Wendy Raphael Roberts
The news had traveled fast. Ever since Nathan Cole read about the spectacular preaching of the young Anglican George Whitefield newly arrived from Britain, he had anxiously awaited his chance to hear him. Whitefield had already visited New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Then, on the morning of 23 October 1740, a messenger rushed through the country proclaiming that Whitefield would preach at Middletown, Connecticut that very morning. Cole (1741) records his response as one caught up in the millennial return of Christ: “I was in my field at Work. I dropt my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to my wife telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr Whitfield […] then run to my pasture for my horse with all my might. […] we improved every moment to get along as if we were fleeing for our lives” (74). By reflecting the urgency of many gospel stories in which a person immediately drops everything to follow Christ and invoking the eschatological parable of a man who while working in a field is suddenly taken by the Lord, Cole portrays the exigency and magnitude of the special outpouring of God’s spirit in what would later be called the Great Awakening in America and the Evangelical Revival in England. As he and his wife approached Middletown, Cole writes:
I saw before me a Cloud or fog rising. […] I heard a noise of something like a low rumbling thunder and presently found it was the noise of Horses feet coming down the Road and this Cloud was a Cloud of dust made by the Horses feet. […] I could see men and horses Slipping along in the Cloud like shadows and as I drew nearer it seemed like a steady Stream of horses and their riders. […] all of a Lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils every Jump; every horse seemed to go with all his might to carry his rider to hear news from heaven for the saving of Souls, it made me tremble to see the Sight, how the world was in a Struggle; I found a Vacancy between two horses to Slip in mine and my Wife said law our Clothes will be all spoiled see how they look, for they were so Covered with dust, that they looked almost all of a Colour Coats, hats, Shirts, and horses. (74)
Cole’s description mixes the earthy sweat of the laboring beasts and the estimated 4000 dusty travelers with salvific imagery: a line of visibly dirty sinners carried in an apocalyptic procession of horses to a man whose “angelical” appearance incited “trembling fear […] for he looked as if he was Clothed with authority from the Great God” (75). Cole’s haste was not in vain. Upon hearing Whitefield preach, “like one of the Old apostles,” Cole received what thousands of eighteenth‐century revivalists described as “a heart wound” (73). He writes, “my old Foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me” (75).
Hordes of listeners were similarly affected by Whitefield’s preaching and that of other leading revival ministers, including John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, Samuel Davies, and many others. A New England woman named Hannah Heaton (1740) wrote in her diary that Whitefield “awakened me much,” exclaiming “O strange it was such preaching as I never heard before” (69). People often followed Whitefield to hear him speak multiple times; one woman walked 20 miles because she “believed he was either more than mortal, or else that he was supernaturally assisted to know her heart” (Farrand 1806: 45). Observing a gathering in New York, one man wrote, “I never in my Life saw so attentive an Audience. […] The Peoples Eyes and Ears hung on his Lips. They greedily devour’d every Word. I came Home astonished!” (Account 1739: 1) Even those who were merely curious, or intent on disturbing the large outdoor meetings, often met with a power they did not expect. John Marrant (1785), who would become one of the early black itinerant ministers, looked in on a meeting to observe a “crazy man” who was “hallooing” there. Intending to disrupt Whitefield’s sermon by blowing his French horn, Marrant instead met with Whitefield’s intense stare and his words, “Prepare to meet thy God, O ISRAEL,” which knocked him to the ground “speechless and senseless near half an hour” (51).
The sheer spectacle of the large noisy crowds drew more observers and consistently made headlines by both those for and against the events. Whitefield and his devoted supporters did not let this media attention fall by the wayside, but strategically used print to create and sustain the revival buzz. Supporters acted as Whitefield’s own press corps by advertising his tour and reporting on its effects in local newspapers, papering the streets with broadsides, and disseminating the revival journal that he edited, along with his autobiographical journals and sermons. By the time Whitefield’s 10‐week tour ended, which saw him two to three times a day in the pulpit, it is likely that at least half the population of the seven colonies he had visited heard him speak (Noll 2010: 13). Advertised, welcomed, and remembered in print, the phenomenon of Whitefield has been labeled the first American media event (Stout 1991; Lambert 1994). After seven tours to America, he had become the largest product of the colonies’ print industry (Green 2007: 260).
