http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
McLoughlin, William Gerald. Revivals, awakenings, and reform: an essay on religion and social change in America, 1607-1977 /William G. McLoughlin. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1978. (Copyrighted material)
[Page 1]
Awakenings have been the shaping power of American culture from its inception. The first settlers came to British North America in the midst of the great Puritan Awakening in England bringing with them the basic beliefs and values that provided the original core of our culture.
Our Revolution came after the First Great Awakening on American soil had made the thirteen colonies into a cohesive unit (e pluribus unum), had given them a sense of unique nationality, and had inspired them with the belief that they were, "and of right ought to be," a free and independent people.
Shortly after the Constitution had launched the American republic, a second era of religious revivals created the definitions of what it meant to be "an American" and what the manifest destiny of the new nation was. After the Civil War had cemented our sense of the Union ("One nation, indivisible under God, with liberty and justice for all"), the Third Great Awakening helped us to understand the meaning of evolutionary science and industrial progress and led us into the crusades "to make the world safe for democracy" in 1917 and 1941.
Since 1960, Americans have been in the midst of their Fourth Great Awakening (or their fifth, if we include the Puritan Awakening). Once again we are in a difficult period of reorientation, seeking an understanding of who we are, how we relate to the rest of the universe, and what the meaning is of the manifold crises that
[Page 2]
Chapter 1
threaten our sense of order at home and our commitments as a world power abroad.
Great awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are the results, not of depressions, wars, or epidemics, but of critical disjunctions in our self-understanding. They are not brief outbursts of mass emotionalism by one group or another but profound cultural transformations affecting all Americans and extending over a generation or more. Awakenings begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state. They eventuate in basic restructurings of our institutions and redefinitions of our social goals.
Great awakenings are not periods of social neurosis (though they begin in times of cultural confusion). They are times of revitalization. They are therapeutic and cathartic, not pathological. They restore our cultural verve and our self-confidence, helping us to maintain faith in ourselves, our ideals, and our "covenant with God" even while they compel us to reinterpret that covenant in the light of new experience. Through awakenings a nation grows in wisdom, in respect for itself, and into more harmonious rdations with other peoples and the physical universe. Without them our social order would cease to be dynamic; our cultUre would wither, fragment, and dissolve in confusion, as many civilizations have done before.
Revivals and awakenings occur in all cultures. They are essentially folk movements, the means by which a people or a nation reshapes its identity, transforms its patterns of thought and action, and sustains a healthy relationship with environmental and social change. To understand the functions of American revivalism and revitalization is to understand the power and meaning of America as a civilization. Until the present generation these periods of cultural readjustment have been associated almost wholly with the Protestant churches. The association of awakenings with revivalism derives from the fact that Protestant ideology has, until recently, been so dominant in our culture that other faiths have not really counted, or have not been counted, in measuring the growth of the nation in it efforts to redeem the world.
[Page 3]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
Until recently, most Americans assumed that the progress of their nation toward the millennium could be measured in the growing adherence of people here and around the world to some form of Protestantism. Protestants assumed that the preaching of God's Word (especially by gifted evangelists or missionaries) would eventually bring the whole world into a right relationship with God. Periods of mass conversion were seen as evidence of God's favor and of man's obedience to his will. R. H. Tawney said, in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, that "Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth. . . ; the doctrine of predestination satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a dIfferent age by the theory of materialism. IJ Americans, whose nation began with the upthrust of Calvinism in England and whose prosperity rose with the success of capitalist enterprise, have always felt that they were the elect of God, and the growth in church membership (which in seventeenth-century New England included about 20 percent of the population) to close to two-thirds of the population in the 1970s confirmed the view that God had blessed America spiritually as he had blessed it materially.
The success of the British colonists against the pagan Indians and their Catholic Spanish and French allies prior to 1776 seemed proof of this. Our successful revolution against British tyranny, our rapid expansion to the Pacific, our rise to industrial power, our triumphal role in the great European wars, and our assumption of global power after World War II added further conviction that we were indeed God's chosen people. But that conviction rested on the ideological assumption that Protestants had replaced Catholics as the true church after 1517 just as Christians had replaced Jews after the death of Christ. Protestant church growth was the measure of Christianity's success, and revivalistic evangelism was the means of that growth.
The first inkling of the possibility that evangelical Protestantism might not remain the dominant religious ideology of the new nation came with the massive immigration of Irish Catholics in the second quarter of the nineteeth centUry. Their resistance to "evangelistic effort produced a great fear among pious Protestants that
[Page 4]
Chapter 1
the safety and progress of the nation were endangered. Fear as well as hope has been a spur to revivalism ever since. Evangelistic efforts to reach the unchurched redoubled after 1830, and a host of "professional" revivalists arose to sustain Protestant church growth. After the Civil War, when the cities were described by home missionaries as seething caldrons of foreign, godless, and radical immorality among "the masses," new evangelistic techniques were directed toward' 'winning the cities for Christ. " Revivalists like D. 1. Moody,]. Wilbur Chapman, Sam P.Jones, and Billy Sunday led elaborate revival campaigns in cities across the country. Because they were thought to have a special gift for "reaching the masses," they were given broad Protestant support and publicity. Their success, however, proved limited.
After World War I, when it became statistically evident that non-Protestant church membership was rising more rapidly than Protestant membership and when the split between Fundamentalists and Modernists led many of the rising generation to abandon formal church affiliation for agnosticism, humanism, or atheism, xenophobic fears became so great that the nation's first immigration-restriction laws were passed. These were specifically written to exclude immigrants from non-Protestant countries just as earlier laws and agreements had specifically excluded Oriental immigrants).
Fundamentalist Protestants began to adopt a premillennial perspective on human history at the end of the nineteenth century .because their conception of America's covenant with God ceased to be dominant among the largest denominations. Pervaded by gloom as the non-Protestant immigrants increased and as Protestant leaders abandoned belief in a literally infallible Bible, the Fundamentalists concluded that they were the saving remnant. Yet they doubted whether they alone could save America or the world from the imminent Apocalypse. The Modernists or Liberal Protestants, accommodating the Bible to the higher criticism of the Bible and to Darwinian evolution, assumed that God still intended to work
[Page 5]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
through America to redeem mankind. However, they yielded considerable authority to the scientists (including sociologists, psychologists, economists, and political scientists) in working out man's progress toward the millennium. The nonchurchgoing humanists and agnostics, relying on science rather than revelation or the churches, had more in common with the Modernists than with the Fundamentalists. And, for the first time, Liberals (whether Modernist Protestants or lapsed-Protestant humanists) made gestures of including Catholic and Jewish liberals in their efforts to overcome the roadblocks to the millennium. After all, many of the poor, and many members of the working class, were recent immigrants; to uplift them, to allow them to participate fully in the working-out of America's millennial mission, could be construed to be as much the task of the Catholic and the Jew as of the Liberal Protestant and the progressive humanist.
Unfortunately, this tentative ecumenism was still tainted with superciliousness on the part of the native-born; their general support of restrictions on immigration and their feeling that Catholic and Jewish immigrants needed to be "uplifted" from their "backward" and "superstitious" ignorance scarcely contributed to religious equality. However, when the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 created a revolutionary force in the world that rivaled the potential power of the American Revolution as a source of hope for the oppressed of the world, a new kind of ecumenism began to develop among conservative Fundamentalists, Catholics, and Jews.
[[// Jews and Evangelicals
Fearing that Communism represented the Anti-Christ, aware that it threatened not only private property and American capitalism but the Judeo-Christian faith, many Fundamentalists and Catholics found common ground in defending "the Cross and the Flag" against this satanic foreign conspiracy. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 (following Hitler's efforts to eliminate the Jews from human history) provided a link between conservative Evangelical Christians and Jews. According to Fundamentalist exegesis of the Bible, the redemption of the human race included a role for the Jews; particularly noted was the prediction that in "the latter days" a sign of the millennium would be the return of the Jews to their homeland. Defense of religious liberty, of capitalist
[Page 6]
Chapter 1
hegemony in the world, of "inalienable natural rights" against tyrannical fascists and communists alike, also united Liberal Protestants and humanists behind a common front with Catholics and Jews after 1950.
At this point Americans at last accepted the concept of a pluralistic nation, at least to the extent, as Will Herberg put it in 1955, of agreeing that "to be a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew are today the alternative ways of being an American." The election of a Roman Catholic to the presidency in 1960 and the admiration for Henry Kissinger (a foreign-born Jew) as secretary of state after 1968 were outward symbols of this pluralism. Although Orientals were still only a tiny group in the nation, their religious outlook gained respectability in the 1950s when the rising generation found the ecumenism of the new pluralistic' 'establishment" too fear-ridden, conservative, and culture-bound. The interest in Zen Buddhism suggested that ecumenism should be worldwide rather than American or Western.
When a tremendous upsurge of interest in religion began in the 1960s, many journalists and social critics found signs that a new awakening was at hand, but they found them at first in the older symbols of revivalism. Protestant evangelists like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Katheryn Kuhlman resurrected the tradition of mass revivalism in the cities, while Catholics like Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen and Jews like Rabbi Joshua Liebman aroused tremendous popular response within their faiths. Revivalism seemed more ecumenical but not essentially different. What did not fit the old pattern was the new interest in Zen Buddhism, magic, astrology, satanism, and the occult. It seemed that, while the older generation of Americans was ready to reaffirm its Judeo-Christian heritage, a large proportion of the younger generation was ready to abandon it. There was also a renewed interest in atheistic Marxism in the 1960s, not to mention the continued appeal of scientism, evident in Scientology, Esalen, and est. Faith in the Holy Spirit was matched by faith in ESP. Revivalism was present, but it did not seem to be at the center of the new awakening. The emergence of the Jesus People and the new popularity of neo-Evangelicalism (personified in President Jimmy Caner and his faith-healing sister) were matched by the death-of-God movement and the new rural
[Page 7]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
communes, which seemed to reject the nation's Judeo-Christian hentage To explain all this, a new definition of an "awakening" was necessary
The purpose of this essay is to indicate why the key to a great awakening is no longer to be found simply in Protestant (or even ecumenical) mass revivalism. Most historians, although they note a serious ideological shift in American culture between 1890 and 1920, do not describe that period (as I shall here) as America's Third Great Awakening. They do not because they rightly see that Dwight. I. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Aimee Semple MacPherson were not really at the heart of that ideological reorientation in the same sense that Jonathan Edwards was at the center of our First Great Awakening and Lyman Beecher at the center of our Second. Nevertheless, these four great eras of ideological reorientation (along with the Puritan movement) are similar. What we need, therefore, is a model that can abstract the causes, functions, and results of such reorientations from the Protestant revivalism that originally characterized them.
If we can rid ourselves of the old Protestant definition of revivalism and awakenings and think more sociologically and anthropologically about religion, we will better understand our past as well as our present times of concern with man's place in the universe. Ever since the first applications of psychological analysis to religious experiences in the 1890s there has been a tendency to denigrate their spiritual quality. But while such analysis freed us from doctrinal explanation of conversions, it also tended to deny their religious dimension. Despite the best effons of William James, most psychologists, whether Freudian or behaviorist, have reduced religious experiences to secular terms by stressing latent versus manifest content. The scientific analyst of religion has also stressed the "primitive," "backward, "culturally impoverished," "economically deprived," "socially ostracized," or privately , "neurotic" aspects of religious experience. But reductionism is not explanation. Nor does it help to say simply, as anthropologists have, that all cultUres construct rituals to help the child transform
[Page 8]
Chapter 1
himself into a man or herself into a woman. To call conversion a rite de passage still begs the question of periodic mass awakenings. It explains what a culturally normal event is, but it does not explain the culturally abnormal event. Hence the new interest among anthropologists since 1960 in ghost-dance religions and cargo cults. Some religious experiences are undoubtedly the results of pathological problems. Still, I would say with William James and Erik Erikson that, even in what may seem extreme cases, the results may be heuristic or cathartic. By and large, most religious converts move from states of anxiety and inhibition to states of functionally constructive personal and social action. Similarly, the abnormal cultural events that we call religious awakenings or revivalsmovements that grip whole communities or nations for many years -are not only fruitful but necessary if a culture is to survive the traumas of social change.
I propose, therefore, to view the five great awakenings that have shaped and reshaped our culture since 1607 as periods of fundamental ideological transformation necessary to the dynamic growth of the nation in adapting to basic social, ecological, psychological, and economic changes. The conversion of great numbers of people from an old to a new world view (a new ideological or religious understanding of their place in the cosmos) is a natural and necessary aspect of social change. It constitutes the awakening of a people caught in an outmoded, dysfunctional world view to the necessity of convening their mindset, their behavior, and their institutions to more relevant or more functionally useful ways of understanding and coping with the changes in the world they live in.
The Protestant theologian speaks of great awakenings or revival times as divine manifestations of concern for the" salvation of Adam's children from the bondage of Satan," as signs of "the coming Kingdom of God on earth," or as kairos (the invasion of the temporal by the eternal). What I have to say will not necessarily contradict the faith system of either the behavioral psychologist or the Judeo-Christian theologian. My concern is with the social function of religious systems and with achieving a historical perspective on their periodic transformations.
Since there is agreement that widespread expressions of religious
[Page 9]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
concern have recurred periodically in American history, the task of the historian is to explain why they occurred in those particular spans of time, in that particular place, among those particular people, in that particular way. Such attempts have of course been made before (especially concerning what our textbooks describe as the First Great Awakening in the 1740s and the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century). These explanations have included efforts to associate revivals of religion with great natural catastrophes (floods, eanhquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves), or with epidemics, wars, and depressions, but without convincing correlations. Some histOrians have argued that charismatic individuals have the power to sway multitudes at will, but history is not the biographies of great men. Others have traced revivals to the rise and decline of religious institutions, to the decadence of one ecclesiastical system and its challenge by a new one. Still others have explained these awakenings in terms of the conflict of ideas-the impact upon old theological dogmas of new modes of thought about the nature of the universe or the nature of man-as though religion were simply the rational process of convincing people that one world view is more consistent than another.
The causes of great awakenings and the revivalism that is part of them seem to me to lie in more complex social and intellectual relationships. There can be no single cause for such wide-ranging transformations in thought and behavior upon which millions are ready to stake their lives.
Human institutions generally assume that there is a fixed or normative relationship of one man or group to another, of one generation to an'other. They prepare men for continuity: not change; they are the means by which men try to insure stability, order, regularity, and predictability in their lives. The child-rearing practices of the family, the husband-wife relationship, the legal system, the schools, the churches, the government, all assume permanent relationships and therefore impose sanctions on deviations from these social norms. But times change; the world changes; people change; and therefore institutions, world views, and cultural systems must change.
In this study I have adapted a formulation of cultural change described by the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace in his essay
[Page 10]
Chapter 1
"Revitalization Movements" (American Anthropology, 1956). Because Wallace derived his theory from studies of so-called primitive peoples (preliterate and homogeneous), it is not totally applicable to the complex, pluralistic, and highly literate people of the United States. Wallace speaks of a single prophet's inaugurating a revitalization movement and transforming a whole society, because he is concerned with the Seneca Indians and the Handsome Lake religious movement. Nevertheless, the general configuration of his model can be applied to American history, and he himself explicitly says that it applies to movements as broad and complex as the rise of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Wesleyan Methodism. I shall treat each of the five awakenings as a period of fundamental social and intellectual reorientation of the American belief value system, behavior patterns, and institutional structUre. But I shall also contend that these reorientations have revolved around a constant culture core of rather broadly stated beliefs. These beliefs (though radically altered in definition during each awakening) have provided the continuity that sustains the culture. In short, great awakenings are periods when the cultural system has had to be revitalized in order to overcome jarring disjunctions between norms and experience, old beliefs and new realities, dying patterns and emerging patterns of behavior. Each of the awakenings has to be studied as a process of social change taking place in various stages over a thirty- to forty-year period. The specific revivals and revival leaders within these broad periods generate or articulate not a single theological system (as Handsome Lake did for the Seneca's revitalization movement) but a set of commonly shared beliefs and practices that cut across the specific denominational lines that divide American ecclesiastical life. Denominational organizations, sects, and cults provide alternative strategies within the grand overall design of revitalization suitable to the various regional, class, color, ethnic, or educational groups within the nation as they cope with the broad necessities of social change.
While I should not like to be held strictly to the dating, I would roughly describe our periods of awakening as follows: the Puritan Awakening, 1610-40; the First Great Awakening (in America), 1730-60; the Second Great Awakening, 1800-1830; the Third Great Awakening, 1890-1920; and the Fourth Great Awakening,
[Page 11]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
1960-90e) These generatlons of transition were confusing and tumultuous, but it is important at the outset to stress the positive, umfying results of each of them. The Puritan Awakening led to the bcgmning of constitutional monarchy in England; America's First Great Awakening led to the creation of the American republic; our Second Awakening led to the solidification of the Union and the rise of Jacksonian participatory democracy; our Third Awakening led to the rejection of unregulated capitalistic eXploitation and the beginning of the welfare state; and our Fourth Awakening appears headed toward a rejection of unregulated exploitation of humankmd and of nature and toward a series of regional and international consortlums for the conservation and optimal use of the world's resources
Robert Bellah in The Broken Covenant (1975) stated well the reasons why the study of a nation's changing religious system is at least as Important as a stUdy of its poliucal or economic system and, hence, why a book on America's great awakenings is relevant to those who do not share the religious concerns of the current awakening:
Our five awakenings came about when, by the standards of our culture core and the experiences of daily life, our society deviated too far from the moral and religious understandings that legitimized authority in church and state. Not surprisingly, each of our awakenings in the past (and undoubtedly the same will hold for our current one as well) has been followed by a period of drastic (once, truly revolutionary) restructuring of our social, political, and economic institutions.
[Page 12]
Chaptet 1
A great awakening occurs, Wallace says, when a society finds that its day-to-day behavior has deviated so far from the accepted (traditional) norms that neither individuals nor large groups can honestly (consistently) sustain the common set of religious understandings by which they believe (have been taught) they should act. When parents can no longer adequately guide their pwn hves or their children's, when schools and churches provide conflicting ethical guidelines for economic and political behavior, and when courts impose sanctions upon acts commonly recognized as necessary (or accepted) deviations from old rules, then a period of profound cultural disorientation results. Then leaders lose their authority and institUtions the respect essential for their effective operation. Then men begin to doubt their sense and their sanity and to search about for new gods, new ways to perceive and comprehend the power that guides the universe. If they are lucky, they will find leaders able to articulate a new accommodation with "reality," a new sense of reality, of identity, and of self-confidence, and, above all, a revision of their institutional structUre that will return daily life to regularity and order. If they are unlucky, their culture will disintegrate: their birthrate will decline, psychic disorder will increase, and some wild ghost-dance religion will mark the final sputtering-out.
In the perception of this crisis of legitimacy and the effort to cope with it lies the beginning of what Wallace calls a revitalization movement. Such movements follow certain patterns of evolution. The first stage he calls "the period of individual stress," when, one .' by one, people lose their bearings, become psychically or physically . . ill, show what appear to be signs of neurosis, psychosis, or madness, and may either break out in acts of violence against family, friends, and authorities or become apathetic, catatonic, incapable of functioning. Emile Durkheim described this as "anomie," or loss of identity. Often anomic individuals destroy themselves by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. By their friends, and by society in general, these early victims of social disjunction are seen as deviants, misfits, persons too weak or too psychologically infirm to cope with life. They are sent to ministerial or psychological counselors (medicine
[Page 13]
Awakenings as Revttal1zations of Culture
men) orto hospitals and asylums to be cured or to "readjust." But as the number of these mdividuals increases, the institUtional bonds of society begin to snap. Families are the first to suffer as husbands and wives quarrel, divorce, and neglect or mistreat their children.
The second state of the revitalization movement Wallace calls the "period of cultural distortion." Gradually people conclude that the problems are not personal but are resulting from institutional malfunction. The churches do not offer solace and acceptance of the prevailing order; the schools cannot maintain discipline over their pupils; the police and courtS cannot maintain orderly processes of action (they often infringe the very laws they are supposed to enforce); the hospitals cannot cure; the jails burst at their seams; and, finally, the government itself fails to function with the respect and authority it requires. Political rebellion in the streets and schismatic behavior in churches create civil and ecclesiastical disorder, to which the authorities in church and state can react only by more sanctions, more censures, more punishments.
