Feeling Godly

Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America

Caroline Wigginton, Abram Van Engen, Caroline Wigginton, Abram Van Engen

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781613768471
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In 1746, Jonathan Edwards described his philosophy on the process of Christian conversion in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. For Edwards, a strict Congregationalist, true conversion is accompanied by a new heart and yields humility, forgiveness, and love—affections that work a change in the person's nature. But, how did other early American communities understand religious affections and come to recognize their manifestation? Feeling Godly brings together well-known and highly regarded scholars of early American history and literature, Native American studies, African American history, and religious studies to investigate the shape, feel, look, theology, and influence of religious affections in early American sites of contact with and between Christians. While remaining focused on the question of religious affections, these essays span a wide range of early North American cultures, affiliations, practices, and devotions, and enable a comparative approach that draws together a history of emotions with a history of religion.In addition to the volume editors, this collection includes essays from Joanna Brooks, Kathleen Donegan, Melissa Frost, Stephanie Kirk, Jon Sensbach, Scott Manning Stevens, and Mark Valeri, with an afterword by Barbara H. Rosenwein.

Part I

Theory and Language

Chapter 1

Conversion, Free Will, and the Affections in Eighteenth-Century New England

Mark Valeri

New England Protestants during the eighteenth century held no single definition of “religious affections.” They contested the term because to them the word “religious” conveyed a theological judgment: “religious” in the sense of true to the right religion, or divine revelation as interpreted in Protestant tradition. For many New Englanders, the term raised questions about the effusion of emotions, the weeping for sin and crying for the joy of salvation, that attended some of the revivals that we have come to know as the Great Awakening. Critics of the revival, and some defenders such as Jonathan Edwards, warned that pure emotion in such terms might be an expression of mundane passion, something quite apart from true religion. He and many of his contemporaries spoke of religious affections as the result of an experience of divine realities such as the Holy Spirit or grace: more sobering and edifying, in their view, than passion or enthusiasm. Arguments about the revivals, however, raised a further set of questions about the meaning of “affection” itself and its relationship to moral choice. In this sense, “affection” was often used interchangeably with disposition, inclination, taste, or simply the heart. As a central term in the moral philosophy of the day, it was associated with moral judgment or conscience.1

Disputes about affections in this sense—as components of moral con-sciousness—shadowed religious controversy throughout the century. In the most general terms, New Englanders considered affections to be mental sensations that attended one’s relationship with another—love, say, or hate. Affections also marked one’s perception of oneself, as in the pleasure of doing good or the pain of doing bad. As perceptions of the goodness or badness of some act or some thing under consideration, they amounted to moral judgments. And as moral judgments, they at least informed and at most determined one’s moral choices or the will. New Englanders debated how to conceive of the power of affections, but they agreed on this: they were crucial to religious choice, especially conversion.

Scholars of Puritanism have maintained that affections had long stood in Reformed teaching for a realm of experience outside of individuals’ self-determination.2 Puritans used the term to refute competing Protestant and Catholic theologies that emphasized faith as a choice by a free will and love as an act of moral volition. Protestants often gave the name Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, to those who defined faith as a choice. Calvinists contended that one could not choose one’s affections. They were subject to disorder and corruption and equally subject to an infusion of divine grace, all matters beyond conscious control. If one construed faith or love for God as the central act of conversion, and faith or love as affections, then conversion was involuntary. Although this claim created no small amount of anxiety among Puritans who wondered if they had undergone conversion, it sustained a Protestant emphasis on divine sovereignty and the role of the godly community in helping individuals to fathom their spiritual conditions.3

An eighteenth-century imperative to script the idioms of moral reasonableness, liberty of conscience, and religious choice onto conversion shaped the evangelical movement in ways that diverged from Puritanism. Political and philosophical affairs in the Anglo-American world had, by the time of the revivals, pushed Protestants to legitimate the language of human liberty, free will, moral choice, and uncoerced conscience. Revivalists such as George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, David Brainerd, and Jonathan Edwards claimed that zeal for the absolute sovereignty of God and denial of human moral capability defined the very soul of Christianity, yet they called on people to select the way of salvation, close with Christ, and choose heaven. Evangelistic preaching was premised on the idea of religious choice, as were the missions to Native Americans that followed in its wake. New approaches to the evangelization of Native peoples during the mid-eighteenth century, foreshadowed by Cotton Mather’s desire for less cultural critique and more mutual exchange of sentiments among missionaries and Native Americans, assumed the potency of voluntary religious affiliation.4

Evangelicals proposed that conversion, as well as post-conversion attempts to obey God, were concurrently acts of choice and changes of affections. We often think of preachers such as Edwards as apologists for the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. True enough in a way, but we must also consider how their defense of Calvinism rested on a redefinition of terms such as will and affection—a redefinition that allowed them to align the doctrines of grace with the ideals of liberty.

