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

his ministry was growing increasingly out of step with the interests of his congregants,

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...

John Brown did not live to witness the dissolution of the steady religious culture that he had labored quietly and persistently to create throughout his career. But his successor, Edward Barnard, and longtime colleagues in the Bradford ministerial association certainly did. As they turned to assess blame for the ecclesiastical strife that plagued their once-tranquil parishes during the 1740s, they seized on a single cause: the celebrated itinerant Anglican evangelist, George Whitefield.

New England had entered an era of great awakenings. The gospel land of light would never be the same.

For Cole, Whitefield’s unexpected arrival in Middletown marked a decisive break with the past and propelled him into an uncertain religious future.

Whitefield directly repudiated the ideal of the godly walk.

These “whitfeldarians” or “rideing ministers,” as Cole described them, attacked infant baptism, family upbringing, doctrinal knowledge, devotional routines, and healing vows as a “Sandy Foundation” on which to build hopes for salvation.

Whitefield, in short, capitalized on a midcentury consumer revolution and engineered the first modern religious awakening in the Atlantic world.

The rhetorical power of Whitefield’s gospel labors soon persuaded other clergymen to adopt his emotive oratorical style.

So many of the principal itinerants descended on Hartford and the surrounding towns during the spring and summer of 1741 that minister Daniel Wadsworth complained of “much Talk and running after new preachers” among his parishioners.

The most prominent itinerant preachers recycled two-thirds of their sermons during their travels.

There was more to the sermons of George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and New England’s riding ministers than mere oratorical pyrotechnics.

Theologically, their sermons represented a narrowing of traditional preaching themes.

Whitefieldarians trained their sights on election and conversion

frontal assault on the entrenched ideals of the godly walk and the prevailing conventions of church admission relations.

During the months following Whitefield’s and Tennent’s preaching tours, local clergymen grew increasingly acerbic in their attacks on the godly walking.

Jonathan Edwards and his most accomplished student, Joseph Bellamy, appear to have narrowed the theological focus of their sermons for several years before Whitefield’s visit.

Edwards went so far as to align “Christless” church members with unredeemed Indian captives who had been forced to convert to Catholicism.

Edwards’s caustic attacks on unconverted church members culminated in his homiletic masterpiece, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

Joshua Bowles.

master cabinetmaker

of Copp’s...

Bowles converted his pocket journal of family devotions into an informal sermon notebook.

During the next ten months, he summarized numerous sermons by local ministers and visiting itinerants, jotting the speakers’ names, texts, doctrines, and other information on nearly every blank space in his tiny book.

Nearly half of the sermons that Bowles recorded in his commonplace book emphasized the immediacy of hell, the urgency of conversion in a time of great awakenings, and the dangers of resting secure in routine religious duties.

The two dramatic images—thousands gathering in silent anticipation in Providence waiting for a preacher who would never appear, and thousands more coursing to Middletown at breakneck speed—were two sides of the same coin.

Quite possibly the most distinctive feature of New England’s era of great awakenings was the spectacular way the Whitefieldarians moved their audiences, both spiritually and physically.

Jonathan Mayhew

After visiting York

receiving news from his brother of an awakening on M...

“I hear (and desire with my whole Soul to bless God for it),” he wrote to his brother during the spring of 1742, “that there is a R...

Viewed from the vantage point of more than two centuries of evangelical revivalism, Mayhew’s language appears conventional, but his letter was among the first to describe New England’s scattered great awakenings as an interconnected...

The unusual religious stirs that gripped the northern New England frontier during the fall and winter of 1741–1742 convinced many clergymen that sporadic occurrences in distant towns were part of a grand scheme and even...

Over the course of its two-year publishing run, the Christian History printed more than two dozen revival narratives by New England ministers,

each of which conformed to a set of instructions

began with a brief history of the town

contented themselves with the “empty Form” of outward religious duties.

one “remarkable Day”

Meetings increased along with the rising zeal of the townspeople.

the second half of his narrative

“Rise, Progress, and Effects of this Work among You to the Present Day.”

the general moral reformation ...

revivals among the young people

carefully acknowledged occasional instances in which the zeal of some participants had gone too far.

The diffusion of revival news helped to create an overwhelming mood of expectation.

The diaries and correspondence of ministers across New England reveal the same sequence of events:

a period of careful preparation and mounting interest followed by peaks of intensive itinerant preaching, attacks on the ideal of the godly walk, protracted revival meetings, surges in church membership, and the exportation of revival intelligence to distant communities.

His powerful conversion experience marked a dramatic break with the past—a new birth—in which he repudiated the religious experiences that had precipitated his decision to affiliate with the Kensington church.

the touring Anglican clergyman had struck at the foundations of Cole’s faith and unleashed grave uncertainties about the proper order of the Congregational establishment.

Thousands of New Englanders like Cole experienced the Whitefieldian awakening as a sudden and dramatic rupture with the past rather than a resurgence of traditional puritan piety.