Conceived in Liberty (123 page)

Roman Catholics were a small but uniformly persecuted minority. This despite the fact that there were virtually no Catholics, except in Maryland among the old Calvert aristocracy and among the Pennsylvania Germans. They were excluded from most of the provinces, and any suspected Catholic was treated with hate and fear as a menace to society, a subversive, and a probable agent of France or Spain.

By the first decades of the eighteenth century, religion, though still established, had lost its commanding power in society and its practitioners their old dogmatic zeal. The Puritan theocracy gradually but steadily dissolved during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Some of the reasons why Puritan zeal flagged were the debilitating effects of the growth of culture and worldly cosmopolitanism on it, plus the liberal trends emerging from within the Puritan church to become powerful in Harvard College, the very training ground of Massachusetts Puritanism. The liberal Puritans, incidentally, used the Salem witch-hunt effectively as an object lesson of the consequences of unchecked religious superstition and frenzy. In the Southern colonies, the Anglican establishment was largely a formal shell behind which religion
per se
had very little impact on the people. The Virginia squire, for example, was naturally and habitually a churchgoer and vestryman; but far more for institutional and social than for deeply religious reasons. The Anglican ministry had little influence in the Southern colonies, even though the vestry in the state church was the basic unit of local government. In fact, there is generally a clearly discernible correlation between the governmental perquisite of an establishment and the dwindling of religious zeal in the society. Even in dedicated Pennsylvania, as we have seen, recently intense Quaker zeal faded rather rapidly and a more worldly and less-principled Quaker generation replaced the old “holy experiment.” Moreover, in Pennsylvania, the Quakers were by midcentury far outnumbered by other creeds. As for the Ulster Scot frontiersmen, they were almost devoid of ministers during much of this period. Hence religious activity slackened greatly in that numerous group.

The growing liberalization of the churches was also a function of the new spirit abroad in Europe: the great rationalist movement we know now as the Enlightenment. The intellectual emphasis in England was shifting from a Calvinist preoccupation with pure faith, divine revelation, and the depravity of man, to an Enlightenment belief in the supremacy of man’s reason and in the possibility of his goodness and his progress. The Enlightenment emphasis was on individual liberty, including the sphere of religion. Isaac Newton’s great achievement in the late seventeenth century gave a powerful impetus—despite the great physicist’s own personal inclination—to the growth of rationalism. Here was a mighty achievement of man using his reason to uncover the hitherto hidden and mysterious laws of nature. For the eighteenth century, Newton’s achievement had an enormously liberating impact. As the great poet Alexander Pope celebrated:

Nature and nature’s law lay hidden in night,

God said: “Let Newton be,” and all was light

And in America, William Livingston, future governor of New Jersey, hailed the “immortal Newton: whose illustrious name will shine on records of
eternal fame.” Even the Reverend Cotton Mather incurred the distrust of such hard-shell Puritans as Samuel Sewall in 1714 by accepting the Copernican system. Clearly, even Mather was displaying a softness toward modern trends.

Newton’s works graced libraries and private bookshelves throughout colonial America. Also very popular in America was John Locke’s late seventeenth-century essay
Concerning Human Understanding,
which set forth an empiricist philosophy and psychology. The works of both Newton and Locke contributed to a more rationalist and liberal view of religion.

While liberalism made great strides in New England, it had by no means completely conquered Puritanism or even Harvard by the end of the first third of the eighteenth century. Despite the great fears of the orthodox that liberal, Arminian doctrines were spreading in New England, there were few Arminian ministers, and no Arminian works had yet been published in America. (Arminians were followers of the Dutch liberal theologian Jacobus Arminius [1560–1609], who stressed the moral freedom and responsibility of the individual to achieve salvation partly by his own merits.) Ensconced in the theology chair at Harvard was the impeccably orthodox Reverend Edward Wigglesworth, and at Marlborough the Reverend Benjamin Kent was forced out of the ministry for his advanced liberal views.

Still, by the end of the first third of the eighteenth century, liberalism was advancing and religion was definitely declining as a vital force in the lives of the people.