This line of argument cuts against the grain of an older historiography, exemplified by Garry Wills’s Head and Heart, that limns evangelicalism as a religion of emotion in contrast to Enlightenment reason. It also offers a different perspective from more recent interpretations, such as Douglas Winiarski’s Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, that emphasize the ecstatic experiences and social divisiveness of the early revival movement. Emotion, affections, ecstasies, and social schism certainly characterized much of the eighteenth-century revivals, but so too did the efforts of leaders such as Edwards to align so-called experimental (or evangelical) Calvinism with contemporary ideas about moral virtue, religious sincerity, and political liberty. Evangelicals’ acceptance of the social and philosophical mandates of these ideas helps to explain, among other developments, their agreement with other Americans who promoted independence as a matter of deep moral conscience.5

In its emphasis on eighteenth-century innovations among New Englanders, this argument also diverges from scholarly interpretations that focus on seventeenth-century precedents. Historians such as Mark Noll, Bruce Hindmarsh, and W. R. Ward have argued that evangelicalism can best be understood as a confluence of Enlightenment epistemologies of sensation and seventeenth-century religious streams such as Puritan doctrines of divine grace and Pietist teachings about devotion.6 There is something to this historical explanation. Pious eighteenth-century New Englanders read plenty of Puritan literature, which confirmed the salience of introspection and affection in the experience of conversion. Divines such as Edwards frequently engaged the writings of his Puritan predecessors. Yet these interpretations tend to obscure important differences between Puritan and evangelical Calvinist accounts. Edwards, Whitefield, and their followers engaged a new moral vocabulary and confronted new social and political demands. Rearticulating conversion accordingly, they accepted a discourse of liberty that Puritans would have found incredible.

The eighteenth-century push for freedom and its impact on the evangelical notion of conversion clarifies one aspect of the role of affections in New England and suggests its revolutionary political implications. The following account describes how political and philosophical developments in England after the Glorious Revolution pressured English Protestants to embrace the idea of moral freedom. New England divines during the first three decades of the eighteenth century stumbled to articulate the relationship between affections—which theologians had associated with uncontrolled power over one’s volition—and the will, using new Lockean vocabularies in contradictory ways. This confusion came to the surface especially during the revivals, when converts such as the laywoman Sarah Osborn blended older Puritan notions of the affections with newer understandings of religious choice. In the aftermath of the revivals, Edwards especially applied himself to the task of clarifying how the experience of grace and the social mandate for moral freedom were compatible. Edwards represented, in a particularly influential fashion, how evangelical Calvinists adopted a language that sustained republican social and political agendas. By the mid-1770s, in fact, that language conveyed the legitimacy of independence from Britain as a free moral choice, a corollary to the choices made in religious conversion.

The relationship between divinely infused grace and human choice in conversion—or, more simply, the problem of free will—had long occupied Protestants and especially Calvinists, but had taken on new meaning by the time of the Awakening. At the time of the Glorious Revolution, English Protestants with Whig sentiments touted the idioms of moral freedom or liberty as integral to social virtue. Many moralists during the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first three decades of the eighteenth—from Locke through Tillotson, to the Scottish moral sense school of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson—along with many of their New England admirers, argued that the very notion of virtue assumed moral responsibility and, thus, an assertion of free will. Only with such an assertion, they argued, could individuals be said to act in a moral manner, deserving of praise or blame.

That argument sustained liberal perspectives on England’s commonwealth. Whig politics, with its republican insistence on self-determination, rested on the language of free choice in religious, social, and moral matters. In contrast, the moral determinism of writers such as Thomas Hobbes stood for political authoritarianism. A good Whig, progressive, republican, opponent of absolute tyranny—what have you—used a moral discourse grounded in the assumption of human moral freedom.7 In this context, “free will” came to be associated less with Reformation-era and seventeenth-century controversies about the efficacy of moral effort in obtaining divine grace—debates between Erasmus and Luther or Dutch Arminians and Dortian Calvinists—and more with philosophical and political agendas to confirm individual moral liberty whatever one’s theological doctrines.8

Parsing conversion in the terms of liberty also highlighted, for English moralists, the superiority of Protestantism to other religious traditions. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, for example, New Englanders eagerly consumed accounts of Protestants who were forced to “convert” to a different religion: Huguenots faced with either enslavement on galleys or the Mass in post–Edict of Nantes France and New England mariners compelled to adopt Islam when captured by Algerian pirates. Conversion without moral freedom, without liberty of conscience, appeared in this literature as tyranny; Cotton Mather often criticized the deployment of forced conversions in Catholic and Islamic territories. Such tales did not directly address the meaning of free will, but they drove home with vivid illustration the dangers, from a Protestant perspective, of separating conversion from free moral choice. Coercion, whether describing the policies of a Catholic monarch or the saving operations of grace, sounded dangerous to many Anglo-Protestant ears.9

Patriotic admirers of England’s constitutional monarchy during the first three decades of the eighteenth century, New England Calvinists struggled to find a vocabulary to express the doctrine of irresistible grace within a social and political culture shaped by assertions of human moral liberty. They drew especially on Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) suggested definitions of the will that had the potential to harmonize Protestant ideas about conversion with moral freedom. Locke argued that it was nonsense to speak of volition or the will as “free” in the sense of free to choose. The will was the choice. To assert that the will was free in the sense of free to choose was a tautology, merely to say that the will wills. Rather, Locke maintained, the “will” amounted to the conclusion of a complex mental process of self-reflection that determined whether certain objects were good or bad. That determination could be, and most often in common parlance was, expressed as affections: to love, hate, esteem, despise, and the like.10

New England Calvinists tinkered with a Lockean vocabulary of mental self-perception, action, power, and choice. Yet they were wary of Arminianism and its varied challenges to Reformed theology, from an emphasis on moral effort in the pursuit of salvation to a denial of the doctrine of original sin. As a result, they tended to deploy the rhetoric of freedom without clearly or fully harmonizing Calvinism and free will. They did not come to a coherent account of the relationship between the affections, grace, and free choice or will in ways that satisfied the social and political mandate to assert moral liberty.

Take, for example, the 1719 lecture by Solomon Stoddard (Edwards’s grandfather), published as A Treatise Concerning Conversion...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Contributors
• Index