In a viable, healthy, effectively functioning society there are always, of course, strains and stresses, but the system is prepared to handle them. Every cultUre has stress-reduction mechanisms built into it. For individuals these include appeals to God through churchly offices, the medical assistance of doctors, and various legitimate outlets for aggression in recreation or sports. But in a period of cultural distortion the stresses are abnormal, the ordinary stressreduction techniques fail to help those who resort to them, and the decreasing efficiency of these mechanisms leads to severe and widespread personality disorders. Similarly, when a culture is functioning harmoniously, it is able to cope with major natUral disorders (floods, earthquakes, epidemics) and to pull its people together in a common cause against external dangers (military invasion, subversion, economic dislocations). However, in periods of cultural distortion the populace is at odds with itself. The people cannot agree on proper measures for coping with dangers; instead of joining together to meet it, they quarrel and divide, often blaming those in authority. They refuse to unite on any scheme. They may even flout the establishment by unpatriotic acts, seeming thus to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
[Page 14]
Chapter 1
At this early stage of revitalization, Wallace notes, there almost always arises a nativist or traditionalist movement within the culture, that is, an attempt by those with rigid personalities or with much at stake in the older order to argue that the danger comes from the failure of the populace to adhere more strictly to the old beliefs, values, and behavior patterns. Generally these traditionalists are found among the older generations, those in authority or closely associated with the hierarchy in various institutions. In the ecclesiastical system they point out that God is displeased because the old rituals have not been adhered to; in the civil system they point to the rise of crime and insist that disrespect for law and order lies at the root of the problem. They mistake symptoms for causes. Their solution is double-edged. First they call for a retUrn to the "old-time religion," "the ways of our fathers," and "respect for the flag" (or other symbols of the old order). Second, they tend to find scapegoats in their midst (aliens, witches, conspirators, foreigners, traitors) upon whom they can project their fear; then, by punishing these "outsiders," they can set an example of revived authority. The nativists, denying any cause for disorder, often blame the younger generation for unjustifiable deviation from the right ways. "Rigid persons," Wallace says, "apparently prefer to tolerate high levels of chronic stress rather than make systematic changes" in their ways of thought or behavior. They are reactionaries who look backward to a golden time, "the period of homeostasis," when the system worked; they insist that it will still work if only everyone will conform to the old standards.
Wallace used the term' 'mazeways" to describe the enculturated patterns of thought and behavior that guide individuals in their daily lives. At the basis of any culture is a generally understood and
. accepted world view by which each adult orients himself or herself to the family, the neighbors, the employers, the rulers, the social order in general. Through the child-rearing process the individual learns what his role is in his own town and what his place is in the universal scheme of things. He learns that he should act in conformity with man-made laws because they are the ways pre. scribed by the power that controls the universe. "Culture," as Wallace says, "depends relatively more on the ability of constituent
[Page 15]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
units autonomously to perceive the system of which they are a pan, to receive and transmit information, and to act in accordance with the necessities of the system" than it depends on the compulsory authority of any "central administration." Each individual maintains "a mental image of the society and its culture" and knows how to act automatically in any normal or normally-abnormal situation. But in periods of cultUral distonion these routine mazeways become blocked, and the individual, unable to react automattcally, becomes stymied and frustrated. His normal responses do not kad to the expected results. Fear and anxiety increase as he struggles to find a solution that lies outside his accepted patterns of thought.
Robert K. Merton defines a stressful or anxiety-ridden situation as one in which there is a "dissociation between culturally preswbed aspirations and socially structUred avenues for realizing these aspirations." Seymour M. Lipset speaks of the need for "a dynamic equilibrium" in any social system between autonomous action and changing experiences: "a complex society is under constant pressure to adjust its institutions to its central value system in order to alleviate strains created by changes in social relations." A religious revival or a great awakening begins when accumulated pressures for change produce such acute personal and social stress that the whole culture must break the crust of custom, crash through the blocks in the mazeways, and find new socially structured avenues along which the members of the society may pursue their course in mutual harinony with one another.
So stressful a situation inevitably produces profound and widespread emotional confusion and excitement. People must be found who can help to formulate a new consensus, create new mazeways. These new mazeways must be understood to be in harmony not only with daily experience but also with the way in which that experience is understood to reflect the realities of the mysterious power that controls the universe. As Clifford Geenz puts it, "In religious belief and practice a group's ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing I
[Page 16]
Chapter 1
by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs . peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life. " This is what occurs in the religious excitement of an awakening.
The final stages of a great awakening arrive with the building of the new world view or mazeway and the restructuring of old institutions. The most rigid and reactiol1ary nativistS are seldom able to make this transition; they continue, as much as they can, to follow the old ways, but they now represent the minority, the dissident view in the new consensus. But many who at first adopted the traditionalist stance gradually drift into the new consensus when they find it more satisfactory or when they conclude that they cannot sustain the old order. Wallace putS forth as the third stage of the revitalization movement the appearance of a prophet who (like Moses, Mohammed, Martin Luther, or Handsome Lake) personally undergoes a traumatic religious experience that epitomizes the crisis of the culture. Often such prophets have hallucinatOry visions or dreams (for them as vividly real as any physical experience) in which they directly confront the deity. From that confrontation they receive (or have revealed to them) new formulations of divine law. Thereafter the prophet reveals (as God's chosen messenger) this new way to his fellow men. Gradually he develops a band of disciples or followers, whom he appoints (or anoints), and they fan out through the social system to prosely.tize for the new religious order. Among the preceptS they inculcate are not only theological statements regarding the nature and will of God and how he is to be worshiped but also (more or less explicitly) a new set of social norms for individual and group behavior. Those who come in contact with the prophet or his charismatic disciples are "touched" by the same divine experience, and this validates both the prophet's vision and the new mazeway he inculcates as God's will for his people.
There has been no single prophet in America's five awakenings and no national displacement of the Judeo-Christian tradition. There have, of course, been individual religious leaders, of great force, who founded new denominations or cults: Joseph Smith and Brigham Young among the Mormons; Ann Lee among the Shakers; Aimee Semple McPherson and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel; William J. Seymour among the black Pentecostalists; William Miller and Ellen White among the Adventists;
[Page 17]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; Charles Taze Russell founder ofJehovah's Witnesses. These leaders have sustained a core of believers, not by repudiating Christianity, but by supplementing or modifying it. They all fall within the Judeo-Christian tradition in major aspects of their theology, and, despite some eccentricities, they generally conform to the prevailing codes of behavior. They have not deflected the mainstream of American culture and, in fact, generally claIm to represent a better version of it.
America's revitaltstlc movements consequently fall outside Wallace's model, and it is useful to cite Peter Worsley's work The Trumpet Shall Sound (1968) to supplement it. Worsley argues that "charisma-sociologically viewed-is a social relationship, not an attribute of individual personality or a mystical quality." Charisma provides "more than an abstract ideological rationale. . . . It is a legitimation grounded in a relationship of loyalty and identification in which the leader is followed simply because he embodies values in which the followers have an 'interest' . . . The followers. . . in a dialectical way, create, by selecting them out, the leaders who in turn command on the basis of this newly-accorded legitimacy. . . . He articulates and consolidates their aspirations. " He specifies and converts aspirations into" beliefs which can be validated by reference to experience. " Worsley maintains that the message is more important than the medium in revitalization. "It is indeed highly probable that a prophetic movement will generate not a centrally focussed, single authority-structure but a fissiparous dispersion of leadership in the persons of numerous leaders, particularly where inspiration is open to all. ' ,
Worsley's view seems particularly relevant to American religious leadership. Because we have had a voluntaristic religious and political structure, together with fundamental religious freedom, leadership in our awakenings has been widely dispersed, differing in emphasis or tOne in different regions and groups. We shall have tOI seek for the common elements among a wide variety of prophetS in each awakening and choose as key spokespersons those who articulate and consolidate the new world view for the mainstream majority-in short, those whose appeal is interdenominational rather than denominational. Such persons have never repudiated the " older world VIews entirely; instead, they have claimed merely to
[Page 18]
Chapter 1
shed new light on them, that is, to look upon old truths from a new perspective.
The concept of' 'new light" from God is intrinsic in the JudeoChristian tradition, which thus has within itself the power of self-renewal. Each of the Old Testament prophets, though castigating God's chosen for departing frpm the old ways, shed new light on those traditions. Jesus of Nazareth, the last of these prophets, urged the Jews to live more truly by the old laws, not to abandon them. Martin Luther claimed to be retUrning the Christian churches to their original apostolic truths in his reformation of Catholicism. When John Robinson bade the Pilgrims godspeed from Holland to New England, he reminded them that their dissent from Anglican orthodoxy was justified: "The Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word." The belief that' 'God has yet further light to shed upon his revelations" has been a constant theme of English and American revivalism. Part of the strength of the new lights in every awakening comes from their placing the burden of corruption upon those who are illuminated by an older, dimmer light. Orthodoxy in America has been progressive or syncretic, offering new definitions for old truths. God is, of course, always and everywhere the same, but his spirit manifests itself in new ways to meet new needs. It is the old lights in each of our awakenings (variously called "Old Sides," "Old School," "Old divinity," or "Fundamentalists") who have clung to the letter and ignored the spirit of God's will. Their reliance on dead formalism and shibboleths that have lost their meaning has enabled the new lights to capture the imagination of a confused people and lead them out of the old churches and into new ones, constantly revitalizing the mazeways.
There is no conservative tradition in America because God is not a conservative. God is an innovator. American culture is thus always in the making but never complete. It will be completed, according to one of our most cherished cultural myths, at the end of human time, the beginning of God's Kingdom, the coming of the millennium. Exactly how and when that will occur is itself constantly subject to new light. America, the New World, has easily become a metaphor for the New Eden; it is "the new Garden in the West," where, unspoiled by old and corrupt institutions (monarchy,
[Page 19]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
an established church, a nobility), man might create a perfect moral order with perfect moral freedom. From its first settlements, not only in Pilgrim Plymouth but in almost every colony, America has been a utopian experiment in achieving the Kingdom of God on earth. Our Revolution was justified on these terms in 1776. Our history has been essentially the history of one long millenarian movement. Americans, in their cultural mythology, are God's chosen, leading the world to perfection. Every awakening has revived, revitalized, and redefined that culture core.
To retUrn to our model of cultural reorientation, Wallace says that the fourth state of revitalization begins when the prophet (or prophets) of the new-light vision begin to attract the more flexible (usually the younger) members of the society, who are willing to experiment with new mazeways or life-styles. These persons "try out various limited mazeway changes in their personal lives," Wallace says, in order to relieve the stresses they feel. They leave home or school and travel to other parts of the country. They join informal groups trying out new communal (or utopian) forms of social relationship. Often they experiment with new economic, political, and familial arrangements or new sexual mores. Every awakening has brought new kinds of" communes" or communities of this sort. But some of these experiments become psychologically regressive, violent and destructive. There is a negative side to every new-light movement, and often the most pietistic and perfectionist new lights become the most destructive. They make transvaluation of all values the measure of their separatism from a corrupt order. They practice as truth what formerly was called demonic; they deify their leaders, invert Christian rituals, denigrate the individual. Eventually the more moderate new lights repudiate such extremists in order to establish their own stability and order.
But even among the moderate new lights there is at first considerable emotionalism (or enthusiasm); many are carried away in transports of hysteria by their vision of God in revivalistic meetings. It is considered a measure of one's commitment to the new ways that he or she experience a violent psychological break with the past through a direct confrontation with God (under the aegis of the new prophets). So profound are these confrontations that the convert from the old to the new way of belief feels that
[Page 20]
Chapter 1
God's power has totally transformed him, regenerated him, made him a new man. From that cataclysmic conversion experience he dates his "new birth," and many see the world thereafter through such different eyes that they seem to friends and relatives to be truly reborn. Their behavioral patterns are transformed. Frequently these persons conclude that God's spirit has come to dwell in them, for how else can they explain the different aspect in which they view the world?
In all awakenings the concept of divine immanence as opposed to divine transcendence becomes a central issue. The Calvinist tradition, so central to American culture, emphasized the separateness of God from his creation and the separation of man from God (through Adam's fall). However, in times of cultural stress, when institutionalized religion is unable to sustain, even among the faithful, a sense of regular communion with God in formal church rites, the distance between Creator and created becomes intolerably great; men sink in fear and loneliness. Then the pendulum swings to the pole of divine immanence (dating back, perhaps, to more primitive, animistic, or pantheistic religious feelings). God's absence from the churches is compensated for by his spiritual presence in nature; regular churchly practices begin to appear as a barrier rather than as a bridge to God. People seek him elsewhere. The assumption grows that he is more really present in this world than his priests have let on and more readily available to all. He has left the temple and entered the world around it. God's spirit, sensing man's need, makes itself known to man in new ways, appearing unbidden in visions and speaking through even the most humble people. In an awakening, the gap between this world and the next disappears. The spiritual and physical worlds intermingle. God can be discerned as easily in a flower, a blade of grass, or a child as in a church. He can be spoken to directly, confronted personally, and his spirit takes up its dwelling in all of creation. God is all in all.
By the same token, the spiritual power of evil also becomes more immanent. The distraught see God and the devil locked in conflict for men's souls; both are at arm's length, seeking to possess men with their power. The most frightening, and heartening, of spiritual possiblities seem imminent. Then logic yields to intUition
[Page 21]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
as a source of knowledge or truth; self-discipline yields to impulse, SClence to magic, formal worship to vision. Man having lost control of himself and his world, other forces seek to control him and it. Anything is possible.
In this crisis the new-light prophets and their apostles offer a ViSiOn of God as a guardian spirit, capable of helping those who seek It, ready to define new rules of conduct to bring back order and tranqmllity. But they also preach that, if God's new rules are not adhered to, some terrible catastrophe-the end of the world Itself-will surely follow. Part of the American culture core has been its myth that we are a "covenanted people" (successors to the apostate Jewish nation as God's chosen people). As such, God has a special interest in helping, and a special reason for punishing, us. This covenant applies both to individuals and to the nation as a whole. But if each does his or her part to adhere to the new rules, then God promises, according to his prophets, a glorious new day of peace, fraternity, and perfection-a time in which all human needs will be met, both physical and spiritUal. Thus the experience of hearing, yielding to, and experiencing this call is one of ecstatic release from the burden of guilt and fear.
The revivalism of an awakening is the ritual process by which this transformation or regeneration takes places both individually and en masse. All revitalization movements are replete with symbols of death and rebirth-death to the old Adam, the old errors, the old sms, the old ways, and rebirth into bodily rejuvenation and spiritual renewal. A revival meeting is at once a funeral service and a christening. In many cases this rebirth includes the healing of old bodily ailments, and faith healing has been a constant feature of revivalism. In extreme perfectionist cults the claim has been made that the converted will never die.
Wallace points out, however, that successful prophets never "lose their sense of personal identity." They bear God's message but are not God incarnate. To revitalize their society, their message must spread beyond them geographically and chronologically. This means that they must skillfully argue down the old-light opposition and skillfully keep their followers from total civil suppression. They must learn to distinguish between what is God's and what is Caesar's In addition, they must be able to organize their followers
[Page 22]
Chapter 1
and routinize their charisma. The spontaneous, ecstatic experience of a revival meeting during an awakening must be canalized, ritualized, linked to regular services. The followers who hang on the revivalist's words and long to be in his presence must learn to sublimate that feeling in regular church services under anointed apostles, and these in turn must create means to raise up successors from the gifted laity. In each of our awakenings the successful new-light prophets have achieved this important organizational transition. When the Puritan movement died, the evangelistic spirit within it was reborn in Congregationalism and Presbyterianism and was later revitalized by the Baptists, Methodists. Campbellites, Disciples of Christ, and by Progressive, Liberal Protestants. Finally, in the last phase of a revitalization movement, the prophets succeed in winning over that large group of undecided folk who, though they have not themselves experienced the ecstasy of conversion, have been sufficiently impressed with the doctrines and behavior of the new lights to see the relevance of their new, guidelines and to accept their practices. Even many of the former old lights are won over to the new consensus in this final stage. Now control of the old religious institutions passes to the new leadership. From the thesis and antithesis of the revival generation a new synthesis emerges. But the old light never quite dies, and the process is never finished.
As the new lights become dominant and the mazeways are cleared, there is considerable revision of the institutional structure, often through political action. Familial patterns change, sex roles alter, schools reform their curriculums and teaching methods, courts revise their interpretations, governments enact new laws and reorganize their recruitment of civil servants. It frequently happens that the spiritual fervor released by this unblocking of the mazeways, this renewal of the convenant, produces an uncontrollable effort to reform the most basic aspects of the older social order: the relations of sons to fathers or husbands to wives, new concepts of property rights, new economic practices. It was through following the new guidelines of our revitalization movements that Americans abandoned allegiance to the king, abolished human slavery, regulated business enterprise, empowered labor unions, and is now
[Page 23]
Awakenings as Revitalizations of Culture
trying to equalize the rights of women, blacks, Indians, and other mmOflt1es.
More often than not this reunited sense of national millenarian purpose has led Americans into war in the effort to speed up the fulfillment of their manifest destiny. It might be more accurately said that our periods of great awakening have produced wars ramer than resulted from them. All our wars, like Cromwell's against Charles I, have been understood as holy crusades against error within and evil without. Cromwell first destroyed the monarchy and its Cavaliers and then tried to eradicate the Celtic Catholics in Ireland. The colonists, after the First Awakening, first defeated the French and Indians and then threw off the corrupt king and Parliament. The Americans, after the Second Awakening, first eliminated the Indians and Mexicans and British from the West and then attacked those who would secede from the covenant in order to uphold black slavery. At the height of their Third Awakening, Americans stopped attacking big business and turned against "the Hun" to save the world for democracy; the war against Naziism was simply a continuation of that effort. From our Fourth Great Awakening we may expect a similar crusade, unless the new light of this revitalization drastically alters the millenarian concept of manifest destiny (as it fortunately shows signs of doing).
Wallace concludes his essay on "Revitalization Movements" by noting their drive toward "extensive cultural changes" and their implementation of' 'an enthusiastic embarkation on some organized program" of reform, which generally includes' 'projects of further social, political, and economic reform." This being so, our effort in the following pages cannot help being a rather cursory summary of the whole of American history, so closely intertwined are revivalism and awakenings with our culture.
[Page 24]
America was born in an awakening. Its settlements arose from the tremendous energy unleashed in the Puritan revitalization movement in England in the decades preceding 1640. It took a profound commitment to God's will and faith in his oversight to encourage tens of thousands of men, women, and children to uproot themselves from their homes and embark in frail, cramped ships for the steaming forest or frigid rocks of the New World. In setting sail for "an howling wilderness" inhabited only by savage beasts and beastly savages, the first settlers had to be driven by conscience and faith as much as by the hope of bettering their condition.
Perry Miller defined Puritanism as "that point of view, that philosophy of life, that code of values which was carried to New England by the first settlers. " But it was also carried by early settlers to Virginia and other colonies as well, though in different forms of Puritanism. "Puritanism," as Miller said, "was not only a religious creed, it was a philosophy and a metaphysic; it was an organization of man's whole life, emotional and intellectual." In his introduction to The Puritans (1938) Miller noted that' 'Puritan culture as a whole [shared] about ninety percent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners, customs, notions and prejudices. . . of all Englishmen." Yet the other 10 percent "made all the difference"; it dyed the whole barrel; it changed the whole nature of a person's outlook. Puritanism was a different world view from Anglicanism, with which it was in conflict.
