From Holiness to Healing: The Faith Cure in America 1872–1892

One of the more interesting features of American religious life in the years following the Civil War was the renascence of perfectionist or “holiness” teachings among evangelical Protestants. Declaring that the scriptural Baptism of the Holy Spirit brought entire sanctification, perfectionists held that all Christians should seek and expect a “second blessing”, beyond the conversion experience, which would bring complete and instantaneous purification from sin and perfect holiness toward God. Beyond the “new birth” of justification, there lay the “higher life” of sanctification. These doctrines were first promulgated in the United States by the evangelist Charles Finney in the 1830s. Finney drew upon the theology of John Wesley and the early Methodists whose doctrine of “perfect love” paralleled his own religious experience. In the antebellum decades a proliferation of perfectionist devotional literature and a wave of perfectionist-oriented revivals bore witness to the appeal of the doctrine. Although Methodists were in the vanguard, the movement was thoroughly interdenominational. In this period perfectionism also had strong social connotations, and many social reforms of the era drew freely upon perfectionist impulses.