The eighteenth century in America was a time of awakening from the slumber of the past. Light was shed on the darkness of superstition, irrationality, autocracy, aristocratic privilege, and dogma. The individual, weighed down by the chains of time, institutions, thought, and traditions, became unencumbered, liberated. The new science taught Americans the value of reason, the laws of motion, the tools of empiricism. Political and social philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic discovered the laws of nature that applied to society and government. Religious thinkers broke from the constraints of orthodoxy, presenting Christians with the gift of choosing how best to recognize, worship, and serve God. The Great Awakening, beginning in the 1730s, was a reaction to the limits of the past and to the social and economic constraints of the present. The awakeners shared a vision of a society based on the recognition that God’s will was the basis for human actions, thought, institutions, history, existence.

CALVINISTS AND PURITANS

American history, indeed, seemed to be shaped by the will of God. So argued seventeenth-century New England Puritans such as William Bradford (in Of Plymouth Plantation) and Cotton Mather (in Magnalia Christi Americana), who believed that divine providence led religious reformers to America to fulfill the visions of the first protestant reformers, in particular John Calvin. As Jeremy Belknap wrote in his History of New-Hampshire (1784), “It is happy for America that its discovery and settlement by the Europeans happened at a time, when they wee emerging from a long period of ignorance and darkness. The discovery of the magnetic needle, the invention of printing, the revival of literature and the reformation of religion, had caused a vast alteration in their views, and taught them the true use of their rational and active powers.” Likewise Calvin believed that God shed light upon His will and His works for those who could discern it and act upon such knowledge for the sake of His kingdom. Calvin thought that the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation was the individual examination of God’s holy word in scripture and in nature. The awareness of what is the true and original expression of Christianity would lead to active reformation of those abuses in contemporary Christianity that were inconsistent with God’s will and word. Calvin, educated in French legal scholarship and the texts and assumptions of the Renaissance, envisioned congregations of devout Christians working in concert to achieve virtue in civil society that was never accomplished by secular governments. These saintly citizens of the bible commonwealth were to reform the world according to the model of the heavenly city of God found in the Old Testament and New Testament. Calvin and his followers organized these self-perceived Christian saints (those bound for heaven) into active soldiers fighting for the word of God. This joining of political and social concerns and actions with deeply held religious beliefs had a revolutionary impact on Europe, England, and America.

Calvin’s followers in England, for example, sought to purify not only the Roman Catholic Church but the Church of England (the Anglican Church) as well. Each congregation of these Puritans performed illegal, treasonous actions in refusing to abide by all of the requirements of the Church of England, which included use of the Book of Common Prayer and obedience to the hierarchy of church authorities, culminating in the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Crown. Puritans believed in action to accomplish God’s will. Their singular devotion to a perceived divine cause resulted in dramatic consequences, the two most important of which were the English Civil War and the Puritan migration to North America.

American Calvinists such as John Winthrop saw in the examples of the Old Testament patriarchs and the teachings of the New Testament apostles models for uniting political and religious order under one system of government. The New England Way was very close to a theocracy, basing governing on religious belief and participation in religious activities. These first New England Puritans perceived themselves engaged in an errand into the wilderness, a notion that continued to guide religious and secular thinkers alike in coming centuries. The errand was to create a religious commonwealth, to civilize hence Christianize the wilderness and its native peoples, to stay true to the covenant that united themselves to God, to exercise constant restraint in material and secular matters, and to reform as much as possible human institutions.

