Itâs nearly impossible for me to imagine colonial New England without a religious image springing to mind. I start thinking about the English settlers who journeyed to the New World to pioneer a new life, and soon my head is filled with images of Pilgrims in black buckled hats giving thanks to God for the bounty of a new world. If itâs not the Pilgrims, itâs someone like John Winthrop, rocking gently on the good ship Arbella and articulating his ambition that he and his fellow settlers will be a âcity on a hillâ in the new wilderness of testing. Even when the mental image of the colonial era is negative, it is often religiousâlike the dark, dour Puritans of Nathaniel Hawthorneâs âYoung Goodman Brownâ and other stories. Google âcolonial Americaâ and the first few pictures that appear depict people preaching or praying.
These images can overstate the piety of the first American colonists. The truth is the colonies were unevenly devout. Faith was arguably a more fundamental aspect of life in New England than it was in some Southern colonies. In New England, villages were often constructed with a church, or âmeetinghouse,â at the center, and the rest of civilization radiating from it like spokes on a wheel. But just because the meetinghouse was the central feature of the New England village doesnât mean the Christian faith was the driving beat of every citizenâs heart. America before the Revolution was not as religious as many imagine.
The first generation of New Englanders, those who colonized Plymouth beginning in 1620 and who established Massachusetts Bay Colony beginning in 1630, had a clear sense of their calling and purpose in the New World and had made the journey to America at great personal cost and risk. But religious commitment is difficult to transmit from one generation to the next. Already by the second generation many lamented the decline of the peopleâs commitment to God and to the founding vision of the Christian commonwealth.
Benjamin Tompsonâs 1676 poem âNew Englandâs Crisisâ gives some idea of the kinds of changes the older faithful found troubling. The subtitle sets the tone. His poem told the tale âOf New Englandâs Lamentable Estate at Present, Compared with the Former (but Few) Years of Prosperity.â Tompson reminisces (in meter) about an age when people were happy as songbirds with simple diets and modest clothesââWhen flesh was food and hairy skins made coats / And men as well as birds had chirping notes.â In his generation, backbiting and gossip were common. The earlier golden years, by contrast, were made up of days âWhen honest sisters met to pray not prate / About their own and not their neighborâs state.â
Alas, these âgolden times (too fortunate to hold) / Were quickly signed away for love of gold.â The modest fashion of New Englandâs founding fathers was gradually replaced by new trends from Europe. No longer satisfied with a simple diet, the colony began importing chocolate and French wine and exotic fruits. People couldnât delay gratifying their new and sophisticated palates long enough to pray over their meal. They were unkind to one another on the streets. Materially, the colony experienced a season of prosperity. Spiritually, in Tompsonâs view, the colony was increasingly impoverished. Tompson grieved the loss of simpler times, when âNew Englandâs beauties, which still seemed to me / Illustrious in their own simplicity.â
Growing materialism was an external symptom, men like Tompson believed, of New Englandâs internal spiritual problems. The children of churchgoers showed little interest in their parentsâ faith. A series of debates about baptism and the Lordâs Supper divided Christians. Frequent bloody conflicts with Native Americans led many leaders in the 1660s and beyond to believe God was punishing his people for their disobedience. The Puritans, those pioneers who established Massachusetts Bay Colony (which ultimately absorbed Plymouth Plantation), believed they were in a special covenant with God. Keeping that covenant was a group effort. And now, because the group was failing just a generation after the covenant was forged, it was showing signs of breaking.
Pastors developed a style of sermon called the âjeremiadâ as a response to spiritual decline. The format gets its name from the biblical âweeping prophet,â Jeremiah, who lamented the sins of his people Israel and warned them of Godâs impending judgment. Many New England preachers, who considered New Englanders a new Israel, took up the same task and called the populace to repentance.
In some places, congregations got the message and repented. Over the next seventy or eighty years, seasons of spiritual renewal and rededication known as âawakeningsâ became a common feature of the New England religious experience. One type of revival service was the covenant renewal service, which started becoming popular in the 1670s. These were essentially seasons in which pastors reminded their congregations of their duties to God and each other. The events gave church members opportunity to assess their personal relationship with God and provided an opportunity for people who were considering joining the church to convert and become full members. During covenant renewal seasons, preaching focused on salvation, and conversions were frequent. As a result of these events, congregations here and there experienced seasons of spiritual revival.
But a wholesale, wide-scale return to holiness remained out of reach. Church attendance remained low. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have estimated that in 1776, only 17 percent of American colonists were religiously affiliated. That number must have been even lower the generation before. A meetinghouse may have sat in the center of town, but some villages boasted more taverns than churches. In the first half of the eighteenth century, young people were postponing marriage until their late twenties. The result was a âwell-developed youth cultureâ that brought a range of sinsâfrom simple idleness and disrespect to sexual immorality. Roughly a third of babies in New England were conceived out of wedlock. Religious leaders committed to a vision of a Christian commonwealth in the New World saw that vision evaporating. Their society was losing its moorings, and New England was becoming less faithful. For decades many Christians prayed for an act of God to rekindle the spiritual life of New England.
In the 1740s it appeared to many that their prayers were answered. A generation of backsliders and spiritual sluggards was yanked to its feet by fiery preachers who delivered simple, passionate messages in a new theatrical style in a movement that came to be called the Great Awakening.
The Divine Dramatist
The Great Awakening (sometimes called âthe Awakeningâ) had no single champion or representative, but it did have one singular luminary. No revival preacher at the time had more influence than George Whitefield. He was a superstar, Americaâs first celebrity. Imagine Beatlemania or Bieber Fever in an age of periwigs and petticoats.
