The First Great Awakening or Apostasy?

Part One on American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards or Spiraling Downwards

This is part one of “The Fourth Great Awakening or Apostasy?” originally published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (December 2001).

In his 1999 presidential speech to the Evangelical Theological Society, Professor Wayne Grudem, in an otherwise excellent address, suggested that evangelicalism has been evolving toward a more mature sense of the essentials of the faith over its history. University of Chicago Nobel laureate Robert W. Fogel argued for a similarly rosy picture of the trajectory of American evangelicalism in his recently published The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Professor Fogel believes that beginning with the “First Great Awakening” evangelical Christianity has been on the vanguard of social renewal in America pushing forward the progress of “egalitarianism.” Professor Grudem gives us the view of someone very much on the inside while Fogel’s perspective is that of an outsider. Robert Fogel is a self-confessed secular Jew and a world-renowned empirical historian, a founder of the scientific economic history school known as cliometrics. As such, Professor Fogel’s work is a valuable source for diagnosing the moral health of America and the evangelicalism with it.

Fogel’s paradigm is drawn from what he believes are cycles of ethical challenges America has undergone provoked by technological innovations that create moral crises that, in turn, are resolved by evangelical awakenings.[1] In its own way this is another expression of “the Enlightenment faith in progress.”[2] In a Hegelian-like dialectic, egalitarian movements pose a thesis that has excesses that are corrected by an “antithesis;” the synthesis leaves us better off than before but soon another “Awakening” poses another thesis and onward and upward we go. There may be lags between technological transformations and the human ability to cope with them, in Fogel’s theory, but eventually, with the impetus of religious institutions, America adjusts to the new ethical complexities.

Fogel’s cycles begin with the “First Great Awakening.” In harmony with recent scholarship, Fogel believes the Awakening was key in developing the sentiments and concepts that led to the American Revolution. New Lights, both close to the people and reflective of their values, had the most to do with preparing the ground for the Revolution.[3] After the cultural influences of the Puritan awakening helped provoke the American Revolution, they regrouped, were joined by the Methodist invasion, and set off the “Second Great Awakening.” The creation of the term “Second Great Awakening” in the nineteenth century created the impression of a repetition of something similar which in turn lends itself to the idea of cycles. Whether there are cycles is one of the major questions in weighing the Fogel paradigm.

Fogel is, in part, breaking from and, in part, affirming his mentor, Simon Kuznets. Kuznets, also a Nobel laureate in economics, described the modern economic epoch as instilling “secularism, egalitarianism, and nationalism.”[4] Fogel, a self-described secular product of the “Third Great Awakening,” no longer believes that the Puritan ethic is evaporating under the hot sun of Western secularism. But he does seem to believe in secularization as demystification. The values that the Puritans inculcated in their followers on the basis of divine sanction became part of the national ethos. Fogel affirms Kuznets’ link of the modern economy to egalitarianism, though, in light of his findings on slavery, Fogel would not argue that egalitarian progress was an inevitable fruit of modern economic growth. In his view, the “New Lights” made that possible. Hence the main catalyst for the growth of moral progress in America, according to the Fogel paradigm, has been the religious ethic found principally in the Puritans and inherited chiefly (though not solely) by today’s evangelicals. The “Great Awakenings,” in his view were uprisings of the Puritan conscience still deep in the American psyche.

American Cycles in Religion and Their Political Impact:

The Fogel Paradigm[5]

Awakenings or Apostasies?

But is this optimistic picture of evangelicalism accurate? In the following, I will attempt to sketch a proposal that, though Fogel’s paradigm is largely true for America generally, it obscures a more significant cycle of apostasies that have ravaged evangelicalism for over three hundred years. Rather than American evangelicalism growing from strength to strength through Awakenings, it has, rather, declined through four great apostasies. True, these apostasies were met by something that could, arguably, be called an “awakening.” Yet in the wake of each apostasy and corresponding awakening, American evangelicalism was left weaker in itself and in its effect over the surrounding culture. This jeremiad-like paradigm has alarming implications for the trajectory of today’s evangelicalism.

