The Great Awakening
This is part two of a five-part religious history series taking us from early Granby through events to the First Amendment. (Part one is available here)
Last month, we experienced what 1700s Granby life was like living and chafing under a town government responsible for one’s religious well-being. In part two, we’ll add more local religious context as tensions become division in the Salmon Brook Ecclesiastical Society. The Great Awakening in the Connecticut River Valley includes two key figures, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.
Jonathan Edwards was America’s first theologian, a Yale-educated Congregational Pastor, born in South Windsor. When preaching, he methodically read his notes from point to point and was thought maybe to be boring. Edwards was an insider, part of the established Puritan Congregational clergy. His grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was nicknamed the Puritan Pope of the Connecticut River Valley. Edwards preached the sermon Sinners in the Hands of any Angry God in Enfield (on Route 5 with a rock marking the spot). The message is often quoted for its fire and brimstone scare. Edwards’ point in the message was not to scare people into heaven but “warn them away from hell.”
The unexpected effect of Edwards’ preaching was recorded in A Narrative of Surprising Conversions from 1733-1735. The response was men and women held onto the pews, cried out for mercy, pleading “is there no way to escape?” Minds were more engaged in religion with visible effects upon their bodies, outcries, fainting and crying in the streets, meetings for prayer and fasting, some with joys, some with convulsion. This included elderly to young, regardless of class, men, women, children, and “even some zealous from Suffield.” He attributed it to God in Distinguishing Marks of a work of the Spirit of God as people were awakened with a sense of their potential eternal ruin. He later reported a similar response to his boss in An account of the Revival of Religion in Northampton 1740-1742, the same year the Granby society was formed.
In contrast to Edwards, George Whitefield was an outsider. An English Anglican evangelist with extraordinary oratory skills, he had a booming voice said to carry for miles. He made seven tours to America including one to the Connecticut River valley in 1740-1741, preaching in churches and open fields. He was a friend of Edwards and knew him well. He kept a journal of his crusades while touring America, preaching an estimated 18,000 times to more than seven million people.
In Whitefield’s journal at age 25, he recorded town by town, day by day, his ministry results. In Suffield and Windsor, he wrote that he “preached of the doctrine of the new birth… to several thousand in Suffield with many ministers present …. but the word came with power, and I did not spare them.” Furthermore, he alleged that “Mr. Stoddard is much to be blamed for unconverted men to be admitted into the ministry… being a bane of the Christian Church.” Meanwhile, others received the conversion “spirit of adoption” he presented, but there was no mention of Granby.
In his book, Tempest in a Small Town, Mark Williams answers why. One facet of the tempest was a religious split in the new Salmon Brook Society between the established church members called Old Lights, while those with a newfound conviction leading to a conversion experience were called New Lights. The New Lights were common folk who searched the scriptures for themselves. In Granby, 12 years of disputes between Old and New Lights resulted in not inviting Whitefield to preach.
The New Lights of the valley went even further. Whitefield believed in infant baptism and would say that my “chicks have turned to ducks.” The metaphor was of Jesus’ followers being his “chicks under his wing.” However, Whitefield’s followers were now getting baptized by immersion (as ducks) following the New Testament pattern of baptism after a conversion experience and not him.
Next, in Part 3: How did the Connecticut colony and certain New Lights respond?