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Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Philip Goff
Philip Goff
Affiliation:
Philip Goff is assistant professor of history and religious studies at California State University, Los Angeles.
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Extract

Thirty years ago Alan Heimert published his monumental study of religion's relationship to the American Revolution. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution contradicted the conventional wisdom rooted in Vernon Parrington's 1927 Main Currents of American Thought and implicitly challenged the more recent interpretation put forward by Heimert's own mentor, Perry Miller. Critics responded vigorously, but their reproofs did not foretell the future of Heimert's argument. Indeed, in the past twenty years a cadreof young scholars assumed either his thesis or method and moved the debate toward the personalities and movements Heimert underscored. Some of today's leading scholars who study connections between the revivals and the Revolution pay homage to Heimert's thought in footnotes if not in the texts themselves. Two social/intellectual movements seemingly at cross-purposes, namely Protestant evangelicalism and the new cultural history, rescued Heimert's work from scathing yet well-placed criticisms to establish its assertions as a leading model for understanding religion's role in the American Revolution.

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Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , December 1998 , pp. 695 - 721
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1998

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References

Parts of this article were originally read at the Institute of Early American History and Culture annual meeting, Boulder, Colorado, 2 June 1996. The author wishes to thank Allen Guelzo, Jon Butler, Choi Chatterjee, Lillian Taiz, Katherine McGinn, and the late Wilbur Jacobs for their comments and suggestions; and Steve Sheehan for his research assistance.

1. Heimert, Alan, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).Google ScholarParrington, V. L., Main Currents of American Thought, vol. 1, The Colonial Mind, 1620–1800 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927).Google Scholar

2. Two excellent historiographic essays from the 1993 Wingspread Conference recently appeared in print, both dealing with religion's relationship to the American Revolution. While Alan Heimert's work plays a signficant role in each, their interests differ substantially from this essay. Allen Guelzo thoroughly lays out the “considerable amount of interpretive territory” between Heimert and Jon Butler in order to indicate how the Great Awakening straddles intellectual history and religious history and to put forth a new language for writing about it. Gordon Wood reviews much of the same literature, but with an eye to the long Revolutionary period—which begins in the early eighteenth century and ends in the early nineteenth century—to argue for the primacy of migratory, economic, and social changes that manifested themselves in political and religious rebellion. See Guelzo, Allen C., “God's Designs: The Literature of the Colonial Revivals of Religion, 1735–1760”;Google Scholarand Wood, Gordon S., “Religion and the American Revolution,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Stout, Harry S. and Hart, D. G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

3. Parrington, , Main Currents, 148.Google ScholarSee also the interpretation of one church historian whose conclusions paralleled those of Parrington, in Rowe, Henry K., History of Religion in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1928).Google Scholar Most historians ignored the revivals in relating religion's role in the Revolution; see especially G. A. Koch, “Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1933);Google ScholarBaldwin, Alice, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1928) analyzes the Great Awakening's debates along Enlightenment lines, focusing on who used John Locke's thought most often and most effectively, centering on debates over natural and constitutional rights.Google ScholarVan Tyne, C. H., The Causes of the War of Independence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), approached the topic similarly by reasoning that Puritan politics were democratic in nature, linking Congregational and Presbyterian ministers to Locke and John Milton.Google ScholarSee also Miller, John C., Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943).Google ScholarSweet, William Warren, the foremost religious historian of the day and a devotee of Frederick Jackson Turner, placed emphasis on Calvinism's frontier transformation from communitarian societies to individualistic faith, and in doing so made possible an organic connection to the revolutionary spirit: “The emphasis everywhere was upon man's personal needs; every man was expected to find his own way to God. In a pioneer society this emphasis was both natural and inevitable, for a pioneer society is a self-reliant individualistic society. … The emphasis upon the individual therefore meant variability; implied in it the right to be different. And is this not basic in democracy; the right to live his own life; his right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?”Google Scholar(See Sweet, Revivalism in America: Its Origin, Growth, and Decline [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944], 40–41) Likewise, “For the first time the American people found, in the revival, a common intellectual and emotional interest;Google Scholar for the first time intercolonial leaders emerged, which broke over political as well as sectarian lines. … In these respects the Great Awakening may be considered one of the important contributing factors in preparing the way for the Revolution” (idem, The Story of Religion in America [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930], 250–51). Nonetheless, Sweet never exhibited the link between the two events more precisely than such rare allusions. In fact, he usually kept the two events in separate divisions of his books, or even in separate books altogether; see above and Religion in Colonial America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942)Google Scholar, and Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765–1840 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952). This tendency is especially revealed in Religion in Colonial America, where his chapter titled “The By-Products of the Great Awakening” does not mention politics or the American Revolution. Sweet's main interest in linking the revivals to the Revolution usually lay in showing cooperation and unity behind once competing faiths.Google Scholar

