social form of religious life.

Individualization names something different than individualism as a set of ideas. It refers to a social condition in which the individual increasingly becomes the primary unit of social construction and reproduction. Inherited roles weaken. Institutions lose their taken-for-granted authority. The older structures that once mediated identity and belonging—family, class, denomination, affiliation—no longer carry the same force. Individuals are left, as Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim put it, to construct “do-it-yourself biographies” out of a widening range of possibilities. Religion, in such a setting, becomes something of a building block in one’s identity formation that represents some preference or another rather than a community in which one participates, draws their sense of identity from, and comes to understand their place within the wider society. 

This, I think, helps us understand our movement’s moment better than the charged language of “decline” and the theoretical framework of secularization. What is happening is not that religion is disappearing per se. Rather, the world of Voluntary Associations—the world that gave shape to the ecclesial life we know, and especially to our own Disciples life—is losing its normative grip. The constellation of congregation, denomination, seminary, clergy, benevolent society, and missionary society no longer carries the same social significance it once did.

That has enormous implications for the church. If that ecology is unraveling, then it stands to reason that the inherited models of ministry and ecclesial life will have to change as well. Here, I find Smith especially helpful. He doesn’t provide a blueprint for solving it, but he helps us name the shift for what it is. The old world is ending. Something new will need to be born. 

I do not pretend to know exactly what that will look like, but I am hopeful that Cane Ridge and the Last Will and Testament may still help us.

They remind us that our movement was born in a moment of profound upheaval—amid significant social and ecclesial change. And they remind us that the path of faithfulness in such moments may require something other than working to preserve the forms we inherited. It may require discerning what, in fact, must die so that the Body of Christ may live.

Mark Twain is often attributed with saying that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. It may be that in remembering Cane Ridge, we can hear something of the rhyme of our own time: the ending of a world we had mistaken for permanent, and the uncertain, unsettling, and yet hopeful beginnings of what may yet come next.