The Great Awakening REVIEW
It is always so fascinating to me to discover where an idea, now manifested in an institution or assortment of institutions, was actually born. Thomas Kidd’s book The Great Awakening takes the reader back to the point in American history (specifically, 1740) where the established American church metastasized into the ever multiplying denominational fractals we see today. There is a reason why a city like Grand Rapids, Michigan has hundreds of churches (maybe my friend Tom will count them for me?) The answer starts in the first chapter of this lively history of the revivals that erupted in the years between 1740 and 1743 (and beyond).
“A close look at early American evangelicalism shows how oversimplified the ‘Old lights’ versus ‘New lights’ framework is,” Kidd writes as he introduces us to the idea of a unified church that could no longer contain its fringes.
“In this book I present evangelicalism as having fluid boundaries that changed over time. Instead of ‘Old lights’ and ‘New lights,’ we should think of the debates over this movement in terms of three points on a continuum. On one end were the anti-revivalists, who dismissed revivals as religious frenzy or enthusiasm. In the middle were the moderate evangelicals, who supported the revivals at their outset but became concerned about the chaotic, leveling extremes that the awakenings produced. Finally, on the other end, were the radical evangelicals, who eagerly embraced the spirit's movements, even if social conventions had to be sacrificed.”
Perhaps there were more than three points along that spectrum though? Obviously, Kidd concerns himself with the fractious evangelical movement alone but the template applies to a variety of other expressions of spirituality as well. At some point, people are too different to have their spiritual lives conformed to a one-size-fits-nobody church with a single minister (or synagogue with a single rabbi or mosque with a single imam). Even Catholicism, which markets itself as “the mother church” has many different orders and expressions. George Whitfield’s revival tour was the catalyst that made that already emerging diversity obvious in American Protestantism.
In the 1730’s a bubbling cauldron of differences in the Puritan churches of New England boiled over until it required the creation of new pots to put it all in. Each New England town (with a few exceptions) had been trying to maintain one single church headed by a single minister but with the arrival of George Whitfield, this model was put into serious jeopardy. “We should see Whitfield as a catalyst reacting with already existing materials to help initiate the great awakening,” Kidd writes,
“The tributaries feeding the creation of Anglo American evangelicalism hardly originated with Whitfield but perhaps he helped their confluence arrive earlier and more forcefully that it otherwise would have.”
Some of the tributaries that Kidd described might be alliterated as follows: pietism, puritanism, primitivism, and perfectionism. That is, he inspired a form of Christianity that was more personal, less “Catholic,” more apostolic, and less tolerant of gradualism in conversion and sanctification. Ministers were delighted with the droves of converts that Whitfield inspired but they soon realized that increased numbers came at a cost in unity. Itinerant preachers gave congregants exposure to options in a way similar to the way that cable TV replaced the model of having three networks (ABC - Catholic, NBC - Orthodox, CBS - Protestant). New converts were drawn by Whitfield’s message of individual empowerment and choice; not by the ministers’ message of the need for congregational subservience to unity and clerical dominion. Whitfield was the 18th century’s version of “youtube” replacing corporate media.
Whitfield intended to challenge the idea that God could only be heard by listening to a Harvard-trained consociation-approved minister on a Sunday morning (The Pravda church I will call it). But his message, once planted, grew into some pretty strange plants sometimes. The freedom that he preached in the style that it was preached went viral, perhaps beyond what he intended. Kidd explains why the New England clergy soon grew alarmed (including those who originally sponsored the revivals).
“One can appreciate, then, why many might have viewed radical evangelicals as a threat to a well ordered society. Radical evangelicals ordained untutored, and occasionally nonwhite, men as pastors. They sometimes allowed women and nonwhites to serve as deacons or even as elders. They lead crowds of the poor, children, and nonwhites singing through the streets. They permitted Native Americans, African-Americans, and women to exhort in mixed congregations, and they commended their words as worthy of white male attention. They endorsed the visionary, ecstatic experiences of the disenfranchised. They believed that individuals could have immediate assurance of salvation by the indwelling witness of the Spirit. They affirmed lay people's right to critique their pastors and founded new churches fully committed to radical revival.”