As the decades passed, however, the errand into the wilderness was forgotten and ignored, its institutions altered, its ideals trod upon. Some Puritan ministers called upon the flock to repent and to form a new covenant with God, but in vain. Change forever has an impact on religious beliefs and institutions. The anxiety and uncertainty of sixteenth-century Europe brought about a religious response, the Protestant Reformation. Likewise social, economic, political, and intellectual changes in America during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought about varying religious consequences. Trade grew, particularly with England. Merchants became wealthy, inspiring in others the same goal. Population expanded because of immigration, better diet, and growing medical knowledge. As a consequence cities emerged from the wilderness. Success breeds jealousy and aggression among contestants for land and wealth. British Americans contested with Native Americans and French Americans over the rich frontier and important waterways of the Piedmont and lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Wars in Europe yielded wars in America. The expanding frontier brought with it a host of political problems. Meanwhile Americans became aware of new ideas in science about the universe and its governing laws; in the philosophy of science and government; in the origins, progress, and significance of Christianity. Bombarded by the new and unknown, uncertain what were right and wrong, good and bad, some Americans rejected Christianity as untenable, others embraced it all the more. Such was the setting for the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s.

OLD LIGHTS AND NEW LIGHTS

George Whitefield, an itinerant preacher from England, personified the uncertainty and restlessness that resulted in the Great Awakening. A man without a parish in America, a wanderer intent on attracting notice by dramatic speeches rather than solid theology, Whitefield caught the attention of masses of men and women, young and old, seeking release from life’s daily drudgery, searching for alternatives to the sermons of college-educated clergy who always had the same message. Whitefield was different. Theology meant little to him. Denominational distinctions, the intricate variations of the sacraments, the learned discourses of the educated, were meaningless next to the horror of the dread consequence of sin and the joy of salvation through Christ. Whitefield’s appeal to the emotions fit well the character of a people devoted to the practical and commonplace who eschewed thought for action, who were experiential and intuitive rather than logical and sophisticated. Whitefield tapped into common American qualities that transcended the individualism of a capitalist, frontier society.

Imitating Christ in his choice of venue, Whitefield preached in open spaces, fields, and meadows. Farmers journeyed from far and wide in response. Whitefield’s discourse, filled with imagery and drama yet void of doctrinal intricacy, fit well in such unpretentious, familiar surroundings. People listened in common, and responded en masse. The old ways of religious habit and perfunctory faith, a nod to God on Sunday and a return to sin on Monday, vanished as the multitude felt anew the presence of a Redeemer disgusted with the sinful neglect of His people, demanding wholehearted repentance and complete abandonment to His will.

Christianity has always thrived on loneliness, despair, anxiety, meaninglessness, pain, and fear. The Great Awakening brought such suffering, an awareness of its causes and consequences, to the surface, where it lost its illusory singularity and achieved common recognition. Personal anxiety, fear, suffering, and pain were revealed as universal human experiences. One could sob and wail in the open, surrounded by strangers, and yet feel the comfort of releasing a burden to one’s intimate friends. Surprised by joy amid suffering, one could laugh and shed tears of happiness without embarrassment. Religious affectations became emotions to share with others rather than to experience in private. This was an awakening of fundamental humanness. New light was shed upon the darkness of the soul.

Jonathan Edwards, the Yale-educated pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, understood these feelings of loss and hope, repentance and redemption, the abandonment of self to God, that were products of the New Light experience of the Great Awakening. In A Treatise Concerning Religious Affectations, Edwards argued that the emotions rather than the intellect were the true foundation and expression of religious belief. Who can have an intellectual understanding of the Incarnation or the Resurrection? One can only feel Christ’s sacrifice, empathize with it, and make the experience one’s own. In A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards showed that reason relies on intuition, thought is dependent on emotion. Knowledge of God comes from God, who makes Himself known in the human heart and soul–only later does the mind acquire recognition. Edward’s Personal Narrative provides wonderful insights into his own religious journey, his abandonment of reason and thought to his base feelings of sin and depravity, and his joyful emotions of healing and redemption through Christ, not self. Yet Edward’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, which focuses on the revival in Northampton, describes the Great Awakening as a group rather than an individual phenomenon.

