Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early ... and the University of North Carolina Press)

by Douglas L. Winiarski

The times were changing rapidly. Between 1741 and 1742, churches throughout New England admitted more men and women than in any other period of the century, excepting only the powerful awakenings that followed the Great Earthquake of 1727. Unlike this earlier revitalization period, however, the men and women that swelled the ranks of full church members during the 1740s differed in significant ways from earlier generations. They were much younger, on average; men formed a larger proportion of this new cohort of communicants; and, since most were unmarried at the time they joined the church, the demands of raising a family in the land of light figured less prominently in their affiliation strategies. Their relations struck a decidedly different tone as well. Candidates admitted to full communion during the early 1740s expressed greater confidence about their spiritual estates. Fewer people acknowledged their fears of communicating at the Lord’s Table or described church membership as a Christ-commanded duty encumbered with terms and obligations. Whereas candidates earlier in the eighteenth century cited the formative influence of published sacramental works, the rising generation now claimed to have been stirred to join the church through the powerful oratory of a new generation of preachers, many of whom traveled widely throughout the region as itinerant ministers. They narrated dramatic conversion experiences in which they lay prostrate at the gaping maw of hell before be...