The church of the 1740’s was a study in contradictions. The Halfway Covenant of 1662 allowed people to have children baptized into churches even though they themselves were not attendees.[i] This system insured that the churches would be filled with substantial numbers of pseudo-members waiting for their conversion. When the revivalists came, they found a lot of “dry tinder” ready to be evangelized. For some time, ministers had been threatening physical punishments in the form of disease or Indian attacks or poor harvests. As physical security needs were increasingly met however, these threats became less effective and the complacent people who had been allowed to become members were incentivized to remain complacent. It is no wonder that some greater fear of suffering was needed as a motivator to commitment. This is why Jonathan Edwards’ sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was so powerful in its effects. Hell might not have been as real an immediate threat as an Indian attack but in the words of an effective public speaker, it could be made to *seem* more real.
Kidd notes that Edwards’ account of the revival in Northampton became a template for how to record revivals anywhere. “This was what any certifiable Holy Spirit inspired revival should look like,” Edwards seems to be implying. Kidd asserts that,
“The circulation of books like Edwards's a Faithful Narrative, and Whitfield’s journals and of Thomas Prince's magazine The Christian History was critical for generating excitement about the revivals and expectations that awakenings could happen in towns receiving those publications, too.”[ii]
I found it interesting that the fiery heart of the revivals could be found in central Connecticut.
“Adams, along with East Windsor’s Timothy Edwards, Norwich’s Benjamin Lord, Windham's Samuel Whiting, and Windsor’s Jonathan Marsh, formed the most activist contingent yet of evangelical ministers in New England. This group helped lead a series of revivals in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1710s and 1720s.”
Norwich was where so many of the early settlers to Middletown (Vt.) came from and it is clear to me that they brought the revival inspired conflicts with them when they came to Vermont. Thomas Prince would have been the source of the books that Sylvanus Haynes was incubated and educated with as a young man in Princeton, Ma (a town named for Thomas Prince, father of Sarah Prince the wife of Moses Gill).[iii]
In pursuing his theme, the author of The Great Awakening notes how outspoken some of the pro-revival ministers were in trying to limit the damage that the excesses of revivalism inflicted on their revival-loving unity. Those, like Edwards, who tried to hold a middle ground, had to fight both the rationalist and the mystical wings of the revived church. “Edwards had to work hard to disavow enthusiastic excesses,” Kidd writes,
“while at the same time not endorsing a naturalistic approach to revival. ... Edwards' Faithful Narrative would become the first, and most important, text of the new genre of revival narratives.”
“Most of the twenty-five revival narratives printed in North America from 1741 to 1745 (mostly printed in the new evangelical magazine the Christian History) followed Edwards' model fairly closely. Prominent features in these narratives, like Edwards', included the spiritual history and assessment of the town in question before the revival, a description of the beginning of effects of the revival, detailed accounts of individual convert's experiences, and a report on the continuing/declining state of the revival.”
Unfortunately, in spite of Whitfiled’s later attempts to mute the radicalism of his message, his early revivals had sown the field of American religion with the dandelions of an early transcendentalism and perhaps Mormonism and Universalism. Whitfield himself had described his own conversion experience as a soulful response to direct revelations. “Here God was pleased to give me great fortastes of his love,” Whitfield had said in his conversion narrative,
“and filled me with much unspeakable raptures, particularly once in St. John's Church, that I was carried out beyond myself.”
The evangelists who followed in Whitfield’s wake were almost always amplifying this message of mysticism. “William Tennent Junior, for example,
“considered divisions normal and acceptable, so long as they affirmed orthodox doctrine, reprised visions seen in the Bible, or gave a person an early taste of heaven or hell. He himself had experienced all of these, and he certainly believed that his own visions could not count as common enthusiasm.”
Whitfield had closed the distance between his time and the apostolic age, allowing that believers could do almost anything apostles could do “but work miracles.” It was only a matter of time and enthusiasm before those were put back on the table of possibility as well. Within a hundred years, those possibilities included the ability to receive new written revelations. Stephen Bordly complained that Whitfield had,
“put some among us here on a wild goose chase, in quest of that degree of the spirit which perhaps they never will find. Others he has thrown into the vapors and despair and into a full persuasion that the good man, as he would have them believe, is miraculously inspired.”
The “fractalization” of the Puritan churches began innocently enough with the right of ministers to preach in communities other than their own. Eventually, this grew into a declared right for congregants to voluntarily attend church elsewhere (even in a barn or field) if they did not cozy up to their appointed minister’s teaching. Many congregants began to believe that the ideas that occurred to them accompanied by some warm and fuzzy feeling were to be regarded as more authoritative and direct than the ideas of their college-trained minister. The “New Light” revivalists “lead great stress upon impressions and impulses; particularly, upon any sense of scripture that was suddenly and strongly suggested to their minds.” Revelation democratized. Soon, the epidemic of itinerancy manifested itself in competition between ministerial opponents in the same locals. A church would split and the New Light minister would begin to run the new church, like Reverend Davenport, “in a separatist style, picking only certain holy friends to admit to communion.” Five of the sixteen Boston area churches showed signs of major revival in the months following Whitfield's fall tour,” Kidd explains, “These included Joseph Sewall’s and Thomas Prince’s Old South church.”