[Page 25]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
Starting as a quarrel over the purification of the Church of England, the Puritan movement spread to include a host of political and economic issues until, by 1630, "the gulf between the belief of those Puritans and the majority in the Church of England grew so wide that at last there was no bridging it at all." In effect, England had two antagonistic ideologies; Puritanism had become the counterculture, the" new light" to the Anglican" old light." And while the Puritan Revolution did not succeed, it brought to a head those basic dysfunctions within their society which Englishmen had to resolve if their culture was to remain dynamic. The king and his church, the aristocracy and its feudal rights, simply could not withstand forever the forces of social change for which the Puritan movement spoke. Though Cromwell's Bible Commonwealth failed, the gentry class did rise to power, the Commons did seize the initiative in Parliament, the king's prerogatives were limited by constitutional bounds, and commerce in a market economy did replace the feudal, agrarian way of life. England went through two political revolutions (one in 1642, the other in 1688) in the process of accommodating to these forces of social change. The American colonies were a direct offshoot of this cultural revolution. They were settled at its height and retained so much of its thrust as to give the colonies an accelerating trajectory out of the orbit of the motherland. The Puritan Awakening in effect gave America its own culture core, its sense of being a differently constituted people, covenanted with God on a special errand into the wilderness. The millennial hopes of the colonists, their pietistic perfectionism, their belief in further light and a higher law, their commitment to freedom of conscience and separation Of church and state, and, above all, their profound sense of individual piety made the Americans different. The colonies of North America attracted from their beginning a special kind of people who found this cultural outlook more appealing than that of old England. It was a land committed to the reformation of God's world and the freedom of the individual in his calling, though its settlers also possessed a large share of self-interest, aggression, and acquisitiveness.
The Puritan awakening in England was a reaction against the established order that had grown out of the English Reformation a
[Page 26]
Chapter 2
century earlier. The religious excitement that climaxed in Henry VIII's break with the Church of Rome in 1523 continued to boil through the reigns of Edward VI and Mary but finally settled down under the compromise system of Elizabeth I. The more fanatical reformers, who had fled to Europe during Mary's efforts to retUrn England to Catholicism in the 1550s, returned under Elizabeth but were unsatisfied with her halfway measures. Too small a minority to do much about it, they could only mutter among themselves as the Anglican Church developed its own world view and won the allegiance of the vast majority of Englishmen. But the reign of Elizabeth was filled with other aspects of social change, and these slowly built up to a new period of tension under her successors. The discovery of the New World, leading to the first exploitative settlements in Central and South America, opened new interest in trade and discovery in Europe and greatly enhanced Spanish wealth and power. The Catholic Counter-Reformation stemmed the southward advance of Luther's and Calvin's Protestant revolt (though Calvinism gained in these years a strong hold over the people of Scotland). The gold and silver of the Aztecs and Incas stimulated new economic development in Europe, particularly in the textile industry. Trade routes expanded to the East, and cities arose at crossroads and seaports, housing a new class of middlemen (tradesmen, merchants, craftsmen, lawyers, businessmen) between the peasants and the nobility. England was at first isolated from these changes; and until it defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, it was in danger of being conquered by Spain and returned to Catholicism. After that victory England entered into its own age of discovery, trade, and colonization. Then Britain began its phenomenal rise to world power through its navy and merchant marine. The early years of the seventeenth century were seething with social ferment, and Puritanism provided a congenial лл new light" on what this meant for England's God-ordained future greatness. R. H. Tawney summarized the ideological conflict between Anglicanism and Puritanism in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926):
[Page 27]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
Tawney exaggerated somewhat, but in essence the philosophy of Puritanism did challenge not only the theology and polity of the Anglican Church but also its social theory. Englishmen, especially in the middling class, who prior to 1600 had little use for Puritanism, began to find that it had much to commend it.
The ascendancy of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1604 seemed to give the Puritan reformers the chance they had been waiting for. James had been raised in Scotland and was an ardent Calvinist theologian. But to their dismay he rejected the petition asking him to do away with the rule by bishops in the church and to abolish other corrupt rituals left over from Catholic times. His famous statement, "No bishop, no king," reflected his faith in an older tradition, one that was to end a generation later when his son was beheaded, along with the archbishop of Canterbury, in the Puritan Revolution. In large part, however, James I's opposition to Puritanism was based less on theology than on his commitment to the theory of the divine right of kings and his defense of the royal prerogative. In pursuing this royalist theory the Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century ran strongly against the rising currents of what the middle class considered its own prerogatives. Good Anglicans, who did not mind if James I and Charles I harried religious fanatics out of the realm, could not tolerate their laying taxes without assent of Parliament upon those engaged in trade and textiles. Nor could they stomach the bishops' use of ecclesiastical courts to restrain and punish economic practices essential to capitalist expansion (on the grounds that such practices ran counter to medieval religious morality).
The Puritans' new light on God's will argued that men must be diligent in business and that, if they were among the predestined saints, their business ventures would thrive. The "Protestant ethic," as Max Weber pointed out, offered a new set of social
[Page 28]
Chapter 2
virtues more in harmony with capitalist practice than the medieval condemnation of usury, "filthy lucre," and rugged individualism. Thrift, industry, frugality, scrupulous financial honesty, a horror of debt, and the integrity of credit were all prime virtues to the Calvinist. True, Calvinists opposed charging excessive rates of interest for capital loans and disapproved of businessmen who took advantage of the laws of supply and demand to gouge their neighbors. However, a modest gain on one's investment was considered good business sense and commendable in the eyes of God, who expected his stewards to increase their wealth. God required men to labor diligently in their callings and to improve the earth. The increasing wealth of individuals increased the commonwealth and honored God's commands. Puritan social theory, in short, was in harmony with social change; it dignified and sanctified trade and commerce, while Anglican social theory sought to regulate and impede its progress.
Consequently, Puritan beliefs and values began to gain a wider hearing among the gentry and middle class after 1610. Anglicans caught in the intellectual and religious confusion between experiential necessities and outmoded norms looked about for new light on their problems. Honest men simply could not engage in trade without borrowing and lending capital at interest; they could not grow wool without enclosing common land and abridging some of the traditional privileges of the peasantry; they could not engage in competitive trade without making up by high profits the losses they sustained in bad ventures. Nor did it seem fair to them that the king should arbitrarily take away their profits by high taxes and forced loans or appoint his favorities to head monopolistic trading companies, which prevented other (and better) businessmen from running them more profitably. Puritanism was a revitalization movement within English society. It urged English tradition in church and state to yield to changes beyond the comprehension of the old institutional structure. It offered a new code of beliefs and values more harmonious with experiential needs. The Calvinistic ethic, as Tawney noted, was the necessary complement to the rise of bourgeois capitalism:
[Page 29]
The Puritan AwakenIng and the Culture Core
Thus, Tawney concludes, Puritanism's new light worked with the forces of social change, while Anglican old light worked against them. Tawney and Weber may have overemphasized the extent of capitalistic individualism and the power of the bourgeoisie in seventeenth-century England, but they clearly delineated the general nature of the cultural distortion at the beginning of the century and the cultural transformation at work in the thrust of the PurItan rebellion.
Eventually, Puritan concepts spread among the common people as well as the merchants and gentry, for they too were caught up in the disjunction of norms and experience. The commoners who suffered most in this transition were attracted to the more radical imphcatlons of Puritan theology. They took more literally the concept of direct communion with divinity, the power of God's grace to transform the hearts of individuals, the possibilities of total social reformation, and the creation of God's Kingdom on Earth. The Puritan appeals for the rights of the bourgeoisie in Parliament could be extended downward to suggest republicanism; their appeals for the rights of conscientious dissent against Anglican persecution of Puritans could"be taken to mean that every man had the righ t to his own religious views and practices. The attacks on bishops could be extended to an attack on all religious' establishments. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, even claimed in 1647 the right to refuse to make war or to swear a civil oath or to take his hat off to any man. Ultimately the necessities of revolution forced Cromwell to tolerate a wide range of religious dissent, and the rights claimed by the bourgeoisie were extended by radical theorists in the New Model Army to commoners; some even argued for total leveling, equality, and common ownership of the land. Like all revitalization movements, Puritanism could not be confined within the bounds of moderate reform. Once the crust of custom was broken, a whole host of blackbirds flew out to sing their
[Page 30]
Chapter 2
own songs of spiritual and political freedom. Conservative Puritans (like the Scottish Presbyterians or those who settled New England) had never denied that the Church of England was a true church of God; they sought to reform it from within and were horrified when more radical reformers declared it the church of Anti-Christ, broke away from it, and set up their own churches on Anabaptist, Quaker, or Leveler principles. When James I harried the first Separatists from the land in 1608 (the Pilgrims, who went to Holland to escape jail), conservative Puritans had applauded. But not long afterward they were themselves faced with the same choice of flight or persecution under Charles I. Between 1630 and 1640 almost 30,000 Englishmen of varying degrees of Puritan commitment went to New England alone; as many more went to other colonies in North America, where, though Puritans constituted a smaller proportion of the settlers, they nonetheless had a significant impact, even in Virginia.
Historians are still arguing over the precise definition of Puritanism. Perry Miller tried to limit itS definition to those who held the views of New England's founders. Since Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished from Massachusetts for heresy, Miller excluded them from the Puritan fold. More recent interpretations, however, have not only included Williams and Hutchinson within the broad framework of this new-light movement but have extended the definition to include the Anabaptists, the Quakers, the Seekers, the Ranters, and the Levelers on the left and the Presbyterians on the right. Similarly, a reexamination of the Anglican movement (the old lightS) reveals that it too was badly divided between an Anglo-Catholic (or high church) right wing and a Presbyterian left. '
To examine the distinctions among the proliferating varieties of religious opinion in the Puritan movement (as in other awakenings) is less important to our sociological viewpoint here than it may be to historians of church history. Theologically and ecclesiastically it is possible to make distinctions between the views of John Cotton and
[Page 31]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Shepard and Roger Williams, Roger Williams and John Clarke, John Clarke and Mary Dyer, and so on. But to a social anthropologist these particularist distinctions do not alter the baste contours of the revitalization movement of which they were a part. Various groups within every new-light movement adopt d1fferent strategies suited to various social, regional, Of class needs in coping with the cultural distortions they face. Nevertheless, each belongs to the counterculture opposing the older world view. We are less interested here in the shape of the trees than in the configuration of the forest, less concerned fOf the vaneties of dissent than in what they share in each awakening. What was the overarching world view of the new-light revitalization movement we call Puritanism? And how did its beliefs and values come together to form the early subculture of the British colonies of America?
Perhaps the most important belief they all shared was a conviction that the B1ble contained absolutely authoritative answers to all questlons of human and social action. Miller has stated that the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were" radical" in their opposition to the Anglican concept of traditionalism, i.e., the view that the Bible 1S not a complete code of ecclesiastical and civil practice and that reliance on customs and the wisdom of the past may supplement (though not replace) bibltcal authority. The Puritans' reliance on bibltcal authority, interpreted through the reason of those enlightened (or "newly lighted") by God's grace, made them extremely dangerous to a social order that rested so much authority on custom and tradition. To the Pumans every action of man (including both church leaders and civil rulers) was subject to scrupulous conformity to biblical law. This quarrel over" authority" or the source of truth, Miller said,
[Page 32]
Chapter 2
Other common features of the Puritan world view included its belief in appeal to a higher law, its millennialism, its covenant ideal, and its theory of separation of church and state. All of these took firmer root in America than in England. Because of selective immigration, the weakness of the Church of England, and the complex confrontation with the wilderness, the Puritan world view found the New World more congenial. Anglicanism never attained the power in the colonies that it had in England. Even the so-called Anglican colonies distrusted bishops and fought vigorously against efforts to send a bishop to America. More radical sects in all the colonies held strong views about the rights of private conscience and the spiritually inspired individual's right to interpret God's will for himself. In some places this radical element in Puritanism was held in check by the conservative view that only a learned ministry could fathom the subtle metaphysics and ancient linguistic meanings involved in biblical exegesis. But in the New World, where colleges were few and the population widely dispersed, this tradition could not long prevail.
The defeat of Puritanism as a political movement in England and the amalgamation of its world view there, after 1688, with the new Anglican-dominated synthesis curtailed the radical aspects of the English revitalization movement. However, the more important political and economic ends of the movement were accomplished. In America, far from the scene of Puritan warfare, the colonists continued to follow their own ways, despite sporadic efforts by the Crown and Parliament to assert controls. Among the pietistic settlers who came to the various colonies, the Puritan way of reliance upon the Bible, the higher law, and inalienable God-given rights persisted and grew, in part because these settlers lacked the institutions to sustain Anglican ways and in part because adjustment to the frontier broke down the traditions they brought with them.
Because the New England Puritans established in their colonies a very conservative social order (a patriarchal system with closed, corporate towns rather than the individualistic system associated with modern capitalist society), recent social histOrians have argued that Puritanism (in England and America) might more properly be understood as a backward-looking, traditionalist, nativist move-
[Page 33]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
ment rather than (as Tawney and Weber implied) a forwardlooking, revolutionary movement. This is a chicken-and-egg controversy. Perry Miller, in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), long ago noted the traditionalist aspect: "SpringIng from the traditions of the past, from the deep and wordless sense of the tribe, of the organic community, came a desire to intensify the social bond, to strengthen the cohesion of the folk." New Englanders (and Englishmen in the other colonies as well) naturally brought with them customary ways of organizing their relationships-in families, in towns, in farming, in crafts. A host of local and town histOries have demonstrated how the first settlers laid out thelf towns, chose their officers, and ordered their local regulations according to the time-honored practices of the rural vIllages they had left behind. All immigrants have demonstrated nostalgia for the old world and have done their best to recreate as much of its order as they could.
Recently the works of Peter Laslett, Christopher Hill, and Lawrence Stone have reemphasized this aspect of colonial settlement, and a new school of social historians has emphasized "the conservative peasant mentality," the "staunch country morality," and the' 'folk memory" of the early settlers. It is beyond denial. But It has been further argued that it was this conservatism that lay behind the appeal of the Puritan movement and the desire to emigrate. Puritan ministers preached sermons of apocalyptic doom in the early seventeenth century because England was departing from the customs and traditions of the past and God would punish the nation for its corruptions, for the wickedgess of its king, the licentiousness of the aristocrats, and the heresies of the bIshops Hence simple country folk, who made up the vast majority of the early colonists, were eager to fly from this wrath. In America they sought shelter and a hiding place, hoping to appease God's anger by reestabhshing, there, the good old ways of their forefathers.
In effect this school of social histOry has simply stood Weber's and Tawney's analysis on its head. Puritanism was a ghost-dance religIOn, a nativist reaction to social change, a fearful return to the past rather than the herald of a more glorious future, the vanguard of social revolution. These social historians have educed
[Page 34]
Chapter 2
considerable evidence to support this view. Puritans did fear God's wrath and, like Jeremiah , denounced the corruption of the nation's leaders. Peasants did come to the New World and recreate many aspects of their old ways of life, a way of life that, as Laslett shows, had been thoroughly disrupted in the sixteenth century, leaving that social chaos and confusion among the rural villagers that provided such fertile ground for the more radical movements of Cromwell's day. Nevertheless, it seems perverse to pOFtray America as a backwater of English culture and to imply that the Puritans wanted to reestablish the past. The whole thrust of their world view, however premillennial its sermonizing in the years 1590 to 1630, was toward perfecting the world; its goal was reformation, purification. And its social ethic (the economic virtues, the doctrines of the calling and stewardship, the sense of manifest destiny inherent in the predestination of the elect) was much more harmonious with the new socioeconomic trend of the times than to the peasant life of the medieval past.
Miller's argument is correct, that 90 percent of Puritan social thought and practice was shared with Anglicanism, but he is also correct that the other 10 percent completely altered its temper. There were traditionalist or nativist aspects to the early stages of the movement, when future reformation seemed hopeless; but the drive that produced the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 was not backward-looking, even when arguments were made in terms of Magna Charta and common law. As for the conservative peasant villages established in the American colonies, their conservative elements were thoroughly mixed with new ideological elements. And how long did they last as peasant communities? The Puritan world view may have achieved only partial success in the new consensus that emerged in England after the Glorious Revolution, but in America, I would contend, its ideology found continued implementation in each new awakening.
The townspeople of Puritan New England were not huddled together in fear of God's wrath but in the conviction of hIS favor and their assurance that they were the vanguards of a better world order. They established church covenants and town covenants (as John Demos and Kenneth Lockridge have shown) on prinCIples of religious fellowship and perfectionism totally at odds with the
[Page 35]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
territorial parish system and feudal theory of old English villages. Their churches were organized, led, and upheld on new principles. Any examination of the Cambridge Platform of 1648 indicates that it was written to demonstrate that' 'the New England way" of (hurch government was to be a model for restructuring the Church of England. It was common sense and not "conservative peasant mentality" that led New Englangers to face the Indians and the wilderness in organized townships.
It is true that Puritans believed that society should be arranged in hierarchical ranks; they even arranged the seating in their churches on the basis of social status. They also believed that only "saints" (the predestined elect) should vote and hold office. It is true that the Puritan magistrates were authoritarian and regulated every aspect of dress and behavior, but it is also true that they specifically excluded ministers from holding office and churches from inflicting civil penalties and that they struggled to maintain a distinct line between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Despite the emphasis in the Puritan ideology upon organic order, community, and obedience to authority, it is important to keep in mind Miller's statement that' 'there was a strong element of individualism in the Puritan creed." It is this tension between individual freedom and social order th:i.t Edmund S. Morgan describes as "the Puritan dilemma." "They had themselves been rebels," Morgan writes, ,. in order to put into practice their ideas of a new society. But to do so they had to restrain the rebeUion of others" -like Antinomians, Baptists, and Quakers. "The result was a long conflict between the demands of authority and the permissiveness of freedom." In this polar tension lies much of the dynamism of the American culture core. "To a considerable degree," writes Oscar Handlin, in his lOtroduction to Morgan's book, "the American pattern of constitutional and responsible liberty emerged from more than three centuries of such conflict."
We can see these tensions most clearly in terms of the Puritan ideal of the covenant, which bound each individual to obey God first and foremost and at the same time bound him to submit himself to the
[Page 36]
Chapter 2
will of the group for the common good (whether that group was the brethren of the church, the majority in the town or colony, or, later, the- will ofthe electorate in the nation). This is the substance of our earliest and most important social documents, the sacred symbols of our culture: the Mayflower Compact of the Pilgrims in 1620, the first code of laws adopted in Virginia in 1610, the famous sermon of John Winthrop on board the Arabella in 1630, and the Cambridge Platform of Massachusetts of 1648. .
Early Virginians also considered themselves chosen of God for a special mission in the New World. John Rolfe expressed this in his well-known statement describing the settlers in the South as "a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God, to possess it, for undoubtedly He is with us." Virginia's Laws, Dwtne, Moral, and Martial (1610) provides good evidence of the Puritan temper in that colony. These laws prescribed severe penalties against cursing, speaking against the Christian religion, and failure to attend church on the Sabbath. The first House of Burgesses in 1619 immediately enacted laws against idleness, gambling, drunkenness, and excess in apparel. Every town and borough in Virginia was required to collect tithes for the poor and set aside 100 acres of land to support ministers and churches. Virginia's magistrates appointed days of fasting, humiliation, thanksgiving, and prayer. While E. S. Morgan has shown how strong a hold the Protestant ethic (with its individualistic drive for profit and success) had upon early Virginians, these religious laws indicate that even in a colony not closely identified with the Puritan movement the tension between communal piety and individual freedom was strong. John Winthrop's sermon in 1630, calling upon the settlers of Massachusetts to establish a utopian city upon a hill, is probably the classic formulation of this tension within the culture core:
[Page 37]
The PurItan Awakening and the Culture Core
The Implication here is clearly toward a voluntary ideal of self-sacrifice for the common good. And John Cotton, the Aaron to Winthrop's Moses In the Bible Commonwealth, stressed tbe importance of drawIng a proper line between church and state (one of the more radical departures of Puritanism from Anglicanism):
This was still a far cry from the view of separation that Thomas Jefferson or the eighteenth-century Baptists were to espouse (and that the First Amendment to the Constitution would include withIn the supreme law of the new nation); yet Roger Williams came out of the same Puritan tradition as Cotton, and in the colony of Rhode Island he came close to establishing in 1636 what the rest of America finally evolved to after 1776. The seeds of later revitalization movements were. thus embedded in this earliest awakening. That the Puritan Awakening started America on a dIfferent road from England can be seen in the facts that England still has a Crown, its church is still established, and its bishops still
sit in the House of Lords.
Embedded also in the Puritan movement were the ideals of a congregational church polity, a voluntary church membership, a justifIcation for the priesthood of all believers (the right of the laity to prophesy), and an evangelistic concept of soul-winning. The Cambridge Platform, designed to point the way forward to old England, gave church members the right to choose their own ministers and to remove them. While these powers were hedged in among the conservative Puritan communities of New England. they
[Page 38]
Chapter 2
were not so hedged eleswhere in the colonies, among the Baptists and Quakers.
