America is losing its religion.
In a recent Gallup report, only three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services regularly. Within that, Mormons are the “most observant, with two-thirds attending church weekly or nearly weekly,” followed by Protestants (44%), Muslims (38%) and Catholics (33%). This number is down 12 percent since the early 2000s. Most Americans (68%) identify as some form of Christian, yet 28% are religiously unaffiliated (or “nones”) — a steep increase since 2007 when the latter accounted for 16%.
Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year found that 80% of U.S. adults say religion’s role in American life is shrinking, and only 49% believe that is a “bad thing.”
New England is at the epicenter of this apostasy with New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and Connecticut leading the nation in least religious states. Unsurprisingly, southern U.S. states remain the most active.
For the unaffiliated or less devout, the rise of ‘Christian nationalism’ — a still nebulous term — poses a threat to the separation of church and state. For the religious, these trends are more than troublesome.
But the decline of religious participation is not unknown in American history. In fact, similar trends existed 300 years ago as “religion was becoming more formal and less personal during this time, which led to lower church attendance,” according to History, adding, “Christians were feeling complacent with their methods of worship, and some were disillusioned with how wealth and rationalism were dominating culture.”
Yet colonists “crave[d] a return to religious piety,” History states. It was at this time America experienced what has become known as ‘The Great Awakening,’ a spiritual revival that lasted from the 1730s into the 1740s. This is the story of how a Connecticut man, Jonathan Edwards, became one of the movement’s most influential preachers.
Wrestling with God
Edwards was born on Oct. 5, 1703, in modern-day South Windsor into a “family of prominent Congregational ministers,” according to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As the only son of eleven children (who, shockingly for the times, all survived childhood), he was “set aside for the ministry” because not only was his father, Timothy, a minister, so was his maternal grandfather, Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Ma., who had an influential reputation in New England.
Ministry was part of Edwards’ lineage, which he readily accepted, resolving “to be great in the cause of Christianity” at an early age, as noted by Boston University’s School of Theology. In his biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George M. Marsden, the young Edwards grew under his father’s “disciplinarian” tutelage, who “set high standards for everyone,” taking “seriously his role as the guardian of the behavior of the village.”
Along with his studies in Latin and Scripture, Edwards — like others — lived with a “Puritan upbringing” that was “designed to teach children to recognize how insecure their lives were,” according to Marsden. This was partially influenced by French and Native American attacks on English settlements, especially the “Deerfield Massacre” (1704) when nearly 50 were killed and more than 100 colonists were taken captive and brought to Canada. Several victims included members of the Stoddard family.
Edwards understood life’s precariousness; but the weight of spiritual training, coupled with the emphasis on eternal punishment, led to a “spiritually troubled” adolescence. As Marsden describes, the future preacher wrestled with God’s sovereignty, the “very foundation of Calvinist teaching” because “he could not believe in, let alone submit to, such a tyrant” who predestined many souls to the “horrors of eternal punishment.”
In 1716, before turning 13 years old, he entered Yale when the average entry-level age was 16. His internal rebellious spirit yet rational mind was ripe for the Enlightenment age and study of the natural sciences. For the former, Edwards gravitated toward Isaac Newton and John Locke, reading the latter’s works with “more delight ‘than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold, from some newly discovered treasure,’” according to Christianity Today. Regarding natural sciences, the young student enthusiastically examined spiders. He once wrote, “Of all insects no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.”
Marsden suggests Edwards, like many 18th-century philosophers, was a polymath.
Yet along with his fascination with the sciences and liberal philosophy remained his conflict with God. As a young man, Edwards was often awed by other peoples’ conversions — his own would change the course of his life.
In the spring of his first graduate year, the pivotal moment came as he read 1 Timothy 1:17: “Now unto the King eternal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” After reading the passage, he felt:
“…there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before. …I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be wrapped up to God in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.”
Now reconciled with God, Edwards left Yale in 1722 after completing his studies and briefly served in New York City, Bolton, Conn., tutored at Yale, and then Northampton, providing pastoral care alongside his grandfather until the latter’s passing in 1729. Within those years, he developed a list of nearly 70 resolutions to cultivate Christian piety and virtues, which he would read to himself once a week, according to Memoirs of the Rev. Jonathan Edwards. The first one gives clearer insight into the actions he would take throughout the rest of his life:
“Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God’s glory and my own good, profit, and pleasure, on the whole; without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence; — to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general,— whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.”
By the dawn of the Great Awakening, Edwards’ prolific works — both books and sermons — placed him as “early America’s most eminent Christian philosopher,” according to Boston University’s School of Theology. But his most famous contribution to American religion was yet to come.
An Angry God
Life as a pastor was stressful. After taking sole leadership of his grandfather’s church, Edwards suffered several health collapses, most likely from anxiety and “strain of too much work” as Marsden describes. He also “could not escape the conclusion that most of his neighbors and parishioners were blindly stumbling their way to perdition,” according to Jonathan Edwards: A Life.
Still, he persisted, reshaping and refashioning a 17th-century “Puritan worldview into something that was entirely different; something that, by enlightened eighteenth-century standards, was ‘modern’ and uniquely his own,” as noted by A Jonathan Edwards Reader.
Due to his rising prominence, Edwards was invited by Boston clergymen to speak at Harvard on July 8, 1731, against Arminianism — a Protestant movement that challenged Calvinist doctrine. The sermon marked a “turning point” in his career, according to Marsden’s biography. Although it did not necessarily present anything different from previous defenses of Calvinist orthodoxy, Edwards “said it well,” inspiring the Boston clergy to publish the sermon in local newspapers soon thereafter.
