Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

The vast majority of those living in the colonies in the first decades of the eighteenth century identified as Christian, belonging to a wide array of denominations. These ranged from the Congregationalist churches of New England to the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Quakers of the Middle Colonies and the Anglican and Baptist congregations located in the South. Religion was an inescapable component of colonial communities, embedded in everyday life in numerous ways. Churches and meeting houses continued to be the loci of social and political life in a great many communities throughout the colonies. Colonial children's education, whether at home or in schoolhouses, relied heavily on primers, first published in the 1690s, that combined reading lessons with prayers as means of molding children who exhibited sobriety and obedience.

While many colonists attended worship services with dutiful regularity, it was increasingly recognized by religious leaders in the 1730s that authentic piousness and spirituality seemed to be fading among their parishioners. Religious life throughout the colonies appeared to be a product more of routine than sincere belief. Concerned ministers in America identified political and economic reasons for the growing sense of spiritual disengagement and a drop in church membership. The philosophical writings of Enlightenment thinker John Locke and the success of the Glorious Revolution in England inspired colonial elites, who embraced the principles of liberalism and devoted more of their time and energies to political matters than sacred ones. The far more democratic nature of American society compared with that of Great Britain allowed for and encouraged more in the way of civic engagement.

Other distractions from the colonists' religious lives came courtesy of the rapidly expanding colonial economy and the opportunities it offered. Rice and tobacco plantation owners in the Southern Colonies enjoyed rapidly increasing profits as they cultivated more acreage through the use of a growing number of slaves. Merchants and shipbuilders of New England prospered from the increasing trade between England and the English colonies as cargoes of timber, animal pelts, wool, rum, and numerous other goods went to sate the appetites of an expanding consumer market. Although the Middle Colonies lagged behind when it came to per capita wealth, the growing demand for wheat in Europe and the Caribbean allowed even the proprietors of smaller farms to improve their fortunes. By the 1730s, the colonists enjoyed an overall higher standard of living compared with those living in the British Isles. To many religious leaders, they also appeared to have lost touch with God and the church.

Reaching American shores by the start of the 1700s, the European Enlightenment, with its veneration of scientific discovery and human reason, provided another possible explanation as to why so many Americans seemed in desperate need of spiritual renewal. In challenging long-held and potentially irrational beliefs in the supernatural that they blamed for the numerous religious wars fought in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment thinkers aspired to reshape Western civilization along more tolerant and rational lines. Some followers of the Enlightenment embraced atheism or agnosticism; others sought to bridge the gap between blind faith and reason by subscribing to Deism, which envisioned a god who had created the world but was not directly involved in human affairs. The Deists held that an individual's sense of morality and commitment to good works far outweighed one's adherence to religious dogma.

In response to these new political, economic, and philosophical concepts, a growing number of colonial ministers (who was first remains the source of debate) took it upon themselves to change the tone and content of their sermons in the late 1720s. They saw fit to strip away much of the formalism and reaffirm such core concepts of Calvinism as predestination, which offered little hope of salvation, and the necessity of God's grace. Other preachers adopted a more hopeful tone by paying little attention to predestination in their sermons or ignoring it altogether. They instead preached a message of redemption available to those who acknowledged their sinfulness and experienced a genuine conversion. The specter of damnation and eternal suffering tended to be a core element of this new evangelical message that unleashed a religious revival.