Conceived in Liberty (124 page)

Emotions, particularly frenzied emotions, are notoriously fleeting, and the Old Light counterattack was soon able to crush the New Light movement even in Northampton, where not a single new member joined the church from 1744 to 1748. Whitefield’s second tour of New England in 1744 was hardly triumphal. Although he attracted thousands, he was generally rebuffed and denounced by ministerial associations and by Yale as well as Harvard. Ironically, Jonathan Edwards was even ousted from his home parish at Northampton in 1750 when he abandoned the liberal practice of his predecessors in administering the sacraments to unregenerate members. This was far too purist even for his own congregation.

In New Jersey the battle between the Evangelicals, or New Side party, and the Old Side party came to a head at the meeting of the Presbyterian synod of 1741. The Old Siders expelled the New Side for their itinerant activities, their bitter attacks, and their emotional stress on hellfire. After vain attempts to win their return, the New Lights set up their own New York Synod in 1745 at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. The developments after the Presbyterian split, however, were the opposite of the Congregational experience. The New Siders attracted the young ministers and grew apace while the Old Siders dwindled. Finally turning conciliatory, the majority New Siders were able to induce a reunion of both groups in 1758. The New Siders founded the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1746 as the first college of the Awakening, and this college became the main training ground of Presbyterianism in America. And the College of New Jersey symbolized its new position as the fortress of Calvinist orthodoxy (taking the honors from an Old Light Yale) when it named Edwards its president shortly before his death. The immigrant Ulster Scots, formerly almost devoid of ministers, now received the expanding product of the new school and were instructed by New Side ministers.

Frelinghuysen, a leader of the revival movement, also sparked a schism in the Dutch Reformed Church in New York. The conservatives, however, stood no chance there, for they called for remaining under the authority of the Classis of Amsterdam as well as for services in the Dutch language, whereas Evangelicals wanted independence for the American church and preaching in English. Eventually, in 1772, the split was healed on Evangelical terms.

As the New Side became dominant among young Presbyterians and finally conquered the church, the new Presbyterian ministers to the Ulster Scots naturally brought the Great Awakening to the South. Early in the Awakening, a revival movement had begun among lay Presbyterians in Hanover County in the Virginia Piedmont. Led by Samuel Morris and inspired by Whitefield’s sermons, they persisted as a New Side center nourished by visiting New Side ministers. When the Reverend John Roan, in 1745, bitterly denounced the established church and its ministers, Governor William Gooch, with equal bitterness, condemned “such false teachers... who without order or license... lead the innocent and ignorant people into all kinds of delusion,” including “railing against our religious establishment.” In response, the Virginia grand jury indicted Roan for “vilifying the established religion,” as well as two laymen for speaking ill of the establishment and for allowing Roan to speak in an unlicensed house of worship. The three were eventually convicted and forced to pay small fines and court costs. The embattled Old Siders of the Philadelphia synod welcomed Gooch’s intervention against their enemies. The New Siders won permission to continue operations from Gooch, but two years later, the governor and Council issued
a proclamation to prohibit all itinerant preachers. At this point the New Lights of Virginia were saved by the arrival of the young Reverend Samuel Davies as the first settled Presbyterian minister in the region. The relatively moderate Davies was able to win a license to preach from Virginia’s governor and General Court.

The Reverend Mr. Davies actually won the hearts of the Virginia authorities with his fervent warmongering during the French and Indian War. Davies found it easy to substitute the enemy for the devil in his sermons. Thus:

Ye that love your country enlist; for honor will follow you in life or death in such a course. Ye that love your religion enlist; for your religion is in danger. Can Protestant Christianity expect quarters from heathen savages and French Papists? Sure in such an alliance the powers of Hell make a third party. Ye that love your friends and relations enlist; lest ye see them enslaved and butchered before your eyes.

Shortly after this bit of elegant demagoguery the Reverend Mr. Davies achieved the pinnacle of his career; like Jonathan Edwards before him, he became president of the College of New Jersey until his death two years later in 1761.

