Jonathan Edwards

by George M. Marsden

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable since Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses.7 Most strikingly, the standard narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity flourished in American and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports. The particularities of Edwards' life-so different in many ways from what followed-do not explain all that, even if they shed light on it. Nonetheless, the larger point is that histories of America-or of the modern world for that matter-need to integrate people like Edwards into their accounts.