Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England REVIEW
Stephen Marini’s book covers a fascinating period of time and subject, the emergence of non-conformity in one of the world’s most intentionally conformative societies, New England in decades before the First Great Awakening. From the time the Puritans had first landed, they had endeavored to maintain a uniform and disciplined communal life, often at the expense of individuality (of thought, of family structure, of dress, of religion, of politics, etc.)
Part one of the book was of most interest to me as it focused on radical evangelical movements to emerge from the Whitefield and Edwards revivals (and splinter group revivals). What came before Whitfield was generally a religious sensibility that did not allow for a great deal of certainty. One spoke of their salvation as a “reasonable hope” and instead of certainty, offered “evidence of grace.” The radical evangelicals offered a more addictive cocktail of certainty begat of experience. Whitefield thus opened up a Pandora’s box of more ecstatic experience than he himself may have cared for. If certainty was possible, and if experience was the way to it, who dared stand in the way of people’s experience? ”By the logic of the New Birth, hysterical spasms, glossolalia, trances, and the like became symptoms of spiritual transformation.” Whitefield’s revivals opened the door to a more charismatic and Pentecostal style that appealed to many formally bored with the stodgy flat-affect of Puritan ministerial culture. The young were particularly enamored of it. As they would be centuries later with Elvis and the Beatles and Pink Floyd.
What’s more, Whitefield had a natural capacity of theatrics that went well beyond what someone else could achieve with mere education. He was his own sound system, light show, strobe light, and spotlight. He did not analyze text so much as dramatize it. He did not explain God. He stood in God’s place and appealed to his listeners as if he were God. His radical converts called it “preaching in the Spirit” and in time, they would have nothing but. By this means, congregations all along the seaboard and interior were split into “Old Lights” and “New Lights” and out of the New Light movement, a further fractalization took place that allowed for and encouraged those who even New light ministers could begin to get uncomfortable with. Of these, “the most extreme was James Davenport.” His message demanded extremism and emotionalism, as though someone had put Whitefield on speed. Davenport exhausted people into conversion, emotionally and physically. The focus of his most intense evangelism was the town of New London, Connecticut. March 6, 1743 was the day when most people believe the dam broke when he demanded that people gather up all the symbols of their worldliness to be burned in a fire (wigs, gowns, jewelry, theological books suspected of too much intellectualism, etc.)
Though he would soon mellow, Davenport’s followers gained a sense of what was possible and the arch of his influence would ricochet on into the founding of entire towns and churches in the Vermont frontier some 20 years later. “Between 1745 and 1770, nearly one hundred congregations separated from the established church, about one quarter of all organized parishes.” These churches were called “Strict” or “separatist” churches and eventually, they would attempt to form a denomination of their own when it became apparent that there were advantages for doing so.
These churches took on several characteristics that did not bode well for their long-term stability. They were heavily reliant upon radical conversion and a belief in a subsequent perfectionism. They demanded public conversion stories as a ticket of membership. They tested their own members and devoted themselves to strict observance of Biblical codes of ethics. They generally believed that saints could always know who other saints were (or were not) and the battles that this would eventually lead to were innumerable. These churches, says Marini, “sought to make the revival permanent.”
Eventually, the Baptists “carried off” most of the “Separates” (as is the case in my family) but they took traces of the divine fire with them and many sought to find pockets of the frontier that would still be open to their raw emotive approach to religion. For many of the radicals, their best course of action involved moving to the new settlements where more educated and professional clerics were too timid to go. Places like Bennington, Vt. And Middletown, Vt were not unattractive for these reasons. From 1770 to 1776, the population of Vermont doubled. The number skyrocketed to 85,416 by 1790. By 1820, that number had grown to 235,754. The sheer numbers meant that social cohesion was in serious doubt from the moment a second homesteader started cutting down trees. Settlement was no easy process and often the creation of a funded town church was delayed. In that environment, self-educated and self-ordained ministers could find purchase. And so they did. In Vermont, the formation of a legal church followed, on average, some fifteen years after the town was founded. This was precisely the period where, in towns like Middletown, someone like Ithimar Hibbard or Nathaniel Wood could gain a hold on control of a movement for founding a church.
Marini writes:
“ Separates were also active in the New Light stir, though without the benefit of fixed institutions. The leaders of the Separate revival were rural exhorters Joseph Marshall, David Avery, and Ithimar Hibbard, who itinerated widely in the Green Mountains and Connecticut Valley. But Separate revivalism was often a lay enterprise conducted in isolated conditions among friendship circles.”
This was certainly true of Hibbard in Wood in Middletown as their families were interconnected.
The radicalism itself made organization and sustainability difficult. Separate organizational structures could almost be clan-like and patriarchal in comparison. They resembled the tribal leadership of an Abraham more than the institutional leadership of a Jonathan Edwards. Marini notes that the Baptists were more equipped to lead sustained multi-generational movements of New Light evangelicalism. “In 1778, Caleb Blood, an elder from Marlow, NH began making inroads into Vermont. Sylvanus Haynes, Middletown’s first Baptist minister would be one of his disciples. A slew of churches arose almost spontaneously in Shaftsbury Vermont where Sylvanus first arrived and began his ministry. Soon clerically educated ministers would have induced him to move further into the wilderness for congregants and so it is that he found his way to Middletown and started the revival that my own family bears the marks of so many generations later.
Question for Comment: Where did the mix of emotionalism and intellectualism come from in your own spirituality? If you have one.
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