Not only did the Pilgrim Separatists argue that God had yet further light to shed upon his Word, but the Congregational Puritans of New England told the more conservative Presbyterian Puritans in England in 1648 that their light on what God had ordained as the true form of church government was better than the
light John Knox and the Presbyterians had: . 'wee conceiv a
different apprehension of the mind of Christ" than you and
proceed" (as in the spirit wee are bound) to follow the Lamb withersoever he goeth and (after the Apostles example) as wee believe, so wee speake." This readiness to follow their own apprehension of God's higher laws became ingrained in American culture. The individual is responsible first and foremost to that higher law, as he apprehends it. And having justified their own schism from the Church of England, Puritans laid the basis for countless other schismatics, separatists, and' 'come-outers" in later generations.
These central themes of the Puritan Awakening pervaded all of the British colonies in North America. If we accept the fact that Puritanism in some form influenced most of the denominations that broke off from the Church of England in the seventeenth century, and if we acknowledge that, even within Anglicanism, Puritanism had its exponents, we will have a better understanding of the importance of the Puritan Awakening on the nascent ideology of Americans. It is sometimes forgotten that in Anglican Virginia there were Puritans and Quakers who upheld this ideology, and Puritan views in sectarian form were widely diffused in Maryland and Rhode Island, which tolerated all sects. Quakers espoused their form of Puritanism widely, but especially in the colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In fact, most of the churches in the colonies were decidedly Calvinistic in their theology; Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists were of course the most orthodox, but Calvinism tinctured even many Anglican pulpits. In New York, the Dutch Reformed churches were strict Calvinists, and their views spread out to Long Island, where they met the expanding Congregational Calvinism from Connecticut. The Presbyterian form of Puritanism received a great boost from the
[Page 39]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
migration from Scotland and northern Ireland to all the colonies after 1660. Presbyterian Puritanism was particularly strong in the Middle Colonies, whence it spread southward and westward along the Appalachian valleys and passes. In addition, there were close relationships between Puritan pietism and most of the German sects attracted to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth and early eIghteenth centuries. In short, a broad Calvinistic Puritan base waS the common feature of the colonial world view, and it grew stronger rather than weaker as the years went by. In this respect, Puritanism was the prevalent ideology in the colonial period.
The New England colonies, however, possessed a cohesive and organizational power that gave their institutions and ideas preeminence. Its learned clergy used the printing press to spread their views everywhere; its public school system (supported by compulsory taxation at the township level) was widely imitated; its concept of town-meeting democracy and its aggressive economic theory set the tone for much of the rest of the colonial system. And these practices moved westward as the population moved.
Perhaps the most important Puritan legacy, though the hardest to measure, was its toughness of temper, its strenuous, self-discipltned sense of commitment, its soul-searching and self-testing, its seriousness of purpose, its intensity of will, its determination. While these qualities had their harsh and cruel side, they were particularly appropriate for the conquest of a howling wilderness. They are not far from the "Spirit of '76." Michael Walzer has admirably described the political features of this driving, unquenchable spirit in The Revolution of the Saints (1969).
Walzer's thesis is important also for the light it throws on the important link between religious awakenings and social reform in American culture. The Puritan movement, Walzer argues, developed for the first time in modern history CIa politics of party organization and methodical activity, opposition and reform, radical ideology and revolution. . . detached appraisal of a going system, the programmatic expression of discontent and aspiration, the organization of zealous men for sustained political activity." These elements still lie within the American political tradition, as the frequent creation of third parties and other voluntary political groups attests. Behind this political commitment to perfect the
[Page 40]
Chapter 2
world lay an intense religious conviction; we owe to Puritanism, Walzer states, the "idea that specially designated and organized bands of men might play a creative part in the political world." This is the basis for much of what is called the American liberal tradition-a tradition based on voluntary, lay-directed, participatory political activism. "What Calvinists said of the saint," Walzer concludes, "other men would later say of the citizen." Edmund Burke did say precisely that in 1775, when he noted that the patriots of the North American colonies (and not only of New England) constituted' 'the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." Walzer says that
When later foreign commentators spoke of the United States as "a nation with the soul of a church," they were taking cognizance of this moral view of politics, which still tends to see all official acts (or omissions) as matters of right or wrong and all officeholders as men of morality or corruption.
Walzer has also pointed out the strong Puritan emphasis on consent or voluntary action in nonpolitical activities. Just as men must voluntarily sacrifice time, energy, and wealth for the public good in political affairs, so must individuals act with each other in terms of consent or persuasion. Marriage in the Puritan ideology was not a holy sacrament and not to be arranged by parents but a civil covenant requiring mutual consent of husband and wife. The basis of this covenant was to be love, not convenience. Likewise, Puritan children obeyed their parents by consent; church members joined in mutual brotherhood by consent; the local community and the colony's inhabitants submitted to magistrates, clergy, and the majority of their elected representatives by consent. "Radical politics was dependent upon the breaking up of the traditional family," Walzer notes; "it also had a part in the reconstruction of the family in more modern form."
This is not to say that the Puritans were not patriarchal, did not
[Page 41]
The Puritan Awakening and the Culture Core
believe in obedience to duly constituted authority, or were egalitarian in social relations. But they held in their social theory, as in their church polity, a radically different principle of human relatIonships from that of the Anglican old lights (or the medieval sOCial theory), whose ideology they challenged in the early seventeenth century. And just as they expected the king to govern by the consent of his subjects, so in the" little commonwealths," the towns of New England, each member of the community voluntarily assented to participate in self-government and be governed by the consensus of their fellow townsmen. The history of the New England town, writes Kenneth Lockridge, is above all "the story of the lmplementation of the politics of perfection written into the [town and church] covenant." So, eventually, did the citizens of the new natIon, after 1787, establish a new government on the basis of a pledge, in the name of "We, the people" to form "a more perfect Union"
There is one more dualism that the Puritans bequeathed to American culture: the conflict between reason and intuition, between the head and the heart, between realism and idealism. Certain elements in Pufltanism, Perry Miller wrote, "were carried into the creeds and practices of the evangelical religious revivals"the mystical experience of conversion, the ecstasy of a direct splfitual confrontation with God-"but others were perpetuated by the rationalists and the forerunners of Unitarianism" -the tendency toward skepticism, the. preference for scientific explanations. In rebelllng against the formalism and sacerdotalism of the Church of England, the Puritan theology "brought every man to a dlrect experience of the spirit and removed intermediaries between himself and the deity." Yet, at the same time, the Puritans were heirs of humanism, and their faith in human reason led them "to accentuate the element of rationalism." On the one hand the Puritans distrusted" the affections," emotions, passions, "enthusiasm"; but on the other they urged men to "strive for an inward communication with the force that controls the world." The Puritan longed for the mystical wonder and beauty of communion with God's Spirit and at the same time checked himself against visions, arguing that God gave man reason in order to distinguish truth from hallucination. In short, the Puritans managed to hold in
[Page 42]
Chapter 2
delicate but firm balance the idealism of Platonic thought (or the mysticism of the saints) and the realism of Aristotelian thought (or the skepticism of the humanist). When Anne Hutchinson claimed that she governed her thought and actions by direct revelatIons from God and that the Holy Spirit dwelt in her heart, so that she did not need learning or the Bible to understand God's will, the Puritans of MassachusettS banished her for losing her balance. They treated even more harshly the Quakers, who claimed to receive "leadings" from the Holy Spirit and to be guided by the "inner light" of God's divinity that dwells in all men. Yet the Antinomians and the Quakers were part of that same rebellion against Anglican formalism and sacerdotalism; they simply placed too much weight on the evidence of the heart and too little on the evidence of the head to suit New England Puritans. Some generations later, Jonathan Edwards was to accuse the proto-Unitarians of erring on the other side.
American culture has tried to sustain .this same balance but has constantly shifted itS emphasis from one side to the other. If the seventeenth century was the Age of Faith, the eighteenth was the Age of Reason; if the nineteenth century was the Era of Romanticism, the twentieth became the Era of Scientism. In times of awakening, the antinomian tendency is more prominent than in times of homeostasis, but the two elements are never far apart. The Puritan awakening in which American culture was born revitalized English society by facilitating the transition from a medieval to a capitalist economy, by transforming the divine right of monarchy into a constitutional monarchy, by emphasizing the individualistic ethic of Calvinism over the corporate ethic of feudalism, and by establishing the principle of religious toleration as opposed to uniformity of faith and practice. It was these beliefs and values, predominantly expressed in the world view of Calvinism, that were established firmly by the first settlers in America. Puritanism, in all itS various forms, and Calvinism, expressed in various denominational formulas, permeated the American colonies, while Anglicanism remained weak and unstable.
The Calvinistic world view needs only a brief summary here. It started frpm the assumption that God, having created the world, rules directly but mysteriously over everthing that takes place in it.
[Page 43]
The Puritan A wakenmg and the Culture Core
He has revealed much of his wtll in the Bible, which is the supreme authonty for all human actIon. But God's will can be accurately ascertained only by men of learning, infused by God's grace-, and even they are fallible; man can never fathom all of God's ways. Human nature, since Adam's fall, has been totally corrupt and selfIsh, ruled more by paSSlOn than reason, though susceptible to appeals to fear, authority, and self-interest. Life is a constant struggle with Satan, both in the life of the individual and among groups of people, and only by the most intense effort, self-disci. pltne, and self-control can man hope to keep Satan at bay; church ritual IS of no help in this, but the mutual support of other saints is. God has, however, promIsed to help those who accept the Christian fauh as revealed in the Gospel and has, through Christ's atonement, arbmarily predestined some for salvation, though all deserve hell. By constant piety and soul-searching men may come to entertain a hope that they are among the elect and may experience an lOfusion of God's grace, enabling them to see the world through different eyes from those who are reprobate, not among the predestined elect. In the best form of government the magistrates will always be "saints" -those who have obtained inner knowledge of God's grace through a conversion experience (conversion from selfish depravity \.0 regenerate love of God). But for most of mankind the only way even minimal order and social prosperity can be preserved is through strict laws, hard work, self-control, and dedication to one's vocation or calling. Men must help each other (be charitable), show respect to their betters (the clergy, the magistrates, the learned, the gentry and upper orders), and ob,serve all of God's laws (especially regarding prayer, church attendance, Bible-reading, temperance, and morality). Good or bad, whatever happens is God's will, and men must graciously accept it. Ultimately, in God's own good time, Christ will return and a millennium of peace and plenty will take place, after which God will judge the quick and the dead and the world will come to an end.
This harsh ideology, combined with the social customs of English life, came to America and proved well adapted to the harsh environment of frontier life. It made sense to people, and, living according to its beliefs and values, the colonies first established the
[Page 44]
Chapter 2
coastal towns, then conquered the Indians and began to move westward and to prosper. But the very prosperity of this way of life posed a problem. Free land was one of the prime causes of the difficulty, for it broke down the reliance upon the community and provided a source of wealth that brought corruption to everyone. The opportunities for gain led men to break the rules that poverty and necessity had enforced upon the first generations. With these opportunities came selfishness as opposed to charity, inpividualism as opposed to cooperation. As the seventeenth century ended, Perry Miller noted,
What Miller was describing was an accumulated series of social, political, and economic changes that brought about a disjunction between the older norms and the new frontier experience. Early in the eighteenth century, signs of individual stress and cultural distortion began to appear. (Some argue that the witchcraft trials in Salem were an early symptom of this.) The synthesis that had emerged following the Puritan Awakening began to disintegrate; men began to question their institutions and authority figures. A new awakening was in the making.
[Page 45]
When Jonathan Edwards described the outbreak of revivalistic fervor lO his pansh in 1734 as "a surprising work of God," he spoke for most Amencans. Well aware of the social and psychic crisis that had been build 109 among the people for some time, he had preached frequently on the problems upsetting New England. What surprised hIm (and them) was not the intensity of the emotional outburst but the mercy of a stern and angry God, who suddenly, lOexplicably, offered peace and hope to so many whom, in Justice, he might have destroyed. Calvinistically oriented Americans (probably three-fourths of the colonists) fully believed that they deserved to be "cast into hell" for their refusal to obey God's commands . Yet, beginning in 1734 (in some colonies earlier, in others later), God mercifully extended forgiveness and salvation to thousands (the best estimates are thirty to forty thousand in the years 1740-43 out of a total population of one million). Edwards was astonished. Look, he said, at "the people of Suffield, where they are flocking from day to day to Christ"; see how many reborn souls around the colonies are" rejoicing and singing for joy of heart." Sinners should take hope "in the present remarkable and wonderful dispensation of God's mercy." Why remain dejected, despairing, tormented, and despondent "when so many other chIldren in the land are converted and become holy and happy children of the King of kings?" (It is worth noting this infantilization of the congregation, called "children" by their minister.)
[Page 46]
Chapter 3
Readers of this sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," sometimes neglect Edwards' conclusion that the gates of heaven were wide open:
We miss the whole spirit of this Calvinist awakening if we fail to recognize it as one of extraordinary hope, joy, ecstasy, and release. Edwards was only one of many new-light prophets in the years 1730 to 1760 telling ,distressed individuals in a time of cultural 9!g.91tiQn that God still loved them and was ready to help them out of their confusion.
Of course, like all revivalists, Edwards also warned that those so confirmed in their guilt, so smug in their complacency, so "given up to hardness of heart and blindness of mind" as to resist or refuse to "wake thoroughly out of sleep" and hearken to "the loud calls" might have "to bear the dreadful wrath of that God" who was trying so hard to help them. The fault, however, and the responsibility were not God's but theirs; it was their stubborn, willful refusal to yield to his will and accept his loving concern for their welfare that prevented their salvation. Obviously, Edwards dearly wanted his people to "strive to enter in at the gate" of heaven, where he saw Christ beckoning. Although, like most of the revivalists in this awakening, Edwards believed in predestination and felt that men were so innately selfish that they had an overwhelming propensity to sinful disobedience, nevertheless he preached that if they would simply yield their wills to the higher authority of their Father in heaven, he would guide and reward them.
Despite the dangers in applying psychological theory to the past, there are so many aspects of this and subsequent awakenings that relate to the changing patterns of child-rearing, and specifically to the breakdown of the patriarchal family structure brought from England, that it would be a grave omission to avoid speculation
[Page 47]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
about this subject in this essay. One need not be a Freudian to recogOlze the connotations of the deep emotional relationship in the Judeo-Christian religion between God's power over his "children" and a parent's power over his children. God's fatherhood is one of the most powerful symbols or metaphors in that tradition. In the Calvinist use of the metaphor, God is further defined as omniscient, stern, strict, and usually angry. Furthermore, Western culture has identified all authority figures in paternal and godlike terms. In New England the selectmen who ruled over the towns were called "the town fathers"; the pastor was a father to his parish; the colonial magistrates were described as "nursing fathers to the church" and fathers of the colony; the king was a "father to his loyal subjects. " When dissenters in New England were brought to court for breaking the laws of church or state, they were told they had dishonored the Fifth Commandment: "Honor thy father and thy mother." Lawgiving and law-enforcing officials were father surrogates and viceregents of God, who had "ordained the powers that be." To understand this First Great Awakening-and also the revolution against the king, which followed it-we should take a closer look at how psychic conflicts within the family contributed to it.
In the midst of all the demographic, economic, and intellectual changes that produced increasing tensions within the colonial system in the years preceding the awakening, the family structure remained the basic bulwark of social order and control. This was particularl y true on the isolated, expanding frontier, where village and church controls were weakest and the authority of the colonial legislatures most distant. But as old institutional restraints weakened after 1700, the family everywhere bore the brunt of the strain. The Calvinistic theology, which predominated in the colonies, magnified the father's role over the "little commonwealth" that was the family. To sustain order in the household, the father was required to bring up his children in strict obedience to his will. Child-rearing meant teaching self-discipline. Submission of the stubborn will of mankind was the essential feature of the prevailing Christian world view, even among incipient Arminians and Enlightened rationalists. Since all children, as a result of Adam's sin (or their animal nature), were born rebels against authority, the
[Page 48]
Chapter 3
first necessary step in child-rearing was to subdue the rebelllOus will of the infant.
Parental (usually "paternal") child-rearing practices in the eighteenth century were fair but firm. Fathers and mothers took very seriously their duty to exact obedience even from infants-for their own sake, not simply for that of the parent. God commanded parents to break their children's w1l1s: Spare the rod and spoil the child. Spoil the child, and one had sinned in one's duty to God, the child, and the community. Philip Greven, in -Chzld-rearmg Concepts, 1620-1861, has complled numerous statements from many different sources which indteate that subduing the wIlls of stUbborn children took place in most families immediately following weaning, often as early as six months after birth, almost always within the first year. Infants were not even allowed the pleasure of wailing protests against discomfort in their cradles but were taught to cry softly if at all. John Robinson, spiritUal leader of the Scrooby Pilgrims, wrote in 1628:
John Locke, himself the son of Puritan parents but more famous as a progenitor of Enlightenment rationalism, wrote in 1690 that the great mistake most parents made was not in "due season" to have taken care that the minds and wills of their children were" made obedient to discipline and pliant to reason when first it was most tender and most easy to be bowed. He that is not used to submit his will to the reason of others when he is young, will scarce hearken or submit to his own reason" when he is of age.
Susanna Wesley, Anglican mother of John Wesley, wrote that in raising her children, "When turned a year old (and some before) they were taught to fear the rod and to cry softly, by which means they escaped abundance of correction which they might otherwise have had." John Wesley himself lamented, as the leader of the great evangelical revival in eighteenth-century England, that so few
[Page 49]
The First Great AwakenIng, 1730-60
parents understood the importance of curing the self-will of chIldren: "A wise parent, on the other hand, should begin to break their will the first moment it appears," and that would be within their first or second year. It reqUIred, he said, "incredible firmness and resolution," but without it we cannot "cure the Atheism of our children" -atheism being the logical result of disobedience to parents
These precepts were doubtless followed religiously by most pietistic parents in the colonies, as well as by many who did not belong to any church. Yet it seems obvious that if children not yet able to talk, scarcely able to walk, and in the midst of the trauma of weaning were subjected to such severe discipline by supposedly loving parents from whom they expected succor and comfort, they might be permanently marked. Freudians maintain that a severe "reaction formation" will inevitably result. The child, feeling at flfSt outrage, fear, and hatred toward this exercise of parental authority, can come to terms with it only by reversing his feelings and assuming total submissiveness. Unconsciously repressing his fear and hatred, his dangerous desire to strike back, he adopts an attitude of reverence and love. He thus grows up desiring to please the parent in all things, constantly seeking approbation and affection. Expressions of parental disapproval for later acts offensive to family or social propnety further exacerbate this internalized gUIlt. The connection between parental punishment and God's eternal punishment was also inculcated from infancy. Colonial families commonly practiced daily Bible reading and prayer; the laws in all colonies required regular church attendance; schoolchlldren were compelled to learn their lessons from biblical stories (If not from the Bible itself) and were catechized regularly by pastors of the established church. In all these rituals, obedience to the authorities and to God was stressed. The two words "obey God" virtually encapsulate American culture.
Nevertheless, by both training and necessity, colonial children were also required to become increasingly independent and autonomous as they grew older. They had to learn a trade, prepare themselves to become church members, fathers, voting members in ecclesiastical and town affairs. Under stable conditions the growing chIld learned that submission worked to his benefit. Parental love
[Page 50]
Chapter 3
and social approval sustained his own obedience and provided psychological security and self-esteem. During adolescence, when the child was faced with moving from a dependent to an autonomous role in the community, he was expected to have a crisis conversion experience, during which he replaced dependence on his father with dependence on God. If he felt anxiety about his ultimate reconciliation with God, nevertheless it was an anxiety. shared with his fellows and even his parents. Enculturating institutions provided release from stress in regular rituals, 'ordinances, and symbolic functions.
