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April 27 - June 23, 2023
no sooner had they organized themselves into a dissenting church then Ebenezer Moulton arrived from the neighboring town of Brimfield with a new gift: adult, or believers’, baptism. The logic of the Separates’ zealous quest to purify the corrupt churches of New England’s Congregational establishment had propelled them beyond the boundaries of the puritan tradition altogether.
Mirroring relations from dozens of churches in eastern and central Massachusetts, the Holbrooks’ patterned discourse reinforced their willingness to submit to ecclesiastical institutions and communal expectations. The Coreys wrote as inspired individuals whose revelatory experiences impelled them to reject the authority of their minister and neighbors.
It is not a story of resurgent puritan piety but a tale of insurgent religious radicalism.
The “New England Way”—the distinctive ecclesiastical system that shaped the Congregational tradition during the century following the puritan Great Migration of the 1630s—did not collapse under the weight of secularizing impulses, as Perry Miller and an earlier generation of social historians assumed. Nor was it plagued by the moribund formalism often denigrated by scholars of early evangelicalism.11 Instead, a vibrant Congregational establishment was buried under an avalanche of innovative and incendiary religious beliefs and practices during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
I characterize New England’s era of great awakenings as the historical fulcrum on which the “shared culture” of David Hall’s “world of wonders” tilted decisively toward Jon Butler’s robust antebellum “spiritual hothouse.”
Charles Chauncy and other clergymen resurrected the phrase “NEW-LIGHT” from the Antinomian controversy and the Quaker insurgencies of the seventeenth century to condemn what they considered to be religious disorders and excesses.
Yale College president Ezra Stiles began referring to “Old Light” churches long after the revivals had subsided.17
Even Jonathan Edwards coined phrases for the “visible conversions (if I may so call them)” that he witnessed during the 1740s.
The last term, “Whitfeldarians,” comes closest to naming those eighteenth-century Protestants whom contemporary historians have identified as evangelicals.
By the time that Hannah Adams of Medfield, Massachusetts, published the definitive edition of her Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations in 1817, New Englanders had become accustomed to talking about the “diversity of sentiment among Christians” in terms of specific denominations, theological schools—including “Whitefieldites”—and even homegrown sectarian movements; but no entry in her celebrated early reference work yet bore the heading “Evangelical.”
Although provincial Congregationalists were steeped in the scriptures, during the Whitefieldian revivals and the decades that followed new converts such as Hannah Corey learned to think of the Bible as a detextualized voice that pierced their minds with supernatural force.
Emphasizing lay experience and ecclesiastical innovations, Susan Juster’s fourfold definition is much closer to the argument advanced in this study, but it nonetheless tends to reify a nascent religious temperament that came out of the religious revivals of the 1740s and remained constantly in motion throughout the eighteenth century.
The “people called New Lights” diverged from their puritan ancestors in two specific ways: their preoccupation with Whitefield’s definition of the new birth and their fascination with biblical impulses.
religious institutions that once commanded the allegiance of more than 80 percent of the population in many New England towns devolved into a fractious spiritual marketplace of competing denominations and sects.
In 1750, to be a Whitefieldarian was to be a religious radical.
During the revivals of the 1740s, New Englanders learned to associate the descent of the Holy Spirit with exercised bodies, impulsive biblical texts, and unusual visionary phenomena.
The middle decades of the eighteenth century were the dark night of the collective New England soul, as ordinary people groped toward a radically restructured religious order.
The outcome of that struggle—the travail of New England Congregationalism—transformed the once-puritan churches from inclusive communities of interlocking parishes and families into exclusive networks of gifted spiritual seekers.
Then, as now, religion empowered men and women to question structures of authority. It also to...
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John Brown
October 28, 1719, the day that he was ordained minister of the Congregational church in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Between his ordination in 1719 and his death in 1742, Brown promoted 420 parishioners to full church membership; baptized 1,088 infants, children, and adults; and placed 325 congregants under the watch of the church through a ritual known as owning the covenant.
With its tax-supported monopoly, the Haverhill church enjoyed unquestioned authority among the families in town.
An emerging cohort of sacerdotal clergymen—“
emphasized the importance of religious practices in their weekly sermons. Expanding access to the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper through revised church affiliation requirements might have tempered the reforming zeal of the puritan founders, but these ecclesiastical innovations also ensured nearly universal participation in the life of the church.
“I Desire the Church to recieve me into their †tian [Christian] fellowship and Watch, and pray for me,” explained one candidate, “that I may have Grace to walk inoffensively and Exemplarily, and profitably to my own Soul and the Good of my Neighbours.”
Eastman
Sarah Peaslee,
winter of 1724,
autobiographical testimony:
I deiser to blass god that I was born in a land of light and brought up under the light of the gospell. I have thought itt my duty to cum to the ordenances of baptism and the lords supper for sum Considrabell time but thinking mysalf unworthy of partacking of such holy ordenences has kapt me from Cuming sum Considrabell time. But of lat god has been sorly aflicting me by the dath of my mother and that in a vary offull manner which has ben a grat quickening to me in my duty. Thar has ben many plases of criptuer [scripture] has ben vary incoriging and quicking to me to Cum to thos ordinances as
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After discussing the contents of the relation and inquiring further into Eastman’s theological knowledge, Brown “Propounded,” or nominated, her to full communion in the Haverhill church. For the next two weeks, she remained in this probationary state, as existing church members scrutinized her testimony. Then, on March 8, 1724, the Haverhill m...
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Church admission relations were the lingua franca of religious experience in New England;
Seventeenth-century puritan divines maintained a clear distinction between congregation and church.
The former referred to the body of townspeople who were required by law to attend Sabbath meetings.
church denoted an inner circle of visible saints who voted on ecclesiastical issues, subjected themselves to church discipline, and enjoyed privileged access to the...
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1648 Cambridge Platform of Church...
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Finally, the elder called for a vote, asked the applicant to assent to the church covenant, and extended the “right hand of Fellowship” to the newly admitted member.
During the next century, churches throughout New England steadily adjusted their admission standards.
Between 1700 and 1740, many long-standing and recently gathered churches in Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut eliminated the practice outright.
Written church admission testimonies composed during the provincial period differed markedly from their seventeenth-century oral predecessors.
The clergy’s role in regulating admission expanded in direct proportion to the extent that oral testimonies receded from public view.
Few church membership candidates claimed to have progressed any further than what seventeenth-century divines would have called the legal humiliation stage of conversion.
By the time John Brown was ordained in 1719, the practice of composing written relations had decisively transformed the meaning of church affiliation. Established during the years surrounding the Antinomian controversy of the 1630s, the test of a relation initially served to inoculate New England’s gathered churches against the revelatory claims of radicals such as Anne Hutchinson.
Church membership professions—theological propositions strung together in series of “I believe” statements—gradually supplanted experiential relations in many Massachusetts parishes.
as early as 1676.
Absent in seventeenth-century oral testimonies, the word “duty” appeared more than two hundred times in the Haverhill narratives.
Others resorted to contractual language to describe the meaning of church fellowship.
Over and over again, the men and women of Haverhill arrived at the same conclusion in their relations: joining the church was an obligation, a requirement placed on all believers, regardless of the state of their souls.
most plodded from month to month, hoping, as Woods and King both expressed in their journals, that God would “Give me Grace Better to prepare for the next Communion.”
