American Evangelicalism

George Marsden and the State of American Religious History

Darren Dochuk, Thomas S. Kidd, Kurt W. Peterson, Darren Dochuk, Thomas S. Kidd, Kurt W. Peterson

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780268158798, 9780268038427
• eBook ISBN: 9780268158552
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries.

This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this faith tradition as it has developed between the eighteenth century and the present. Moving through five sections, each centered around one of Marsden's major books and the time period it represents, the volume explores different methodologies and approaches to the history of evangelicalism and American religion.

Besides assessing Marsden's illustrious works on their own terms, this collection's contributors isolate several key themes as deserving of fresh, rigorous, and extensive examination. Through their close investigation of these particular themes, they expand the range of characters and communities, issues and ideas, and contingencies that can and should be accounted for in our historical texts. Marsden's timeless scholarship thus serves as a launchpad for new directions in our rendering of the American religious past.

PART I

PURITAN BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER 1

Jonathan Edwards and the Study of His Eighteenth-Century World

George Marsden’s Contribution to Colonial American Religious Historiography

DOUGLAS A. SWEENEY

George Marsden has been working on Jonathan Edwards since the time when this was actually a fashionable pursuit. Two of his first publications treated Perry Miller’s views of Edwards’s Puritan predecessors and Edwards’s controversial legacy in the Presbyterian Church. These appeared in 1970, when Miller, though deceased, continued to haunt the guild at large but The Works of Jonathan Edwards, founded by Miller, had nearly stalled.¹ Ironically, in the forty years since Marsden’s first book, social historians have managed to banish Miller’s ghost from the guild, and dead white males have lost preeminence in “the new religious history,” but The Works of Jonathan Edwards has succeeded beyond belief, fueling an Edwards renaissance in some of the byways of the discipline that evangelical males like Marsden himself have helped to lead.²

Books on Christian intellectuals no longer stand near the cutting edge of any field of study—except theology, of course. But the so-called “evangelical surge” in American academe, combined with Edwards’s iconic status among the leaders of the surge, has meant that Marsden and his Edwards have played a powerful role in the guild—cutting against the scholarly grain and teaching hundreds of younger scholars to do the same.³ Who would have guessed that a biography of a W.A.S.P. clergyman and evangelical theologian, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, could have taken the Bancroft Prize in 2004?⁴ I will plumb this irony further in the latter part of this essay. First, however, I want to offer a word about a few of the less surprising and more practical contributions of Marsden’s Edwards: to scholarship on the life of Edwards since the time of Miller; to the field of Atlantic history; to the study of evangelicals; and to our estimation of the place of Christianity in the rise of the American Revolution.

MODERN EDWARDS SCHOLARSHIP

Most of the leading lives of Edwards published during the twentieth century interpret their subject in tragic terms. Ola Winslow painted Edwards as a detached and lonely leader struggling to nurture true religion with an “outworn dogmatic system.” Perry Miller depicted Edwards and his work as “an enigma.” Though he “speaks from a primitive religious conception which often seems hopelessly out of touch with even his own day,” claimed Miller, “yet at the same time he speaks from an insight into science and psychology so much ahead of his time that our own can hardly be said to have caught up with him.” As Miller expounded on this elsewhere, “Part of the tragedy of Edwards is that he expended so much energy upon [a theological] effort that has subsequently fallen into contempt.” Miller’s Edwards was a genius, a literary artist, stuck in the role of a Calvinist pastor in the hinterlands of New England—a pity, to be sure. Patricia Tracy echoed the theme of Edwards’s tragic limitations, though in a somewhat different way, interpreting Edwards’s pastoral labors in terms of the conflict she perceived between his own patriarchy and the increasingly democratic aspirations of his people—one that ended in Edwards’s ejection from Northampton. “The tragedy of … Edwards,” she concluded, true to form, “was that he was so clearly a product of the changing patterns of authority and community life in eighteenth-century New England.”⁵

Marsden resists this chronic temptation to employ the trope of tragedy. He refuses to rehearse the usual biographical data and then make sense of Edwards’s life in terms of his failure to transcend his socio-cultural location and anticipate the advances of later American cultural leaders. “In writing this life of Edwards,” he announces early on, “one of my goals has been to understand him as a real person in his own time.” Marsden reiterates this goal so often that one can hardly miss it. “Our challenge,” he explains, “is to try to step into [Edwards’s] world and to understand it in terms that he himself would recognize.” Again, “My focus is primarily on understanding Edwards as a person, a public figure, and a thinker in his own time and place.”⁶ As Marsden reflected on this challenge in another publication, he said it required him to struggle “to get beyond Perry Miller, who simultaneously did the most to promote Edwards studies over the past half century and the most to confuse the issues of biography.” Miller’s tragic, anachronistic, even presentist life of Edwards, he said, “is to Edwards what Shakespeare’s Hamlet is to the actual Danish prince—a triumph of the imagination.”⁷ Marsden’s Edwards is a triumph of historical understanding.