I believe, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay, that American evangelical history is best seen as having largely begun with Puritanism, centered in New England but also expressed in English (New Side) Presbyterianism and, later, the Baptists. Until the advent of Methodism, there were only small movements that were not Puritan and can arguably be cited as ancestors of today’s evangelicals.[6]

“Declension” is a vexed question in American religious history. That Puritanism declined is an historical fact. It is not now ruling over a pious New England. The second generation of Puritanism, led by the long-lived Increase Mather (1639-1723), saw what they believed to be “declension” and decried it, creating with their frequent sermons on the topic the new genre of “jeremiad.” However, much of this evidence is disregarded by historians as a mere preaching device – quite mistakenly, I believe. In addition, to call a process “declension” begs the question as to whose standards are being applied. Part of the reason some modern historians are reticent to point to declension in late American Puritanism may be because they prefer post-Puritan New England.[7] However, it is the Puritans’ definition of declension that matters. To see declension from the Puritan point of view, we must remind ourselves of the stuff Puritanism was made. What set Puritanism apart and gave it its potency was something much more deep-seated than some of the relatively petty controversies which marked their initial struggles with mainstream Anglicanism – like the wearing of the surplice, the sign of the cross, kneeling at communion. In sociologist Pitirim Sorokin’s terms, Puritanism was an ideational island in an increasingly synthetic and even sensate sea.

In their view, but our terms, the insufficiently reformed Church of England had evolved out of a theology of culture -- a theology that takes its cues not from a transcendent authority but from the desires of the human society in which it lives. The Puritans believed that the Kingdom of God is the pearl of great price.[8] As such they were what H. Richard Niebuhr described as a “conversionist” culture. C. Stephen Mott claims that the Puritans were the first group in history to believe that “one could intentionally and organizationally make changes in one’s community.”[9]

Niebuhr points to culture as “concerned with the temporal and material realization of values.”[10] Hence culture incarnates a value system. For the Puritans, being ideationalists, scripture, as they interpreted it according to their Calvinist covenant theology, was the final judge for interpreting meaning and creating values. Perry Miller was right, then, to call the Puritan colonies  “Bible Commonwealths.” The Puritan wedding shows us the degree to which they were willing to push the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura. One would expect such a highly “religious” people to elevate the church wedding. But because it was scripture, not the church per se, which was the voice of God -- the ultimate concern for ideationalists -- they took the church out of the wedding business. Failing to find either precedent or command for the church wedding in scripture, they decided that weddings ought to be civil -- but not secular -- affairs. They gave the magistrate the power to perform them.[11] For example, the magistrate John Winthrop, not the minister John Cotton, performed the wedding of John and Judith Hull in their house, not the church, on May 11, 1647.[12] This despite the fact that the Puritans inserted the church, the sermon particularly, into almost every public event: days of fasting, elections, and even executions.

Puritan culture was, then, truly a culture of theology. So, we can spot declension in Puritan New England when other criteria than the Calvinist Bible began shaping their values. We need not wait for slumping church membership percentages or overt denials of the authority of the Bible. When, for example, New Englanders began preferring English culture, both intellectual and material, over their own Puritan heritage, we may take that as a sign of a change of values and thus a change of ultimate commitments. And, in fact, Harry S. Stout entitles a chapter covering this period “Anglicization.”[13] Such Anglicization was most dramatically illustrated by the defection of several sons of the Puritans at Yale to the Church of England, an incident that became known as “the Great Apostasy.”

For Puritans decline was from being integrated rather than fragmented, what missiologist Richard Bliese insists is the imperative for the Church in a globalized world: being enmeshed in the world.[14] Decline would not simply be a failing of orthodoxy or piety but of the Church’s ability to shape the morals and character of society at large. Religious zeal, narrowly defined, might even be as strong or stronger than ever. If, however, the church no longer engages the world and particularly if the Puritan economic ethic is no longer guiding the marketplace then, by Puritan standards, evangelicalism can be said to have declined.

