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Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turnssince Alan Heimert's Religion and the AmericanMind

Philip Goff

Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture / Volume 67 / Issue 04 / December1998, pp 695 - 721DOI: 10.2307/3169849, Published online: 28 July 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009640700070153

How to cite this article:Philip Goff (1998). Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since AlanHeimert's Religion and the American Mind. Church History: Studies inChristianity and Culture, 67, pp 695-721 doi:10.2307/3169849

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Revivals and Revolution:Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert's

Religion and the American MindPHILIP GOFF

Thirty years ago Alan Heimert published his monumental study ofreligion's relationship to the American Revolution. Religion and theAmerican Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution contradictedthe conventional wisdom rooted in Vernon Parrington's 1927 MainCurrents of American Thought and implicitly challenged the more recentinterpretation put forward by Heimert's own mentor, Perry Miller.Critics responded vigorously, but their reproofs did not foretell thefuture of Heimert's argument. Indeed, in the past twenty years a cadreof young scholars assumed either his thesis or method and moved thedebate toward the personalities and movements Heimert under-scored. Some of today's leading scholars who study connectionsbetween the revivals and the Revolution pay homage to Heimert'sthought in footnotes if not in the texts themselves. Two social/intellectual movements seemingly at cross-purposes, namely Protes-tant evangelicalism and the new cultural history, rescued Heimert'swork from scathing yet well-placed criticisms to establish its asser-tions as a leading model for understanding religion's role in theAmerican Revolution.1

The story of this rehabilitation demonstrates the shifting groundunder historians' feet as the profession continues both to shape and tobe shaped by larger social and cultural forces. Even further, it uncoverstoday's strange bedfellows, evangelicals and postmodernists, whotogether have launched a forceful objection to long-standing historical

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

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

Philip Goff is assistant professor of history and religious studies at California StateUniversity, Los Angeles.

© 1998, The American Society of Church HistoryChurch History 67:4 (December 1998)

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assumptions and paradigms. Because the very academic categoriesand methods that underlay the violent reactions to Heimert's book inthe 1960s mirrored the societal battles taking place then, this essaybegins with a review of the book's scholarly setting, its purpose, andthe volatile responses it engendered. Next, I hope to show thatchanging social and intellectual currents in the late 1970s and the 1980screated an academic atmosphere that encouraged a new generation ofscholars to recover much of Heimert's argument and approach. Thattrend did not discourage recent detractors from leveling some of thebroadest and deepest attacks yet against the book. Indeed, the echoesof the initial storm can still be heard in contemporary debates. Clearly,though, the scholarly shoreline has been reshaped to the map Heimertdrew three decades ago, thanks in large part to both Protestantevangelical and new cultural historians.2

I. THE 1960S: DIVIDING THE PROPHET'S MANTLE

The specter of Perry Miller hovers over Heimert's book and re-sponses to it. Dedicated to Miller, the work dealt with many of histhemes and the intellectual battles he fought for decades. Miller andhis students faced an uphill battle, as the dominant paradigm re-mained firmly entrenched in academic culture. Vernon Parrington hadcontended that liberal, enlightened thought won the eighteenth-century struggle with Calvinist Christianity and became the basis forthe American Revolution. In a chapter titled "The Anachronism ofJonathan Edwards," Parrington stated, "Before an adequate demo-cratic philosophy could arise in this world of pragmatic individualism,the traditional system of New England theology must be put away,and a new conception of man and of his duty and destiny in the worldmust take its place." Progressive historians in the first half of thiscentury fully assumed that ideal—the mind released from the bondage

2. Two excellent historiographic essays from the 1993 Wingspread Conference recentlyappeared in print, both dealing with religion's relationship to the American Revolution.While Alan Heimerf s work plays a signficant role in each, their interests differ substan-tially from this essay. Allen Guelzo thoroughly lays out the "considerable amount ofinterpretive territory" between Heimert and Jon Butler in order to indicate how the GreatAwakening straddles intellectual history and religious history and to put forth a newlanguage for writing about it. Gordon Wood reviews much of the same literature, butwith an eye to the long Revolutionary period—which begins in the early eighteenthcentury and ends in the early nineteenth century—to argue for the primacy of migratory,economic, and social changes that manifested themselves in political and religiousrebellion. See Allen C. Guelzo, "God's Designs: The Literature of the Colonial Revivals ofReligion, 1735-1760"; and Gordon S. Wood, "Religion and the American Revolution," inNew Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York:Oxford University Press, 1997).

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of irrational religious experience to rational thought—which domi-nated their interpretation of America's founding and the establish-ment of the nation.3

Miller's desire to find an intellectual mooring for a "spirit of theage" ironically was not that different from Parrington's goal. Millerhowever challenged the assumption that behavior must be studiedsolely from functional or environmental perspectives. By taking the"life of ideas into their own consciousness," intellectual historianscould move deeper into understanding the influence of thought uponhuman action. More specifically, Miller objected to the accepted inter-pretation of religion's role in colonial American life. He argued thatNew England's religious ideas created the social atmosphere andinspired the behavior of Puritans, not vice versa. By the eighteenthcentury two movements, Pietism and the Enlightenment, divided

3. Parrington, Main Currents, 148. See also the interpretation of one church historian whoseconclusions paralleled those of Parrington, in Henry K. Rowe, History of Religion in theUnited States (New York: Macmillan, 1928). Most historians ignored the revivals inrelating religion's role in the Revolution; see especially G. A. Koch, "RepublicanReligion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason" (Ph.D. dissertation, Colum-bia University, 1933); Alice Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1928) analyzes the Great Awakening's debatesalong Enlightenment lines, focusing on who used John Locke's thought most often andmost effectively, centering on debates over natural and constitutional rights. C. H. VanTyne, The Causes of the War of Independence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), approachedthe topic similarly by reasoning that Puritan politics were democratic in nature, linkingCongregational and Presbyterian ministers to Locke and John Milton. See also John C.Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943). William WarrenSweet, the foremost religious historian of the day and a devotee of Frederick JacksonTurner, placed emphasis on Calvinism's frontier transformation from communitariansocieties to individualistic faith, and in doing so made possible an organic connection tothe 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 emphasiswas both natural and inevitable, for a pioneer society is a self-reliant individualisticsociety. .. . The emphasis upon the individual therefore meant variability; implied in itthe 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?" (See Sweet, Revivalism in America: ItsOrigin, 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 andemotional interest; for the first time intercolonial leaders emerged, which broke overpolitical as well as sectarian lines. . . . In these respects the Great Awakening may beconsidered one of the important contributing factors in preparing the way for theRevolution" (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 moreprecisely than such rare allusions. In fact, he usually kept the two events in separatedivisions of his books, or even in separate books altogether; see above and Religion inColonial America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942), and Religion in the Develop-ment of American Culture, 1765-1840 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952). Thistendency 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 AmericanRevolution. Sweef s main interest in linking the revivals to the Revolution usually lay inshowing cooperation and unity behind once competing faiths.