Indeed, Marsden meets his goal of placing Edwards back in context better than anyone else before. He helps us enter Edwards’s world—physically, mentally, and spiritually—and understand his significance as an eighteenth-century leader. He covers all the usual ground, from Edwards’s birth in East Windsor, Connecticut, through his study and teaching at Yale, from his pastorates in New York, Bolton, Connecticut, and Northampton through his move to the Stockbridge mission and short-lived presidency of Princeton. He also provides an expert account of Edwards’s revivalism.

Along the way, Marsden brings to life a varied cast of characters who were central to Edwards’s life but have often been neglected by other scholars: Jonathan Belcher, for example, a crucial friend and supporter who served as Massachusetts’s governor and, later, New Jersey’s too, becoming president of the board of trustees of the College of New Jersey (Princeton); Abigail Williams Sergeant Dwight, a cousin and nemesis of Edwards who married his predecessor in Stockbridge (the Rev. John Sergeant), became a leader at the mission, and, after her first husband’s death, remarried a judge, politician, and British military officer named Col. Joseph Dwight, who joined her family’s opposition to Edwards’s ministry; and William Shippen, one of the architects of Princeton’s old main (Nassau Hall) and the physician who administered the inoculation for smallpox that led to Edwards’s death two months after he had assumed the Princeton presidency.

Marsden also covers new ground. He makes extensive use of Edwards’s understudied manuscripts, working most closely with correspondence and filling out our estimation of Edwards’s everyday affairs. Especially impressive is Marsden’s handling of the military context of Edwards’s life on the western edge of English Massachusetts, and with Native American Indians. He aids us in imagining the billeting of soldiers in the Edwards parsonage, the outfitting of Edwards’s Stockbridge cabin as a garrison, and Edwards’s near obsession with the significance—apocalyptic and otherwise—of British fighting against the Roman Catholic French. He thereby highlights Edwards’s remarkable composure as a scholar. And he stresses the worldly importance of Edwards’s work with Stockbridge Indians.

“The first goal of a biographer,” Marsden stipulates, “should be to tell a good story that illuminates not only the subject, but also the landscapes surrounding that person and the horizons of the readers.”⁸ Marsden tells a wonderful story, enriching his narrative with a wealth of little-known gems from Edwards’s world. He also succeeds in shedding new light on the varied landscapes of Edwards’s life, inviting his readers to enter them vicariously.

As he acknowledges in his preface, his ability to do this was enlarged exponentially by The Works of Jonathan Edwards. For more than half a century, a team of seasoned scholars and employees of “the Edition” has transcribed, annotated, and introduced Edwards’s writings, working in recent years especially with unpublished manuscripts. Read in the past only by those who could decipher Edwards’s hand (an extremely difficult task that has left many in despair) and could afford an extended stay at Yale’s Beinecke Library, these manuscripts—as published in The Works of Jonathan Edwards—have revolutionized the field of Edwards studies. It is not exaggeration, in fact, to assert that Marsden’s most significant feat in Jonathan Edwards is to have written the first biography that comprehends the massive, critical work of the Yale Edition.

Of course, as Edwards has been placed back into his eighteenth-century world, he has proven less attractive to progressive, modern thinkers. Now that Edwards has been shown to be a man of his own time—a supernaturalist, a biblicist, a Calvinist and revivalist, a patriarchal, hierarchical, slaveholding monarchist—many find it difficult to pay him heed today. In the words of Bruce Kuklick, Edwards was far more serviceable to secular intellectuals when portrayed by Perry Miller as “one of us—close to being an atheist for Niebuhr.” But now that Edwards has been unmasked—ironically, by Miller’s Yale Edition of his Works—his thought “is not likely to compel the attention of intellectuals ever again. Indeed,” argues Kuklick, “it is more likely to repel their attention.”⁹ To disinterested observers Kuklick’s claim seems hyperbolic. Large numbers of intellectuals remain intrigued by Edwards. Nonetheless, Kuklick’s statement represents a common perception that Marsden’s eighteenth-century Edwards is not as useful in the public square as Miller’s protomodern, enigmatic, artful Edwards.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD

One of the first things Marsden does as he puts Edwards into the setting of his eighteenth-century world is to broaden our understanding of its geography. “The world into which Edwards was born will make a lot more sense,” he suggests, furthermore, “if we think of it as British” (i.e., “rather than American”).¹⁰ These moves, along with Marsden’s later depictions of that world as an international, cosmopolitan, broadly Protestant world, render Marsden’s life of Edwards an important contribution to the most popular form of early modern history: the history of the transatlantic world, or the “Atlantic world.”

Atlantic history treats the multilateral contacts and exchanges of the peoples, cultures, and merchants near the Atlantic (in western Africa, Europe, and eastern North and South America).¹¹ For much of the twentieth century, national boundaries shaped and limited the scope of most history and restricted the frames of reference scholars employed. However, during the past couple of decades, rapid globalization of commerce, culture, and even national politics has yielded globalization in Western history.¹² This trend has gained so much momentum, in fact, that even Atlantic history is often blamed for being parochial (or insufficiently global). Nevertheless, it continues to shape the field of American history. Eighteenth-century American studies often feature cultural commerce—both voluntary and forced—between the ethnic groups that skirt the planet’s second largest ocean.¹³

Marsden’s life of Edwards is an Atlantic life of Edwards. It foregrounds the fact that although Edwards never traveled beyond Great Britain’s American borders he circled the globe with his mind, pen, and legacy. Marsden highlights Edwards’s vast array of foreign correspondence. He explains the global context of Edwards’s sense of identity, Christian faith and practice, defense of Calvinist orthodoxy, and work with Native Americans. He shows that Edwards was part of the Anglicization of British America—and gentrification of North America’s cultural leadership—during the early eighteenth century.¹⁴ He is careful to note the “British or Old World character” of Edwards’s life, “evident,” he says, “in its rigid hierarchical structures.”¹⁵

Most significantly, perhaps, Marsden demonstrates that Edwards was fully engaged with the Enlightenment, the Christian republic of letters, and the world of Western public discourse.¹⁶ He engaged this world primarily in defense of “the Protestant interest,” a phenomenon that Thomas Kidd has done so much to explore.¹⁷ Edwards’s cosmopolitanism was clearly not an end in itself; it was part of a larger mission to combat the forces of Antichrist and spread the Protestant gospel through revival and reform. Nevertheless, it was significant. No longer does Edwards represent the isolated, archetypal, national man of letters, heading straight for revolution, transcendentalism, and pragmatism, and adumbrating American exceptionalism. Marsden demonstrates that Edwards’s Atlantic world was bigger than that.

MODERN EVANGELICALISM

Marsden also contributes, of course, to the field of evangelical studies, a form of scholarship that he has helped to make a cottage industry. With colleagues Mark Noll, David Bebbington, George Rawlyk, Nathan Hatch, and many others, through the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (which Marsden helped to found), through a host of books and articles on nearly every period of American evangelicalism, Marsden has elucidated the transatlantic origins, multifaceted character, and international history of the movement. Marsden’s Edwards shines yet more light on its early modern founding.¹⁸

Most who write about evangelicalism treat the “Great Awakening” of the 1730s and ’40s as its matrix, or its catalyst, which birthed or sped the development of its global social network and its spirit of enthusiastic, ecumenical mission. And many tie the Awakening to the ethos of the Enlightenment, suggesting that evangelicals share a uniquely modern history that has played a powerful role in shaping modern American culture.¹⁹ Since the early 1980s, however, this story line has been challenged by several highly regarded scholars, along with the nature—and even existen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: George Marsden as Scholar, Christian, and Friend
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Puritan Beginnings
• Part II. Protestantism’s Century
• Part III. Protesting Modernity
• Part IV. Pluralism’s Challenge
• Part V. Pluralism’s Blessing
• Conclusion: How an Evangelical Won the Bancroft Prize
• Appendix: List of George Marsden’s Doctoral Students and Their Dissertations
• Selected Bibliography of George Marsden’s Works
• List of Contributors
• Index