The First Great Apostasy

The most definite evidence of spiritual decline is the overwhelming testimony of those who were actually there. Eleazer Mather noted “there is a sad declining in the spirit of the churches” and calls his own time (1676) “a backsliding time.”[15] A Synod of New England churches met in Boston in 1679. The solemn ministers were convinced that God had a controversy with New England. They resolved that beyond doubt the churches had declined and that the problems that had afflicted them lately, especially King Philip’s War, were God’s judgment for their decline.[16] The jeremiad was created by those who thought the form was necessary. The title to a 1683 sermon speaks volumes: A Plea for the Life of a Dying Religion. Increase Mather prefaced the published version of that sermon with, “That [our founding] interest [in religion] has been for many years languishing and dying is the observation of all men that have their hearts exercised in discerning things of this nature.”[17] Cotton Mather frequently refers to what Puritan scholar Sidney Rooy called “the fact of declension.” “I saw a fearful degeneracy.”[18] A minister’s dying plea was to “look after . . . the dying power of godliness” in the churches, the “old spirit” was dying out with the “old saints,” and the like.”[19] “Certainly the power of godliness is now grievously decayed among us.”[20]

“God’s Controversy with New England” by Michael Wigglesworth

If these be they, how is it that I find

   In stead of holiness Carnality,

In stead of heavenly frames an Earthly mind,

   For burning zeal luke-warm Indifferency,

For flaming love, key-cold Dead-heartedness,

   For temperance (in meat, and drinke, and cloaths) excess?[21]

            William Bradford

Love and fervent zeal do seem to sleep/

Security and the world on men do creep.[22]

Jonathan Edwards wrote that the Awakening occurred “after a long continued, and almost universal deadness.”[23] Whitefield himself noted the results of decline. “Boston is a large, populous place and very wealthy. It has the form of religion kept up, but has lost most of its power.”[24] Isaac Backus, a late eighteenth century Baptist leader in New England, explained that the practice of infant baptism combined with ever loosening standards of church membership worked, over 120 years, to turn “the world into the church and the church into the world, in such a manner as to leave very little difference between them.”[25]

But “decline” is relative. What to Increase Mather is a decrepit state of spirituality might strike later generations as remarkable piety. Puritan standards and aspirations were remarkably high; the movement had dominated New England for over a century and could not be expected to go quietly into the night. What is frequently termed “The First Great Awakening” was, in fact, a Puritan response to the declension of New England’s founding evangelical ideals. It was a Puritan revival. The decline in zeal had allowed other cultural competitors to gain ground. There was an early “crisis of cultural authority.” Who has authority, the enlightenment, traditionalism, or the experiential Calvinism of the Puritans?[26] Leaders, such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, were drawn from the educated middle class on both sides of the Atlantic. Awakening leaders had not “been undone by cosmopolitanism or luxury, or infected by a demoralizing enlightenment.”[27] The Awakening was not an ethnic or merely geographically local protest but a cultural protest, a reassertion of Puritan values. The “First Great Awakening” was an up-rising by Puritanism to stop the system of Anglicization from sweeping away their evangelical culture.

The problem for ministers like Jonathan Edwards was how to revive Puritan ideas, how to make them speak compellingly to the rapidly changing culture of Anglo-America. These leaders were content with their Reformed and Puritan heritage. They sought to re-present it: packaging the old convictions in a way that would attract and impact the developing eighteenth-century society.[28]

New England’s Awakening, unlike that of the Wesleys, throve on the preaching of Calvinism.[29] All the leading Awakening revivalists -- Edwards, Whitefield, the Tennents and their “log college” disciples, most Separatists and Baptists -- reasserted the “Calvinist” doctrines of divine sovereignty and human dependence. These doctrines they believed they had learned not so much from Calvin as Christ.[30] Hence, although there was a weakening of the doctrine of predestination in America at this time, as Fogel’s paradigm suggests, it was not on the part of the leaders of the Awakening, but on the part of the opposers of the revival.[31]

In one sense, the “First Great Awakening” was remarkably successful. Alan Heimert argues that it laid the cultural ground-work for the American Revolution. And it appears to have been the spark that led to evangelical missionaries spreading out across the thirteen colonies and then the new Republic, evangelists who in a generation or so would themselves spark what became known as “The Second Great Awakening.”