The foundations of later religious conflict in places like Middletown Vt. were being laid as early as 1741. Kidd writes:
“Up the Thames River from New London, at Norwich, the future Baptist leader Isaac Bacchus was converted during the summer of 1741 revivals, partly through Davenport’s preaching. In 1751 Backus recalled that it please the Lord to cause a very gentle awakening through the land especially in Norwich.”
Soon, the clerical empire began striking back and the practice of itinerancy without the permission of the local pastor was banned in Connecticut. The new law also outlawed all non-Connecticut itinerants altogether. The law was intended from the outset to give a legal cover for a unified response to ministers like Davenport. As Kidd puts it, he “was the first quarry caught under the policy.” When the Rev. Davenport was banished from the colony for preaching without permission, “the scene at the courthouse turned ugly.” “Pomroy and Davenport supposedly began calling for God to rain judgment on the court and the sheriff,” Kidd explains,
“which brought a rush of their followers beginning to sigh, groan, beat their breasts, cry out, and to be put into strange agitations of the body.”
This region of Connecticut began to develop a reputation for contention, radicalism, dissention, and the denunciation of settled ministers. Those out there to the “wacko side” of Whitfield began to insist that they had the power to know which ministers were Christians and which were not (a spiritual McCarthyism of sorts). Soon, ministers all along the spectrum began to declare ministers not at the same spot they were, “apostates” and “enthusiasts.” “Radical separates had begun establishing private meetings in 1741 and 42 across New England,” writes Kidd, “most notably in New London, New Haven, and Boston.”
At some point, radicals went too far for some revival lovers to follow. Davenport insisted that the truly converted should shed all their worldly things and worldly clothes. He built a bonfire for his followers to throw their fashionable duds in and led the way by taking off his own britches and putting them in the fire. “A young woman thought all this crossed the line of propriety,” Kidd tells us, “and she snatched out his pants, and cried, ‘the calf you have made is too big’ and flung his plush britches into his face.”
From that point on, the positions began to solidify, with a minority moving away from the revivals altogether (Charles Chauncy), a minority following the radicals as far as they would go (Davenport), and a majority struggling to retain a position in the middle (Backus and Edwards).
Because so many of the early settlers of Middletown came from Norwich, Ct, I would like to highlight the story of that particular locale as it may shed light on Middletown’s first ministers and churches. Ithimar Hibbard, Henry Bigelow, Sylvanus Haynes, and Nathaniel Wood were all, in some ways products of the 1740 revivals. I suspect that Ithimar Hibbard was a “New Light” Separatist, that Henry Bigelow was a “middle grounder” (he was Yale graduated and trained by a minister by the name of Ichabod Lord Skinner who was a direct apprentice of Jonathan Edwards). Sylvanus Haynes can be connected in so many ways to the Baptist, Isaac Backus, and Nathaniel Wood seems almost certainly to have been influenced by the Davenport radicals in Norwich.
Nathaniel Woods was not crazy but Deacon Brewster (that scion of the Mayflower Brewsters) would take his separatism only so far. Here is a lengthy excerpt from the book that provides a context for Middletown spiritual divisions.
“In Norwich, Connecticut, disputes over the Saybrook platform also precipitated a church schism and launched the career of the most influential separate Baptist leader of the 18th century, Isaac Bacchus. Backus was converted in Norwich in 1741. The revivals continued in Norwich for two more years, and in June 1743 Norwich’s pastor, Benjamin Lord, wrote of ‘a great and glorious work of divine grace and a great reformation of religion’ transpiring in the area. Lord’s church saw ninety-one new full members added between 1741 and 1744, including the church’s first Native American and African American full members. Lord feared the excesses of lay exhorters, however, who seem to have sprung up in or visited Norwich and we're ‘so infatuated by a strange kind of Spirit as to think (many would think) there was much of the spirit of God’ in them.”