In the mid-1700s, Whitefield traveled from England to America thirteen times and logged some eighty thousand miles crisscrossing the colonies. Benjamin Franklin, the famous newspaperman from Philadelphia, was a contemporary of Whitefieldâs and a committed agnostic. He didnât believe a word Whitefield said when he preached the gospel, but Franklin couldnât help but admire him. In fact, the two were good friends, and Franklin attended many of Whitefieldâs events. Whitefieldâs speaking style was so refined, Franklin wrote, âthat every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed,â that even if you had no interest in the subject matterâand Franklin didnâtââone could not help being pleased with the discourse.â It elicited the same sort of pleasure as listening to âan excellent piece of music.â This was quite a change of pace from the average sermon of the day, which was typically read aloud by a seated pastor in some degree of monotone. Whitefield was captivating. Rumor has it he could cause a crowd to swoon by the way he pronounced the word Mesopotamia.
At one event, Franklin did the math and estimated Whitefield could preach to more than 30,000 people in the open air, without amplification. âHe had a loud and clear voice,â Franklin observed, âand articulated his words and sentences so perfectly that he might be heard and understood at a great distance.â It helped that his audience, âhowever numerous, observed the most exact silence.â But the immensity of Whitefieldâs audiences testifies to more than the power of his voice. It testifies, too, to his extraordinary appeal in colonial America. Boston was Americaâs most populous city in 1740. In that year, the entire population of Boston was around 16,400 souls. A crowd of 30,000 would have been equivalent to the entire populations of Boston and Philadelphia at the time.
Wherever Whitefield preached, people swarmed from cities and villages to hear him. A New England farmer, Nathan Cole, recorded in his journal his experience of hearing Whitefield preach. Cole knew Whitefield by reputation and âlonged to see and hear him, and wished he would come this way.â Soon enough, he had his chance:
Then on a Sudden, in the morning about 8 or 9 of the Clock there came a messenger and said Mr. Whitefield preached at Hartford and Wethersfield yesterday and is to preach at Middletown this morning at ten of the Clock. I was in my field at Work, I dropt my tool I had in my hand and ran home to my wife telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown, then run to my pasture for my horse with all my might; fearing that I should be too late; having my horse I with my wife soon mounted the horse and went forward as fast as I thought the horse could bear, and when my horse got much out of breath I would get down and put my wife on the Saddle and bid her ride as fast as she could and not stop or slack for me except I bade her and so I would run until I was much out of breath; and then mount my horse again, and so I did several times to favor my horse; we improved every moment to get along as if we were fleeing for our lives; all the while fearing we should be too late to hear the sermon.
Itâs difficult to imagine this level of enthusiasm about a sermon from any preacher in modern times. In the years before digital streaming entertainment, this was about as good as it got.
Cole and his wife were not the only ones frantic to hear Whitefield preach. They soon ran into traffic in their breakneck journey to see the English celebrity:
And when we came within about half a mile or a mile of the road that comes down from Hartford, Wethersfield and Stepney to Middletown; on high land I saw before me a cloud or fog rising; I first thought it came from the great River, but I came near the road, I heard a noise something like a low rumbling thunder and presently found it was the noise of horses feet coming down the road and this cloud was a cloud of dust made by the horses feet; it arose some rods into the air over the tops of hills and trees and when I came within about 20 rods of the road, I could see men and horses slipping along in the cloud like shadows and as I drew nearer it seemed like a steady stream of horses and their riders, scarcely a horse more than a length behind another, all of a lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils every Jump; every horse seemed to go with all his might to carry his rider to hear news from heaven for the saving of souls; it made me tremble to see the sight.
The sermon the Coles heard that day touched on the themes Whitefield included in most of his sermons. Whitefield was no feel-good preacher. Cole said of the sermon,
And my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound; by Godâs blessing my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me; then I was convinced of the doctrine of Election and went right to quarrelling with God about it, because all that I could do would not save me; and he had decreed from Eternity who should be saved and who not.
Like other revival preachers at the time, Whitefield assured his listeners that they were wretched sinners doomed for the fires of hell. Franklin marveled at the fact that people traveled so far only to hear a preacher describe them all as ânaturally half beasts and half devils.â Nevertheless, the message about human depravity and Godâs grace struck a chord in the colonies. Sinners heard again and againânot just from Whitefield but from a host of other preachersâthat they must repent of their sins and have a personal and converting experience of faith. If they did, they could experience the ânew birthâ and be âborn again.â
The Awakening drew a line in the sand and demanded that a casual, inherited faith was no faith at all. People responded, and the effects of their new birth, in some towns, were palpable in society. Franklin saw the transformation too, although he doubted there was anything supernatural about it. âFrom being thoughtless or indifferent about religion,â Franklin observed, âit seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.â
Other Luminaries
George Whitefield was not the only important figure of the Awakening. There were the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, whose followers became known as Methodists. In addition to writing hymns still sung in churches the world over today, they founded a movement that became Americaâs largest Christian denomination in the following century.
And there was Jonathan Edwards, the reserved and startlingly brilliant pastor whose uncharacteristically grim sermon âSinners in the Hands of an Angry Godâ brought white-knuckled Christians to their knees in repentance in more than one parish church. If George Whitefield was the movementâs most notable evangelist, Edwards was its most influential theologian. Edwards led his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, through a season of awakening in the early 1730s, at which time nearly three hundred people converted and joined the church. Three hundred people is a lot of people, until we put the number in perspective. Then it becomes a whole lot of people. The average church in Edwardsâs day usually had about seventy-five in attendance...