Into this relaxing atmosphere came a great reaction, which has become known in rather loaded terms as the Great Awakening. Since the Great Awakening was certainly a peoples’ movement, it has been dubbed as necessarily a progressive force by Marxist and neo-Marxist historians. But it was nothing of the sort. The Great Awakening was a profoundly reactionary counterblow to the emergence of a liberal and more rational and cosmopolitan religious atmosphere. It set itself determinedly against all that was enlightened, and constituted an attempt to return to the pure Calvinism of the previous century. This is particularly true of the form taken by the Great Awakening in New England, where the religious revival had its most eminent leader.

The founder of the Great Awakening in New England was the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, minister of the important inland town of Northampton, Massachusetts. Born in Connecticut, young Edwards, who came from a long line of Puritan ministers on both his father’s side and his mother’s, was graduated from and taught at Yale, the center of Puritan orthodoxy. He then took up his post at Northampton in 1727. Edwards was horrified to find Northampton happily filled with a most un-Puritan addiction to “mirth and jollity,” including the frequenting of taverns. Edwards began to thunder at these modern corruptions, and moved on to rail at the rising menace of Arminianism and its “papist” view that salvation was a function of a man’s free will and his consequent good works. What was happening to the good old creed of their fathers: of the depravity of man, of the predestination of the elect, of reliance on faith and not on reason? Was the pervasive Calvinist fear of hellfire and damnation to be replaced by the modern namby-pamby view that
God is love? To the sinners—and who is not a sinner?—Edwards warned: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell much as anyone holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire.”

It is possible to pinpoint the time when the rapidly growing influence of this oratory reached a crisis and accelerated and burst into flame: December 1734. Religious concerns swept the people of Northampton: “other discourse than of the things of religion would scarcely be tolerated in any company.” In an orgy of proclaiming their repentance, over three hundred people of Northampton soon professed conversion to the true faith. Children formed prayer groups to repent the monstrousness of their sins, and Edwards’ own uncle committed suicide in remorse. The intense religious excitement faded in Northampton by the spring, but the precedent had been set and the revivals of the Great Awakening spread to other towns in the colonies.

Apart from the content of the creed, the mechanism and strategy of the revival movement was profoundly reactionary: in contrast to the older Calvinism, it functioned by whipping up the emotions of the masses rather than by serving or convincing their intellect. With emotional frenzy and hysteria suspending sober and rational conviction, the leaders of the revivals soon reached the point of making this frenzy the acid test of a person’s true Christianity: a man, even a minister of Christ, was still a sinner unless he too had been born again, and experienced conversion by emotional hysteria.

Meanwhile, the Great Awakening had begun independently among Calvinists in New Jersey. It was launched there by the Reverend Theodore J. Frelinghuysen of the Dutch Reformed Church. Frelinghuysen arrived in New Jersey from Holland in 1720 and immediately began an evangelistic revivalism, attacking the sobriety and intellectuality of Dutch Reformed Orthodoxy. The new revivalism soon split the Dutch churches into pro- and anti-Frelinghuysen factions, which were battling furiously by 1723. In three more years, Frelinghuysen’s converts were increasing and spreading beyond New Jersey. A particularly important convert was the Reverend Gilbert Tennent, a young English-speaking Presbyterian who took up the task of spreading the revival among Presbyterians in New Jersey. Tennent and his ministerial brothers soon controlled the New Brunswick Presbytery of Central New Jersey, and emotional revivalism spread throughout rural New Jersey and to Newark, and on to Long Island and Pennsylvania. The revival encountered bitter opposition among the Presbyterian ministry, angry at the emotionalism of the new movement.

The various trends of the revival movement were soon fused into a Great Awakening by the first of the continental tours of the famous English evangelical preacher, the Reverend George Whitefield. Young Whitefield was one of the first members of the small Holy Club at Oxford
University, which stressed evangelical preaching to the masses and constituted the first of the Methodists. Graduated from Oxford in 1736, Whitefield was ordained an Anglican priest and soon won fame as by far the most popular and crowd-pleasing evangelist of the day. It was soon to become evident, however, that Whitefield was not a true Methodist, for while he and John Wesley used similar evangelical methods, Wesley was at once a liberal believer in free will and in more rigorous observation of the Anglican rite, while Whitefield cared little for ritual and a great deal for Calvinist orthodoxy. Whitefield and his followers soon broke off to form the Calvinistic Methodists.