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Puritanism's once coherent aspects into rival philosophical and socialmovements—evangelicalism and rationalism. Jonathan Edwards andBenjamin Franklin personified the two sides. Even then, the di-chotomy was more apparent than real, for Miller understood—in anearly Weberian sense—Franklin's character as a secularized form ofreligious thought based on the same Puritan underpinnings thatcreated Edwards. The American mind, even in its most worldly sense,thus found its core in religion. Miller's untimely death in 1963 left asignificant hole among American historians still hoping to discover adistinctive character to the American mind—the window to pastAmericans' behavior.4

In Religion and the American Mind Alan Heimert argued that thosevery Calvinists whom Parrington dismissed had, in fact, stimulatedthe democratic movement that resulted in the Revolution. FollowingMiller, he claimed that despite the multiplicity of sects in colonialAmerica there were essentially two religious parties, Liberals andCalvinists, but for Heimert these divisions became most apparent inthe years after the religious revivals of the 1740s. Documenting hisassertions with thousands of citations he turned upside down thenotion that Calvinism's death brought life to colonial and Revolution-ary politics. "For it has long been received historical doctrine that'Liberal' religion—the rationalism espoused by critics of the Awaken-ing enthusiasm and further developed as a counterthrust to eighteenth-century Calvinism—was comparatively humane and progressive inoutlook and import, that, indeed, Liberal religion prepared the way fora Revolution of which its spokesmen were the heralds," he wrote,reminding his readers of the conventional wisdom. "It is my conclu-sion, however, that Liberalism was profoundly conservative, politi-cally as well as socially, and that its leaders, insofar as they did in factembrace the Revolution, were the most reluctant of rebels. Conversely,'evangelical' religion, which had as its most notable formal expressionthe 'Calvinism' of Jonathan Edwards, was not the retrograde philoso-phy that many historians rejoice to see confounded in America's Ageof Reason. Rather Calvinism, and Edwards, provided pre-Revolution-

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


ary America with a radical, even democratic, social and politicalideology, and evangelical religion embodied, and inspired, a thrusttoward American nationalism."5

Heimert sought not only to challenge Parrington's model but also toproceed beyond Miller's assertions. This move ultimately broughtdown upon his head the fire of reviewers who considered Heimert thenatural heir to Miller, having worked closely with his mentor studyingthe revivals and having been hired at Harvard. Miller's second volumeof The New England Mind, which concludes in 1730, had implied thatPuritanism's decline into separate competing movements created bothhalves of the American mind. But Heimert hoped to elevate Edwards'sevangelicals as the true American progenitors, the authentic genesis ofthe push for independence and nationalism. Status quo-seeking ratio-nalists proved to be latecomers to the revolutionary spirit, if theyshowed up at all. While he remained true to Miller's contention thattwo "isms" existed in the early eighteenth century, Heimert assertedthat evangelicalism proved more significantly "American." ColonialCalvinism—in all its intellectual and emotional power—lay at thebasis of the distinctly American Great Awakening. And it, in turn, layat the basis of the American Revolution.6

Heimert's thesis was not the only aspect of his book standingagainst the whirlwind of historical scholarship. Clearly, he understoodhis work to challenge conventional methods of studying and writingabout the past. "The interpretations that follow," he admitted to hisreaders, "often derive from a view of doctrinal positions and develop-ments that does not, confessedly, adhere to the standard rubrics for ahistory of religious dogma." The book proved as much interpretationas narrative of ideas, for it sought to go beyond what was written towhat was meant, through "a continuing act of literary interpretation,for the language with which an idea is presented, and the imaginativeuniverse by which it is surrounded, often tells us more of an author'smeaning and intention than his declarative propositions." Ideas, afterall, do not exist in isolation. Their significance demands the historian'sawareness of the "context of institutions and events out of whichthought emerged, and with which it strove to come to terms." ForHeimert, then, full apprehension of an idea's significance "dependsfinally on reading, not between the lines but, as it were, through andbeyond them." Calvinists and Liberals inhabited separate intellectualuniverses. The same word often held disparate connotations andsignified different meanings. Reading the context and character into

5. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, vii-viii.6. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 16.

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each statement revealed that "Liberalism was a profoundly elitist andconservative ideology, while evangelical religion embodied a radicaland even democratic challenge to the standing order of colonialAmerica."7

Critics attacked Heimert's work on numerous levels. The two mostpowerful attacks came from Edmund Morgan and Sidney Mead.Morgan, also a student of Miller, appreciated Heimert's focus onreligious ideas, calling the work "one of the most ambitious efforts inintellectual history to appear in the past decade." But he took excep-tion to Heimert's method of reading "through and beyond the lines."Noting that Heimert chose conspicuous cases that identified Edwards-eans as aggressive patriots, Morgan claimed that "it becomes apparentthat the secret of this technique of literary interpretation is to ask ofevery passage: who wrote it?" Heimert cast liberal authors fromJonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy to John Adams as reactionar-ies hoping to justify the status quo. Naturally, Morgan—long con-vinced that a secular form of Puritanism that underscored a personalwork ethic, frugality, and public virtue fired the Revolutionary'simaginations—took exception to any approach that required such aninterpretation. This was unsurprising, as months before Morgan'sinfluential essay, "The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,"appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, arguing that a secularized,moralized form of Puritan virtue animated the Revolutionary genera-tion. If Heimert were correct, then it was a distinctly warm, revivalistCalvinism that lay at the heart of Revolutionary ideology rather thanthe residual, secularized religion Morgan found. The final paragraphof Morgan's 1967 review of Heimert, the most pointed, deserves fullattention.

The book is well-written. It rests on enormous erudition. And it ispossible that some of the attributes the author ascribes to his contend-ing forces are placed where they belong. There indisputably was adivision among American clergymen in the eighteenth century, andsome of the improbable things Professor Heimert says about thatdivision may be correct. Things are indeed not always what theyseem. But sometimes they are. How are we to know when they arenot? Professor Heimert does not assist us with empirical evidence.He tells us very little about the "context of institutions and events outof which thought emerged." The world he offers us has been con-structed by reading beyond the lines of what men said; and what hefinds beyond the lines is so far beyond, so wrenched from the context,and so at odds with empirical evidence, that his world, to thisreviewer at least, partakes more of fantasy than of history.

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


Having also written earlier in the decade a remarkable essay introduc-ing the newly published papers of John Adams, whom Morganunderstood as paradigmatic of secularized Puritanism, he no doubtfelt the sting of Heimert's attack against the "Unitarian historiogra-phy" based on "John Adams's memory" that had created "one of themore sophisticated myths concerning the American past." Morgan'sreview simply answered Heimert in kind.8

Meanwhile, Sidney Mead's lengthy review focused on three addi-tional problems that hurt what he considered an otherwise helpfulcorrective to the traditional interpretation. First, he took great excep-tion to Heimert's suggestive yoking of Calvinism to nineteenth-century Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy. Heimert's claim that "thearchitecture of the Republicans' heavenly cities was not all that differ-ent from what had been envisioned in the philosophy of Edwards"concerned Mead deeply. Actually that section of Heimert's book is aconjectural essay included at the end of the final chapter and goesbeyond the book's stated limits. But while that might explain itsspeculative nature, that did not excuse it. Mead employed its moredubious implications and apparent self-contradictions as his majorsubstantial critique. The second problem proved more methodologicaland linguistic in nature. "Obviously Heimert does not use the words'Calvinism' and 'Calvinist' with their commonly accepted denotationand connotations," he complained. "To me it suggests a doctrine oftransmigration adapted to the writing of intellectual history wherebythe soul of a theological system reappears in successive epochs in quitedifferent bodies." Heimert argued that while the Stamp Act crisis of1765 marked the death of Edwards's theological Calvinism, its spiritwas resurrected in an American aspiration whose rhetoric mergedpolitical opponents with the enemies of God. Such was the root,according to Heimert, of nineteenth-century democracy. Mead de-murred. To his mind, Heimert's creative reading of authors' motiva-tions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources proved moreinteresting than serious. "Heimert's genealogy of Jacksonian democ-racy is about as plausible as the 'begat' passages in the gospels ofMatthew and Luke and apparently has about the same relationship tohistorical evidence."9

8. Edmund S. Morgan, review of Religion and the American Mind, by Alan Heimert, Williamand Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967): 454-59. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 11.Morgan, review, 459. Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution," Williamand Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24 (1967): 3—43. Morgan, review of The Adams Papers, NewEngland Quarterly 34 (1961): 518-29.