However, as the fervor of the Puritan Awakening waned after 1660, a steady formalization and routinization of church ordinances gradually took place. The voluntary covenant broke down in the church and the township. Church membership in almost all denominations was open to those who had had no conversion experience; birthright membership replaced committed voluntary membership. Voting rights were equated with property-holding, not covenant-signing. The abundance of cheap land made officeholding and the full privileges of adulthood available to every able-bodied white male. It became difficult to tell saints from reprobates, the upper social orders from the lower. This formalism may have helped to sustain outward relations with the church and the state, but it undermined the emotional ties and sense of common purpose uniting the community. It also weakened the means of establishing forgiveness and close communion between brethren and with God.
While this falling-off in conversions worried the clergy, it did not at first appear to trouble the laity. Times were generally prosperous, and those who worked hard were able to make their way in the world. Material success was taken as a sign that one's behavior was acceptable to God; the rewards of prestige and power demonstrated approval by one's neighbors. Since so few in any town or parish experienced "saving grace," the majority felt they were no worse than the next. Ministers, while regretting the lack of conversions, preached that ultimately God, in his own way and his own good time, would save the souls of his elect. God would display the same kind of paternal approval that parents gave to children who did their duty and obeyed the rules. After 1662 baptism was extended
[Page 51]
The FIrst Great AwakenlOg, 1730-60
in Puritan churches to many whose parents had not been church members; some mmlsters baptized all children of respectable parents The Reverend Solomon Stoddard of MassachusettS set a precedent followed by many mmisters after 1700 when he allowed all respectable persons who "owned the covenant" (i.e., who formally assented to the doctrines of the parish church) to participate in communion, hitherto a sacred ordinance reserved for the elect. He did so on the ground that the Lord's Supper was a means of grace through which God's spirit might work upon the souls of men Cotton Mather urged after 1710 the importance of "doing good" to the poor and needy as a means of demonstrating one's concern to be a worthy servant of God (though he denied that good works could lead to salvation). By 1720 the vast majority of mmlsters were telhng their parishioners that regular prayer, church attendance, upright behavior, and responsible citizenship were all means of preparation for the salvation God would send when the time was ripe. Outwardly even the most sincere Calvinist began to feel secure in his own rectitude. But inward malaise spread. Although times were generally prosperous in the colonies after 1690, they were far from stable; institutions strained to maintain order as expansion, mobility, economic opportunity, and political fmuon produced growing tensions. The ministers no longer ehClted deeply felt responses but rather a vague and undefinable discomfort. Men and women in every colony recognized that their efforts to succeed in this world were compelling departures from older behavlOr patterns and values. Businessmen had to cut corners to compete with their rivals. Farmers had to charge high prices to payoff mortgages on new land. Political leaders distorted the truth to wm votes or gain influence. Town fathers enriched themselves and shghted the needs of the community. Lawyers and judges seemed unable to reach verdicts recognizably just to both parties. Legislators seemed to yield to special interests instead of serving the general welfare. On the frontier, where institutional restraintS were weakest, men increasingly took the law into their own hands -against Indians, horse thieves, or an interloper overreaching himself The westerners began to resent the power of easterners, who controlled the land sales, the lumber operations, the Indian trade, the roads, and the taxes. In poorer communities there was
[Page 52]
Chapter 3
resentment against the high taxes required to support the church and its ministers; sometimes the ministerial graduates of Yale and Harvard requested higher salaries than the towns thought they were worth. Similar tensions over salaries and church discipline wracked Anglican parishes in the South. Occasionally, when a parish fell behind in paying the minister's salary, he went to court to sue for it. But who was more to blame? The people, for not joining the church and giving freely to support it? Or the pastor, for preachinr too formally and relying on the courts for his pay? .
As the social order lost its old cohesion, guilt and anxiuy increased. Men became angry with their neighbors, with the authorities, with themselves and their families. Quarrels and lawsuits become more common than obedience to authority or subjugation of self to commonweal. The rapid pace of social change made it impossible for the existing institutional structUre to sustain what A. F. C. Wallace calls "a minimally fluctuating, life-supporting matrix for individual members of the social organism." Individual stress increased to the point of cultural distortion. Historians have explained this growing incongruence between prescriptive norms and prevailing circumstances in a number of ways. Some of their" explanations apply specifically to one part of the colonies, some to all parts equally. But friction increased everywhere.
Explanations of the cause of what we call the First Great Awakening in America may be divided into five broad categories: first, those that stress rapid social change, arguing that after several generations of fairly stable communal life, based on the patriarchal social order carried over from Europe, a variety of demographic and psychosocial factors made this system inadequate to the needs of the expanding population; second, explanations that argue that the Calvinistic world view, always a delicate balance of polar concepts, faced such grave challenges from the new ideological thrust of the European Enlightenment that it burst apart; third, environmental explanations, which emphasize the importance of the frontier in dispersing the population, in providing new opponunities for individual enterprise, in breaking down law and order, and in creating sociopolitical divisions between East and West; fourth, those explanations that stress the changed relationship with the
[Page 53]
The FIrst Great Awakening, 1730-60
mother country after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, since the increaslOg presence of royal authority led the more well-to-do Americans to abandon their simple life-style and pietism in order to Imitate courtly manners and to share power, and bask in the prestIge of closer alliance, with those close to the king. A Marxist lOterpretation provides the fifth line of argument, to the effect that between 1650 and 1750, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, the old feudal, patriarchal agrarian system was replaced by a new bourgeoIs capitalist system; consequently, Americans became colonIal pawns of English imperial interests, and, within the colOOles themselves, elements of class conflict arose between the nch and the poor, the merchant-bankers and the artisan-farmers, the power-brokers of Engltsh capitalists and the proletariat (white, red, and black) that supplied them with raw materials and markets. We could subsume all of these arguments under the general heading of "changing structUres of authority and power." Or we could speak of them all in terms of the continuing shift from a medIeval, corporate, organic ideal of social order to a modern, lOdividualtstic, contractual, atomistic social order (what Ferdinand Tonnies descnbed as the transformation from Gemeinschaft to Gese!lschaft that accompanies modernization). English settlers, whether Calvinistic or Angltcan, brought with them to America in the early seventeenth century a world view that stressed the ideal of a collectivist, hierarchIcal social structUre of mutual rights and obligations among the class ranks. By 1720 individualism had advanced so far that this older order was under severe stress.
Most hlstonans seem to agree that personal economic ambition was at the root of much of this social tension. The Protestant ethic, as Max Weber said, urged men to work hard at their callings in order to get ahead in the world. Ministers urged upon their congregations the norms of diligence, frugality, honesty, and persistence. At the same time, however, they worried that people were becoming too eager for material wealth and luxury, too centered on the goods of this life rather than on the good of eternal life. "Restraint of ambition," as Richard Bushman writes in From Puritan to Yankee (1%7), "was a vulnerable spot among the interlocking institutions and beliefs that contained man through most of the seventeenth century, for Puritan preachers could not
[Page 54]
Chapter 3
clearly distinguish laudable industry from reprehensible world Itness." The tension was inherent in Calvinism, but, as Perry Miller wrote, "It was only as the seventeenth century came to a close that the imported structure began to show the strain." The rapidly expanding economy in America after 1690 simply provided too many easy opportunities for men to get rich quick, too many ways to improve their statUs, and they saw no reason not to take advantage of them.
But laudable diligence frequently bordered on sinful acquisitiveness. "As, in the expanding economy of the eighteenth century," Bushman writes, "merchants and farmers felt free to pursue wealth with an avidity dangerously close to avarice, the energies released asserted irresistible pressure against traditional bounds." Others, like Perry Miller, place much of the blame for this upon the leveling forces of frontier life, where respect for learning and culture gave way to "more simple, downright, democratic feelings." To attribute the cultural distortion of this era to environmental causes requires more than a discussion of the opportunities of self-relIance on the wilderness edge of the frontier. The whole colonial region was the frontier of Europe, the ragged edge of civilized order. To the rugged individualism of the western pioneer we would have to add the capitalist enterprise of the seacoast entrepreneur. Environmental factors in the broadest sense include the increasing selfconfidence of the people, the restless desire to escape old restraints, the willingness to experiment.
But the price of boldness was criticism, especially in the form of what Perry Miller called "the jeremiads" of clerical upholders of tradition. Ministers everywhere in the colonies berated parishioners for growing rich, and yet the parishioners could not see that their exercise of business acumen was a sin against the community if the whole community was prospering. R. H. Tawney pointed out that, from the earliest days of Plymouth Colony, Governor Bradford observed "how men grew 'in their outward estates' " and predicted that' 'the increase in material prosperity 'will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there.'" But as the economy flourished "the desire to prosper" Bushman notes, simply "precipitated dashes with law and authority, adding to accumulating guilt":
[Page 55]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
By 1730, Bushman concludes, "estrangement" between the ordi. nary people and their leaders in church and state had created unbearable stress. While there was still, especially among the rising bourgeoisie, a general religious conformity, the more pious pastors and laymen saw it as a mere fa!;:ade. Yet, the more the law punished (or winked at) offenders, and the more the clergy berated (or placated) them, the more confusion grew and the greater became the loss of credibility in "the standing order":
By "voluntarily," he means outside the compulsions of traditional beliefs and customs.
A very similar scenario is presented if the breakdown of the old order IS analyzed from the viewpoint of the new social history. Although the studies of Greven, Lockridge, Rutman, and Demos flOd MIller's analysis of the jeremiads too literary, the WeberTawney thesis too reductionist, and Turner's frontier thesis too simplistic, their general conclusions supplement rather than contradlCt these earlIer explanations of the decline of Puritanism. Concerned less with the internal tensions within Puritan ideology than with the folkways of peasant villagers, they argue that, after an iOitlally successful reconstruction of sixteenth-cemury communal order in the New World, the expected stability or homeostasiS failed to sustain itself. The availability of cheap land and the increasing autonomy of the younger generation led, by the
[Page 56]
Chapter 3
beginning of the eighteenth century (if not earlier), to a serious disruption of the patriarchal peasant order. "Sublimation of self to society," Rutman says in American Puritanism (1970), "was matched by exaltation of self in pursuit of personal gain." And . . the same urge which brought them to abandon what they had in England could lead them to abandon what they were creating in New England," i.e., the urge to better their condition. "Even those motivated to cross the ocean less by profit afld more by religion (and hence more wedded to the traditional by the preachers' rhetoric) could be tempted away from the village by the promise of profit. "
Greven stresses, in Four Generations (1970), the desire of young adults for independence from parental authority. In the seventeenth century this independence was often not achieved until the age of thirty-five, after marriage. The effort to sustain the European patriarchal system, with its closed organic community of extended kinship, had succeeded initially because the first three generations of fathers and sons stayed within the original township boundaries. By deeding their property to their children only in their wills, the fathers sustained authority over the sons even after these had families of their own, for sons did not obtain fee-simple ownership over their own farms on their father's land until the father died. However, when the original townships became crowded (by an increasing birthrate and longevity), parents no longer had enough land nearby to be divided; nor could they purchase more nearby except at high prices. Then the sons, seeking status as heads of their own patriarchy, were forced to move away. At first they left reluctantly, uneasy at breaking loose from family ties and paternal protection. In new western townships (as close as possible to the old family) they tried to reestablish the same patriarchal, extendedkinship pattern for their sons and grandsons. But their effort was less successful. Land in the West was too plentiful. Paternal authority became steadily more tenuous with each new settletnent. Mter 1720, Greven discovered, the younger sons were far more individualistic, while the fathers (themselves having broken loose) were more willing to grant early autonomy to the succeeding generation. The nuclear family was cutting itself loose from the extended family and the older sources of order and conformity. But
[Page 57]
The First Great Awakemng, 1730-60
the nuclear, self-reliant family did not always find life easier; socIally and psychologically its resources were diminished, its self. doubts increased.
John Demos found, in A Ltttle Commonwealth (1970), that in the more loosely controlled Plymouth Colony, with its Separatist background, the closely knit communal order broke down within a smgle generation. Kenneth Lockridge, studying the town' of Oedham, Massachusetts, in A New England Town, the First Hundred Years (1970), described 1686 as the critical turning point m village life. In hJS chapter entitled "Toward a New Society," Lockridge presents a model for the whole disruptive process:
But in order to break free of the last ties, the individual villagers had to break free of the plCture they carried in their heads of the Ideal social order and its relationship to God.
The tremendous cultural reorientation that this requiredBushman calls it "a psychological earthquake" -is the movement historians have called the First Great Awakening. We may see it in part as the breakdown of the inner tensions between pietistic radicalism and collectivist authority. "The tensions between tradition and counter-tradition," writes Darrett Rutman, "could be accommodated nowhere. The traditional gave way-social unity to the institutionalization of diversity and conflict (the politics of representative democracy) and to geographic mobility ('frontier'
[Page 58]
Chapter 3
restlessness or more apt, if less exciting, urban restlessness. . . )." In short, by 1720 the old ideological framework had lost its cultural
I ,legitimacy and the people needed new light from God by which to guide their behavior, measure their goals, and establish new sources of communal authority in church and state. The awakening was a search for new loyalties.
Yet, when this process began, so unexpected was the "awakening," so buried in the unconscious was the smoldering revolt against the fathers, that people could comprehend it 'only as a miraculous, . 'surprising work of God." No other explanation seemed to account for the transition from pain to ecstasy, from confusion to confidence. A contemporary, commenting on the revival outburst in Jonathan Edwards' parish in 1734-35, wrote:
However, fear of death and judgment was preached by Edwards and most other revivalists. What people feared, and why they welcomed the release of a crisis conversion experience, was their own rebellious tempers (as the revivalists rightly tOld them) and, beneath that, their expectation of deserved paternal punishment (God's wrath for their continued disobedience to their fathers' ways). By calling it "a work of God," they excused this rebellion against traditional authority; it was out of their hands. What joy, then, to find that God loved and forgave them, once they had confessed their willfulness. During the trauma of conversion they received new light on their place in the universe, a light that reinstated them in paternal grace. They awakened as from a nightmare to discover that they had been living under a false consciousness of their sinfulness. They had felt guilt because they were not following the ways of their fathers, but they now saw, and were stunned at the wonder of it, that it was their fathers' ways that
[Page 59]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
had been false The church and the state had been living by a dim, dIstorted light and by that light had led the people astray.
Once the individual broke out of his old darkness, he longed to share his joy and tell hIS experience to others; he sought spiritual' wmmunion with his brethren. Out of the awakening emerged new (hurches and new sects, new forms of Christian fellowship. IncHvIdual freedom and fraternal union went hand in hand. The new sense of brotherhood and sisterhood was expressed in new church wvenants. Out of the ecstasy of many regenerated souls came the unIon of all in servIce to God. More slowly, a new, overarching sense of intercolonial untty emerged.
At flfSt the awakening was a spontaneous, undirected, individualtstlc breakmg-oUt from the dead skin of the past that had mhibited personal freedom and social energy. It began with private explosions of the personality in emotional conversion experiences; these occurred in scattered local revivals in the 1720s and 1730s throughout the colonIes. Then, after 1739, when the experience had taken common shape and been given general articulation, the whole of British North America, from Georgia to Nova Scotia, seemed to explode lIke a stnng of firecrackers. Massive and continuous revIval meetmgs were kept in motion by traveling preachers from 1740 to 1745 In some places the established authorities tried to quench the notOus behavior of the awakened. In others the local authorities were themselves caught up in it and supported it. There were also examples of nativist reaction among old-light opponents of the awakening, who saw it as the work of the devtl or of popular demagogues intent on arousing the rabble against their rulers.
During the generatlon in which this revitalization movement worked itself out, the colonists came to see that acculturation to the New World had opened an enormous gap between them and the mother country. They felt a new and semiautonomous identity as a people; and when the king, their royal father, refused to acknowledge this, they turned against him as a wicked, unnatural parent, unwilling to grant freedom to his mature and self-reliant sons of ltberty. However, during that awakening generation, an immense amount of new experience and new ideas had to be accommodateq.
to the new world view in order to give it shape and coherence.
[Page 60]
Chapter 3
Because the various colonies were in different stages of acculturation, because their experiences and leadership differed, the awakening progressed unevenly and took different forms in different regions. Different denominations devised different strategies to meet local exigencies. However, by 1765 the majority of members of the leading denominations were all at approximately the same point in the new ideological consensus and were thus ready to move on together into political reformation. Still, it will be easier to follow the course of this movement if we consider separately its New England, Middle Colonies, and southern phases. While the timing varied and different denominations took the major roles in each region, a common pattern of meaning and events prevailed everywhere. Before we look at the three regional variations withlO the awkening, it is important first to describe what they shared: a new preaching style, itinerant evangelists, and a new morphology of conversion.
Throughout the colonies the awakening began when itinerant, though ordained, ministers offered new styles of preaching and a new rhetoric that ostensibly called people back to God but in effect redefined their relationship to him. The enthusiasm aroused by these itinerant men of God inspired imitators, sometimes local pastors, sometimes persons who were not ordained but who felt an internal call to preach in a new way out of their own experiential confrontation with God. This call led them from place to place, seeking an audience for their new message. Soon itinerant exhorters and revivalists were swarming through the countryside, arousing such disorder that parish ministers became alarmed and sought aid from the civil authorities to suppress them. At first this call for law and order simply increased the disorder by stimulating true believers in the new-light message to denounce both the established clergy and the established authority that backed them. Schisms and separations followed, with increasing denunciations on both sides. A few disturbed souls concluded that the world was coming to an end, that only withdrawal into communities of the perfected saints
[Page 61]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
could preserve a "savlOg remnant" from God's wrath. A few chansmatic figures assumed messianic roles and were treated by their followers as God incarnate. To the new lights the old order seemed insanely disordered; to the old lights the new fanatics seemed out of their minds.
Perhaps the major contributing force to the general outbreak of the iunerant aspect of the awakening was the Reverend George Whitefield, who had already established a reputation as a sensational preacher in England. He had the advantage of coming from outside the prevailing colonial society yet of bearing with him the authority of his Angltcan ordination; he also had an appealing youthfulness (he was twenty-three) and a striking new style in the pulpit. His sermons, when read today, seem banal, but contemporary accounts confirm the striking charisma of an approach that both startled and enthralled his audiences. Whitefield allowed full range to his flaIr for hIstrionics. He would sing hymns, wave his arms, tell stones in colloquial language, employ vivid imagery, weep profusely over his own melodramatic appeals, and pray extemporaneously and directly to God, as though he were talking to him. On provincial Americans who had never seen anything like It, the effect was electric. No one supposed that preachers were to appeal so directly and powerfully to the emotions of their audience (it had not been done since the 1630s). Moralizing and doctrinal sermons had for several generations become the accepted formula for colonial preaching. Whitefield deemphasized the institUtional side of religion and emphasized the personal responsibility of the individual.
Apart from his flamboyance, the most characteristic' featUres of Whitefield's rhetoric were his assumption (despite his alleged Calvinism) that sinners could repent and be saved if they really wanted to, his effort to arouse individuals by repeatedly using the word "you" in his imperative commands (looking directly at some person in the crowd), and his emphasis on the joy of salvation:
[Page 62]
Chapter 3
Whitefield was here addressing those already converted, but he made that state seem so ecstatic that all his hearers clamored to attain it: "What shall I do to be saved?" How could they attain that blessed love, assurance, and personal security that Whitefield promised to all who believed in God on faith?
Nor did it hurt Whitefield's popularity among the Calvinists that he was opposed by most of the Anglican clergy in the colonies for his flamboyance and for his willingness to preach in non-Anglican churches or to address large throngs in public squares or open fields. His refusal to be cowed by his superiors' threats to bring him to trial in ecclesiastical courts made him a hero to other rebels for God.
Whitefield's first itinerant tour of the colonies in 1739-40 is generally described as his most successful, but his many later tours, from Maine to Georgia, always drew large crowds wherever he spoke. He set a new style, which impressed people as different as Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Edwards' wife marveled at his" deep-toned, yet clear and melodious voice" and declared it "wonderful to see what a spell he casts over an audience. . . . I have seen upwards of a thousand people hang on his words with breathless silence, broken only by an occasional half-suppressed sob." One ordinary farmer, who saddled his horse, hoisted his wife behind him, and rode madly into town when he heard Whitefield had arrived, said that when Whitefield mounted the scaffold erected for him on the village green,
Not all the itinerant revivalists spoke in the same way, but
[Page 63]
The First Great Av.:akening, 1730-60
Whitefield set a pattern; and in their various styles, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies, Eleazar Wheelock, and Samuel Finley aroused the same awesome respect as messengers of God Consequently, when these prophets told anxious sinners that their deplorable spiritual condition was not entirely their own fault, they believed it. The reason they had lost touch with God and could not understand what they must do to be saved was because they had had such poor spiritual guidance from their regular pastors "The generality of preachers," Whitefield said, even of the respected Massachusetts clergy, "talk of an unknown, unfelt Chnst. The reason why congregations have ,been so dead is because they had dead men preaching to them."
