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

Even as ministers counseled everyone to perform their sacramental duties by joining the church, they repeatedly warned their parishioners to prepare carefully for the Lord’s Supper.

One in three Haverhill church membership candidates quoted or cited 1 Corinthians 11:29 as a source of “discouragement,” “exceeding dread,” or a “matter of Terror” that clouded their decision to join the church, while scores of others deployed a less specific language of “unworthyness” to vent their fears of joining the church and attending the Lord’s Supper.

Seldom cited in seventeenth-century oral testimonies, 1 Corinthians 11:29 ranked among the top five most frequently quoted biblical passages in relations composed during the period between 1690 and 1740.35

Mary Sanders: “I Sin in Coming unworthily and I sin in staying away unworthily.”

Scripture reading was the cornerstone of private piety in early New England.

Lay men and women who could not sign their names nonetheless had learned to read and study the scriptures.

The most frequently cited scriptural passages revolved around two themes: God’s boundless mercy in pardoning human sin and Jesus’s generous invitation to eat and drink his body and blood.

Matthew 11:28,

Isaiah 5...

Isaiah...

John 6:37

Luke 22:19.

These five texts accounted for more than 40 percent of all biblical citations in the Haverhill relations and nearly a...

Knowledgeable in Reformed doctrine and encouraged by scriptural promises, most lay people nonetheless feared the sacramental obligations that came with church membership.

Without a loud call from the heavens, judgment-fearing New Englanders had little incentive to take up their Christian obligations.

Shortly before eleven o’clock on the night of October 29, 1727, the townspeople of Haverhill were roused out of their homes by a “Mighty Earthquake.”

The earthquake instantly roused Brown’s congregants to attend to their Christian duties.

deepening their private and public devotional performances.

traditional practices of piety,

ritual days of fasting and covenant renewal.

The headstones in Pentucket Cemetery tell a grim story of the epidemic that ravaged Haverhill for two years beginning in the fall of 1735. Set in a single row were markers for the 4 children of James and Margaret McHard, each of whom succumbed to the disease in July 1736. The following year, James and Jemima Holgate buried 4 children in a single month. Ebenezer Buck commissioned one gravestone to memorialize the deaths of his 2 adolescent children.

Funeral expenses increased sevenfold, as wealthy families distributed scarves and rings to pallbearers, financed the publication of broadside elegies, and sponsored lavish celebrations on behalf of the dead. Ornate gravestones depicting iconic winged skulls replaced the plain-style wooden posts of the seventeenth century.

Ritual days of fasting and humiliation had long been a staple among the public ordinances of puritan worship.

Participants abstained from food and dressed in plain clothes. Rising early for private meditation or family prayer, they spent the remainder of the day in the meetinghouse listening to sermons on the necessity of moral reformation.

John Brown and his colleagues tended to view fast-day rituals as opportunities for their parishioners to prepare for death and divine judgment.

others understood the broader applications of collective acts of repentance.

By the 1720s, covenant renewal ceremonies had developed into an important tool through which Congregational ministers expanded the reach of their churches.

Church admission testimonies dating from the Connecticut stirs of the 1730s diverged in several ways from relations in eastern Massachusetts.

Benjamin Pomeroy’s Hebron, Connecticut,

prospective church members in Hebron were preoccupied with seeking “good Satisfaction of my conversion” and were more fluent in narrating “what God has done for my Soul.”

the men and women of Hebron emerged from the stirs of the 1730s more confident of their religious experiences than people in other parts of New England.

Together, the earthquake and Connecticut Valley awakenings marked an important transitional moment in the history of New England Congregationalism. In both cases, churches in towns such as Haverhill and Suffield admitted exceptionally large cohorts of new communicants—between ten and twenty times the annual average (Chart 1). But some evidence suggests that New Englanders had begun to think about the “wonderful work of God” in regionally specific ways.

Lay men and women in the towns of the Connecticut Valley increasingly arrived at the belief that their religious lives moved in unexpected, disorderly, spasmodic shifts that conformed only to God’s surprising plan for his faithful saints.

These remarkably uniform texts suggest that most New Englanders did not conceive of church membership as an individual response to a personal conversion crisis.

Instead, they yoked their covenantal duties to life-course transitions, broader patterns of social maturation, and strategies of family preservation.

Statements of religious pedigree instantly conveyed important information to the assembled congregation that the candidate had been raised within the community of the godly.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, these credentialing statements appeared with increasing frequency in church admission testimonies from Boston to the Connecticut Valley.

During the decades following the puritan Great Migration, church membership candidates were far more likely to complain of the deficiencies of their religious upbringing.

The rhythms of church affiliation correlated closely with these broader patterns of social maturation.

Religious duties remained the peculiar responsibility of married adults

Young parents affiliated with the church as part of a broader protective family strategy designed to ensure that their children would be raised in the gospel land of light.

Of the more than one hundred families that affiliated with the Harwich, Massachusetts, church between 1700 and 1740, three-quarters presented at least one child for baptism within a month’s time.

446 parents from 340 families in Beverly, Massachusetts, between 1702 and 1765 found that 52 percent brought children for baptism the same day that they covenanted with the church,

The rise of private baptisms during the first half of the eighteenth century was one of several important ecclesiastical reforms through which ministers and lay people worked to align church affiliation practices with the imperatives of family formation.

Those who walked closely with God lived in the hope that “Their outward, and temporal Good, and profitt will be promoted, and advanced.” A “well ordered conversation,” in short, was the “surest way to enjoy the greatest Good, and happiness” while in this world.

One in four church membership candidates in Haverhill closed their relations with a nearly identical phrase, requesting that fellow parishioners “pray that I might walk answerable to my Profession.”

The structure of lay devotional writings drew inspiration from financial records. The most common forms of personal religious writings that survive between 1680 and 1740 were not introspective journals; they were rather rules, covenants, and resolutions.

December 2, 1742, John Brown

He died a few hours later, “having just compleated the 46th Year of his Age, and the 24th of his Ministry.”

a staunch critic of the “Uncharitableness, and Irregularities, which so much prevail in the Land at this present Day.”