9. Sidney E. Mead, "Through and beyond the Lines," Journal of Religion 48 (1968): 281.Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 539. Mead, "Through and Beyond," 281;

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Mead's final attack was especially surprising for its ad hominemnature and self-disclosure. Like Morgan, he was bothered by Hei-mert's willingness to "read beyond the lines" and not accept manycharacters' words at face value. Unhappy that Heimert had dismissedthe liberal Jonathan Mayhew's arguments as the result of a tempera-ment shaped by too quick success in the big city, Mead turned thetables and posed the question about Heimert himself: Does his back-ground explain this unusual book? He pointed to the author's tenureas a Korean War officer in the army's Far East Psychological WarfareSection. Heimert himself had claimed that his wartime experiencehelped him read the Awakening's pamphlet wars with a greater senseof "the relationship of ideology and political commitment to modes ofpersuasion" in shaping propaganda. But Mead, writing in the midst ofpublic debate about Vietnam, found such an admission alarming, for itpointed to a "habit of mind" in presenting material using—in PaulLinebarger's words—argument, suggestion, enlightenment, and obfus-cation. Heimert's employment of character assassination in the case ofLiberals "gives the work the odor of Calvinist propaganda—a psycho-logical blitz designed to induce the 'will to surrender' in the erstwhiledefenders and present dupes of the 'Liberals' who 'identify the Revo-lution as the cause of Charles Chauncy alone' and have 'effaced' its'evangelical sources.'"10

But why such a vitriolic attack—something between an applicationof Heimert's own method and an ad hominem argument? After all, ifinterpretation is the pursuit of all historians, why did "reading be-tween the lines" bother Mead, and presumably Morgan, to this de-gree? Mead quoted Marshall McLuhan to reveal his deep-seatedanxiety that Heimert's book reflected the "literate, fragmented West-ern man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture."Moving from the content of messages to their effect beguiles peopleinto believing they have discovered the hidden meaning. "In this onecould readily see a description of Heimert's methodology," lamentedMead, "and a plausible explanation of why it so irritates us olderhistorians with our 'phonetic literacy' . . . and alphabetic and linealapproach to knowledge, and our great concern for the precise meaningof the lines we find in our documents." Indeed, Mead frankly admittedthat Heimert's answer to his criticisms points up Mead's own continu-ing insecurities. In a poignant conclusion, he disclosed that if the

interestingly, Mead misquoted Heimert's words, mistaking Heimert's "Republicanheavenly cities" for Carl Becker's "heavenly City," a reference to Enlightenment religion(277).

10. Mead, "Through and Beyond," 283-85, especially 284 n. 6 (on Paul Linebarger'sPsychological Warfare). Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, vii.


profession was becoming concerned more with effect than meaning,"then we old-line historians who criticize the work must realize that,in Lewis Carroll's lines,

We are but older children, dear,Who fret to find our bedtime near."11

William McLoughlin gave Religion and the American Mind its mostpositive major review. Certain that Heimert had "opened up a new erain the study of the American Revolution," McLoughlin claimed that apantheon of such scholars as Parrington, Baldwin, Thornton, Weber,Tawney, Beard, Miller, Adams, Hofstadter, Sweet, Boorstin, Haroutu-nian, Foster, Walker, Trinterud, Goen, Tracy, and Gaustad must be putaside. Certainly, McLoughlin had difficulties with the book; he particu-larly complained about its failure to distinguish clearly among suchsharply different groups as religious Liberals and secular Liberals, andamong the many types of Calvinists. He thought the work would havebeen stronger had Heimert spent more time with church records,diaries, association minutes, and letters. Still, he wrote, "If Heimert'sreading of the eighteenth-century religious mind is correct, and I thinkit is, then we must reject the old liberal-oriented interpretations." ButMcLoughlin, also a former Miller student, took Heimert's assessmentsa level deeper, asking how evangelical creativity during the Awaken-ing differed from any other episode of religious development in theface of philosophical difference. Heimert's narrative only communi-cates the eighteenth-century chapter of a longer story of pietists'constant struggle for "inner felicity" against a backdrop of moraldeclension and social disunity. While McLoughlin was convinced thatHeimert's interpretation revealed how historians had misread much ofthe religious literature of the era, his was—in the words of JohnMurrin—an "ironic appreciation."12

In all, the dominant paradigm remained a tough nut to crack.Heimert's massive book, however, seemed all too easy to pick apart. In1970 Bernard Bailyn's essay "Religion and Revolution: Three Biographi-

11. Mead, "Through and Beyond," 288. Mead later voiced his disagreement with Heimert byputting the issues into their church-state relationship. He asserted that the earlyrepublic's rejection of religious establishment indicates the Enlightenment's victory overorthodox Christianity (see "Christendom, Enlightenment, and Revolution," in Religionand the Revolution, ed. Jerald C. Brauer [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976]). Brauer disagreed,arguing that the Awakening's intense piety and critical religion engendered the demo-cratic movement—a claim akin to Heimert's argument (see "Puritanism, Revivalism,and the Revolution," in Religion and the Revolution).

12. William G. McLoughlin, "The American Revolution as a Religious Revival: 'The Millen-nium in One Country,'" New England Quarterly 40 (1967): 100-101, 100, 110, 108. John M.Murrin, "No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations," Reviews inAmerican History 11 (1983): 161.

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cal Studies" directly attacked Religion and the American Mind with threecase studies that contradicted Heimert's thesis. Picking up the bannerof Miller's rationalist-minded Americans, Bailyn's argument rein-forced his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which hadappeared within months of Heimert's book: Religion served to spreadWhig ideology, Bailyn's primary player, by employing moral argu-ments that defended the political tenets of revolutionaries. Though nota return to Parrington, Bailyn's work underscored the importance ofsecular ideas in the Revolution. Religion was present, but "it is a grosssimplification to believe that religion as such, or any of its doctrinalelements, had a unique political role in the Revolutionary move-ment."13

After its initial press, Religion and the American Mind received littleattention for nearly a decade. At least four reasons explain this silence.First, the volume itself is so massive and its arguments so complex—attimes seemingly contradictory—that it said too much about religion'srelationship to the Revolution. It proved difficult to nail down exactlywhat Heimert's contribution was, the fault of Heimert and not hisreaders. Meanwhile, most of those involved in the debate seemedsatisfied to let sleeping dogs lie. The discussion about which Millerstudent—Heimert, McLoughlin, Morgan, or Bailyn—most deserved towear the prophet's mantle appeared useless and too personal tocontinue arguing in public. Simultaneously, the rise of the new socialhistory turned scholars' attention to the past's inarticulate masses,many of whom would not have recognized the elite-based "Americanmind" those like Heimert and others in the developing AmericanStudies school touted. Finally, related to the rise of social history,Richard Bushman's From Puritan to Yankee, published in 1967, met theneed for many who wanted to place the Great Awakening as a centralevent without ascribing to it all the significance Heimert attempted. ABailyn student at Harvard, Bushman pushed his mentor's notion tothe limit without crossing the line: Economic ambitions and a resultantyet residual Puritan guilt led to the revivals as a means to alleviate theYankee conscience, thus giving religious justification for an increasedsense of individualism and political freedom. Certainly Bushman gavethe Awakening a more notable role, but it remained secondary to otherforces. One reviewer recognized this distinction. "His book might well