Despite their rapid expansion in the South, the New Side Presbyterians faced two inherent restrictions on their growth among the masses: the moderation brought to the movement by Samuel Davies, and their stringent requirements that their ministers be properly educated. The Baptists, however, labored under no such handicaps, and a fateful shift in the Baptist creed enabled them to fill this gap after midcentury.

The Baptists had begun in the colonies in mid-seventeenth-century Rhode Island. There they emerged not only as a liberal but as a radically individualist group. Their “creed” was individualism not only in religion, but also in political philosophy, to the point of anarchism. The religious individualism of the Rhode Island Baptists, however, was not frenzied Calvinist orthodoxy but a liberal and rationalistic creed that tended toward Arminianism and deism. It is not surprising that with such a heroically radical creed the Baptists did not exactly flourish in the colonies. They managed to grow moderately, however, and to establish centers in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and New York early in the eighteenth century, in addition to their previous membership in New England. Their main center soon became the new and expanding colony of religious liberty, Pennsylvania, and the first general organization of American Baptists met as the Philadelphia Association in 1707.

Ever since the founding of the Baptist sect in early seventeenth-century England, however, there had been two drastically conflicting and contradictory strains within Baptism: the “General,” that is, those subscribing to the
individualist, rationalist, and Arminian creed; and the independently founded “Particular” Baptists, that is, orthodox Calvinists except for their opposition to infant baptism and differences over church polity. The American Baptists had always been Arminian, but the Church had remained small. Under the impact of the Calvinist outburst of the Great Awakening, the Philadelphia Association, in a fateful turning point in Baptist history, abandoned the great tradition of the American church and swung over to a rigid Calvinism in 1742. The Baptists had not yet gone so far as to join the Awakening, but this drastic switch to Calvinism paved the way for their eventual surrender to the new movement.

It soon became clear that the Old Lights were winning the struggle for the capture of the Puritan churches of New England. Many of the separated New Lights, harassed as unrecognized churches, then took the opportunity to declare themselves Baptists and thus to win a recognized religious status —an important consideration in any community where a church is established. And the shift of the Philadelphia Association to Calvinism made this course an especially easy one. Between 1740 and the mid-1760s, the number of Baptist churches in Massachusetts expanded fivefold, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island threefold. The Baptists were now not only Calvinists but New Light Separatists to boot. By 1764 the Baptists were strong enough to found Rhode Island College (later Brown University), though it began on liberal principles, with various Protestant sects sharing in control of the college.

By the early 1760s the Baptists were ready to follow the Ulster Scots and the Presbyterians southward. To meet the demands of the masses, they allowed virtually anyone, even illiterates, to dub themselves ministers and to take up evangelical preaching. By 1760, the Separate Baptists, led by the former New Light Connecticut Congregationalist Shubal Stearns, had taken up headquarters at Sandy Creek in Guilford County in western North Carolina. From there, the Sandy Creek Association spread the Separate Baptist gospel into Virginia and South Carolina; they soon far overshadowed the sober and educated older or Regular Baptist churches in these provinces. Moreover, with their enthusiasm and uneducated ministry, the Separate Baptists were able after 1760 to grow far more rapidly in the South than were the Presbyterians. Indeed, they grew extremely rapidly, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. In the years 1768-70, the “period of the Great Persecution,” the angered Virginia government arrested and imprisoned over thirty Separate Baptist ministers as disturbers of the peace, but the persecutions only served to multiply rather than restrict the number of Baptist adherents.

Despite Whitefield’s original connection with the Church of England, the Anglican church remained a stronghold of opposition to the Great Awakening. Indeed, many Old Siders, when defeated in their own communions,
turned to the Anglican church. Methodism began as an evangelical tendency within the Church of England. As such, it first took root in the colonies in 1763, in Dinwiddie County in southern Virginia, with the New Light preaching of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt. Cooperating with Methodist lay preachers emerging in New York and Maryland, Methodism grew rapidly in the vicinity of Jarratt’s parish.