"In late 1744, the church began to squabble over the Saybrook platform, and its standards of full membership. It is not clear whether the separation preceded or followed a relaxing of membership standards, but it does seem that Lord wanted both to deemphasize personal conversion testimonies for full membership and to continue an informal compliance with the Saybrook standards through his involvement with the New London County ministerial Association. By summer 1745, thirteen members, including Isaac Backus, had withdrawn from the church. Lord summoned them to explain their absence, and in August 1745, Lord recorded some of their reasons.”
“Many expressed objections to Lord himself, saying that he denied the power of godliness and was not sufficiently supportive of the late revivals. Some complained that the church had lax membership standards, and that the church did not make conversion a term of communion. Others protested that the church body was committed to the congregational model of church government, but that Lord had swayed toward the Saybrook Presbyterian model. One mentioned that Lord was no friend of godly preaching and preachers and that he had banned Andrew Crosswell from preaching there. Mary Lathrup may have spoken for most Separates when she stated simply, ‘by covenant I am not held here any longer than I am edified.’ The Separates established a new congregation in the western part of Norwich. The church appears to have benefited both from the radical zeal and ongoing frustrations on the west side of town concerning the relatively distant location of Lord’s meeting house.”
“In any case, the church ordained one of the Separates, Jedidiah Hyde, as its first pastor in October 1747. Hyde and Backus frequently itinerated together during this period. Hyde testified that he separated from Lord’s church ‘because the gospel is not preached here.’”
Isaac Backus would go on to be a primary cause of the growth of the Baptist denomination in Vermont as the doctrine of adult baptism was the surest way to protect one’s church from the infiltration of the unwashed masses who could get through the unlatched gate of infant baptism. Sylvanus Haynes would be one of his indirect and possibly even direct converts (Haynes notes in his journal that he was compelled to accept the Baptist position by a pamphlet he read as a teenager – quite possibly one written by Backus in answer to the Reverend Lord). “Backus,” Kidd notes, “had no college education, but those who joined the church believed that his spiritual call to the ministry far outweighed his unfamiliarity with classical learning languages.” It was this disposition of the Baptist Churches not to send their ministers to seminary that caused Sylvanus and his best friend Abel Wood not forego further education.) “The Separates and Baptists were very close to another theologically,” Thomas Kidd adds, “but their split over baptism allowed no ultimate reconciliation.”
“Similarly, the Baptist church at Norwich, Connecticut (Backus's hometown) reported to Backus that ‘fifty or more have been converted there since December. Great and marvelous are Gods works sought out of all of that have pleasure in them.’ Bacchus and Norwich's Benjamin Lord developed a running argument in the 1760’s over Separate and Baptist principles. In 1764, Isaac Bacchus replied to Lord’s charges that the Baptist were apostate. Backus noted that churches like Lord’s had been declining in the early 1740s. Although the revivals re-energized the moderate evangelical churches for a time, their corrupt admission practices and hostility to popular manifestations of revival required honest Christians to separate. The liberty for Christians to improve their gifts, was allowed for a while, but soon the moderates joined with others that had called the work of God a ‘delusion of the devil’ and attacked the lay exhorters, among whom Bacchus became one of the most prominent. The moderates called the exhorters ‘disturbers,’ and deluded pretenders to an extraordinary call, and had some of them arrested and fined.
“Lord predicted that the Separates pursuit of individual edification would produce declension and apostasy, but Backus concluded with delight that as of 1764, it seemed that only the Separate churches were flourishing. He saw the Separate Baptists as the authentic bearers of 1740’s style revivalism. . . . Backus, in particular, would soon become one of the revolutionary era's foremost advocates of liberty of conscience, the rights of religious dissenters, and abolishing religious establishments.”
IT should be abundantly clear from all this that the conflicts that erupted in Middletown in the 1780’s and 1790’s were not made in Middletown. They were imported there from Connecticut and the positions ranged all the way from Ethan Allen’s denial of any revelation at all to Nathaniel Woods claim that he was himself a priest, capable of receiving revelation direct.
Question for Comment: As you go through life, where do you look for revelation and how much do you expect to get?
[i] The halfway covenant of 1662 extended the right of baptism but not the Lord supper to many of the unregenerate.
[ii] Though it followed in the train of earlier New England awakenings, Northhampton's 1734-35 awakening has become the model revival of evangelicalism. Its Publicity dramatically heightened expectations in Britain and America for new awakenings, and it provided a framework for local pastors to use to promote revival in their own congregations.
[iii] Thomas Prince of the old South church thought that the earthquake was worth the damage caused, if accompanied by revival. After noting the path of the earthquake in the appendix to Earthquakes the Works of God 1727, he rejoiced that the terrible shaking had led to a wonderful reformation.
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