For some clergy, the emotional response of tears and wailing and writhing on the floor of the New Lights did not fit at all the decorum, piety, and restraint required of the pilgrim when worshipping in the house of the Lord. The Boston clergyman and theologian Charles Chauncy responded to Edward’s joyful tracts with literary attacks on the enthusiasm, spontaneity, and emotions of the masses. The uneducated common herd of mankind could hardly know how best to worship God. Emotion is not an adequate tool to measure God’s will and ways. Christ requires piety, forbearance, silence, reason, order in His worship. Chauncy’s Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against, published in 1742, was welcomed by the solid middle and upper classes, the well-educated and professionals, who were suspicious of the immediacy of New Light religious conversion. Their experience taught them that God revealed Himself to the intellect not the emotions–conversion took time, was a subtle occurrence rarely recognized until by learned hindsight one could trace it and accept it. Chauncy and other Old Lights, content with the ways of their fathers, could hardly accept Edward’s description of hell, in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which was graphic, horrifying, and intent on eliciting the most emotional response. The uneducated lacked the intellectual resources to decide such matters of God’s benevolence, justice, and love for themselves. The Old Lights refused to accept the logical contradiction of a just and loving God who condemns His children to unending torment in Hell. New Light arguments–that human sin is universal, inherited from the first man and woman, Adam and Eve; that all humans deserve condemnation; that God for unknown reasons mercifully saves some from hellfire; that humans do not have the free will to determine their own eternal fate–did not accord with a rational God currently being fashioned in Europe and America by Arminians and Deists. Chauncy and the Old Lights, raised in the Calvinist theological environment of Congregationalism, slowly rejected Calvin’s claims and the revolutionary consequences of Calvinist social thought.

Portrait of Charles Chauncy

RELIGION AND REVOLUTION

Indeed, it is not surprising to learn that as the eighteenth century progressed the Old Lights were less apt to embrace the revolutionary political arguments of Whig statesmen, unlike the New Lights, who could accept the paradoxes and dangers of the American Revolution simply because their theology taught them that life is full of paradox, that human reason is limited, that God Himself threatens all of His sinful children with eternal damnation, that security in mind, body, society, and institutions is illusory. The Great Awakening taught its adherents that God does not respect class, inheritance, fame, and power. All humans are equal in respect to God, who alone is separate, elevated beyond all others. New Light religious beliefs did not allow them to accept the pretensions to power and rank of the British aristocracy, the House of Lords and House of Commons, the King. Politics made little sense without religion, and if religion taught equality among all men and women, politics must follow. The revolutionary tendencies of the Great Awakening spilled over into the revolution against Great Britain.

Neither theology nor politics are black and white, and sensitive eighteenth-century Americans often found themselves caught between the Old Light/New Light debate as well as the struggle between Loyalists and Patriots. It was difficult to reconcile the order and decorum at the meetinghouse on Sunday and the disorder and chaos of town meetings on Monday. Some Old Lights such as the Boston clergyman Mather Byles, refusing such contradiction, became notorious (if consistent) Tories. Others, such as the New Hampshire pastor Jeremy Belknap, sought ways to avoid the confrontation of religion and politics by questioning the traditional beliefs of his fathers. Belknap was raised in the still Calvinist environment of mid-eighteenth century Boston. Belknap was descended from Increase and Cotton Mather on his mother’s side. He found as a communicant of South Parish a mentor in the Rev. Thomas Prince, a clergyman interested in science and history. At Harvard College Belknap discovered the writings of Jonathan Edwards, which inspired in him a search for God’s saving grace. His great uncle Mather Byles counseled the young pilgrim not to seek the type of emotional conversion described by Edwards. But Belknap was dissatisfied with a rational approach to God. He refused to consider the ministry until he experienced the saving change of God’s grace, which occurred during the long New England winter days of 1766. Belknap became the pastor of the First Parish of Dover, New Hampshire, in 1767 and proceeded to try to inaugurate an awakening among his parishioners. But Dover was not Northampton. Belknap found a few close associates willing to allow emotion and intuition to guide them; but his religious zeal alienated many others.