4. Miller, Perry, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933);CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939);Google Scholaridem, Jonathan Edwards (New York: W. Sloan Assoc, 1949); idem, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). For Miller's place among twentieth-century historians, see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277, 380–81;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDarnton, Robert, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” in The Past before Us: Contemporary Writing in the United States, ed. Kammen, Michael (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980);Google ScholarHigham, John, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 209, 227.Google Scholar

5. Heimert, , Religion and the American Mind, vii–viii.Google Scholar

6. Heimert, , Religion and the American Mind, 16.Google Scholar

7. Heimert, , Religion and the American Mind, 11, 12.Google Scholar

8. Morgan, Edmund S., review of Religion and the American Mind, by Heimert, Alan, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967): 454–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarHeimert, , Religion and the American Mind, 11. Morgan, review, 459.Google ScholarMorgan, , “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967): 3–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMorgan, , review of The Adams Papers, New England Quarterly 34 (1961): 518–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Mead, Sidney E., “Through and beyond the Lines,” Journal of Religion 48 (1968): 281.Google ScholarHeimert, , Religion and the American Mind, 539. Mead, , “Through and Beyond,” 281; interestingly, Mead misquoted Heimert's words, mistaking Heimert's “Republican heavenly cities” for Carl Becker's “heavenly City,” a reference to Enlightenment religion (277).Google Scholar

10. Mead, , “Through and Beyond,” 283–85, especially 284 n. 6 (on Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare). Heimert, , Religion and the American Mind, vii.Google Scholar

11. Mead, “Through and Beyond,” 288. Mead later voiced his disagreement with Heimert by putting the issues into their church-state relationship. He asserted that the early republic's rejection of religious establishment indicates the Enlightenment's victory over orthodox Christianity (see “Christendom, Enlightenment, and Revolution,” in Religion and the Revolution, ed. Brauer, Jerald C. [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976]).Google Scholar Brauer disagreed, arguing that the Awakening's intense piety and critical religion engendered the democratic movement—a claim akin to Heimert's argument (see “Puritanism, Revivalism, and the Revolution,” in Religion and the Revolution).

12. McLoughlin, William G., “The American Revolution as a Religious Revival: ‘The Millennium in One Country,’” New England Quarterly 40 (1967): 100–101, 100, 110, 108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMurrin, John M., “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations,” Reviews in American History 11 (1983): 161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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15. The articles in the Journal of Presbyterian History 54 (1976) were: James G. Leyburn, “Presbyterian Immigrants and the American Revolution”;Google Scholar James L. McAllister Jr., “Francis Alison and John Witherspoon: Political Philosophers and Revolutionaries”; William E. Pauley Jr., “Tragic Hero: Loyalist John J. Zubly”; John M. Mulder, “William Livingston: Propagandist against Episcopacy”; Thomas E. Buckley, S. J., “Church-State Settlement in Virginia: The Presbyterian Contribution”; J. Earl Thompson Jr., “Slavery and Presbyterianism in the Revolutionary Era”; Howard Miller, “The Grammar of Liberty: Presbyterians and the First American Constitutions”; John E. Beardslee III, “The Dutch Reformed Church and the American Revolution”; and Christopher M. Beam, “Millennialism and American Nationalism, 1740–1800.” Articles in Church History 45 (1976) were: Mark Noll, “Ebenezer Devotion: Religion and Society in Revolutionary Connecticut”;Google Scholar John F. Berens, “‘Good News from a Far Country’: A Note on Divine Providence and the Stamp Act Crisis”; and Douglas H. Sweet, “Church Vitality and the American Revolution: Historiographic Consensus and Thoughts towards a New Perspective.”

16. Noll, , “Ebenezer Devotion,” 293–95, 307.Google ScholarIdem, “Observations on the Reconciliation of Politics and Religion in Revolutionary New Jersey: The Case of Jacob Green,” Journal of Presbyterian History 54 (1976): 233.

17. Noll, Mark, Christians in the American Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Christian University Press, 1977).Google ScholarIdem, “The Reformed Politics of the American Revolution,” in One Nation under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). Noll's affinity for Nathan Hatch's work on millennial rhetoric coming out of the French and Indian War is clear in this piece. See my discussion of Hatch's work below.

18. See Wuthnow's, Robert discussion of evangelicals' desire to return to politics in “The Political Rebirth of American Evangelicals,” in The New Christian Right: Mobilization and Legitimation, ed. Liebman, Robert C. and Wuthnow, Robert (New York: Aldine, 1983).Google Scholar

19. Stout, Harry S., “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 34 (1976): 522, 523, 521.Google Scholar

20. Stout, “Religion, Communications,” 525. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 18. Henry May at the same time also noted this importance in Heimert's work: “As Heimert points out in his most penetrating passages, the most important and enduring difference between Old Light and New Lights was one of style” (see May, Henry, The Enlightenment in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1976], 93).Google Scholar

21. Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially part 4 of the book.Google Scholar