13. Bernard Bailyn, "Religion and Revolution: Three Biographical Studies," Perspectives inAmerican History 4 (1970): 83-169, quotation from 85; idem, The Ideological Origins of theAmerican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).


be complemented," wrote Richard Birdsall, "by a reading of PerryMiller or Alan Heimert for a treatment of religious ideas."14

II. MAKING ROOM FOR NEW VOICES: CONSERVATIVE POLITICS ANDLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

While the early 1970s saw relatively few works that sought toreevaluate either religion's relationship to the Revolution or Heimert'sthesis, the bicentennial celebration brought several such studies. Forinstance, the Journal of Presbyterian History dedicated an issue to thetopic of "Presbyterians and the American Revolution: An InterpretiveAccount." Articles on Presbyterian immigrants, John Witherspoon,John Zubly, William Livingston, church-state questions in Virginia,slavery, state constitutions, Dutch Reformed, and millennialism wereincluded. While Religion and the American Mind was cited in three ofthose essays, only one of them appropriated its thesis. Church Historyfollowed with seven articles devoted to religion and the Revolution.Here the generation gap that separates the original reactions to Hei-mert's book from today's assumption of its method and many of itsideas began to appear, as the three articles that spoke approvingly ofHeimert's work, even to the point of assuming his argument, wereauthored by an assistant professor, a recent doctoral program gradu-ate, and a graduate student.15

In fact 1976, the bicentennial of the Revolution and tenth anniver-sary of Religion and the American Mind, saw the beginning of therehabilitation of Heimert's work. Two young scholars made theirmarks that year by picking up different aspects of the book as the basisfor their acute and aggressive work over the next two decades. Mark

14. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut,1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Richard D. Birdsall,review of From Puritan to Yankee, by Richard L. Bushman, New England Quarterly 41(1968): 128.

15. The articles in the Journal of Presbyterian History 54 (1976) were: James G. Leyburn,"Presbyterian Immigrants and the American Revolution"; 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, "WilliamLivingston: Propagandist against Episcopacy"; Thomas E. Buckley, S. J., "Church-StateSettlement in Virginia: The Presbyterian Contribution"; J. Earl Thompson Jr., "Slaveryand Presbyterianism in the Revolutionary Era"; Howard Miller, "The Grammar ofLiberty: Presbyterians and the First American Constitutions"; John E. Beardslee III, "TheDutch 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 RevolutionaryConnecticut"; John F. Berens, '"Good News from a Far Country': A Note on DivineProvidence and the Stamp Act Crisis"; and Douglas H. Sweet, "Church Vitality and theAmerican Revolution: Historiographic Consensus and Thoughts towards a New Perspec-tive."

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Noll and Harry Stout did more to resurrect Heimert's book than anyother historians. Significantly, these authors represent two movementsthat came to the fore in the 1980s that permitted, even encouraged, atransformation in the debate: Protestant evangelicalism and the newcultural history. Heimert's work attracted Noll, a young evangelicalscholar, by its thesis highlighting Edwardsean revivalists' role inprovoking the Revolution; Stout found Heimert's method suggestivefor understanding the transformation of culture by looking for clues inshifting language codes and popular symbols.

Mark Noll's work appeared in both the Journal of Presbyterian Historyand Church History in 1976. Each article examined specific ministerswhom he felt represented a middle ground in the debate. His ChurchHistory article, "Ebenezer Devotion: Religion and Society in Revolution-ary Connecticut," dealt directly with the two models scholars were leftwith at the end of the previous decade. Heimert had focused on thelegacy of the Great Awakening and the principles that were "trans-lated" into political weapons—namely, "'benevolent union,' sociallyindiscriminate predestination, and millennialism." On the other hand,Bailyn had denied that "religious expression can be associated system-atically with political and social behavior in eighteenth-century NewEngland." Noll's conclusion about the Connecticut minister leanedtoward what he called "a more organic relationship" among "religiousallegiances, social commitments, and political ideas." Noll hoped tofashion a synthesis, but one that apparently favored Heimert. "Bothhave accurately portrayed certain aspects of the relationship betweenreligion and society in revolutionary America: libertarian categoriesdid dominate the political thought of the day, even for religiouslyminded individuals; but, in contradiction to Bailyn's conclusion, therewas also a close, even determinative, connection between religiousand political ideas and actions during the period." He ended the studyby asserting that although Whig ideology defined theoretical andpractical political action, "[t]he career of Ebenezer Devotion providessupport for Heimert's contention that the long-term effects of the GreatAwakening were of vital importance for the shaping of responses tothe crisis of revolution." Noll likewise concluded that Jacob Green'scase, the subject of his Journal of Presbyterian History piece, "militatesagainst Bailyn's conclusions concerning the source of moral reform inRevolutionary America." The religious principles of the Great Awaken-ing led this minister to criticize colonial society and support theRevolution.16

16. Noll, "Ebenezer Devotion," 293-95, 307. Idem, "Observations on the Reconciliation ofPolitics and Religion in Revolutionary New Jersey: The Case of Jacob Green," journal ofPresbyterian History 54 (1976): 233.


Noll's discomfort in fitting together Heimert's Calvinist ideas andBailyn's Whig principles also appeared in his Christians in the AmericanRevolution. Obviously uneasy minimizing either component, both ofwhich he thought were present, he made his sharpest dissent fromHeimert's work by showing Old Lights just as excited about thepatriot cause as Edwardseans. Noll completed his synthesis of thecompeting paradigms in "The Reformed Politics of the AmericanRevolution," published in 1988. This, his fullest and most conciseexplication to that point, traced republicanism's history—finding itssources in the English Puritan Revolution—and then sought to showhow American Christianity paralleled republican principles. Bothproducts of seventeenth-century English dissent, he argued that theyshared several formal similarities, including pessimistic views ofhuman nature, virtue as a negative quality (lack of sin or politicalcorruption), notions of freedom (whether from sin or political tyr-anny), and ideas of a good society. Apparently the Christianizationthat took place during the revivals reawakened these components inmany Americans' minds. Both worldviews were brought closer to-gether during the Seven Years' War, later to merge during the Britishimperial crisis.17

In all, Noll's work on the Revolution is best viewed as a struggle tobring Religion and the American Mind into line with scholarship empha-sizing the Republican, Whig intellectual sources of the AmericanRevolution. Because of that, Noll ran into many of the same difficultiesthat Heimert faced, namely, how to fit numerous contrary examplesinto the picture—a task at which Noll enjoyed more success—and howto move beyond New England. Even more important however was thepolitical climate that proved conducive to his efforts. An evangelicalChristian teaching at Wheaton College, home to the Billy GrahamCenter and the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, andhost to Republican presidents, Noll's scholarship rode the religiousright wave that brought evangelical scholars back to the academicarena. Upon the heels of born-again Jimmy Carter's election andopenness about his faith, journalists and historians hurried to under-stand evangelicalism's history and role in American politics. Thepolitical culture, especially since the religious right's marriage to theRepublican Party in 1980, has given Noll the opportunity to remind usof evangelicalism's historical importance. Movements that had beenmarginalized for their religious commitments in the early twentieth

17. Mark Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Christian UniversityPress, 1977). Idem, "The Reformed Politics of the American Revolution," in One Nationunder 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 theFrench and Indian War is clear in this piece. See my discussion of Hatch's work below.