Tennent told them of' 'the dangers of an unconverted ministry" and left no doubt that most opponents of the revival were unconverted preachers who, having no knowledge in their own hearts of spiritUal rebirth" naturally could not convey such knowledge to others. God did not, and could not, work through such "dumb dogs." No one who did not "experimentally" (i.e., experientially) "know Chnst" could convey the new light to anxious souls. Tennent, and others after him, told the people on his revival tours that if a man could not receive spiritual nourishment in his parish church, he might "lawfully go, and that frequently, where he gets most good to his precious soul." The awakening made it clear that the private spiritual needs of the individual came before any loyalty to his parish church or pastor and that each man knew best where to find what he needed for his own good.
Among features of the First Great Awakening that were shared throughout the colonies, the conversion experience was even more important than itinerant preachers. There is no typical conversion, but it is possible to select an example that conveys its most important aspects. This account was written after the event by a young man who was converted in 1741 in the town of Norwich, Connecticut. Born into a family of prosperous farmers, he led the ordinary life of a farm boy , attended church regularly, learned the catechism in the public schools, participated in family prayers, and expected to find his way into church membership when he married. HiS parents had been admitted to the local Congregational church
[Page 64]
Chapter 3
without conversion, and the minister did not require it. "I lived a careless and secure life, " wrote young Isaac Backus, "for more than seventeen years, though in all this time I did never think that I was converted but flattered myself with this, that I would turn by and by" from sin and receive God's grace. But suddenly, shortly after Whitefield had stOrmed through New England, a revival broke out in his town. Many friends and neighbors were converted, and Backus heard many exciting itinerant revivalists prea'ch. He was seventeen years old and wanted to be saved but did not know how to go about it.
Before these times I never thought myself in a safe [l.e ,elect] state yet eased my self with purposes of tUrning [to God] by and by when I should have a more convenient season. . . ; in May and June 1741, God by hIS Splflt was pleased in lOfInlte mercy to bring eternal thIngs near to my soul and to show me the dredful danger of delays.
Though Backus does not mention it, his father had died suddenly in November 1740, and we may suspect that this had a profound psychological effect upon the adolescent boy (as we know it d1d on hi5 mother). His father had not been converted, and Backus had not yet made his own adjustment to adult autonomy. His urgent desire' 'to go and hear the most powerful preaching that I could" may have stemmed from a personal combination of fear and guilt, but it was one shared in other ways by countless members of his generatlon.
It is commonly thought that all conversions dunng revivals of religion take place during preaching services, when large groups of people are under the immediate influence of the preacher's rhetoric and personality. But Backus's experience was typical of many who
[Page 65]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
were converted in solitude at a moment when they least expected it. H1s defenses were down and his guilt welled up:
The rebel submitted-not to established authority, but to a new, more powerful source of paternal authority-to God himself. The confrontation was a direct, felt, visualized experience of the senses (perhaps a reenactment of his childish submission of his will to his father). It had a unique and unforgettable reality, like a blinding 11ght piercing h1s innermost being:
The experience was overwhelming in its power, transforming in its result, and ecstatic in the sense of relief that it provided. "And now my Burden (that was so dreadful heavey before) was gone: that tOrmenting fear that I had was taken away, and I felt a sweet peace and rejoicmg in my soul. " Backus does not state precisely what his burden was or what sins he felt had made him a rebel. Few conversion experiences do. The guilt is not specific but unconscious, repressed. It 1S felt as an inexplicable burden, bearing down, whlCh none of the ordinary stress-release mechanisms can relieve. The wonder of the experience is part of its success. Feeling reborn, h1s slate wiped clean, his burden gone, Backus dated his Christian bmh from that afternoon.
The mtensely personal relationship of God to the convert, the fact that no 1ntermediary (no minister, no congregation, no ritual) parucipates, constitutes the most vital part of the experience. "The Lord God 1S a Sun," Backus later wrote, and "when any Soul is
[Page 66]
Chapter 3
brought to behold his Glories, them [sic] eternal rays of Light and Love shine down particularly upon him to remove his darkness." So personal is this light that "its rays appear to point as directly to us as if there was not another person in the world for it to shine upon." Thereafter the whole world looked different to the convert. He had a new consciousness of his place in the sun. The individual became his own church, and he yearned to share his experience, to make converts to his new way of seeing.
Backus joined his parish church but found no comfort from the preaching of its minister and no reinforcement from a congregation that included so many unconverted persons. When he and other new-light converts asked the minister to exclude from membership those who did not experimentally know Christ, he refused; so they left the parish church and formed a new-light or "Separate" church. Meeting in a private home, they exhorted each other for a while until they discovered that one of their members had a special gift from God-the gift of preaching the Word. He was not a college graduate and had no ministerial training, but when he spoke about a "felt Christ" in terms his fellow converts understood, they ordained him as their pastor. Refusing any longer to pay religious taxes to support the established parish church and its minister, many of these new lights in Norwich were taken to jailor had their household goods sold at auction by the local sheriff. Some of them began to talk of the need of separating the church from the state, for God did not want people taxed to support false religion when they were supporting true religion voluntarily.
Backus then followed the next step taken by many new lights. He discovered that he had an internal call from the Holy Spirit to preach. He became an itinerant exhorter in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. In 1748 he formed a Separate church in Middleborough, Massachusetts, which chose him as its pastor. In the following years he and many other itinerant new lights helped to found scores of these churches throughout New England. In 1756 Backus left the Separates to become a Separate Baptist, thereby adding another denomination to the proliferating sectarianism of the colonies.
[Page 67]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
E S Gaustad has rightly called the founding of these two new denommations (the Separates and the Separate Baptists) "the most conspiCUOUS institutional effect of the Great Awakening in New England." They "destroyed the traditional parish system, weakened the structure of the establishment, and undermined the Say brook Platform" (a plan uniting church and state in Connecticut). The English Toleration Act of 1689 had forced some tolerance for tiny groups of dissenters in Anglican and Puritan colonies in New England, but they had made little headway against the entrenched power of the established Congregational church system. After the First Great Awakening began, it became impossible to hold dissent in check By 1755 there were 125 Separate (or Strict Congregational) churches in New England, and by 1776 there were 70 Separate Baptist churches (excluding those in Rhode Island). The Anglican churches, too, gained an enlarged following in New England after 1740 by attracting many conservative upper-class folk who found the enthusiasm of the awakening too disorderly and the new evangelical Calvinism of the new-light preachers too pietistic. Later, the Universalists, Free Will Baptists, and Shakers added further religious pluralism to the once uniform religious life of New England. The established ecclesiastical system lingered in a formal sense until 1833, but after 1755 it was constantly on the defensive and divided in its counsels.
From the rise of religious pluralism naturally flowed the long effort to disestablish the Congregational churches. At first the Separate and Separate Baptist dissenters struggled simply to attain legal exemption from religious taxes. This had been granted to Quakers and Anglicans in 1727-29 and to old-light (pre-AwakenlOg) Baptists. But when these new-light radicals were denied exemption and defined as "schismatics" or "tax-dodgers," they developed a more concerted program to end the whole concept of tax support for religion. They started petitioning the towns and legislatures for changes in the tax laws. When this proved ineffective, they petitioned the King in Council. After 1774 they petitioned the Continental Congress.
[Page 68]
Chapter 3
Thus an awakening that had started simply as an effort to save souls and revive church piety moved by logical degrees toward a fundamental restructuring of one of New England's most basic institutions. Some of the Separates, facing what they considered political persecution, demonstrated aspects of social revolt. They practiced civil disobedience; they published tracts denouncing the magistrates and clergy as a tyrannical upper class. Ebenezer Frothingham, a Connecticut Separate leader, wrote a booJc in 1767 to show that the people of New England were as' 'priest-ridden" by their establishment as their forefathers in England had been by Anglican bishops during the Puritan Awakening. Isaac Backus became a student of history and wrote a stunning three-volume analysis of New England Puritanism from the dissenting viewpotnt that finally resurrected the all-but-forgotten Roger Williams as a hero of religious liberty. But not until the Second Great Awakening were New Englanders sufficiently enlightened to abandon their established ecclesiastical practices.
At the opposite extreme from the new-light rebels were the old-light reactionaries, led by Samuel Niles and Timothy Clap. Clap, the president of Yale College, became so alarmed by the intensity of the religious dissent following Whitefield's itinerancy that he published a statement in 1743 accusing him of a "Design to turn the generality of the Ministers in the Country [New England] out of their Places and resettle them with Ministers from England, Scotland and Ireland." Niles reinforced this conspiracy theory two years later when he claimed that Whitefield's purpose in arousing "illiterate and enthusiastick Exhorters" to attack the spiritual deadness of the New England churches was to make" a Push at our Constitution. . . with a Design to overthrow it . . . the Sooner the better." Whitefield, in short, was making dupes of the new lights as part of a secret plot by the Church of England to subvert the Puritan established system in New England. Twenty years later Clap was to make peace with the new lights and, in the preRevolutionary era, to find them a bulwark of resistance to the tyranny of Parliament. But, as in all awakenings, the initial stages of revitalization aroused excessive fear among those in positions of authority.
The principal contribution of New England to the First Great
[Page 69]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
A wakenmg was Its articulauon of the new-light theology later known as "Edwardsianism," "Hopkinsianism," "Consistent CalvtnlSm," or Evangelical Calvinism. Basically, the First Great Awakening split the New England clergy into four factions. One of the two old-light factions (the Arians, Socinians, or "Arminians") was tn fact responding to the influence of the Enlightenment in Europe rather than to the new lights in America. This faction included the incipient rationalists, deists, Unitarians, and Universaltsts Though differing widely among themselves, they generally opposed the doctrines of predestination and innate depravity, arguing for freedom of the will and universal salvation. However, this faction was small in New England prior to 1775. The Arians (who denied the doctrine of the Trinity and claimed that Christ was not of the same substance as God) remained within the state churches as "liberal" or "rational" Christians and did not openly avow their Unitarian princlples until after 1800; they were generally called Arminians by the new lights because they denied the necesslty of a conversion experience and believed that all men could attain salvation by leading moral, honest, respectable lives.
The second, and by far the greatest bulk of the old-light group, was the faction that upheld the covenant theology, along with the various modlfications in church practice that had been adopted since 1662 (like the halfway covenant, Stoddardianism, the Saybrook Platform). Theologically they were moderate Calvinists, and many of them were sympathetic to the awakening until its enthusiasm began to cause schisms in the churches. After the furor had cooled and a new theological consensus had emerged, many of these moderates joined hands with the moderate new lights to sustain the old ecclesiasucal order against the schismatics and Anglicans.
The new-l1ght or pietistic reformers were also divided into two factions The leading flgures in the larger of the two were ordained ministers who supported the theological and ecclesiastical position represented by Jonathan Edwards. The smaller faction was a more vehement, uncompromisingly radical group that demanded immediate and drastic reform in the ecclesiastical system and, when this was not forthcoming, broke away to become Separates and Separate Baptists. (At the far end of this radical spectrum were
[Page 70]
Chapter 3
extreme perfectionists like Shadrach Ireland, Jemima WilklOson, and Ann Lee, who formed their own charismatic sects.) However, the great majority of the new lights remained within the estabhshed churches and sought to reform them from within.
Best described as Evangelical Calvinists in theology, the new lights placed great emphasis on spiritual regeneration or a crisis conversion as the criterion for church membership and worked to return church practice to the original Puritan congregationalism of the Cambridge Platform of 1648. It was the revitalization of Calvinism by these new lights that constituted the heart of the awakening in New England. Through their close association with Presbyterianism, their influence was also important in the Middle Colonies. The revised world view of this new-light group was more optimistic, progressive, individualistic, and democratic in its spiritual and social outlook; ultimately it converged at certain points with the new world view in European thought that we call the Enlightenment. One such point of ultimate agreement was separation of church and state (though Edwards himself did not share this). More important were agreements about postmillennialism, the concept of a higher natural law, belief in the special mission of America, and belief in the free and morally responsible individual. In political outlook the Enlightened rationalist and the new-light pietist came also to agreement on the Lockean theories of government by the consent of the governed, on no taxation without representation, and on the necessity for separation from the mother country. But it required more than a generation to work through to these common grounds. At the start of the awakening, the new lights saw the rationalism of the Enlightenment as the real threat to Calvinistic pietism. It was against its Arminianizing tendencies (i.e., its exaltation of man's reason and free will) that Edwards directed his primary effort.
Edwards is generally considered the leading theologian of the First Great Awakening and consequently might be called its chief prophet. However, the process was far too complex to be summed up in the career of anyone person. Moreover, Edwards died in 1758 before the awakening had yet worked out its final consensus. In many respects he did not understand the full extent of the transformation in which he played so large a part. He criticized
[Page 71]
The Ftrst Great Awakening, 1730-60
those radiCal new hghts who separated from their old-light parish churches; he always defended the necessity for religious taxation and an established church system; there is scarcely a word in all his writings to justify social reform, and nothing on politics. Edwards carefully eXplained to ecclesiastical and theological moderates of his day that he could not defend the foolishness of the pietistic perfectionists, Separates, or Separate Baptists, and thus he helped lead the way to the new consensus. The beauty of God's universe for him, as for John Winthrop, lay in its hierarchical order and harmony, not in arrant indIvidualism and social mobility, diversity, or equaltty "There is a beauty of order in society," he wrote, "as when the different members of a society have all their appointed office, place and station, according to their several capacities and talents and everyone keeps his place and continues in his proper business" Social disorder, leveling, was not only rebellion against duly constituted authority but a disruption of God's rank-ordering of the UnIverse.
Edwards did his best to interpret the new light to meet the objections of moderates Though his Arian opponents failed to appreciate it, his writings endeavored to integrate the epistemology of John Locke into a revitalized Calvinist theology. He should be seen as a Janus-faced figure, looking back as well as forward. The most forward-looking aspects of his new vision were the "sensatIonal" (sensory perception) psychology upon which he based his analysis of conversion, his postmillennial view of the rising glory of America, and his concept of disinterested benevolence. To understand the democratic thrust in Edwardsian or Evangelical CalvinIsm, we first have to understand the position of the old lights in this awakening
Because those who held to the Arian and Arminian theological' positions in New England (represented by the incipient Unitarians lO Boston and Harvard, as well as by the Anglican ministry) were committed to the concept of salvation by education, by traditional church ordinances, and by moralistic self-discipline (which was not hkely to be eVIdent among the poor and ignorant), they can be seen as the most socially conservative wing of the awakening, despite; their "liberal" or rationalist theology. The Arians (sometimes I called "supernatural rationalists") do not deserve to be called old;
[Page 72]
Chapter 3
ltghts in the sense of intellectual reactionaries. They were on the forward edge of the Enlightenment's revitalization of Western culture. But to pietists they seemed a throwback to the pre-Puritan, pre-Reformation view of salvation by works. They were also old lights in their staunch defense of the established order, with its elitism, its social conformity, and its ecclesiastical formalism The revival to them was a despicable example of the aroused "animal affections" or emotions; it was spiritually unrefined, lacking in gentility. Intelligent men knew that harmony, good. order, and social prosperity depended on prudence, moderation, and balance -on exalting the rational side of human nature, not the irrational. As the Reverend Charles Chauncy of Boston put it, in his famous denunciation of the awakening, "an enlightened mind, not raised affections" must always be the way to truth and' 'a saving knowledge" of God. When an old light spoke about "knowledge of God," he meant knowing intellectually how God's UnIverse operated, not feeling the presence of God in his heart.
The rationalistic Christians of New England, who shared much with the liberal or latitudinarian Anglicans in the South and with deIsts like Benjamin Franklin in the Middle Colonies, found God through scientific study of the laws of nature. "Natural theology" was for them a more trustworthy guide to the higher moral law of God than a hysterical revival experience. They were shocked that educated ministers like Edwards still clung to the old doctrines of Calvinism in their starkest form, portraying God as a mystenous, angry, vengeful deity who had nothing but contempt for hIS creatures. They failed to understand Edwards' emphasis on God's grace, mercy, and beauty. The rational, "enlightened" outlook of the liberal was in many respects as paternalistic or elitist as the new evangelical Calvinism was democratic. Though many of the' 'liberal Christians" became ardent patriots, they were never ardent democrats. God may have given reason to all men, but he did not give it to all in the same amount. Birth, intelligence, and education distinguished the anstoi, the best and the wisest, from hoi polloI. In a well-ordered society the common folk must still defer to their betters. (Even Jefferson's advocacy of a common school system was democratic only to the extent of raising the natural aristocrat from the rubbish of the common herd.) Alan Heimert, in ReligIon and
[Page 73]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
the Amencan Mmd(1966) , quotes the "liberal" Jonathan Mayhew (whose sermon against unlimited submission to kings made him a hero to pietists and proto-Unitarians alike in 1750) on the limited abilities of the common people: "It is not intended," he said, in claiming that all men are reasonable, to argue' 'that all men have equal abilities for judging what is true and right. . . . Those of the lower class can get but a lIttle ways in their inquiries into the natural and moral constitutions of the world." They would always have to rely on those of superior education and talent to govern them in worldly and religious affairs if they wished to avoid anarchy and chaos.
Nevertheless, the rationalists believed that men are far from totally depraved. On the contrary, men have the ability to comprehend the Bible, to know right from wrong (through God-given conSClence or "the moral sense"). Furthermore, the evils of this world are not the result of Adam's Fall and original sin but of ignorance, lack of information, lack of care, forethought, and selfdIscipline. It is true that most men are motivated by self-love, but self-love can be manipulated or directed by ministers and educators toward virtuous behavior. Men are bright enough to see that it is to their own best interest to obey the law, act honestly, and treat tp.eir neighbor as they wIshed to be treated. Punishing the incorrigibly VIcious and rewarding the morally good is God's way of leading men toward heaven. Any reasonable man can see that this is more realistIc or practical than counting on irrational revival experiences to turn men toward true virtue.
In opposItion to these views, Evangelical Calvinism as preached by the new hghts of all denominations offered a far less elitist view of human nature and a more benevolent view of God's will: God is no respecter of persons. He sheds his light on rich and poor alikein fact, more commonly on the poor, since the rich are unwilling or afraid to bend their pnde. The role of the preacher in the new-light ideology is to bring the word of God to his hearer with such power that it literally bowls them over.
To preach' 'a felt Christ" was more than a figure of speech. All rehglon is concerned with power. Evangelical Calvinism was concerned with the power that changes depraved, selfish men from rebels agaInst God to loving servants of God. Such power cannot
[Page 74]
Chapter 3
derive from education, worldly experience, prudence, or moral self-discipline. True holiness or benevolence toward God is so ineffable, so indescribably different from anything we can know from worldly, sensual experience that it cannot come to us through the intellect and understanding. The link between man and God is not the reason, the head, but the heart.
The heart is "moved," transformed, regenerated through the religious affections or religious feelings. These feelings resemble the ordinary feelings of men, but they operate on a different, higher plane of existence. While John Locke was right to say that men gaip knowledge only through sense impressions, he failed to describe how the soul receives impression of (or from) God. To have spiritual "feelings" we must assume that God operates through religious stimuli working upon spiritual sensibilities lodged in the soul. Theologically this is termed "infusion with grace." God's sensational operations upon the human heart, through the felt but unseen agency of the Holy Spirit, parallel on the spiritual plane of man's being those mundane impressions made on man's animal nature by the sensation oflight, heat, sound, taste, or odor. "Our people," said Edwards in 1742, "do not so much need to have their heads stored as to have their hearts touched." ConverSiOn is, symbolically, the touch of God's finger on the heart, a perception of his glory upon the mind's eye, a divme illumination.