Edwards’ presentation on theological matters and God’s divine redemptive love had similar effects on younger people, bringing them into the church, particularly in 1733-34, when a precursor to the Great Awakening ignited in the Connecticut River Valley. According to Marsden:
“…the awakening had spread and was transforming the youth culture of Northampton. The young people now seemed so compliant to Edwards’ leadership and so eagerly seeking spiritual joys that he easily convinced them to begin meeting on Thursday evenings after lectures (previously a favorite time for frolicking) for ‘social religion’ in smaller groups, meeting in homes in various parts of the town. Soon the adults adopted a similar plan. …Edwards resuscitated one of the basic components of the Puritan movement.”
Yet Edwards was not without his critics, including his former Yale teacher and Anglican priest, Timothy Cutler who “viewed the awakening as mostly ‘whimsical appearances and fantastic shows.’” And he did not escape difficulties, as several parishioners — including his uncle, Joseph Hawley II — committed suicide over spiritual shortcomings. The death stunned Edwards, who called for a day of fasting and later wrote, “Satan had struck when the euphoria of the Awakening was at its height and had turned what should have been a means to salvation into destruction.”
The deaths diminished the renewed religious fervor, at least temporarily. Still, the awakening laid the groundwork for another revival several years later when George Whitefield — an evangelist from England — came for an American preaching tour in 1740. By many retrospective analyses, Whitefield was one of the most prominent figures in pre-Revolutionary America — apart from Benjamin Franklin and Edwards — with reportedly tens of thousands attending his sermons.
Whitefield’s presence marked the ‘Great Awakening.’ For his part, Edwards was also an intellectual titan, but unlike Whitefield, the Connecticut preacher rarely toured. He was an ardent supporter of Whitefield’s work; as for his own mission, Marsden suggests Edwards was caught “between two eras and determinedly and sometimes brilliantly trying to reconcile the two” while trying to “fully affirm the new without giving up anything of the old.”
Despite his years of pastoral care and theological writings, Edwards is best known to modern Americans for his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which he gave on July 8, 1741, ten years to the day of the Boston sermon that solidified his stature as a prominent clergyman.
At a Congregational church in Enfield, Conn., Edwards sought to “remind his listeners of the fiery punishment that awaited unbelievers, and to encourage them to follow the moral path he outlined,” according to Connecticut History. In part, Edwards said:
“The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince: and yet ‘tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every Moment: ‘Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to Hell the last Night; that you was suffer’d to awake again in this World, after you closed your Eyes to sleep: and there is no other Reason to be given why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in the Morning, but that God’s Hand has held you up: There is no other reason to be given why you han’t gone to Hell since you have sat here in the House of God, provoking his pure Eyes by your sinful wicked Manner of attending his solemn Worship: Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a Reason why you don’t this very Moment drop down into Hell.”
Edwards’ imagery is often considered the epitome of a ‘fire and brimstone’ sermon, and indicative of the emotionalism Great Awakening preachers hoped to convey. After all, in their estimation, eternity was at stake — and God’s restraint offered sinners a chance to repent and follow Christ. Yet the fiery subject matter did not typically match his speaking tone that was filled with “such gravity and solemnity, and spake with such distinctness, clearness and precision,” according to Marsden.
Today, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is arguably one of the most well-known and studied sermons in American history, and the site where Edwards gave it is marked by an engraved stone in Enfield.
A New Revival?
Despite the increased conversions and church attendance, the Great Awakening “subsided around 1745 because proponents could not sustain enthusiasm, while the government of the [Connecticut] colony began regulating itinerant preaching and persecuting New Light supporters of the Awakening,” according to The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut.
Meanwhile, Edwards endured his own troubles as relations worsened with his congregation which “came to a head in a dispute over qualifications for church membership,” as noted by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. By 1750, he was dismissed from Northampton by a margin of one vote.
Edwards was offered other posts throughout the colonies and even in Scotland, but eventually moved to Stockbridge, Ma., where he provided pastoral care to a small congregation and a Native American mission, where he preached through an interpreter. He held the post until 1758, while completing numerous “theological treatises including Freedom of the Will (1754) and Original Sin (1758),” as indicated by Boston University’s School of Theology.
Eventually, the preacher accepted an offer to become president of the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton) but died a little over a month into his tenure after complications from a smallpox inoculation on March 22, 1758. He was 54 years old.
Even though modern Americans label him as ‘fiery’ preacher, Edwards’ life of defending Calvinist orthodoxy left an indelible mark on early America, serving as a “window into a critical period in American history” since he was a “shaper of spiritual life in America,” writes Boston University’s School of Theology. Marsden echoes those sentiments, stating that Edwards was “the most acute early American philosopher and the most brilliant of all American theologians.” Likewise, a tribute in A Jonathan Edwards Reader says:
“Like [John] Milton, Edwards sought a renewal in English-speaking religion that would do justice to the Reformation, which the German-speaking Martin Luther and his Protestant heirs had caused. And, as Augustine sought to reconcile piety with the highest forms of secular learning in the Latin world of logic and rhetoric, so Edwards sought to reconcile piety with the new scientific and philosophical age demarcated by Newton and Locke. However, neither the term ‘artist’ nor ‘theologian,’ when taken alone, can capture the full measure of the man.”
His works also went on to inspire abolitionists in the 18th and 19th centuries, along with 20th century evangelists.
While history does not repeat itself but rhymes, as one idiom suggests, perhaps America is poised for another ‘awakening’ soon if the ‘Christian nationalism’ debate is any bellwether. If an American spiritual revival comes to pass, there is no doubt in my mind that Edwards’ work would be influential in some degree in that movement.
Until then, only the Almighty knows what will transpire. Nevertheless, as we are still in the Easter octave, may God hold you lovingly in the palm of His hands.
Till next time —
Your Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Andy Fowler