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century found comfort and cultural meaning in Noll's contention thatevangelicals had played a signficant part in the creation of the coun-try.18

Harry Stout, meanwhile, avoided many of the blows Noll took inappropriating Religion and the American Mind. Again, 1976 was thedecisive year. Stout's "Religion, Communications, and the IdeologicalOrigins of the American Revolution" appeared in the William and MaryQuarterly, questioning the previous decade's interpretation of Hei-mert's work. After reviewing Morgan's and Mead's "impressive as-sault," he pointedly stated that "we must ask whether in fact Heimertwrote the book the critics reviewed." Their critiques assumed the workwas an extension of Perry Miller; if that were so, said Stout, then theirattacks were justified, for "there is no clear and consistent link betweenrevivalism and republicanism at the level of ideas." But it had neverbeen Heimert's sole purpose to attenuate his mentor's program. Theproblem, claimed Stout, appeared in critics' failure to recognize thebook's value "in suggesting a method of historical analysis thatfocuses on the context of communication."19

Stout's point of departure from Noll in reviving Heimert's work isapparent. His interest lay in Heimert's method, underscoring those"rhetorical strategies" the revivals produced. "Approaching the prob-lem of popular receptivity and concentrating on the verbal formsthrough which ideas were presented," he pointed out, "Heimertlocates the sources of this animating egalitarianism in the GreatAwakening but concludes it can be understood only by readingbeyond the religious content of evangelical ideas to the new forms ofpublic address established in the revivals." The important transforma-tion in popular consciousness occurred thus in the form, rather thanthe content, of communication. Therefore, while Mead aimed his gunsin the right direction—the waning significance of apparent content, orbetter, explicit meaning—he missed the target, namely, the culturalmeaning behind changing forms of communication. The religiousrevivals bestowed on the mid-eighteenth century a new rhetoric, a"mode of persuasion that would redefine the norms of social order."Before beginning his own study of popular rhetoric, Stout drove hometo Heimert's critics that the true meaning of Religion and the AmericanMind had been sitting under their noses for years. He used theauthor's own words of introduction: "[T]he contrasts between Liberal

18. See Robert Wuthnow's discussion of evangelicals' desire to return to politics in "ThePolitical Rebirth of American Evangelicals," in The New Christian Right: Mobilization andLegitimation, ed. Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow (New York: Aldine, 1983).

19. Harry S. Stout, "Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 34 (1976): 522, 523,521.


and Calvinist social thought were possibly of less ultimate significancethan the remarkable differences between their oratorical strategies andrhetorical practices."20

Just as Noll went on to work out the implications of his 1976 essays,so Stout—to use a Puritan term—"improved" his argument with amassive study of New England sermons. The New England Soul:Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England emerged in 1986to critical acclaim. After examining over two thousand unpublishedsermons, an ignored source in the preceding debates, Stout did notfind the secularization and nationalization of Puritan tenets touted byPerry Miller and two of his intellectual heirs, Bernard Bailyn andEdmund Morgan. Instead he found that the evangelical message ofNew England piety remained persistent throughout the eighteenthcentury in the form of covenant theology. The Great Awakeningdivided the ministry into two wings as revivals gave birth to a laypiety that democratized the region's religion. Even this division,however, proved temporary as both sides continued to emphasize solascriptura and quickly moved to biblical metaphors for French Catholicsduring the 1750s. Stout's belief that the imperial crisis forced the twosides together seems at first to contradict Heimert's thesis. In truth, itrested on the methodological foundation of Religion and the AmericanMind in that Stout interpreted ministers' language and rhetoricalcontexts as democratic restatements of covenant theology, the bedrockof evangelical piety throughout New England's history before theRevolution.21

Stout's method of reading sermons as much for their form—andhow form often connotes symbolic meanings—as for their contentreflected a new approach that gained popularity in America during the1980s. Cultural historians began to look at linguistic and materialrepresentations of society as suggestive of the larger culture thatexisted, ultimately, in people's minds. Though such representationswere constructed, they served to shape succeeding generations. Stoutclaimed that New England culture remained true to a covenanttheology that molded the worldview of each generation to understandtheir lives according to specific, shared terms imparted as muchthrough the structure as the content of sermons. Riding the wave of

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 Heimertpoints out in his most penetrating passages, the most important and enduring differencebetween Old Light and New Lights was one of style" (see Henry May, The Enlightenmentin America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1976], 93).

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

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new cultural history as it washed up on this side of the Atlantic, Stoutpushed colonial historians to go beyond conventional intellectual andsocial history methods to discover the mentalite of historical NewEngland.22

III. FIGHTING OVER THE WHEEL IN THE LINGUISTIC TURN

Given the emerging postmodern and multicultural environment inAmerican academics during the 1980s, it proves unsurprising that abook called Religion and the American Mind would find a new audienceamong scholars. Increased attention was paid to created mental worldsand their languages and symbols, particularly how ideology andbehavior was maintained through constructed codes. In this context,Stout's book was accompanied by several excellent works that as-sumed much of Heimert's argument initially assailed in print. PatriciaBonomi's Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics inColonial America argued a powerful connection between the GreatAwakening and the Revolution in New England. Following the path ofStout's 1976 essay, she steered clear of doctrinal debates since theintellectual ties between the two events remained tenuous at best. Herwork emphasized the New Lights' language and actions that inspireda popular challenge to institutional authority, a new ability to decidesignificant issues for oneself. Compact and lucidly written, Bonomi'ssections about New England synthesized Heimert's reading of sourceswith Carl Bridenbaugh's concern for Anglican authority in Mitre andSceptre and Richard Hofstadter's final thoughts on religion's role inshaping eighteenth-century politics.23

22. For a direct discussion of this approach in distinction to earlier historical approaches, seeJoyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacobs, Telling the Truth about History (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1994), chapter 6. See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The"Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988), part 4; and Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1989). I do not mean to categorize Stout as a "new culturalhistorian" so much as to indicate his role in encouraging colonial religious scholars toapproach material in a manner that cultural historians during this period used. Since1986 many cultural historians have taken the approach further than Stout seemsinterested in going. Stout's approach straddled the structuralist interest in mappingmental realities and an emerging post-structuralist concern for speech as a polyglot ofcodes. His argument, however, leaned toward structuralism in its regard for NewEngland society's consistency and the historian's ability to decipher various speechcodes. For a contemporaneous example of this transition in nonreligious history, see J. G.A. Pocock, "Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Ameri-cana," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 325-46.

23. Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in ColonialAmerica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre:Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689-1775 (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1962). For Richard Hofstadter's inspiration in Bonomi's underlying argument


Donald Weber's controversial Rhetoric and History in RevolutionaryNew England clearly followed Stout's advice for reading Heimert'swork, to the point that content lost virtually all significance. Similar toBailyn's work in structure only, Weber analyzed five New Englandministers to find the "connections among religious rhetoric, politicaldiscourse, and narrative form in the revolutionary pulpit." Leaningheavily on critical theory and cultural anthropology, he argued that the1740s and 1770s shared transitions in context, referents, and style.Sounding precisely like Heimert two decades earlier, Weber claimedthat "the much debated links between Revival and Revolution mayreside in neither the realm of abstract theology . . . nor in the opposingpolitical stances that determined religious allegiance after Edwards'sdeath in 1758," but "finally exist, most suggestively and provocatively,on the level of rhetoric itself." Weber's dissection is exhausting. Hefound that the fragmentary style, syntax, "vertical catalogs," and"incantatory phrases" that characterized evangelicals' rhetoric in the1740s came to dominate sermons that included Whig libertarianspeech during the 1770s.24

Ruth Bloch's Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought,1756-1800, which appeared in 1985, also exemplifies how Heimert'swork drew attention during the early days of cultural history inAmerica. Bloch's topic and period would not seemingly necessitateassociation with Religion and the American Mind; nevertheless, PhilipGura—a former student of Heimert at Harvard—reviewed Bonomi's,Weber's, and Bloch's books in 1988 as proof of a larger rehabilitation ofHeimert's work. In this insightful essay Gura holds that a closereading finds that Bloch used the Great Awakening as the crucial eventthat shaped perceptions of society—particularly notions of luxury andvirtue—that created a millennialist mindset. The cultural patterns ofsuch a worldview, passed on through shared symbols, lent an imagina-tive meaning to the Revolution.25

There are many angles from which one may assess the criticisms andadoptions of Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind. Themillennialist track, which Bloch exemplified, was not necessarily the

about religion's primary role in shaping colonial religious culture, see Bonomi's introduc-tion. For a good review of Bonomi that examines her similarities to and differences fromHeimert and Stout, see Philip F. Gura, "The Role of the 'Black Regiment': Religion andthe American Revolution," New England Quarterly 61 (1988): 439-54.

24. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988), introduction. For a good review of Weber's book within its 1980shistoriographic context, see Gura, '"Black Regiment.'" Weber asserts, and rightly so, thathis approach—looking solely at form—goes beyond Stout's (157 n. 2).

25. Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Gura, '"Black Regiment,'" 445-46.

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primary contribution of Heimert's work. Truth be told, his use ofEdwards's positive vision of America that inspired New Lights tosocial action leans heavily on Clarence Goen's pathbreaking studies ofEdwards's postmillennialism. Still, many whose careers have includedstudies in millennialism's relationship to the Revolution assumedHeimert's work either explicitly or implicitly. William G. McLough-lin's positive review in 1967 was followed ten years later by a studytitled '"Enthusiasm for Liberty': The Great Awakening as the Key tothe Revolution" in which he explicitly stated his affinity for Heimert'sthought. Charles Royster claimed revolutionaries saw political rebel-lion as the opportunity to work out in the political realm their privateredemption, a notion drawn largely from the revivals. Others whohave interacted with Heimert's work, using his assessments to theiradvantage in otherwise revisionary pieces, include Catherine L. Alba-nese, who introduced a new discourse of civil religion; and MarkValeri, who interpreted Edwardseans' actions as based on concern forthe moral law.26

To be sure, some found Heimert's work no more convincing in the1980s than others had in the 1960s and 1970s, whether their concernswere the revivals or millennialism. Nathan Hatch has consistentlyoffered a countervailing opinion since his seminal Sacred Cause ofLiberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary NewEngland appeared in 1977. Convinced that Edwards's followers wereunable to sustain the optimism surrounding the Awakening, he ar-gued that religion's role in the Revolution centered on the marriage ofReal Whig ideology to millennial language that resulted from theFrench and Indian War. In Bailyn-like fashion, Hatch—who trainedunder J. G. A. Pocock—held political ideas as primary; religion lentitself to the cause in a secondary sense, able to raise the stakes withpowerful images. Hatch's work continues to influence even scholarswho assume much of Heimert's argument, including Noll, Bloch, andBonomi. One could even argue that Stout's New England Soul stepsback a bit from his 1976 essay by integrating Hatch's work into thefinal chapters. J. William T. Youngs's work on Stephen Williams, a New

26. C. C. Goen, "Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology," Church History 28(1959): 25—10. William G. McLoughlin, "'Enthusiasm for Liberty': The Great Awakeningas the Key to the Revolution," in American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 87 (1977):69-95. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and theAmerican Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,1979). Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the AmericanRevolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). Mark Valeri, "The New Divin-ity and the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1989): 741-69; andidem, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: The Origins of the New Divinityin Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).


Divinity revolutionary, nuanced the issue by showing how religiousand secular ideologies that sparked revolutionary behavior could existon separate planes within a single individual—thus simultaneouslychallenging and integrating Hatch's work. At first glance RobertWilson's study of Ebenezer Gay, Massachusetts' South Shore leader ofreligious liberalism who remained a lonely loyalist, appears to main-tain Heimert's thesis that Arminians remained social conservatives;but in fact he calls into question Heimert's assertion that Arminiansfailed to live by their convictions and supported the rebellion, showingin the case of Gay one who stood courageously against the will of thepeople. Wilson's assessment challenges the basic argument of Religionand the American Mind by falling into step with Bailyn and Hatch,arguing that a secular Whig ideology proved the primary motivebehind liberal revolutionary clergy.27

Others have censured Heimert's book more generally. Bruce Tuckerand John Wilson re-envisioned the revolutionary period to extendthroughout the eighteenth century: Tucker in order to argue the 1690sas the moment of origin for New England's sense of identity that wasaugmented in the 1740s and betrayed by England in the 1760s; Wilsonas a theoretical exercise to understand various roles religion played inthe larger "Revolutionary era." In both cases, Heimert was singled outfor criticism. Bailyn's ideas, while updated, continue to find voice inperhaps his finest student, Gordon Wood, who recently identifiedHeimert's book as "much too personal, much too much of a cri decoeur against bourgeois conservatism and stuffiness, to be entirelyconvincing." Echoing Morgan and Mead, Wood found Religion and theAmerican Mind "so imaginatively separated from the reality of theeighteenth century as to be scarcely history; his argument cannot beverified in any conventional manner." Likewise, Heimert's Manicheandichotomy between Liberal and Calvinist traditions proved "too simple,too rarified, too detached from the concrete and complicated world ofreal people." But sitting on this side of nearly three decades ofscholarship that had sprung from Heimert's work, Wood admittedthat the connections Heimert fastened between religion and the Revo-lution were "too important and too intriguing to be ignored." Ulti-

27. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium inRevolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). For another classicstatement of politics' preeminence in the millennial debate, see Melvin B. Endy Jr., "JustWar, Holy War, and Millennialism in Revolutionary America," William and Mary Quar-terly 58 (1985): 3-25. J. William T. Youngs, The Congregationalists (New Haven: Green-wood, 1990). Robert J. Wilson, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of RationalReligion in New England, 1696-1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1984), 219-220.

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mately, Wood placed both religion and politics in the same supportingrole, "consequences of more deeply rooted determinants, as manifestresponses to massive demographic and economic changes taking placein society." Although he placed politics no higher than religion, hestayed true to Bailyn's contention that religion's role in the Revolutionwas indirect and secondary.28

Jon Butler leveled the most fundamental attack in his 1982 essay"Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpre-tive Fiction." Butler clearly preferred the approach of such millennialscholars as Nathan Hatch and Whig proponents in the train of Bailynover students of the revivals, particularly Heimert, Stout, and McLough-lin. Indeed, Butler's powerful article went for the jugular: There wasno Great Awakening. Revivals were local and sporadic. "What, then,"he concluded, "ought we to say about the revivals of religion inprerevolutionary America? The important suggestion is the mostdrastic. Historians should abandon the term 'the Great Awakening'because it distorts the character of eighteenth-century American reli-gious life and misinterprets its relationship to prerevolutionary Ameri-can society and politics."29

Butler's assault was so thorough, covering virtually every assertionfrom ideological connections to Republicanism, from transformationsin language to church growth, that fifteen years later authors writingabout the revivals sense the need to defend themselves against hiswork. Even Mark Noll, after reviewing what can be said about therevivals after Butler's essay, wrote in 1993, "Put this way, the politicalimportance of the Awakening was not direct, as Heimert thought, buteverywhere indirect." Interestingly, Noll went on to develop a theorythat the revivals "opened up possibilities for the migration of politicallanguage into religious speech, most obviously in New England." Butthis was no shift to Stout's position; continuing to look at contentrather than the form of rhetoric, Noll clearly felt more comfortable

28. Bruce Tucker, "The Reinvention of New England, 1691-1770," New England Quarterly 59(1986): 315-40. John F. Wilson, "Religion and Revolution," Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory 23 (1993): 597-613, especially 608-610. Gordon Wood, "Religion and the Ameri-can Revolution," in Stout and Hart, New Directions, 177,181: "And thus, the Awakening'sreligious challenge to established authority inevitably but indirectly prepared manyAmericans for the subsequent political challenge that would become the AmericanRevolution" (182).