These remarkable events point to a transformation in early American Christianity that historians now refer to as the rise of evangelicalism. In early American scholarship, evangelicalism refers to those Christian groups arising out of a renewed sense of pietism in the eighteenth century that resulted in what the nineteenth‐century historian Joseph Tracey (1841) called the Great Awakening, spanning from approximately 1730 through 1770. The label works for historians because it economically designates a shift in Protestant religious history both in America and Europe toward an emphasis on affective relationships with Christ, or what is often referred to as “heart religion.” However, the term is notoriously difficult to define precisely. Early evangelicals did not generally refer to themselves as a whole as evangelicals – at least not in the same way and to the same degree that scholars do now. Even to this day, only a portion of evangelicals (as defined by sociologists) self‐identify as such. Evangelicalism has been and continues to be a large and amorphous term that has shifted in meaning over time. As Whitefield (1741) himself asked when questioned by leading ministers in Boston: “I saw regenerate Souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church‐folks [Church of England]: All Children of GOD, and yet all born again in a different Way of Worship; and who can tell which is the most Evangelical?” (63). Ecumenical in its foundations, yet also tending toward the multiplication of splinter groups and associations, evangelicalism is best thought of primarily as a Protestant pietistic movement rather than a denomination or set of churches.
The revivals – periods of heightened response to the gospel and its application in daily living – resulted in various Protestant denominations proclaiming a more experiential form of Christianity that usually emphasized four convictions defined by historian David Bebbington (1989) as: “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and […] crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross” (2–3). These characteristics appear with a diverse array of emphasis in different historical moments and cultures, but nonetheless designate “a large kin network of churches, voluntary societies, books and periodicals, personal networks, and emphases of belief and practice” (Noll 2010: 19).
Nathan Cole’s account of his religious awakening demonstrates quite clearly the grandeur of the revivals from the perspective of biblical history. At its very core, eighteenth‐century evangelical writing responds to and creates what is conceived of as a new and broad work of God in history to usher in the saints before the return of Christ. The Methodist leader John Wesley (1745) defended the uniqueness of the events: “In what Age has such a Work been wrought, considering the Swiftness as well as the Extent of it?” (86). At the same time, Cole focuses intently on one personal conversion grounded in a particular and acute moment in that history. Experience, grounded in the senses, underlies evangelical print culture.
Ironically, print, which scholars once saw as the engine of the secular enlightenment, enabled the largest Protestant transformation in British North American history, with lasting effects on American culture through the twenty‐first century. Both enlightenment and evangelicalism – if they can even be separated as such – grew up together in a moment when experience became central to epistemology and the meanings of print were not yet determined. Evangelical print culture, then, designates not just the printed material of evangelicals, but also the practices and beliefs that imbued the medium of print with meaning. Two major axes meet in eighteenth‐century evangelicalism with explosive energy – conversion and dissemination – which produce a prolific and diverse print culture. This chapter will focus on three major forms – conversion narratives, revival journals, and verse – while gesturing toward the much larger sheaf of print and writing produced and promoted by early evangelicals.
When Jonathan Edwards’s internationally renowned A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God first appeared in London in 1737, it directly encouraged the writing and dissemination of conversion accounts to further the spread of revival. Whether relayed orally or written in an epistle to a minister, recorded in a diary, or painstakingly edited for print, a new genre proliferated: the evangelical conversion narrative. They were collected in various forms for a diversity of uses: from recitation for church membership to printed accounts read at concerts of prayer, from scribbled diaries passed on to one’s children to sensational broadsides intended to spread revival or to mock it. Accounts of becoming a follower of Christ, of course, date back to the Gospels in which Jesus called fishermen to leave their nets and become fishers of men. But these stories and the majority of those over the next 1700 years were not shaped into the form of a conversion narrative. While conversion narratives proliferated in the eighteenth century, in the long history of Christianity they were new.