But if returning New England to Puritan hegemony was the goal, even the “First Great Awakening” was a failure. The remnants of New Light Puritanism scattered in at least three different directions: the Baptists, the New Divinity movement, and the non-New Divinity Edwardsians. The New Divinity, in particular, was formulated to be a “consistent Calvinism.” But rather than putting humpty-dumpty back together again, the New Divinity deepened the divisions, including their own divisions with their Puritan past. Fractures in the original Puritan holistic worldview show up even among the staunchest New Divinity theologian: Samuel Hopkins. His ethic of “disinterested benevolence,” was contrary to Jonathan Edward’s eudominianism – the belief that ultimately people are happiest obeying the will of God. Hopkins taught that anything tainted with “self-love” was unacceptable to God -- even the desire for salvation. Therefore, the true saint had to be willing to be damned for the glory of God.[32] This repelled many people. The broader Edwardsianism of men like Timothy Dwight was more successful and it eventually co-opted the remnants of the New Divinity.

The New Divinity ministers exhibited a greater tendency to theological speculation than their Puritan forebears and less concern for “personal secular affairs.” Indeed, New Divinity “schools of the prophets” inculcated just these tendencies.[33] Some of the New Divinity ministers, particularly the followers of Nathaniel William Taylor, although they spoke out against slavery and the corruption of wealth, allowed their sharp focus on conversion and piety to become an excuse for escaping “the gritty work of social change.”[34] They were, however, moralistic. Joseph Haroutunian believed that the New Divinity followers of Jonathan Edwards eventually allowed moralism to triumph over transcendent faith. “Calvinism thus degenerated into a scheme of theology plus an independent set of ‘duties.’ Its holy fire was quenched, and its theological ashes lay exposed to the four winds.”[35]

Meanwhile, the Baptists began a burgeoning growth. Though they had never forgotten the persecution meted out to them by the mainstream Puritans, from early on they had felt the bonds of their spiritual kinship to other evangelicals. Puritan champion Cotton Mather even preached the sermon at the ordination of a Baptist minister in Boston in 1718. That one of the first Baptist ministers in Boston would ask one of the leading pedobaptist Puritan ministers to preach his ordination sermon, speaks volumes about how close these two camps saw themselves. That feeling of close relation to other evangelicals would dwindle as Baptists became the big winners after the Awakening, especially in the South.

[to be continued]

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).

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[1] “There has been a recurring lag between the vast technological transformations and the human capacity to cope with them.” (Robert W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000], 8.) “Political realignments are set in motion by the gap between new technologies and the human capacity to cope with the ethical and practical complexities they entail.” (Fogel, 9.)

[2] Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 6.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo emphasizes not the ways in which the Awakening prepared the political mentality of Americans for the Revolution, but the very substantial role the Awakening played in shaping the American evangelical mentality. (“God’s Designs,” New Directions in American Religious History [Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, editors; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997] 160.)

[4] Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 12.

[5] Robert W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening the Future of Egalitarianism, 65. Condensed from original. Used by permission. In Prof. Fogel’s original chart, the third column reads, in full, “Phase of increasing challenge to dominance of the revival’s political program.” For a fuller explanation of the paradigm, see Prof. Fogel’s book.

[6] Randall Balmer emphasizes the role of Pietism in evangelical history. (Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America, [Boston: Beacon Press, 1999].) Pietism and Puritanism are not unrelated or unsympathetic to each other. But given the fact that Puritanism actually founded two of the most influential colonies, that it dominated New England for over a century, that it produced arguably America’s greatest theologian (Jonathan Edwards) and an abundance of New Light missionaries to the South, etc., Puritanism deserves more attention as the father of American evangelicalism.

[7] Harry Stout and Catherine Brekus, “Declension, Gender, and the ‘New Religious History,’” Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 17.