Depraved men are stonyhearted. As Edwards put it, "by a Hard heart is plainly meant an unaffected heart, or a heart not easy to be moved with virtuous affections, like a stone, insensible, stupid, unmoved, and hard to be impressed." Revival sermons consequently speak constantly of breaking, crushing, storming, shattering, and cracking the stony hearts of the unconverted. The revivalists' words (conveying the divine "Word") are said to stab, wound, shock, pierce, and cut the hearts of their hearers. This is not simply metaphor. The revivalists were using the precise, telhnical, scientific terminology of the psychology of their time-Lockean empiricism. They were describing as accurately as they could the physical laws of divine force, a force so great, so overpowering, that those who are hit by it cannot forbear sometimes to cry out, to groan, to shriek, to jump up from their pews or fall off their seats in a faint. The impact of God's power, as Edwards said, is toO much
[Page 75]
The FlfSt Great AwakeOlog, 1730-60
for frail human affectiOn to bear. The essence of the shock, however, is not physical but spiritual. The physical manifestations are side effects, symptomatic of an inner change of heart. The function of grace is not to harm but to heal. The revivalist says of the fain ted convert, "He is slain and made alive by the power of the truth" The old Adam, the old man, the devil who ruled. the depraved heart is dead from the blow; the saint, the new Adam, is reborn, "a new man in Christ." Metaphorically, the grace of God stnkes off the chains that have bound the soul in slavery to Satan (or self), and the captive cannot help shouting, "Lord God Almighty, free at last!"
It is significant that the new-light revivalists throughout the awakenmg found that their liberating theology had a profound effect upon the powerless and the poor of society-upon black slaves, upon women, upon Indians, upon children. These suffered more tensions and suppressed rage than most in society and felt the release of conversion (the reaction formation) more deeply. They could not, however, actualize the new freedom and power they felt except in religious activity-in preaching, saving souls, becoming missiOnaries (or missiOnaries' wives). Yet even this form of sublimated freedom produced a surprising number of black, Indian, and women preachers and exhorters in the years after 1740. Heimert has argued persuasively that in the First Great Awakening, God was democratized
Revitalization of the individual led to efforts to revitalize society. Having a new sense of harmony with God, the new-light convert was Impelled to work in conjunction with God's power to help his fellow men have it likewise. The regenerate could not rest content wIth the world as it was; they wished to make it what it ought to be. Where the old lights saw human progress as slow and gradual, limited by hereditary and environmental contingencies, the new light found the world open to the miraculous-unconditioned, full of new possibilities and unrealized potentials. Religious revivalism, saving souls, is in this respect a political activity, a way of producing a reborn majority to remodel society according to God's will and with his help. Despite Edwards' arguments against freedom of the will, despite the continued belief in man's innate depravity and God's predestined election, the awakening raised hopes that the
[Page 76]
Chapter 3
whole continent might be converted. God might have elected all Americans to sainthood.
Although millennialism in various forms had been prevalent during the Puritan Awakening, the majority of those who came to America had adopted a premillennial interpretation; namely, that God would have to send Christ back a second time to bring order to the world. Increase Mather, appalled at the barbarism of the frontier and the provincialism of the colonies, conclqded that "in the glorious times promised to the Church on Earth, Amenca will be HelL" Eighteenth-century rationalists, though slightly more optimistic about progress because of advances in scientific knowledge, nevertheless were cautious about it and clung to the classical view that history moves in cycles. The British Empire might be in its ascendancy at the moment, but, like Greece and Rome, it too would fall in time. Unitarians like John Adams and deistic Episcopalians like Thomas Jefferson held to this cyclical view even for the United States of America.
But the new lights caught a glimpse of another possibility. They found evidence from the surprising work of God in the awakening and from a careful rereading of biblical prophecies that the premillennial interpretation might be wrong. To them it seemed entirely possible that God might create a millennial order without some cataclysmic holocaust compelling Christ's return. In fact, Christ might not return until after the millennium (hence' 'postmillennialism"). History might not be moving ever downward or in cycles but in a straight line of ascension from Adam's Fall to the redemption of mankind. "We are sure this day will come," said Edwards in 1742, "and we have many reasons to think that it is approaching; from the fulfilment of almost everything that the prophecies speak of as precedmg it . . . and the late extraordinary things that have appeared in the church of God and appertaining to the [present] state of religion." According to Alan Heimert and Clarence C. Goen, this postmillennial note in the new-light movement was the most striking feature of the whole awakening and its clearest claim to being a cultural watershed in American history .
Edwards said that the New Jerusalem would not be "accomplished at once, as by some miracle" but would be "gradually
[Page 77]
The First Great A wakentng, 1730-60
brought to pass," presumably through human effort in cooperation w1th God's grace. Furthermore, Increase Mather notwithstanding, 1t would very likely begm "in the wilderness" -in America-for there men were not yet so corrupted by the Old World's decadence. The mighty outpouring of God's grace during the awakening seemed clearly to presage the approach of that glorious time when . . all the world [shall] be united in one amiable society. All nations, in all parts of the world, on every side of the globe, shall then be knit together 1n sweet harmony." EXplaining the meaning of the awakening to his parish in 1742, Edwards said,
In the years that lay ahead, more and more Americans came to share Edwards' view that America had been discovered and populated by Calvinistic, English-speaking Protestants so that "God might in it begin a new world in a spiritual respect. " American success in the French and Indian Wars gave further proof that God might have predestined the rising glory of America. John Adams sa1d that the Revolution commenced after 1765 "in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments." But in fact it had its beginning a quarter of a century earlier.
Finally, the New England phase of the First Great Awakening and the ideological reorientation that Edwards and his followers effected in the old Calvinistic world view helped to bring about a new social ethic-the pietistic contribution to late eighteenthcentury humanitarian reform. While in some respects this ethic can be seen as complementary to the benevolent sentiment among Enlightenment rationalists and Christian liberals, it was in fact based on a totally different rationale. Paradoxically, the rationalists and Arians based their social ethic on a more pessimistic reading of human nature than the Evangelical Calvinists. Reason and historical experience taught the rationalists that men are fundamentally motivated by self-interest and that few would ever have the moral self-discipline to overcome this. The Calvinist argued that men are
[Page 78]
Chapter 3
born innately depraved but can be reborn (as more and more of them were, every day) with a totally different nature. God's grace having infused new benevolent or "gracious affections" in their hearts, the converted no longer acted from self-love or self-mterest but from' . disinterested benevolence." When Edwards taugh t that true virtue or true holiness meant" disinterested benevolence toward Being in general," he meant by "Being in general" the total mystical beauty of God's pervading power and love, animating the universe; his followers, however, noting tliat men, too, are beings, suggested that true holiness meant serving one's fellow man from disinterested concern for both his eternal and thisworldly well-being.
Joseph Conforti has pointed out that Edwards' rather mystical view of disinterested benevolence led to a quietistic view of Christian ethics: "Edwards always felt more comfortable dilating on the subjective fruits of regeneration than upholding or making manifest its social and political consequences." He placed" holy action" last in the list of twelve distinguishing signs of converSIOn that he discussed in The Religious Affections. However, Samuel Hopkins, Edwards' most prestigious pupil, wrote a work to confute (or, as he said, "improve on") Edwards' doctrine. In it he redefined Being in general, Conforti notes, "and put earthly flesh on what in Edwards' thought was an abstract metaphysical concept.
. . . Where Edwards located true virtue in exalted consciousness, Hopkins placed it in elevated social behavior. Consequently evangelical activism superseded mystical quietism."
Hopkins did this by two means. First, he redefined Bcmg in general so as to give it a this-worldly component. Regeneration, he said, creates in man a universal benevolence or "love to God and our neighbors. . . or friendly affection to all intelligent beings." Second, he argued that rationalist followers of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in social ethics were wrong to argue that moral virtUe can be derived from self-love or enhghtened self-interest, because these are in fact nothing but selfishness. Selfishness can never be a means of attaining true holiness or true virtue: "Selfishness IS the source of all the profaneness and impiety in the world, and of all pride and ambition." Hence regeneration is in fact the transformation of human selfishness into human self-sacrifice or self-denial for
[Page 79]
The First Great Awakenmg, 1730-60
the good ofBemg in general and our neighbors. Hopkins made the new Evangehcal Calvinism more than closet piety or soul-winning. He moved it mto the world of social reform and set the example by attacking the sm of slavery in his own slaveholding communityNewport, Rhode Island-m 1770.
Yet even before this, as RIchard Bushman has pointed out, the Reverend Jonathan Lee delivered a new-light election sermon 'in Connecttcut (in 1766) in which he denounced the rationalist ethic of self-mterest and urged evangelical Calvinists to a higher concept of pubhc service' "Irregular and inordinate self-love and private mterest," said Lee, "have so much dominion in the heart that unless true benevolence and public spirit prevent, there is eminent danger that pnvate interest will be pursued at the expence, or built on the rums, of the pubhc weaL" Self-interest might corrupt, and mere ratIOnality or education was no guarantee of honesty. Lee's concept of "public spim" and Hopkins' ideal of "self-sacrifice" were eventually to merge with the neoclassical view of "civic vlftue" or "pubhc service" during the Revolutionary era. But the two men came to this common position from very different starting pomts.
Bushman notes that out of the First Great Awakening came a new concept of government and public good based on the reciprocal mterest of the governed and the governing. Under the older Puman theory, the social ethic stressed subjugation of private Interest to the covenanted society. The duty of government was to restrain the selfishness of the individual for the sake of the lOmmonwealth. But' 'Whereas public good at the beginning of the century had implied the denial of private interests for the sake of more transcendent values," Bushman writes, "it now [as of 1765] contained the promise also that government would serve private Interests. The civil authority was to act as the public's agent and not merely as its disciplinarian." Thus the kind of institutional restraint that had frustrated and confused rising American individualism from 1690 to 1740 disappeared. The government was to help the mdlvidual to fulfill himself, and the individual in turn was in times of crisis to sacrifice himself, out of disinterested benevolence (or CIVIC vlftue), for the general welfare. Voluntarism replaced coeccion, and a new kind of fraternity replaced the old covenant ideal
[Page 80]
Chapter 3
or, rather, gave it a revitalized form. As Jonathan Lee put it, "the happy tendency of vital piety to heal the maladies and rectify the disorders of the church of Christ" would expand, under the continuing power of the revival, to a "blessed tendency of vital piety to happify the civil state."
In the Middle Colonies the religious life in the early elghteenth century was more diverse, fragmented, and unstable than in the other two regions. Not only did it lack an established church system (outside the feeble Anglican establishment in four New York counties); it lacked even firm denominational organizations. The very atmosphere of toleration in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware contributed to the instability. Small religious groups, persecuted and deprived in Europe and the British Isles, flocked into these colonies as a haven. Their members, however, were usually poor, uneducated, and traditionally conservative farmers or villagers who tended to cluster together for security, since they were often isolated from their neighbors by language as well as religious barriers. Most frustrating for them was their lack of learned ministers, who in the old country had given order and cohesion to their communities. As they struggled to gain a livelihood from the soil, they were overwhelmed by a steady stream of newcomers, seeking assistance. Tension and anxiety arose in part from the newness of their settlements and in part from their indecision over how much of their cultural baggage they needed or wanted to retain. Whether to be clannish ethnic nationalists or new Americans was the crux of a very emotional dilemma.
Although Dutch settlers had been in New York City and along the Hudson since the early seventeenth century, their culture had been disrupted by the British conquest of their colony and the effort of royal governors to supplant their Calvinistic Dutch Reformed churches with an Anglican establishment. Faced with increasing religious restrictions, many of them moved southwestward to New Jersey, but they still looked to traditional leadership from their conservative New York pastors and from the" classis"
[Page 81]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
(the governing reltgious body) of the established church in the Netherlands. In 1719 several groups of these settlers along the Raritan River near New Brunswick, New Jersey, sent a request to Amsterdam for a learned minister. The classis of Dutch Reformed mmisters and elders sent Theodore J. Frelinghuysen to act as a missionary to these outposts of the mother church. Frelinghuysen, though German by birth, had been educated in Holland at the University of Lingen, where he was influenced by the remnantS of the old Puritan and Pilgrim pietism. He thus came to New Jersey eager to arouse the fervor of the conservative Dutch farmers, not realizing that the traditional order was what they expected and thought necessary for their spiritUal and psychological comfort. When Frelinghuysen began demanding more rigorous moral discipline from his Raritan Valley congregations and required a spiritual-crisis experience for admission to church membership (unknown in Holland), he roused a hornet's nest of opposition. Conservative parishioners in the four rural churches he served complained first to the New York pastors (who sympathized with their position) and then to the class is in Holland. Other parishlOners, however, found his spiritual zeal stimulating and through the conversion experiences that followed his pietistic preaching attalOed a greater security and assurance than they had known before. In the turmoil over this conflict between conservatism (formalism) and pietistic fervor a revival spirit arose in the years 1720-28 which some historians have seen as the first symptom of the First Great Awakening in the colonies.
A similar and more far-reaching clash between conservative and pietistic elements occurred among the foreign-born or first-generation immigrants in the Presbyterian churches. Presbyterianism was not new to America in the eighteenth century; but as a result of both English oppression of the Scotch-Irish in Northern Ireland and various schisms arising from theological changes among the Presbyterians in Scotland at the start of the eighteenth centUry, a tremendous new influx of Presbyterian immigrantS occurred. They were not especially welcome in New England. Many were shunted to the Blue Ridge Mountains to act as buffers against the Indians in the southern Anglican colonies, but most of these Scotch-Irish settled in the Middle Colonies, where, by the time of the Revolution, they were the dominant religious group. However, these
[Page 82]
Chapter 3
immigrants, like the Dutch, Scandinavian, and German groups, were intensely conservative. They sought psychological security by trying to maintain their old ways as peasant farmers and devout Calvinists. They wanted their church life in America to be as much as possible like the one they had left behind. Like the Dutch, they had been used to a state establishment whose civil authomies, through taxes, sustained the religious and educational lIfe of the community. But in the New World they had fev.: ministers and fewer schools.
Many of these Presbyterian settlers were twice uprooted within a single generation: from Scotland to Ireland and from there to the New World. The stresses of resettlement were great. They looked to their synods in Ireland and Scotland for guidance and missionary help. But most of the Presbyterian ministers who came to America (where congregations were poor and scattered and salaries-because not guaranteed by taxes-were scanty) were, like those in the Anglican churches, the dregs of the established system at home. Many were doctrinally unsound, badly educated, morally corrupt, intemperate, and psychologically unstable. They caused tension instead of alleviating it. Furthermore, the Enlightenment and the waning Calvinistic fervor in Great Britain were producing Arian, Arminian, and deistic inroads among the Presbyterians; this produced a spiritUal crisis in Scotland, where there were intense ecclesiastical problems over the maintenance of orthodoxy. The new immigrants brought these fears and problems with them to America; Old World fears sometimes dominated New World needs. After the founding of the first Presbyterian synod in America, in Philadelphia in 1717, the denomination faced a series of controversies; these had produced a serious schism just at the time George Whitefield was quickening the revivalistic fervor throughout the colonies (1740). The first of these controversies concerned doctrinal orthodoxy and church discipline. Called "the subscription controversy," it resulted from the conservatives' attempt to require all ministers to subscribe to the standard (Westminster) Calvinistic confession of faith before they could be licensed and ordained. The conservatives passed a rule in 1738 that all ministers must be educated at a university in the British Isles or at Yale or Harvard. This rule arose from the effort of the Reverend William Tennent
[Page 83]
..
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
and his four sons to educate a native Presbyterian ministry at an academy called the Log College in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania (twenty miles north of Philadelphia). Founded in 1726, the college (or academy) graduated sixteen to eighteen young men before it closed, following Tennent's death, in 1746.
Though William Tennent was a graduate of the University of Edmburgh, some conservatives disliked the pietistic tone of his young seminary graduates. Furthermore, his most talented son, Gilbert, had formed a friendship with Theodore Frelinghuysen, whose churches were near his at New Brunswick. Gilbert Tennent and his brother john had engaged in fervent preaching for conversion in the late 1720s (probably influenced by Frelinghuysen) and had produced a senes of local revivals, between 1728 and 1738, simtlar to those in Frelinghuysen's congregations (and to Edwards' m Massachusetts). Some of the Scotch-Irish immigrants praised these as works of God, while others considered them disruptive works of the devil and contrary to traditional Presbyterian practice. The Presby ten an churches in Britain did not require crisis converSion as a test of membership, and the imposition of this test as a requirement for membership in the New World was distUrbing.
In 1740 the issue reached a crisis. The synod of Philadelphia refused to ordain a recent graduate of the Log College, John Rowland. Rowland had been licensed to preach by the presbytery of New Brunswick, whteh was dominated by the Tennents and other pietists. They argued that the synod had no right to overrule their presbytery. But the issue was not ecclesiastical order; it was the Americanization of the Presbyterian church. The ecclesiastical quarrel was in fact a power struggle between traditionalists, who wanted to adhere rigidly to the old ways, and pietistic progressives, who wanted to acculturate their congregations to new circumstances to meet new needs. Hard upon the controversy over educational standards came the issue of itinerant revivalism, the "intrusion" of outside ministers into the parishes. Again the conservatives argued that the progressives (soon to be known as "the New Sides") were trymg to arouse the people against their own pastors by resorting to emotional appeals cloaked as religious revivals.
Gilbert Tennent seized upon the arrival of George Whitefield to press the case for a revitalization of Presbyterianism by means of
[Page 84]
Chapter 3
itinerant preaching, crisis conversion, and an internal call to preach The latter point, frequently raised by new lights in New England, was a defensive thrust against the conservatives. It held that no minister who had not undergone a conversion experience and then been "called by the Spirit" was capable of preaching God's truth with power to save souls. However highly regarded they might be in the British Isles, mere learning and orthodoxy were, in America, insufficient standards for the ministry. In the spring of 1740 Tennent delivered the most vehement blast against the "Old Side" conservatives that was to appear anywhere in the colonies during the whole awakening. He delivered it while he was "intruding" in the Old Side parish of Nottingham, Pennsylvania, on the border of Maryland. He was there, he said, because pietistic ministers had a duty to preach to the spiritually starved people whom the Old Side preachers were neglecting.
Tennent's sermon "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry," indicates that there were some elements of class antagonism embedded in the controversy, as well as a generation gap and an acculturation gap. He implied that some antirevival ministers were more interested in their own social status and the" trade" of preaching than in saving the souls of common folk. Comparing the Old Sides to the Pharisees, who opposed the itinerant revival preaching of Jesus and his disciples, he said, "these Orthodox, Letter-learned. . . old Pharisees were very proud and conceited; they loved the uppermost seats in the Synagogues and to be called Rabbi. . . ; they were masterly and positive in their assertions, as if, forsooth, knowledge must die with them; they look'd upon others that differed from them, and the common People, with an Air of Disdain. ' ,
Not only anticlericalism but anti-intellectualism and demagoguery were evident in Tennent's sermon. The antirevivalists "came into the Priest's Office for a Piece of Bread; they took it up as a Trade, and therefore endeavoured to make the best Market of it they could. 0 Shame! . . . Credit [status] and Money may draw them," but, "being greedy of filthy lucre," they are guided by "the Devil"; they are "wicked [and] natural men," untouched by the supernatural power of conversion. Consequently, "their Discourses are cold and sapless. . . ; they want [lack] divine Author-
[Page 85]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
Ity " Seeking prestige, favor, and wealth, the Old Sides spoke only plautUdes to keep the support of rich and complacent members who paid their high salaries. "They had not the Courage or Honesty to thrust the Nail of Terror into sleeping Souls" but only told them to perform the rituals, mouth the creeds, and do their "duty, duty" to church and civil authority. "0 sad!" These "mOlal Negroes" are white on the outside but black as sin within. Tennent concluded this attack by urging the common people to fmd relief for their pent-up frustration where they got the most help: "If the great Ends of Hearing [the gospel] may be attained as well and better by Heanng of another Minister than our own, then I see not why we should be under a fatal Necessity of hearing him, I mean our Parish-minister, perpetually."
