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The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Richard D. Birdsall
Richard D. Birdsall
Affiliation:
Mr. Birdsall is professor of history inConnecticut College, New London, Connecticut. He would like to thank theFrank L. Weil Institute for Studies in Religion and the Humanitiesfor a fellowship enabling him to do the research for this article
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Extract

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 1970 , pp. 345 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1970

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References

1. Adams, Henry, History of the United States of America during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 4 vols. (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930; first edition, 1889), I, 90.Google Scholar

2. New England orthodoxy can not be rigidly defined but it included both the concept of individual liberty and the idea of a church responsible for all citizens in a given geographical area—the ideal of a Christian Commonwealth—even though only a minority of the town might actually be church members. By the late eighteenth century with the increase of secular interests and more important the large increase of dissenters (non-Congregationalists) some of the leaders of orthodoxy felt embattled and were inclined to use institutional power in rather naked form to effect their ends. Needless to say, liberty suffered. Cf. Strong, Caleb, Patriotism and Piety (Newburyport: Edward M. Blunt, 1808)Google Scholar for speeches by the governor of Massachusetts; Morse, Jedidiah, Sermon on the National Fast, May 9, 1798 (Boston: S. Hall, 1798)Google Scholar. Wild, John, Human Freedom and Social Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1959), p. 56.Google Scholar

3. Dwight, Timothy, Travels in New England …, 4 vols. (London: W. Baynes and Son, 1823), IV, 346Google Scholar. Beyond this the dislocations of the revolution had led to a total cessation of church services in many towns. In Hampshire and Berkshire Counties in Massachusetts thirty-nine of sixty-eight towns had no ministers during the revolution. Meyer, Jacob, Church and State in Massachusetts (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1930), p. 127 n.Google Scholar

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5. Ibid., II, 44–5.

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25. Cf. Trilling, Lionel, Freud and the Crisis of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar, John Wild, op. cit.; Nisbet, Robert A., The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford Press, 1953).Google Scholar

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33. Schneider, Herbert W., The Puritan Mind (New York: Holt, 1930), p. 264Google Scholar. A similarly ironic view of the reformers is seen in Thoreau's view that they would not feel the need to reform others if they had given proper attention to self reformation.

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41. It is interesting to note how closely the new religious life in New England resembled what Ernst Troeltsch has described as the continental Pietism in Europe: “… it accepted the existing social order of the State: the idea of Christianizing the social order did not occur to it. On the contrary Pietism liked to be connected with the ruling class and the aristocracy; it aimed solely at Christianizing the hearts of men. It carried on Home Mission work, and healed social ills by a new kind of charity, which depended on free group initiative; nowhere did it touch the fundamental facts of existing conditions.” Troeltsch, E., The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960; first German ed., 1911), II, 718.Google Scholar