29. Jon Butler, "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as InterpretiveFiction," Journal of American History 69 (1982): 322; see also his book, which paid littleattention to the revivals, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).


with Hatch's thesis that the French and Indian War caused ministers touse Real Whig language.30

IV. IDEOLOGY AND METHOD IN THE NEXT GENERATION

Nevertheless, Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind: Fromthe Great Awakening to the Revolution continues to draw a strongfollowing. A 1992 article by James F. Cooper Jr. in The New EnglandQuarterly speaks to the work's robust status. The picture Cooper drawsdiffers dramatically from that of the late 1960s: "Although there aredissenters among them," he wrote, "historians have traditionallyregarded the Great Awakening in New England not simply as awatershed in the religious history of the region but as a turning pointin popular conceptions of authority, which eventually paved the wayfor a more democratic culture and the American Revolution." Whichhistorians were cited? McLoughlin, Stout, Bonomi, and of course,Heimert. Jon Butler, meanwhile, according to Cooper, "dissents fromthe traditional view." Who could have guessed thirty years ago thatHeimert's work would be understood as the traditional interpreta-tion?31

Numerous scholars new to the topic assume either Heimert's ap-proach, via Harry Stout, or Heimert's thesis outright as Noll once did.Frank Lambert's nuanced study of George Whitefield as a culturalrepresentation of liberty for later revolutionaries reads precisely likeHeimert's argument for the great evangelist's symbolism. NancyRuttenburg claims that Whitefield, as the charismatic model of theconverted "new man," broke through traditional constraints to offerlisteners the "voice of self-enlargement." The revivals therefore fash-ioned a democratic personality for converts, who challenged longstand-ing institutions of authority. Beyond the rhetorical interest in Heimertis Gerald McDermott's One Holy and Happy Society, which appearsmore aligned with Noll's pre-1993 assessment. Also an evangelical, heargues that Jonathan Edwards's social theory, which McDermott calls"public theology," proved more egalitarian than rationalist CharlesChauncy's and "may have helped pave the way for popular accep-

30. Mark Noll, "The American Revolution and Protestant Evangelicalism," Journal of Interdis-ciplinary History 23 (1993): 615-38, especially 626-27. See also Noll's A History ofChristianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), whichcontinues to insist on ideological ties between the revivals and the Revolution within theframework of Hatch's interpretation.

31. James F. Cooper Jr., "Enthusiasts or Democrats? Separatism, Church Government, andthe Great Awakening in Massachusetts," New England Quarterly 65 (1992): 265, textand n. 1.

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tance of both classical republicanism and radical egalitarian republican-ism." At its most basic level this book continues Noll's early argumentbut replaces Bailyn's work with that of J. G. A. Pocock in seeking asynthesis. Evangelical Keith Griffin meanwhile moves south to themiddle colonies in hopes of finding religious ideology behind revolu-tionary principles. He claims that Reformed clergy inherited classicalprinciples from Edwards, namely those of just war and the natural lawof self-defense, which had become part of "Reformed political ideol-ogy." Reminiscent of Noll's early marriage, Griffin blurs the linesbetween the two sides in order to solve the problem—a more conve-nient synthesis since New School Presbyterians of the middle colonieswere influenced by the Reformed politics of Scotland. One even hearsechoes of Religion and the American Mind now in such establishedscholars as J. C. D. Clark, who is new to this particular debate, in hisLanguage of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics inthe Anglo-American World, which finds denominational differencesbehind various reactions to the imperial crisis and political factional-ism in late-eighteenth century America. Some of the criticisms of thatwork even sound familiar.32

Despite severe and often well-targeted reproaches by Morgan andMead in the 1960s, Bailyn and Hatch in the 1970s, and Butler in the1980s, Religion and the American Mind continues to stand. As thevenerable Henry May put it, "Heimert's book, partly because of a fewunfortunate statements, called forth an extraordinary barrage of heavyartillery. And yet I don't think that Heimert was blown clear out of thewater."33

That is the opinion of most scholars who have carried the Heimerttorch the past twenty years. Those employing his ideas or methodstend to overlook or ignore initial vitriol as failure to understand thenature of the book. Moving quickly beyond Morgan's and Mead'scriticisms, they dismiss Religion and the American Mind's most attacked

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

33. Henry May, "Jonathan Edwards and America," in Jonathan Edwards and the AmericanExperience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press,1987), 27.


sections simply as—in the words of Gura—"hyperbole of the sort thatdetracted from Heimert's arguments." As Weber put it, "most criticshave missed Heimert's major point: that the affective preaching modesof Edwardsean clergy were instrumental in the coming of the Revolu-tion." But this only makes room for those who follow Stout's readingof Heimert—sensitive to the agenda of literary criticism and culturalstudies. Outside McDermott, those who sought a Perry Miller-likeconnection of the revival to the Revolution on the ideological levelhave retreated from the ground Noll occupied—owing largely toButler's criticisms. Heimert's work, then, appears most safely posi-tioned in the hands of those interested in cultural forms, who recog-nize that the professor's office was neither in the divinity school, northe department of history, but in the department of English. After all,Heimert warned readers thirty years ago, "I am convinced that it isonly by way of 'literary' analysis that the full meaning and import ofdiscourse can be ascertained. More particularly, it is necessary todiscern the rhetorical stances and strategies of the spokesmen of thevarious colonial persuasions."34

Jon Pahl stands as perhaps the only person still willing in Heimert-esque fashion to marry the substantial argument Noll initially at-tempted to the approach Stout extolled. As such, Pahl's Paradox Lost isperhaps the most likely heir to Religion and the American Mind. Acomplex work that traces the theological (rather than religious) debateabout free will from 1630 to 1760, the volume rarely addresses Hei-mert's work head-on and even agrees with Bailyn's contention thatmillennialism cannot effectively link the revivals to the Revolution. YetPahl asserts that debates over free will both substantially and rhetori-cally corresponded to definitions of liberty, which, consonant withMcDermott, he calls "public theology." Like Noll's take on Heimert,Pahl claims that ideas mattered since eternal life or damnation de-pended on holding the right beliefs. Those ideas about free will—running the gamut from necessity, which connoted tyranny; to chance,which implied anarchy—naturally harmonized with political realities.On the other hand, like Stout's interpretation of Heimert, Pahl main-tains that words mattered since the symbolic language of variousgroups reveals the shifts and development of a public theology equat-ing private free will with public choice. Sounding more conciliatorythan his argument truly is, Pahl concludes, "The American republicmay have had theological roots." Yet one must not be fooled by suchlanguage: This is no wholesale return to Heimert's thesis. Ultimately

34. Gura, '"Black Regiment,'" 445-46; Weber, Rhetoric and History, 158 n. 7; Heimert, Religionand the American Mind, viii.

