A Pragmatic Piety: Experience, Uncertainty, and Action in Charles G. Finney’s Evangelical Revivalism

Abstract This article focuses on the evangelical theology and revival practice of Charles Grandison Finney, popular in his time yet critically under-explored in American philosophy, specifically regarding his role in the emergence of American pragmatism. Spearheaded by American philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, pragmatism argues that the significance of abstract concepts lies in their practical consequences in lived experience, as opposed to their internal logic or conformity to intellectual traditions. Whereas this philosophical method is often seen as predominantly secular in its origins, this article approaches pragmatic thinking and practice from the point of view of the spiritual conversion strategies of Charles Finney and antebellum evangelical culture more broadly. I expand on what Leonard I. Sweet has called Finney’s “pragmatic philosophy of revivalism,” addressing his theology and revival practice to disclose its latent pragmatic tendencies and those within antebellum evangelical culture. I argue that by looking at Finney as an early practitioner of this method, we must reappraise his and evangelicalism’s role in the emergence of philosophical pragmatism, challenge its putative secularity, and – as Charles Taylor has recently demonstrated – reassess what academic disciplines mean when they cite the presumed distinction between the religious and the secular.