1. ]. Trinterud, the historian of this awakening among the Presbyterians, entitled his study The Forming of an American TradItIOn (1949)-the tradltion of appealing over the heads of duly constituted authority to a higher law and asking the people to judge and act in terms of their own experiential needs and satisfactions. The Log College men, Trinterud wrote,
The year after Tennent's blast, the synod expelled the New Brunswick Presbytery from the denomination. Attempts by New Englanders in the denomination Oonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr) to end the dispute failed. For seventeen years "the Truth" was put to the test of experience. The Log College men, joined by other prorevival Presbyterians from other presbyteries, formed a new synod, the New York Synod, in 1745, consisting of presbytenes with ministers from Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. This synod ordained graduates from the Log College and its affihated academies, founded by young men trained by Wilham Tennent. It sent its itinerants into every hamlet where
[Page 86]
Chapter 3
Scotch-Irish congregations were looking for assistance (between 1738 and 1741 it received eighty requests for ministerial supplies). Its evangelists went even to Virginia and the Blue Ridge Mountains to carry the revival to the dispersing Scotch-Irish on the frontier. In 1746 they obtained a charter for the College of New Jersey (first located at Elizabeth, then at Princeton). Three of its first five presidents were Yale graduates (including Jonathan Edwards), and two were graduates of the Log College, including Samuel Finley, who had been expelled from Connecticut in 1742 for breaking the law against itinerancy.
If conversion was the fundamental personal experience of the First Great Awakening, itinerant preaching was the fundamental social phenomenon. Harry Stout has recently pointed out the importance of itinerant revivalism to the emergence of intercolonial unity and the forming of a single American identity. Far more than colonial newspapers, printed sermons, or letters of correspondence, itinerant preaching constituted a new form of mass communication in America. Itinerants not only spread the word of God's new-light ideology but delivered that message in a new medium-the spoken word of the common man. Oral communication by laymen without formal education (as many itinerant new lights were, especially among the Separates, Baptists, and Methodists) meant that ordinary people were speaking to each other with new authority. Their power did not come from their learned academic degree, their ordination by some clerical body, their role as members of the established upper class, but simply from the Spirit of God What was more, they did not speak by leave of any local authonty or relate their message to local circumstances and institutions They did not even bother to seek admission to local pulpits but delivered their messages in private homes, to small groups in the marketplace, or to large groups in barns, schoolhouses, or open fields. They democratized religion; they broke down colony and class lines, denominational and regional differences.
If the medium was the message of itinerancy, it was a message fraught with importance for the creation of America's identity. If God spoke through the common man, the voice of the people was the voice of God. If he spoke everywhere in the same way, then mobihty to the West was part of God's plan for perfecting the
[Page 87]
The Fast Great Awakening, 1730-60
world. Preaclung, formerly confined within meetinghouses, parish boundaries, and specifIc local regulations, was now boundless. Furthermore, these preachers emphasized not doctrinal creeds, theologtcal dogmas, or specific rituals and ordinances; their first and pnmary interest was to convey their own spiritual experience of rebmh ThIS experience, conveyed in the words and accents of men of theu own social rank, conveyed dramatically the view that God was no respecter of persons. God's power could manifest itself through the moUths of the most ordinary person. He did indeed choose the weak and ignorant to confound the learned and powerful. Not rank, education, and political power but the persuasive power of the spoken word was the message of revivalism. "The revIvals [and revivaltsts] of this awakening," as Sidney Mead has saId, "demonstrated the spectacular effectiveness of persuasion alone to churches rapIdly being shorn of coercive power." And respect for the message, acknowledgment of its power, meant respect for those who bore it and those who accepted it. "The rev1valists," Mead also notes, "stressed religious experience and results-namely converSlOn-more than correctness of belief, adherence to creedal statements, and proper observances of traditional forms." All of this was to have a marked effect when, after 1765, the revitalization movement entered its period of political reformation and institutional restructuring.
Ultimately the New Slde Presbyterians demonstrated that their method of revitalization (or acculturation) through ttinerancy was sup en or to that of the Old Sides. When the two factions reunited in 1758, the number of Old Side ministers in the Philadelphia synod had decreased from 24 to 23, while the New Sides in the New York Synod had lOcreased from 22 to 72. The congregations and churches of the New SIdes had likewise grown to more than three times the SIze of the Old Sides. While Tennent accommodated to the C0n<;ervatlves by dropping the requirement that a crisis conver. Slon wac; fundamental to church membership, the reunited der,omination adhered to h1S rule that no ministers could be licensed or ordained without eV1dence of an "inward call" from God to preach. A new kind of relig1ous leadership began to emerge.
The success ofFreltnghuysen among the Dutch Calvinists in New Jersey and of the New Sldes among the Scotch and Scotch-Irish
[Page 88]
Chapter 3
immigrants throughout the Middle Colonies was not matched by the effons of Count Zinzendorf to unite and revitalize the many small German groups in this region: Moravians, Lutherans, German Reformed, Schwenkfelders, Siebentagers, Dunkers, Mennonites. A Moravian who assumed the role of a Lutheran bishop, Zinzendorf came to Pennsylvania in 1741 to bring the pietistic movement in Germany to his countrymen in the New World. He tried also to extend his ecumenism to the Scotch-Irish, but language barriers, heightened by the fact that most of the Germans were not Calvinists, prevented this. Nor would the Calvinists of the German Reformed churches accept his overtures. The small German sects proved too tenacious of their own pietistic, tightly knit, peasant communitarian patterns. Somewhat better off than the Scotch-Irish, more committed to living and working in cohesive groups, and kept united by the animosity of English-speaking neighbors, these groups resisted acculturation. But as a result they did not grow. Or, rather, they grew inward, so intent on perfecting their own communion that they remained outside the mainstream of American religious and social development.
The absence of state churches in the Middle Colonies left the New Side pietists with no particular political focus for their rebellion. Their anticlerical diatribes against the denominattonal fathers must not be taken as parallels to the anticlericalism of deists. If there were bad clergymen and laymen interested only in power and 'Wealth, there were also good clergymen and laymen interested in saving souls. There are no significant overtones of social revolt or political reform in the Middle Colonies' revivals other than opening the ranks of the clergy to talented new men and giving the laity a larger role in church affairs. The acculturation process served primarily to give self-confidence and American identity to the recent immigrants. With the formation of a college to supply an educated native ministry, the Scotch-Irish (and later, with the forming of Queens College in New Brunswick in 1766, the Dutch) entered the American mainstream. The Reverend John Witherspoon, though brought from Scotland to head Princeton College in 1768, saw no reason not to serve in the Continental Congress, sign the Declaration ofIndependence, and work in every way he could for
[Page 89]
The Fast Great Awakening, 1730-60
the patriot cause. The Scotch-Irish were doughty supporters of the RevolutIOn everywhere.
In the southern colonies the failure of the Anglican church .to achIeve significant autonomy and political leverage left the ecclesiastical system in the hands of the same lay gentry who dominated the political establishment These gentry opposed the creation of an episcopate in America, preferring to keep the vestries, the clergy, and ecclesiastical taxes under their own control. The royal governors and a series of "commissaries" to represent the bishop of London constituted only a limited counterforce to the plantation gentry's domll1ation of parish life. For nominal Anglicans the social tensions between rich and poor were alleviated by economic opportunities that allowed easy access to power and wealth. But for non-Anglicans the social order was all but closed. The weakness of the Anglican church, however, left a spiritual vacuum. There was in effect no ecclesiastical stress-relief mechanism available for even the ordinary anxieties of frontier life. Violence in military activities, problems in controlling the slaves, warfare with Indians, and hunting and dueling provided outlets for some kinds of tensions but doubtless exacerbated others. The revelry of social life provided occasional means of psychic catharsis (gambling, horse racing, shooting matches, cock-fighting, card games). But none of these replaced the spiritual solace of a church in cases of sickness or death, and after 1740, when widespread social dislocations led to deepseated personal stress and cultural distortion, the common people became eager to hear the words of invading itinerant revivalists from the Middle Colonies and New England. The spiritual message of these men of God brought extensive emotional responses from the poorer sort, but it also aroused the antagonism of those in authority.
Emotional dissatisfaction with the spiritual inadequacies of Anglicanism at the bottom of society was matched by intellectual alienation at the top. Men of education, wealth, and leisure, many of whom had traveled in Europe and were widely read, came under
[Page 90]
Chapter 3
the influence of Enlightenment ideas that challenged their formal allegiance to Anglican doctrines. Arianism and Armimanism, which in New England led to the Unitarian movement among the upper class, produced in the South a broad-church or latitudinarian movement within Anglicanism. Men like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington emerged from their reading in science, the classics, and rationalist philosophy with deistic views that reduced their religious activism to merely formal participation. Washington's minister said that he never once saw him kneel to God. Jefferson and Madison later took the lead in disestablishing their own denomination. This apathy toward the preferred status of the Church of England did not at first prevent most of the gentry from opposing the social disturbances that resulted from the fervent revivalism of itinerant dissenters.
The dedicated new-light missionaries from New England and new-side itinerants from the Middle Colonies who went south after 1740 in response to manifold calls for their services found a social order rife with confusion and discontent. Not only a religious but an institutional vacuum had developed in many areas where there was no church, no school, no ministerial leadership to provide a sense of order and guidance in the competitive struggle for existence and success. The first calls came after Whitefield had aroused widespread interest in the new theology of Evangelical Calvinism. But Whitefield had been repudiated by most of the clergy in his own denomination, and there were few able to answer the questions about new spiritual sources of power. Many poor and middling folk, nominally Anglican, who agreed with Whitefield's condemnation of the established clergy as unconcerned with the spiritual needs of their flocks (and interested primarily in hobnobbing with the gentry at their dances, foxhunts, and card games) did not know where to turn for a different kind of ministry . When a group of pious laymen in Hanover County, Virginia, led by Samuel Morris, an ironmonger, began holding meetings to read aloud the printed sermons of Whitefield, they were arrested and fined for failing to attend the p.arish church on the Sabbath. When they invited a presbyterian minister, named John Roan, from Gilbert Tennent's presbytery in New Jersey to come to preach to them in 1744, he neglected to obtain permission to preach from the
[Page 91]
The FlCSt Great Awakening, 1730-60
local justice of the peace and was cited by the grand jury for breach of the ecclesiastical laws. Governor Gooch had agreed to tolerate Presbyterianism after 1720 in the unsettled areas west of the Blue RIdge Mountains, but he did not want to tolerate dissenting churches east of the mountains. During the prosecution of Roan in Aprtl1745, Gooch denounced those "false teachers that are lately crept into this government who, without orders [i.e., Anglican ordination] or licenses or producing any testimonial of their educatIon or sect, professing themselves ministers under the pretended influence of new Itght or extraordinary impulse and such ltke fanatical and enthusiastic notions, led the innocent and Ignorant people into all kinds of delusions." Roan soon returned north, but he was followed by William Robinson and other New Side Presbyterians, some of whom roundly attacked the Anglican clergy for their spiritual deadness, declaring their parish churches to be "the synagogues of Satan."
In the spnng of 1747 the governor of Virginia ordered all justices of the peace and other magistrates' 'to suppress and prohibit. . . all itinerant preachers." For some reason, that same spring, the governor and council were willing to grant a license to preach to Samuel Davies, a colleague of Tennent's, perhaps because he carried documents from the New York synod ordaining him as an evangelist. Davies was allowed in 1748 to preach to four dissenting congregations in Hanover County, but when he requested a license for an assistant pastor to relieve him of part of this burden, he was turned down. He was told first that the Toleration Act of 1689 did not apply in the colonies; second, that it was improper for pastors to be itinerant; and third, that the schism among the Presbyterians in the Middle Colonies made it impossible to tell which ministers were legItimate, orthodox Presbyterians and which were not. After considerable effort Davies finally convinced the governor that the Toleration Act did apply and that the New Side Presbyterians were orthodox. This broke a very important barrier to the spread of dissent in Virginia. Thereafter the Presbyterians were able to obtain ltcenses to preach, though their itinerancy was restricted.
But when the Separate Baptist new lights came down from New England (led by Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall in 1754), they disdained asking for licenses. They argued that the Word of God
[Page 92]
Chapter 3
could not be limited by the power of civil authorities-a position they had been forced into by the laws outlawing itinerancy in Connecticut, after they had separated from the Congregational churches. Not only would they not abide by the licensing and antiitinerant regulations in Virginia and the Carolinas, but they brought to the South the movement for total separation of church and state. Their congregations were poor, scattered, and subject to constant persecution by the authorities in the South until after the Revolu tion began. .
Rhys Isaac, who has done the most intensive research into the Separate Baptist movement in Virginia, argues that it was not only an "evangelical revolt" and a "challenge to the traditional order in Virginia" but was, in its more violent phase, betWeen 1765 and 1775, "a radical social revolt, indicative of real strains within the society. " Mobs led by upper-class Anglicans encouraged attacks on the meetings of these revivalists and boarded up their churches. Many were beaten, jailed, and fined. Isaac says that the success of the new-light and new-side movements in the South caused "a crisis of self-confidence. . . in the Virginia gentry." Some magistrates charged the Baptists with" carrying on a mutiny against the authority of the land." (Ihis was not unlike the charges raised by New England justices of the peace against the Separates and Separate Baptists from 1745 to 1760.)
The new-light Baptists denied that their movement was political. "We concern not ourselves with the government, we form no intrigues. . . nor make any attempts to alter the constitution of the kingdom to which as men we belong." They contended, they said, only for the spiritual and moral purification of the social order. Yet, as Isaac correctly notes, to change the norms and values of a society, to say nothing of its religious ideology, was rightly perceived by those in power as an attack on their legitimacy. In effect it asserted that the mlers were not entitled to respect because they lacked proper moral and spiritual qualifications. Isaac lists the contrasting values of the lower-class pietists and the upper-class Anglicans: where the gentry were arrogant and haughty, the Baptists tried to be humble and long-suffering; where the gentry sought violent challenges (man-to-man) and courted tests of skill
[Page 93]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
and daring through violent confrontations (in duels, horse races, and cockfights), the Baptists honored reconciliation and harmony among men; where the gentry were self-centered and willful individualists, the Baptists emphasized brotherhood, mutual con. sideratIon, and caring; where the gentry flouted law and order by mobbing the preachers of God, the Baptists encouraged self. discipline and group discipline for the preservation of order. It was as though the new lights found the gentry responsible for the conunued barbarity of frontier life and consciously sought to restore a sense of social responsibility. The gentry were setting a bad example by continuing the worst aspects of man's combative nature; the Baptists tried to set an example of man's peaceable and supportive character. The southern planter used his leisure and talent for competitive self-display; the poor, hard-working pietist preferred cooperation and mutual'respect. Thus in the norms and values for which the new-light movement stood in the South, Isaac concludes, "The beginnings of a cultural disjunction betWeen gentry and sections of the lower orders, where hitherto there had been a continuum, posed a serious threat to traditional leaders of the community." These leaders reacted by repression and ridicule. They laughed at the emotionalism of Baptist revival meetings, disdained their moral puritanism, and abused their preachers as ignorant, illiterate fools who had pretensions beyond their class. Only learned men of the better sort were considered fit for the ministry. In the Western world at that time, it was everywhere an upper-class vocation.
Isaac's description of the awakening in Virginia corresponds in many respects to Bushman's description of it in Connecticut, though in New England towns the differences in wealth and rank were less conspicuous and the clergy closer to the people. The awakening in Virginia, he says, was an effort to reorganize society on different principles. It was "a popular response to mounting social disorder"; the conversion experience' 'was at the heart of the popular evangelical movement." Through that experience, no matter under what denominational preacher, "a great burden of guilt" was lifted from those who knew they were antagonistic toward their fathers and father surrogates. Isaac's summary of rpc
[Page 94]
Chapter 3
awakening's meaning among VirgiOla's Baptists can stand for its essence everwhere:
The same may be said for the Methodist movement, though it started much later and was not nearly so widespread before the Revolution. As of 1776 there were only 3,000 Methodists throughout the colonies, and all of them were ostensibly within the Anglican church. If the Baptists attacked the gentry life-style from outside the establishment, the Methodists tried to do it from within.
The Methodist movement began within the Church of England in the 1730s, when]ohn Wesley and George Whitefield were both members of "The Holy Club" at Oxford. Wesley, like Whitefield, went to the colony of Georgia in 1736 to strengthen Anglicanism, but Whitefield proved a far more successful revivalist in the American colonies. Wesley, on the other hand, was far more successful in England. For a time the two worked closely together, but in 1739 they split after a bitter theological dispute over Calvinism . Wesley attacked the doctrines of predestination and irresistible grace, while Whitefield defended them. Whitefield could never have played so important a part in the First Great Awakening in the colonies had he not been a Calvinist. Wesley took the view that Christ died for the salvation of all men (not just for the predestined elect) and that men have an important role to play in obtaining their own salvation. Theologically these views
[Page 95]
The First Great AwakenlOg, 1730-60
were called" Arminianism, " and to most Calvinists they were gnevous doctnnal errors But they were not incompatible with AnghcaOlsm
Wesley's efforts to reVive piety among Anglicans in the British Isles were successful not only because of his charismatic preaching and the marvelous hymns of his brother Charles, embodying pis Views, but also because he created a magnificent organizational structure for his movement. Of particular importance were his use of itinerant evangelists, lay preaching, and the formation of small "classes" or groups of converts to form pietistic nuclei within each pansh. After 1769 he sent a number of his followers to the colonies, where they proved highly popular in many Anglican communities. Because Methodist preaching did not openly challenge Anglican trad1tlOn or authority but simply urged a great evangelical piety and a stncter ethtcal moralIty, it was supported by a number of ordained Angltcan priests, among them Devereux]arratt in Virginia. Methodist Itinerants, like Separate and Separate Baptist preach: ers, were popular among the poorer members of the community, who felt estranged from a church that catered to the upper classes. Consequently, the Methodists tapped the same revitalization spirit as the Baptists in the South, but they were less successful in New England Their lay preachers organized "circuits" in the scattered backwoods settlements, where ordained Anglicans seldom bothered to preach. In each community they formed "classes" of ten or twelve converts, who strengthened each other in spiritUal activity and watched over each other's moral discipline. And, like the Baptist congregations, these Methodist groups were despised by the gentry for the countercultural values they espoused.
Unfoftunately , Wesley, like most Anglican ministers, took the king's side in the Revolution. Hence the revival spirit that his movement had so successfully begun in the late 1760s collapsed after 1776. It did not begin to revive until after 1784, when Wesley took the dramatic step of separating the Methodist movement in America from the Anglican (by then the Protestant Episcopal) church and created the Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Its doctrines of experiential conversion, moral purity, and growing in grace (which Wesley formalized as "perfectionism" or "sanctification" through a "second blessing") were in harmony with the
[Page 96]
Chapter 3
spirit (if not with the Calvinist theology) of the First Great Awakening. It was to become even more popular in the Second Great Awakening, when the Methodists reaped the advantage of the reaction against "Consistent Calvinism" and when their circuit-riding itinerant system proved tremendously effective on the trans-Appalachian frontier.
In the decade after 1765, the concept of political independence, Gordon Wood notes in The Creation of the American Republtc (1969), "became not only political but moral. Revolution, republicanism, and regeneration all blended in American thinking." The awakening had regenerated not only thousands of individuals but the spiritual core of the whole people. Such evils as remained were considered more the result of British corruption than American sin; or, rather, it was America's sin only so long as Americans tolerated British corruption. In one sense, as Wood notes, the clergy saw "British tyranny as a divine punishment for the abomination of the American people." In another sense, God had clearly expressed his great faith and hope for America by sending it such a revival of true virtue. God had therefore renewed his covenant with his New Israel. And, with God's help, they could build a harmonious new social order of "comprehensive benevolence" and fulfill their millennial dream of being' 'the eminent example of every divine and social virtue" to a perishing world. Wood's conclusion to his chapter "Republican Regeneration" makes explicit the fundamental link between the First Great Awakening and the Revolution:
[Page 97]
The First Great Awakening, 1730-60
The interval between 1760 and 1789 can hardly be seen, then, as a "declension" from the fervor of the awakening but rather as an extension of it. The RevolUtion, implementing the new republican Ideology, was in fact the secular fulfillment of the religious ideals of the First Great A wakeOlng. In liberating their country from British tyranny, the colonists were both freeing their consciences from a rebellion against the authority of their fathers and asserting the nSIng (postmillennial) glory of America.