Eventually Belknap, like many clergymen, turned his religious zeal toward political issues. He became a firm if conservative patriot, like many of his colleagues of the cloth who were alumni of Harvard or Yale. The pastor and his family suffered economic privation during the war, and rarely were free from the dismal feeling of possible doom should the British gain the upper hand in the war. Belknap’s solace was his historical and scientific studies. But as a clergyman he was called to study the Scriptures as well. One bleak day in 1778 Belknap experienced a revelation while reading the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. He felt sure that Daniel prophesized the eventual defeat of Britain and American independence. In other words, it was God’s will that America become free. Excited and astonished, Belknap preached a sermon and told his friends and family about his insight. For the remainder of his life, twenty years, he lived according to this revelation of the divine will.

That the divine will might enter into and direct society and government was not a new idea. Pagans and Christians, Muslims and Jews, if devout, rarely purposefully act in contradiction to what they perceive to be God’s will. The uniqueness of the Protestant Reformation was the range of interpretation of God’s will. Calvin channeled the perception of God’s grace that he and his fellow saints had purportedly experienced into an active crusade to spread Christianity and the awareness of God’s will on earth. It is slightly absurd, of course, to proclaim the omniscience and omnipotence of God and in the same breath proclaim that notwithstanding the limited perspective, clouded by time and sin, of one’s life one still knows God’s will. Some Christians, both New Light and Old Light, turned their freedom of the will into God’s will, and vice versa. Jonathan Edwards, in his essay Freedom of the Will, argued that free will, which obviously exists, is not will itself, just like human goodness is not the good itself. These were not new ideas. What was new was the unique situation of eighteenth-century America. Edwards and his parishioners felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, God’s overwhelming will, even as they felt called upon to exercise their respective freedom to choose. This differed from John Calvin. One senses from Calvin’s Institutes a sense of the inexorable will of God that no human can reject. Calvin needed the help of the community of believers to substantiate this feeling that he was chosen, against his will, but according to God’s will, to act for the sake of God and His kingdom. Calvin manufactured a kind of certainty amid all the overwhelming uncertainties of life. And yet he still felt terrible anxiety, knowing that his will was never perfectly free, yet bound to Another.

Uncertainty and consequent anxiety are the sine qua non of life. Some respond in silence and humility, become a monastic in theory or in fact. Others give voice to their fears in writings and confessions, hoping to solicit a silent empathy from listeners and readers. Still others are driven by anxiety to join in common with others equally in despair, where numbers and a collective voice drown out solitary cries, giving energy, even if elusive and fleeting, to one’s individual impulses. It feels so much better, when afraid, to act when others are acting as well. Collective action gives legitimacy to individual actions. One person might not challenge the world but a host can; one person might not challenge authority unless joined by countless others; one person might not speak in tongues, or scream and faint in the presence of the congregation, unless others have removed its singularity. To do something strange or untraditional requires a certain anonymity, which the collective provides. If the Great Awakening had been the awakening of one soul to God, it would be a footnote not a chapter in the pages of history. Social, religious, and political movements require the subjugation of the individual self to the collective self, which ironically legitimizes and strengthens individual self-perception. Scores of people believing and acting give credence to the claim that it is God’s will that drives such actions.. It felt good to Edwards to reduce his freedom to a single spark in the light of Freedom. Likewise, it felt good to Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and all the other Patriots who rejected tyranny for freedom, to universalize their feelings, to make their cause the Cause, to make their perceptions self-evident to all humans. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence reads like a religious tract in its focus on the will of the people, the necessity of history, the laws of nature and God. Some Patriots, like Jeremy Belknap, applied Jefferson’s secular, deist tone to a religious format. But clearly Jefferson’s vague allusions to the divine and concrete images of human experience and action struck a chord with the mass of Americans, who by 1776 had been awakened to a recognition of God’s will, no matter what form it might take.