Scholars sometimes trace a line from St. Augustine’s Confessions (397 CE) to current religious and secular self‐writing, but this elides important distinctions between early autobiographical writing and later conversion narratives (Hindmarsh 2005; Pollman 1996). Though evangelicals understand key figures such as St. Paul, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin as having had conversion experiences similar to their own, the reasons for following Christ, the emphasis on what they left behind and what they turned toward, as well as the relative importance of that moment were different. For instance, a desire for final conversion thoroughly shaped the early narratives rather than the experience of an initial turning toward Christ – or being “born again.” Most striking, though, is the overall lack of emphasis on conversion before the seventeenth century. Though thousands upon thousands of people converted to Christianity before this, very few wrote accounts of their experience (Pollman 1996: 47–48). A seismic shift occurred between the Protestant Reformation and the eighteenth century, which, according to Bruce Hindmarsh’s (2005) comprehensive study of English evangelical conversion narratives, saw the invention and internalization of the genre of the conversion narrative rather than the recitation and internalization of creeds (25–26).
Its specific conventions exhibit an evangelical understanding of conversion morphology that emerge out of a changing social, intellectual, and media milieu. Edward Morgan’s classic study Visible Saints (1963) summarized the Puritan conversion morphology, which various Puritan divines detailed as a series of discrete steps through which the believer proceeded toward salvation – all of which appear in Puritan conversion narratives to validate the person’s inclusion in the visible church. Though it could be parsed differently, one influential model by William Perkins put forward in Cases of Conscience (1606) highlights 10 signposts. First are the preparatory stages, which consist of (i) the means of grace (often preaching), (ii) knowledge of God’s law, (iii) awareness of one’s personal sins, (iv) and a fear of hell accompanied by despair over one’s inability to work hard enough to avoid it. Those who are elect – or chosen by God before the creation of the world to be saved – proceed through the remaining steps at the instigation of God’s desire: (v) a mind stirred to contemplate the promises of the gospel, (vi) a heart kindled with some sparks of faith, (vii) a faith tested through doubt and despair, (viii) a quiet conscience assured of final salvation, (ix) a heart dismayed by sin and stimulated to pursue repentance, and, finally, (x) a new capacity to obey God (Hindmarsh 2005: 37). The actual status of the believer – whether he or she was one of those elected by God to be part of the invisible church – could never be definitely determined, but the rubric provided a model for anxious Puritans to chart their likely progress and to determine membership in the visible church. Puritan congregations ceased requiring conversion testimonies to join the church by the beginning of the eighteenth century, but evangelicals revitalized it as central to their religious self‐understanding. They displayed a similar morphology of conversion, but with some key differences that evolved in tandem with other broad intellectual shifts regarding the nature of knowledge and the relative importance of the human.
First, in the eighteenth century the balance between the human will and God’s sovereign will began to tilt toward the human. This had crucial implications for the theology and practice of salvation. Though the experience at the core of evangelical life appears simple – conversion literally means to turn around – understanding it is not. One was on the path to destruction; now one is headed the other direction on the path to and with God. But who or what turns the believer around? And how does he or she know for sure that this has occurred? The answers to these questions were fervently sought by seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century pietists, and evangelicals tended toward explanations that activated the part of the human in this drama. In general, by the early nineteenth century there was a shift from an extreme emphasis on the sovereignty of God (Calvinism) in which the depraved human person plays no role in salvation and cannot know he is one of the elect, to a revivification of the human will through prevenient grace (Arminianism) in which the human person can choose to follow Christ and can receive an assurance of salvation from the Spirit of God.
This general trend, however, does not mean that Calvinism vanished (in fact, there is a recent turn toward Calvinism in many American evangelical communities) or that evangelicals understood themselves to be in control of their own salvation. Central to evangelical conversion is a deep and persistent awareness that all human effort and religious striving are insufficient, mere stumbling blocks to truly knowing Christ; only God’s grace, or unmerited favor, is sufficient for salvation. This is why evangelicals who leaned toward Arminianism, such as the followers of John Wesley, relied upon the concept of prevenient grace: a grace imparted by God before conversion to restore the will and enable one to decide to follow or to reject the gospel. Calvinist Methodists who followed Whitefield continued to proclaim that only God could turn the elect to Christ; yet, their evangelistic preaching implied that people could effect salvation.
