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April 27 - June 23, 2023
one disenchanted Vermont settler, for whom “there was no regular place of worship, nor any likely prospect that there should, for their religions had as many shades of difference as the leaves of autumn; and every man of substance who arrived, was preacher and magistrate to his own little colony.”
Unlike their puritan ancestors, Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists conceived of marriage as an “Instetution of God”—a divinely ordained union of souls—rather than a civil or economic arrangement.
Dissenting ministers opened their correspondence with salutations “from your Brother In Travil and Companion In Tribulation.” The etymological slippage between the travels of riding ministers, the travail of the new birth, and the trials of the Separate movement was not incidental.
Nathan Cole spoke for many radical Whitefieldarians of his generation when he inscribed the running heads “Spiritual Travels” and “Spiritual Tryals” on the facing pages of his autobiography.
His carefully chosen words capitalized on a strikingly modern religious sensibility. They marked the eclipse of the parish-based world of the early eighteenth century and the ascendance of...
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Winnecunnet perfectionists
Fascinated with discrete, somatic conversion experiences; predisposed to heed biblical impulses, dreams, visions, and new revelations; committed to decentralized forms of religious authority and worship; and stridently opposed to established ministers,
On several occasions, Backus refused to admit members of the Winnecunnet circle to his church at Titicut.
Separate Leaders realized that spiritual unions and new covenant marriages were cunning heresies,
Hide traced a slippery slope from antinomianism to infidelity.
It began with parishioners who refused to pray until they had experienced conversion, then renounced their infant baptisms, and, finally, asserted that “marriage is an Institution of God and I Never was married in faith.”
hundreds of families in towns across New England quietly began transferring their religious affiliation to the Church of England.
In contrast to their enthusiastic kin and neighbors who reveled in the extraordinary workings of the Holy Spirit, self-professed Arminians and Anglicans sought shelter from the growing ecclesiastical storm in rational faith and orderly worship.
Instead, the most fertile ground for liberal religious dissent developed in the central New England uplands.
The same towns in Worcester County and eastern Connecticut that had been wracked by schisms and outbreaks of the wildest antinomianism following the Whitefieldian revivals also witnessed a surprising number of church discipline cases involving charges of Arminianism.
These examples reveal a crucial point of difference between purported Arminians and Whitefieldarian dissenters and sectarians.
Liberal critics of the Congregational establishment rarely formed factions or fomented schisms, and few of them permanently withdrew from communion.
During the decades following the Whitefieldian revivals, the real liberal threat to the gospel land of light came from an unlikely quarter,
The “Church of England in New England,”
Anglicanism exploded across New England between 1745 and 1775.
“Many of those deluded people, having lost themselves in the midst of error, wearied in the pursuit” the Fairfield, Connecticut, minister explained, and, “as their passions subsided, sought for rest in the bosom” of the Church of England.
Like provincials in Virginia and elsewhere in the British Empire, New Englanders were drawn to the Church of England for its promise of order.
Recoiling from his earlier radicalism, Edwards came to believe that only a “public profession of religion” would insulate his parish from the centrifugal threats of Arminian formalism and antinomian enthusiasm.
Edwards’s dismissal from Northampton laid bare the gaping fissures that had emerged in the gospel land of light, as ministers and lay people struggled to distinguish traditional relations and professions of doctrine from the inspired narratives of conversion.
“All are agreed that a publick profession of religion is necessary in order to persons being admitted into the church,” acknowledged one of Edwards’s many critics. “But then we Shall differ as to this profession.”
The bitter Farewel-Sermon that Edwards preached in Northampton on June 22, 1750, marked his defeat as a pastor and a revivalist.
Although Ezra Stiles once described himself as one of the “good old Puritans,” he was a more cosmopolitan Protestant, a “citizen of the intellectual world” who remained tolerant of religious diversity throughout his life.
An exception to this pattern was the brief essay he inscribed in one of his notebooks several months before he began writing his ecclesiastical history.
Stiles’s “Eye Salve” was an attempt to come to terms with the effects produced by the revivals of the 1740s on New England’s religious establishment.
“When a Church and Congregation became generally New Lighted,” Stiles maintained, a “new minor Old Li...
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Churches that remained “Old Light” frequently generated “minor New Light Churches.”
In still other cases, when ministers preached against purported revival excesses, Separate churches broke away from the “New Lighted Churches.”
At the close of one of the earliest descriptions of the Old Light–New Light taxonomy that would rise to canonical status among modern historians, Stiles conceded that all New England churches were in “Essence true Churches.”
Established or Separate, peaceable or fractious, led by college-educated ministers or unlettered elders, Congregational or Presbyterian in polity, moralistic or tinctured with enthusiasm—all of them were on some level, or at least for some faction of earnest Christians, legitimate.
To Stiles, an ecumenical spirit of toleration seemed to be the only salve capable of healing the wounds inflicted by New England’s era of great awakenings.
He filled his itineraries with detailed maps of towns that had witnessed bitter schisms, such as Lyme and Canterbury, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island. In each case, Stiles accented Congregational authority by placing a cross atop the established meetinghouses, but he also marked Anglican, Separate, and Baptist societies with buildings labeled “E,” “S,” and “B.”
As he surveyed the fractured situation in towns across New England, Stiles noted with mounting concern the growing number of people who seemed indifferent to the Congregational establishment altogether and “very seldom” came to Sabbath meetings. He struggled to develop a vocabulary to describe these “Non Communicants,” “Neutrals,” people of “no Denomination,” and “stay at home Christians.” Eventually, Stiles settled on a single word to describe their anomalous status. He called them “Nothingarians.”
The struggles of Eunice Andrews provide a final example of the powerful ways in which diverging religious experiences fundamentally transformed the Congregational churches as institutions.
Andrews eventually summoned the courage to relate her experiences to John Cleaveland and placed her mark in the Chebacco church record book on September 16, 1750.232
Andrews and her husband moved to Ebenezer Parkman’s parish in Westborough.
Cleaveland sent a letter to Parkman endorsing Andrews’s upright Christian conversation and dismissed her to his pastoral care.
Andrews had no intention of transferring her membership from Chebacco because she disagreed with Parkman’s inclusive admission procedures.
Andrews maintained that she belonged to a “Reguler Church” at Chebacco. As one of Christ’s “true followers,” she was entitled to participate in the sacrament in Westborough, regardless of her concerns about the state of Parkman’s soul or her reservations regarding the church over which he presided.
After four years of wrangling, tempers cooled and positions softened.
The Westborough church voted to make Andrews a “professor in General and not as a Member of one particular Church or another.”
Parkman’s acquiescence to Andrews’s demands signaled the ascendancy of individual experience over corporate discipline. Church membership no longer related to parish boundaries, ecclesiastical order, or community expectations. Instead, as Cleaveland’s parishioners in Chebacco explained in a landmark series of votes, all individuals had the right to judge for themselves where to worship, regardless of “Lines drawn by the civil Majestrate,” and any church member could move from one congregation to another based solely on the “Principle of Edification.”
Many ministers continued to refer to their parishioners’ church admission testimonies as relations, but some began to call them “Experimental” relations or simply “Experiences.”
A revolutionary era of religious voluntarism, liberty of conscience, and freedom of choice had dawned in the gospel land of light.
These ecclesiastical schisms had been perpetrated, in Lane’s view, by a younger cadre of unlettered itinerants who descended on the northern frontier, preaching house to house, sowing discord wherever they went, and seducing earnest lay people into heterodoxy and sectarianism.
thirteen church admission relations
