Back in the early 19th century, Charles Finney was a religious “influencer.” These days, that term is applied commonly to lifestyle vloggers on TikTok, the app that’s been downloaded over 2 billion times worldwide.
Finney has been called the “father of American revivalism” and he developed a methodology that emphasized creating the right spiritual environment for conversion. He wrote, in What a Revival of Religion is: “Men are so sluggish, there are so many things that lead their minds off from religion and to oppose the influence of the Gospel, that it is necessary to raise an excitement among them, till the tide rises so high as to sweep away the opposing obstacles. They must be so aroused that they will break over these counteracting influences, before they will obey God.” Finney’s then pioneering evangelistic techniques–the emotion-arousing music, the advertising, and the altar call–gained him may converts, but to a different gospel which is not another, but a perversion of the gospel of Christ Jesus held by the Reformers…