22. For a direct discussion of this approach in distinction to earlier historical approaches, see Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn, and Jacobs, Margaret, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), chapter 6.Google ScholarSee also Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), part 4;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar I do not mean to categorize Stout as a “new cultural historian” so much as to indicate his role in encouraging colonial religious scholars to approach material in a manner that cultural historians during this period used. Since 1986 many cultural historians have taken the approach further than Stout seems interested in going. Stout's approach straddled the structuralist interest in mapping mental realities and an emerging post-structuralist concern for speech as a polyglot of codes. His argument, however, leaned toward structuralism in its regard for New England society's consistency and the historian's ability to decipher various speech codes. For a contemporaneous example of this transition in nonreligious history, see Pocock, J. G. A., “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 325–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Bonomi, Patricia U., Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google ScholarBridenbaugh, Carl, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google ScholarFor Richard Hofstadter's inspiration in Bonomi's underlying argument about religion's primary role in shaping colonial religious culture, see Bonomi's introduction. For a good review of Bonomi that examines her similarities to and differences from Heimert and Stout, see Gura, Philip F., “The Role of the ‘Black Regiment’: Religion and the American Revolution” New England Quarterly 61 (1988): 439–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Weber, Donald, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), introduction. For a good review of Weber's book within its 1980s historiographic context, see Gura, ‘“Black Regiment.’” Weber asserts, and rightly so, that his approach—looking solely at form—goes beyond Stout's (157 n. 2).Google Scholar

25. Bloch, Ruth, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Gura, ‘“Black Regiment,’” 445–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Goen, C. C., “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” Church History 28 (1959): 25–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcLoughlin, William G., ‘“Enthusiasm for Liberty’: The Great Awakening as the Key to the Revolution,” in American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 87 (1977): 69–95.Google ScholarRoyster, Charles, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).Google ScholarAlbanese, Catherine L., Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976).Google ScholarValeri, Mark, “The New Divinity and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1989): 741–69;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and idem, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

27. Hatch, Nathan O., The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar For another classic statement of politics' preeminence in the millennial debate, see Endy, Melvin B. Jr., “Just War, Holy War, and Millennialism in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (1985): 3–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarYoungs, J. William T., The Congregationalists (New Haven: Greenwood, 1990).Google ScholarWilson, Robert J., The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 219–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Tucker, Bruce, “The Reinvention of New England, 1691–1770,” New England Quarterly 59 (1986): 315–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWilson, John F., “Religion and Revolution,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 597–613, especially 608–610.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWood, Gordon, “Religion and the American Revolution,” in Stout, and Hart, , New Directions, 177, 181: “And thus, the Awakening's religious challenge to established authority inevitably but indirectly prepared many Americans for the subsequent political challenge that would become the American Revolution” (182).Google Scholar

29. Butler, Jon, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History 69 (1982): 322;CrossRefGoogle Scholarsee also his book, which paid little attention to the revivals, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

30. Noll, Mark, “The American Revolution and Protestant Evangelicalism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 615–38, especially 626–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee also Noll's, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), which continues to insist on ideological ties between the revivals and the Revolution within the framework of Hatch's interpretation.Google Scholar

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32. Lambert, Frank, “The Great Awakening as Artifact: George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739–1745,” Church History 60 (1992): 223–46;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and idem, “Pedlar In Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Ruttenburg, Nancy, “George Whitefield, Spectacular Conversion, and the Rise of Democratic Personality,” American Literary History 5 (1993): 429–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcDermott, Gerald R., One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 175.Google ScholarGriffin, Keith L., Revolution and Religion: American Revolutionary War and the Reformed Clergy (New York: Paragon, 1994).Google ScholarClark, J. C. D., The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

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34. Gura, , “‘Black Regiment,’” 445–46Google Scholar; Weber, , Rhetoric and History, 158 n. 7Google Scholar; Heimert, , Religion and the American Mind, viii.Google Scholar

35. Pahl, Jon, Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 13.Google Scholar

36. Rodgers, Daniel T., “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 20, 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. LaHaye, Timothy, Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Green Forest, Ark.: Master Books, 1990).Google Scholar

38. For a discussion of Noll's disagreement with Francis Schaeffer, a leading evangelical thinker during the 1970s and 1980s, about America's alleged Christian foundation, see Burch, Maxie B., The Evangelical Historians: The Historiography of George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, and Mark Noll (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996), 56–70.Google Scholar

39. Marty, Martin, “The Years of the Evangelicals,” Christian Century, 15 02 1989, 173.Google ScholarBurch, , Evangelical Historians, 41, 90–91.Google ScholarMarsden, George, “Christian Schooling: Beyond the Multiversity,” Christian Century, 7 10 1992, 875.Google ScholarStout, Harry S., “Preface,” in Religious Advocacy and American History, ed. Hart, D. G. and Kuklick, Bruce (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), viii.Google ScholarFor further reading on this subject, see Marsden, George, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and the thought-provoking pieces in Hart and Kuklick.Google Scholar