Whitefield’s important tour of America took place in 1739 and 1740 as he crisscrossed the colonies drawing enormous crowds, arousing great enthusiasm and cementing the whole revival movement. Harvard students were roused and converted en masse, and even the cynical Benjamin Franklin was greatly impressed. In contrast, the brilliant young liberal Jonathan Mayhew, studying for the ministry at Harvard, wrote bitterly of Whitefield’s largely subliterate following; as for himself, “I heard him [Whitefield] once; and it was as low, confused, puerile, conceited, ill natured, enthusiastic a performance as I ever heard.” Whitefield polarized the religious structure of the colonies by thundering his attacks against the dominant clergy and their parishioners.

All too many historians have been misled into treating this movement as a great lower-class protest against the wealthy and the dominant classes. An attack and a protest it was, but of what kind? Not any sort of egalitarian or Marxist rallying cry but a profoundly reactionary and demagogic appeal to the masses against the liberalism, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism, and sobriety of the religion of the day. In short, this was a cry of mystical religious fundamentalism against the trappings of civilization that had begun to emerge in America. Whitefield denounced Christians and their ministers for not having experienced their Christianity in an emotional frenzy. He deplored colleges such as Harvard for being seedbeds of liberalism. He vilified the luxuries of the rich. That this cry appealed to the lower classes— indeed to many people of all classes—is beside the point: this was a religious and not an economic class movement.

Whitefield’s triumphal tour introduced him to his admiring allies Tennent and Edwards. Tennent was moved to level a bitter attack on the “unconverted ministry,” and, to the applause of Whitefield and other evangelists, joined in trying to weed out of Christianity all those ministers who did not support the revival movement.

Whitefield’s preaching in Northampton brought a dramatic new upsurge of revivalism to New England. During early 1741, Edwards and other ministers became itinerant evangelists throughout New England, arousing demonstrations of frenzy and huge crowds. Edwards warned of “sinners in the
hands of an angry God” and the Reverend James Davenport from Long Island denounced the bulk of the Massachusetts ministry as “unconverted and... leading their people blindfold to hell.”

These bitter attacks of course provoked a countermovement in the churches. The reaction as well as the attacks spread through various denominations.
As
we have seen, Whitefield paid no attention to the Anglican creed and made his appeal to all Calvinists. The polarization in Massachusetts and New England especially highlights the nature of the Great Awakening itself. For the opposition to the Great Awakening consisted of two disparate groups: the conservatives like the Reverend Mr. Wigglesworth, aghast at the emotionalism and antiintellectualism of the revival; and the liberals, headed by the Reverend Charles Chauncy of the First Church of Boston, who opposed virtually everything the Awakening stood for. The criticisms of the two groups unsurprisingly differed. Wiggles-worth centered his attack on the disorderly individuality of the revival movement, whereas Chauncy in his
Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England
(1743) concentrated on its fundamentalist emotionalism. By the very nature of polarization it was inevitable that the most thoroughgoing group of critics, the liberals, should take the lead in attacking the Great Awakening. Epitomizing the liberal-rationalist attack on the Awakening in the colonies was this statement by “Philaretes” in the
South Carolina Gazette:
“As none but rational creatures are capable of religion, so there is no true religion but in the use of reason... if we do not make it our own by understanding the reasons for it... we offer to God the
sacrifice of fools,
in which he has no pleasure.”

The Congregational ministry soon split into the “New Lights,” who joined in the Awakening, and the “Old Lights,” who opposed it. The majority of the Massachusetts ministerial convention condemned the revival for “its errors and disorders,” while in Connecticut the general convocation of the established ministry induced the legislature to prohibit itinerant preaching. Throughout New England, revivalists were splitting from their congregations and forming separate churches to become known generally as Separatists.