Hence the Great Awakening succeeded, but only through transformation, adjustment to the perceived realities of the Enlightenment. The Enlightened thinker of the middle to late eighteenth century had come to realize the power of human reason. Yes, there might be this vague universal force, Reason, but it was distant, growing more anonymous, giving a perfunctory nod to Reformation and Revolution. Freedom of the will grew in stature before, during, and after the American Revolution. There might be a transcending Will, as the French believed in their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which legitimized the violence of the French Revolution, but even this transcendent force was the General Will of the people rather than the universal will of God. Social and political movements still sought St. Augustine’s City of God but with a secular twist. Theirs was a heavenly city, a utopia, on earth, where all humans would find happiness; disease, starvation, poverty, ignorance would be eliminated. The millennium still beckoned, could still be inaugurated on earth. The millennium of the enlightened philosopher of the eighteenth century, of the utopian thinker of the nineteenth century, was still eschatological, still divinely sanctioned, however vaguely. Yet this millennium lacked Christ. It lacked the Second Coming, the sound of trumpets, Armageddon, Judgment. It was a secular millennium that the philosophers and quasi-religious called for and expected.

THE SELF-RELIANT BELIEVER

Social and ideological movements of the late eighteenth, early nineteen, centuries were still caused by uncertainty about life, anxiety brought about by the fear of change and death, the manifold wars, epidemics, famines, and the like. The mind struggles to make sense out of disaster, mortality, and suffering, and finds answers to fit the times. The answers of the early nineteen century were of an astonishing variety: Deism, Universalism, Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, Millennialism, Mormonism. The apparent diversity of these responses to the uncertainty and anguish of war, revolution, and industrialization should not blind us to their similarities. Groups who take political and social matters into their own hands, who rise up and revolt and realize their power, understand sovereignty not according to the exclusive right of kings and aristocrats but the inclusive right of all people. They experience power as a possession, an expectation, a fundamental right. Having experienced such power, they will hardly relinquish it to others, human or divine.

The years before and after the American Revolution, then, hosted the unabashed awareness of the power of the human mind. Deists allowed human reason to penetrate all facets of the human and natural past. Thomas Paine referred to his time as The Age of Reason (1794), where superstition and the supernatural took a back seat to science, mathematics, historicism, and empiricism. “My own mind is my own church,” he proclaimed. Unitarians used logic and experience to proclaim that God is a Unity rather than a Trinity. Universalists assumed that their kind of God would not contradict human expectations of goodness and justice in condemning humans, both guilty and not guilty, to eternal torment in Hell. Unitarians and Universalists, like Transcendentalists, ignored revelation, sources of truth and inspiration such as the Old Testament and New Testament, preferring instead their own reason and experiences to gauge what is truth and what is falsehood, what is divine and what is not. Taking a page from the Old Lights, the Unitarians and Universalists could not countenance beliefs and institutions based on the fundamental assumption of human sinfulness, for humans are inherently good, and Adam’s fall has no bearing on the present.

A good example of the movement toward a less rigorous Christianity, a more accommodating spirituality of love, goodness, and peace, was the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau and his friends and associates, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that the route to truth lay within the human heart. Intuition, not reason, nor revelation, nor tradition, taught the individual self what to believe and how to act. Self-reliance, independent thought, personal authority, personal knowledge: these were the credos of the early nineteenth-century Romantic. Thoreau and his type rejected the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment thinker and Old Light as well as the energetic acceptance of God’s will of the awakened New Light for the self in search of meaningful human experience. The only authority was the scripture of self, searching for and finding God within oneself via the conduit of Nature. Emerson felt “perpetual youth” in nature, and childlike innocence as well. Sacrifice, suffering, atonement, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection, blend in, become lost in, the untold variety and plenty of nature, where all is good and life is peace. The phenomenon of social movement, the idea of a Great Awakening, were ignored, become inconsequential, to Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson.

Self-reliant philosophies such as Unitarianism, Universalism, Deism, and Transcendentalism could hardly sponsor-rather could only eschew-the religious concerns of the mass of people. In retrospect a Second Great Awakening was inevitable given the confident, passive tone of early nineteenth-century religion and philosophy and at the same time the overwhelming anxiety caused by modernization. Americans, particularly in the northern states and especially the growing middle-class, were going through a dramatic period of questioning and seeking answers. Independence brought with it a host of concerns. How could a society based on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights sponsor such glaring abuse to people of color, slave and free? How could the factories of the north continue to rely on the raw materials of the south grown through human suffering and despair? What would be the price of the coming Industrial Revolution? How could Americans avoid unstoppable growth, urban blight, increasing poverty and inequality? How best could ambitious young people best utilize their talents and energies in a society and economy exploding to the west, up rivers and canals, over the Appalachians, down the Ohio and Mississippi, up the Missouri, across the Rockies? The decade of the 1830s repeated the experiences of the 1730s-the change, the anxiety, the search, the discovery, the answer.