[8] “Societies are always involved in a more or less laborious effort to hold together in tolerable conflict the many efforts of many men in many groups to achieve and conserve many goods. . . . Among the many values the kingdom of God may be included -- though scarcely as the one pearl of great price.” (Niebuhr, Christ and Culture [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951], 38-39.) But for the Puritans the Kingdom of God was to be exactly that: the center of a monolithic culture.

[9] Stephen Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 194.

[10] original emphasis, Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 36.

[11] John Robinson argues that the “holy scripture divinely inspired . . . does no where furnish or oblige the minister to this work.” (A Just and Necessary Apology of Certain Christians [London, 1644], 37.)

[12] John Hull, “Dairies of John Hull” (1857), Puritan Personal Writings: Diaries (New York: AMS Press, 1982), 143.

[13] The New England Soul, 127.

[14] Richard Bliese, “Globalization,” Dictionary of Mission: Theology, History, Perspectives (Karl Müller, Theo Sundermeier, Stephen B. Bevans, and Richard Bliese, editors; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 177.

[15] An Earnest Exhortation (Cambridge, MA: S.G. and M.J., 1676), 25, 27.

[16] See Increase Mather’s The Necessity of Reformation (Boston, MA: John Foster, 1679). “That God has a controversy with New England people is undeniable.” (p. 3.)

[17] Samuel Torrey, A Plea for the Life of a Dying Religion (Boston: Samuel Green, 1683); Increase Mather’s quote, A2.

[18] Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America, Vol. I (1701; Edinburg: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 249.

[19] Respectively: Magnalia Christi Americana, II, 138; II, 334; according to Rooy, The Theology of Missions in the Puritan Tradition (Delft, Netherlands: Meinema, 1965), 266.

[20] Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (New York: Russel & Russell, 1967), 195.

[21] Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy with New-England.” (1662), The Puritans (New York: American Book Company, 1938).

[22] Bradford, “A Descriptive and Historical Accounting of New England,” Mass. Hist. Soc., Collections, 1st Ser 3 (1694), 83; according to Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (New York: Norton and Company, 1965), 273. John Eliot: “We that have lived to bury most of the good old generation of professors do by experience see that our youth cannot fill the rooms of their fathers, and yet are such as are to be encouraged and received in the Lord.” (according to Stephen Foster, “The Puritan Social Ethic: Class and Calling in the First Hundred Years of Settlement in New England” [Dissertation: Yale University, 1966], 180; from “Baxter-Eliot,” 165.)

[23] Jonathan Edwards, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1741) 125.

[24] Whitefield, “Journals,” The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740-1745. Richard L. Bushman, editor, 31.

[25] Isaac Backus, Church History of New England from 1602 to 1804 (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1853), 150-51.

[26] “All great social crises arise when old sources of authority are no longer able to resolve the social and individual tensions within a culture or community. . . .” (William McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833, 335.)

[27] Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750 A Social Portrait (New York: Anfred A. Knopf, 1971), 221.

[28] Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist, xvii. “The Awakening, in fact, was less an act of cultural defiance than an adaptation of vital orthodoxy to changing cultural and demographic circumstances.” (Gerald Moran, 44.) Allen Guelzo, in summing up both Henry F. May and W. R. Ward, suggests just this interpretation of the Awakening: it can be “seen less as a movement to establish a new identity and more as an effect to recover or protect old ones.” (“God’s Designs,” New Directions in American Religious History, 149.)

[29] Alan Heimert, The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, editor; New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967), xxvi.

[30] Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America, (1976), 54. “The typical sermon of the Great Awakening was a careful disquisition on such points of theology as man’s total depravity or the unconditional election of the saints.” (Heimert, The Great Awakening, xxvi.)

[31] In private conversation I found Fogel is very aware that Edwards, among others, reasserted Calvinism.

[32] Joseph C. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (Grand Rapids, MI.: Christian University Press, 1981), 121.

[33] Conforti, Samuel Hopkins, 35.

[34] Douglas A. Sweeney, “Nathaniel William Taylor and the Edwardsian Tradition: Evolution and Continuity in the Culture of the New England Theology” (Ph.D. Dissertation: Vanderbilt University, 1995), 148-151.

[35] Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: the Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932), 127.