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

Far from an ingathering of the unchurched or the notoriously sinful, revival meetings were dominated by long-standing church members—“ould Christions” like Cole who discovered that they had been building their hopes for salvation on a foundation of sand.

Church membership demographics

great awakenings as a disruption in the established order.

Repudiating the religious duties associated with the ideal of the godly walk opened the doors of the church to anyone who could demonstrate an experimental knowledge of the new birth.

They gloried in their preaching successes, frequently reporting the specific numbers of people that had experienced conversion as a direct result of their sermons.

By the fall of 1741, references to awakened youths had become so ubiquitous that revival proponents coined a pair of phrases to describe this distinctive cohort of church membership candidates. They called them “new converts” or “Young Christians.”

For a brief period between 1741 and 1744, church membership had ceased to serve as a badge of family status or social maturation.

many godly walkers discovered to their dismay that they had never truly experienced the new birth.

Identifying long-standing church members who were caught up in the revivals is difficult, since their names, unlike those of new converts, seldom appear on membership lists.

By 1742, thousands of New Englanders—long-standing professors and new converts alike—had embraced the theological innovations of the Whitefieldarians and were prepared to cast off the inherited traditions of the godly walk.

In graveyards across New England, hopeful images of smiling faces, hearts, and cherubs appeared alongside, within, or, occasionally, supplanted the classic winged skull motif that had dominated late-seventeenth-century funerary iconography.

church membership candidate Eli Forbush took the seemingly audacious step of writing his relation of faith in the form of a personal letter—the first known example in more than a century of practice.

“I was born Feb 15th 1711 and born again octo 1741.” The terse opening sentence of Nathan Cole’s “Spiritual Travels” not only signaled a sharp break with his religious past but it also provided an impetus to write.

godly walkers listed and catalogued; they resolved and covenanted. They infused their correspondence with pious counsel and marked religious time in annotated almanacs. Their prayer bills were relentlessly formulaic, as were most church admission testimonies composed between 1700 and 1740.

Their devotional writings shared much in common with the concurrent rise of financial ledgers.

“great day of reckoning.”

Whitefield’s first New England preaching tour decisively changed the terms of popular religious discourse.

The narrative structure of church admission relations also changed during the revivals.

parishioners struck a more confident tone in their relations. They seemed more convinced that something had happened to them.

older Congregational ministers continued to refer to church admission testimonies as relations,

Whitefield adopted a different term.

he encouraged his audiences to recount their experience...

New Englanders had been experiencing religion all along; however, Whitefield succeeded in persuading many new converts that the only experience that counted was the new birth.

A rise in reports of wondrous supernatural phenomena coincided with the surge in church membership that crested across New England during the great awakenings of the early 1740s.

Pitkin’s analysis of the dual possession of Martha Robinson stands at the intersection of the three most controversial innovations of the revivals: exercised bodies, biblical impulses, and revelatory visions of the Book of Life.

The Whitefieldarians succeeded in reversing a theological trend that had curbed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit for more than half a century.

Early English dissenters initially reveled in its operations.

Radical puritans and Quakers alike described the Holy Spirit as an indwelling presence that warmed the hearts of God’s elect.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, pneumatology receded from theological prominence, as New England ministers increasingly emphasized preparation for salvation, the orderly means of grace, tribalism, sacramental obligations, and the rational springs of the created cosmos.

few relations of faith or diaries written between 1680 and 1740 described the third person of the Trinity as an indwelling vital presence.

most lay men and women talked and wrote about the Holy Spirit as a comforting external presence that labored to awaken sinners to their Christian duties and could be grieved away by ignoring private...

Jonathan Edwards also intensified his explorations on the nature of the Trinity during the revival years.

Edwards had always described the Holy Spirit as an “indwelling vital principle,” he tended to characterize the third person of the Godhead as a “temper and disposition” in his early writings.

Edwards’s manuscript “Treatise on Grace” signaled an important theological shift.

dividing the “influence of God’s Spirit” into common and special, or saving, grace.

“Irrefragable to reason” but ridiculed as “enthusiasm, fanaticism, whimsy and distraction” by unbelievers, the “doctrine of a gracious nature being the immediate influence of the Spirit of God” had become an essential component of Edwards’s emerging revival theology.

“Have we ever experienced the regenerating, renewing, Sanctifying operations of the Spirit of God”?

Determining whether one had been infused by the Holy Spirit proved to be no easy matter. Despite his technical writings on the subject, Edwards concluded that the principle of the indwelling Spirit was “ineffable,” “inconceivable,” and “infinitely above all our conceptions.”

At the height of the Boston revival, how could one discern whether another person had been possessed by the Holy Spirit or by Satan? For sympathetic observers like Joseph Pitkin, there was only one way to know for certain: watch their bodies, listen to their words.

Viewed against the backdrop of protracted revival meetings in the upper Connecticut Valley, Edwards’s decision to preach his most terrifying sermon at Enfield must have been a calculated one.

Edwards could have chosen a different tone for his visit to Enfield, but, after witnessing the ecstatic behavior of the Suffielders and gauging the temper of his audience, he elected to preach Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. It was a deliberate attempt to evoke the dramatic physical manifestations that Williams recorded in his diary later that day.

Neither Edwards,

nor any of the prominent Whitefieldarians who witnessed the revival events

offered an interpretation of what they thought exerci...

Other revival proponents, including Edwards’s protégé and future biographer Samuel Hopkins, developed a more coherent assessment.

“It seems to me,” Hopkins noted in his journal, “that such may be the effects of Discoveries from the Spirit of God, and I rejoyce at it.”

Hopkins quickly learned to associate these “Strange things” with the work of the Holy Spirit

Soon, Hopkins was counting the number of conversions that followed these somatic outbursts.

For Hopkins, bodily distress marked the descent of the Spirit and signified its indwelling presence in the bodies of new converts.

Daniel Rogers also learned to associate agitated bodies with the converting work of the indwelling Holy Spirit during his various preaching circuits.