For some Americans the answer to economic and social change was religious change-a new ideology, new scripture, new church, new life. John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, New York, headed a community of believers who reveled in their perfection-and their sexuality. Shaker communities in New England practiced celibacy and awaited Christ’s imminent return. Joseph Smith proclaimed his revelation that Christ had all along picked America as His chosen land, the place where He would return to reign for a thousand years, a millennium.

Indeed, millennialism was on the minds of quite a few people during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening of the 1830s resulted from new ideas about Christianity, the sinner’s relation to God, Christ’s role in redemption, and the millennium. The great spokesman of the Second Great Awakening was Charles Finney, who preached to the farmers and shopkeepers of New York, particularly upstate New York along the Erie Canal. Here were towns and cities undergoing tremendous change. Rochester, for example, experienced a population explosion, new trade and business; it was a bustling atmosphere with young people willing to work hard, intent on achieving material success. Finney like Edwards and Whitefield of a century earlier was a grand orator who could hold the audience of the hopeful in the palms of his oratorical hands as he recreated hell and suffering for sin, then painted a picture of redemption and heavenly success. For Finney, the sinner can achieve salvation completely by his or her own means. Just as the businessman needs to change his lifestyle to succeed, so the sinner needs to change her lifestyle to reach heaven. But before death bids us to such joy, the redeemed sinner, having made the conscious decision to reject sin for salvation, will enjoy signs of heaven on earth. Material prosperity awaits the person who chooses to be saved. Gone from Finney’s sermons were God’s anger and the damnation of sinful souls, born in sin, predestined for hell. The preceding century had taught rational Americans that God left the choice of salvation entirely in each person’s hands. Self-reliant, independent, freedom-loving Americans could experience do-it-yourself salvation. Conversion does not come from some hidden, unexpected source in response to one’s appeal to God for help. Conversion is a conscious decision to succeed, rather like the choice to go into business.

Portrait of Charles Finney

One can imagine the enthusiastic response to such a doctrine of salvation and success open to all with very little inconvenience. The people of the industrializing north, the people of Rochester, embraced such ideas and put their hearts to the grindstone to learn to be “perfect, as Christ is perfect.” Christ’s perfection, of course, resulted in terrible suffering and death. But the atmosphere of business, materialism, success, Americanism, and free will of the 1830s would hardly accommodate such a negative theology. Life had changed during eighteen hundred years, and so too had the church, the elect, sin, and salvation. Gone were the days of priests, confessions, the damned, God’s wrath, suffering, and the cross. The Second Great Awakening and consequent evangelical movements gave the American in approaching the afterlife what he had always had in life: free choice, self-reliance, independence.

Religious social movements in America from 1730s to the 1830s possessed a peculiar irony. Americans responded to anxiety and uncertainty by allowing themselves to be caught up in a movement involving large groups of people who conformed to the requirements of the majority, and who accepted the teachings of the religious spokesman. Yet these teachings tended to contradict the nature and function of the revival itself. Social movements sweep up the individual, make him a part of a whole, force him to relinquish some of his freedom, demand the merging of his identity with that of the group. The sacrifice of the individual earns rich dividends in return. By becoming a part of the group one feels more an individual. By giving up freedom to act on one’s own one achieves the freedom of salvation. Free will is elusive in theory yet in practice one can revel in it. And best of all, one can agree that the teachings of Christ-humility, peace, acceptance, poverty-are best realized in the pride of conversion, the violence of reform, the pursuit of progress, and the rich signs of salvation.