Of all the major church groups, the Quakers were the least affected by the Great Awakening. The Quakers were already pietistic and individualistic and thus were not affected by this major attraction of the Awakening. Too, the Quaker creed was highly optimistic and liberal, and at the opposite pole from the rigid predestinarian Calvinist theology.

The consequences of dynamic new movements are not always the same as their original objectives. For one thing, although the Great Awakening was by no means an economic class struggle in intent, its permanent
consequence
was to bring about a sharp religious split throughout the colonies along income and educational class lines. The upper classes would remain sober and rationalistic, whether as Quakers, deists, liberal Congregationalists, conservative Congregationalists, or Anglicans; the lower classes would adopt emotional and evangelistic creeds as New Side Presbyterians, Methodists, or Baptists. Previously in America, there had been few if any religious splits along class lines.

The Great Awakening, while reactionary in nature, also had progressive and libertarian consequences: the Awakening split had fragmented the Protestant churches. In doing so, the New Lights found themselves at war with the established church in the various colonies—with the Puritans in New England and the Anglicans in the South. At war with the establishment, the New Lights were willy-nilly pushed by the logic of their situation into libertarian positions and they contributed greatly to the weakening of the establishment in New England and the South. Liberalism in Massachusetts and indifference in the South had already weakened these establishments internally, and the fissures opened by the Awakening greatly furthered this task. Moreover, the ensuing multiplication of sects made it far more difficult for any one sect to establish itself in place of the old creed. In short, the Awakening permanently made matters far more difficult for any sect to become or remain an established religion.

The most severe struggle against establishment came in Connecticut, where control by the established quasi-Presbyterian church was far more rigorous than in the more liberal and more truly Congregationalist Massachusetts. The Connecticut Old Lights in control of the established church were far more willing to tolerate other dissenting groups than their own Separatists. At the behest of the Old Light ministers, the Connecticut Assembly in 1742 outlawed itinerant as well as unlicensed preaching and took away tax support from New Light ministers. Unlicensed or itinerant ministers
were to be fined or expelled from the colony. The following year, toleration of dissent as established in the Act of 1708 was repealed and religious dissidents were required to obtain special permission from the Assembly. When the New Lights tried to set up their own training school, the Connecticut legislature passed a law prohibiting any school, college, or seminary from being created without the license of the Assembly. For unlicensed preaching at Milford and New Haven, the New Light Presbyterian Reverend Samuel Finley, afterwards president of the College of New Jersey, was arrested and expelled from the colony. Furthermore, suspected New Lights were ejected from public office, and elected representatives from New Light towns (such as Canterbury, Plainfield, and Lyme in eastern Connecticut) were refused their seats in the Assembly.

The Old Siders were by no means alone in persecuting the Great Awakening. This was particularly true among the liberals. In 1743, Governor Jonathan Law of Connecticut wrote the powerful Dissenting deputies of Great Britain defending the persecutions in view of the troublesomeness of the Great Awakening movement. The Dissenting deputies replied in a friendly but firm reminder of libertarian principles. They too deplored the “delusions” and disruptions of the Great Awakening, “but great and manifest as those mischiefs are, we cannot be of the opinion that the magistrate has anything to do in this matter but to see that the public peace is preserved, that there are no riots or tumults, and that his subjects are not allowed to assault, hurt, maim, wound, plunder or kill one another in these religious contests.” Laws against differing religious opinions, on the other hand, are unfortunate, as Connecticut should well have known from the experience of the establishment in England. The deputies proceeded to criticize sharply the Connecticut law of 1742 and its severe penalties for dissent from Connecticut’s own establishment. The deputies concluded eloquently: “In short, whether we consider this matter in a religious or political light, it seems every way most advisable to let these men alone, how wildly erroneous soever both you and we may take their sentiments to be.” So great was the prestige of the Dissenting deputies in New England that before long Connecticut had adopted the bulk of their advice.