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Calvinists, representing a corresponding aristocratic public theology,and Arminians with their democratic understanding of liberty, ranheadlong into Heimert's fundamental argument that EdwardseanCalvinists proved more revolutionary than theological liberals.35

V. MEETING AGAIN AT THE DISINTEGRATING CENTER

Daniel Rodgers recently argued in a brilliant essay that a historicalparadigm draws power "less from its logic than from the mesh of itspremises with the shifting canons of common sense." He presentedRepublicanism, the dominant secular model inspired by Bailyn's workfor understanding the Revolution, as "a measure, should historiansneed yet another one, of how deeply responsive the interpretivedisciplines are, not to evidence (though evidence plays at its allottedmoment a critical part) but to their interpretive problematics." Hei-mert's Religion and the American Mind bears out that point. Disdainedand then ignored for over a decade, the work gained a new followingnot because of later changes in its argument or approach but due totransformations in American culture and their effects on the historicalprofession.36

One need look no further than recent culture wars for proof. Afterthirty years Heimert's general ideas appear wrenched once more in yetanother direction by a group not wholly unrelated to Noll's popularreadership: conservative Christians seeking cultural legitimacy in thenation's past. Some evangelicals have adopted the notion that conser-vative Christians led the American Revolution and founded the newrepublic. This goes beyond merely looking back to the "black regi-ment" Peter Oliver decried soon after the war. Such books as TimothyLaHaye's Faith of Our Founding Fathers peddle to believers an eigh-teenth-century theism as twentieth-century evangelicalism. Graspingat every mention of God or a deity, they interpret the founders asdisciples of an amorphous "Judeo-Christian ethic" (read proto-evangelicalism) that has been diluted by today's secularism. Scholarsmay scoff at such unhistorical writings but we must remember thatthese books teach a brand of history to the masses prone to disbelievethe efficacy of anything denominated as "liberal," whether in politicsor religion.37

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

36. Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History79 (1992): 20, 38.

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


That popular evangelical conception underscores just how compli-cated the situation truly is. Heimert's and later Noll's point was neverthat the national founders were evangelicals, but that the revivalsprovided a popular ideology that stimulated Americans' move towardindependence. In fact, those who argue that the Constitution exhibitedChristian, particularly evangelical, principles stand on shaky ground,according to Noll. Still, his presuppositions remained explicitly evan-gelical, committed like George Marsden—the intellectual leader inissues of evangelical scholarship—to the standard that since all knowl-edge is God's knowledge then evangelical scholarship must be particu-larly rigorous, having nothing to fear in it. Ironically, this necessitatestheir "secular" historical method, which requires empirical study overprovidential argument, something many evangelical readers cannotaccept.38

The irony goes deeper still. Both Stout and Hatch, neither of whomagreed with Noll's search for an ideological connection between therevivals and the Revolution, are also evangelicals. The fact that theirinterpretations vary widely indicates just how committed these evan-gelical scholars are to empirical study and professional argumentrather than a sectarian reading of history. But their basic assumptionsdiffer from Morgan, Mead, and Bailyn. Stout, Hatch, and Noll find acommon background in the Dutch Reformed tradition, especially inthe thought of Abraham Kuyper—rurn-of-the-cenrury educator andprime minister of the Netherlands—who claimed that all scholarshipstems from one of two presuppositions, naturalistic or religious. Inother words, there is no such thing as value-free scholarship. CorneliusVan Til, longtime professor at Westminister Seminary in Philadelphia,popularized that notion in the United States among evangelical intel-lectuals, including George Marsden. Marsden remembers Van Til'scritique of modern culture's Baconian postulates as close to present-day postmodernism. Certainly, Marsden's assertion that "the Enlight-enment is over" sounds such a note. "With the demise of Enlighten-ment ideals about universal science and objectivity, the intellectualreasons for such dogmatic attitudes have collapsed," he wrote. "Thosewho wish to relate their theological beliefs to the rest of their intellec-tual life have nothing to apologize for intellectually." Stout recognizedthis shifting ground recently when he wrote about questions of per-sonal religious commitment and the writing of history for the tradition-

38. For a discussion of Noll's disagreement with Francis Schaeffer, a leading evangelicalthinker during the 1970s and 1980s, about America's alleged Christian foundation, seeMaxie B. Burch, The Evangelical Historians: The Historiography of George Marsden, NathanHatch, and Mark Noll (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996), 56-70.

720 CHURCH HISTORY

ally secular academy. "Just as one would not discuss one's sex life ormarriage as 'context' for one's history writing, neither did one discussone's religious commitment," explained Stout. "Now, under the forceof debates surrounding multiculturalism, the canon, and semiotics,both of these prohibitions are being lifted."39

This rejection of the traditional Enlightenment presupposition, thepostulation that research and interpretation can remain "value free,"tethers Marsden, Noll, Hatch, Stout, and many evangelical scholars tocultural historians. At first glance this paradoxical coupling makes nosense. After all, new cultural historians' roots lie deeply embedded indeconstructionist soil, which evangelicals tend to reject as strict relativ-ism. But their common enemies—including the belief that everythingcan be explained in economic and social terms, and that empiricalstudy is untainted with bias—fasten them together practically even ifnot philosophically. Allen Guelzo's recent prediction that studies ofthe Great Awakening, which is usually interpreted from either thevantage point of intellectual history or religious history, will eventu-ally produce a narrative "of surprising convergences" seems trueenough, but for different reasons from the one he foresaw. For it is thepost-Enlightenment assumptions underlying cultural history (whichhas breathed new life into intellectual history) and evangelical scholar-ship that has made the eighteenth-century revivals such a dynamicplace to reside in late-twentieth-century scholarship.

In retrospect, while it seems strange that two 1980s movements thatappear at cross-currents rehabilitated Heimert's work, perhaps that isjust the point behind it all. If Heimert's thesis proves as pervasive as itcurrently seems, then a revolution of sorts has occurred. Whetherreligion in the form of modern evangelicalism, or secular ideology castas postmodernism's cultural history, was the primary force in back ofit proves a familiar debate worth waging. The more fruitful understand-ing, however, rests in the ambiguous and usually unspoken alliancethat has formed between evangelical and postmodern critiques ofscholarly assumptions that dominated American historical scholar-ship until recently. The various languages, arguments, and methods inReligion and the American Mind proved so broad in 1967 to warrantattack by traditional interpreters, but just sweeping enough to attract

39. Martin Marty, "The Years of the Evangelicals," Christian Century, 15 February 1989, 173.Burch, Evangelical Historians, 41, 90-91. George Marsden, "Christian Schooling: Beyondthe Multiversity," Christian Century, 7 October 1992, 875. Harry S. Stout, "Preface," inReligious Advocacy and American History, ed. D. G. Hart and Bruce Kuklick (GrandRapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), viii. For further reading on this subject, see GeorgeMarsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press,1997); and the thought-provoking pieces in Hart and Kuklick.


evangelicals and postmodernists today. Although they fall out onopposite sides of the ideological bed, both share the same pillow asthey read Heimert's book by their individual lights. Ironically, the verymethod and arguments that nearly caused the work to be buried thirtyyears ago resurrected it in two communities interested in confrontingthe liberal Western Enlightenment's claim to sole historical truth.

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