Second, knowledge became tied to experience. While early critics of revivalism and later secular scholars faulted the emphasis evangelicals placed on heart‐felt emotion, bodily responses to God’s presence, and irrational delusions and visions, it was right in step with respected Enlightenment thinkers. Central to eighteenth‐century Enlightenment thought is John Locke’s argument that all ideas come from the senses. Some philosophers, such as Francis Hutcheson, even introduced a sixth sense to account for the moral sense. Jonathan Edwards embraced and extended an evangelical view of Lockean ideas, which based spiritual knowledge on experience. Edwards (1734/1999) argued that there is a difference “between having a rational judgement that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness” (415). His wife, Sarah Pierpont Edwards (1742), along with all of the accounts that he promoted, bore this out. She records an out‐of‐body experience “in a kind of heavenly Elysium” in which she experienced a “clear and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ’s excellent and transcendent love” (8). A rational assent to Christianity was not enough; a true knowledge of Christ came through a real experience of Christ. Part of the new emphasis on an experiential conversion meant that it could be located within a discrete and identifiable moment in time, which impacted the supposed inscrutability of the elect. Rather than Puritan conversion narratives punctuated with uncertainty, evangelicals tended toward a new religious certainty. This arises in tandem with a change in scientific thinking in which uncertainty ceases to be a problem and instead becomes a condition of the modern scientific world (Rivett 2011: 328). In this way, evangelical soteriology could be said to be an Enlightenment form of Puritan salvation.
Because of changes in what conversion meant and how it was effected, many “almost Christians,” as Whitefield (1739) called them in his popular sermon of the same name, needed to experience new birth in Christ – including revered ministers. The majority of the awakenings in the eighteenth century were, in fact, among already churched people. A split occurred between so‐called old lights and new lights, not only over this emphasis on experiential religion, but also over its attendant social discord. The Reverend Charles Chauncy (1743), like others who argued vehemently against the revivals, associated increased affections with a breakdown in hierarchy in which people refused to act “in their various Stations, Relations and Conditions of Life” (103). This included women and people of color improperly taking up the pen and pursuing type.
Although early evangelicalism was initially a project of Christian revivification arising out of German Pietism, the audience soon broadened, and the revivals saw the first significant influx of converts in the West Indies and the British North American colonies from Native and African American populations. What conversion to a settler’s religion meant in these colonial contexts is a critically important question, especially given that evangelical print enabled the first publications of British North American writers of color. Lindford Fisher offers a striking image in his study The Indian Great Awakening (2012) – an excavation of a Pequot girl’s grave that contains a Bible page alongside a bear paw – to illustrate that evangelical print culture and its ideals of conversion landed on very different types of terrain and could maintain meanings quite different from the uses its producers imagined. While white evangelicals idealized conversion as a repudiation of heathen spirituality, African slaves adapted, rather than lost, their religious practices. The most well known autobiographical writers of the black Atlantic – Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano – all relied on the conversion narrative while expanding its narratological framework and modifying, even contesting, its cultural and social uses. Conversion narratives and missionary accounts written by black ministers in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, such as John Marrant, David George, and Boston King, enlarged the meaning of freedom from the bondage of sin to include freedom from the bondage of slavery by incorporating the Old Testament theme of exodus.
As conversion proliferated it became hard to contain. Not only could women, enslaved and free blacks, first nations, and every other kind of “heathen” rely on their experiences to assert a new identity in Christ, they could do so multiple times. Though evangelicals held conversion to be a decisive and eternal event, it did not always turn out that way. In fact, it could produce the opposite effect: serial conversions. The problem with telling the story of your life at 20 years of age is that there is still a lot of life left to live. Once a person turned away from her former life and reinterpreted her entire beliefs and passions, it opened up the possibility for more changes. When this happened after one’s conversion narrative was already in print, it often necessitated printed retractions that re‐narrated the same events toward a different end. In fact, Nathan Cole, with whom this essay begins, published a defense of his conversion back to the Separates called Dialogue between A Separate Minister, and some of his People, and Cole (1779) after having spent a good deal of time with no spiritual community. The well‐known London bookseller and Methodist James Lackington published two accounts – an un‐conversion narrative that went through multiple editions entitled Memoirs of the first forty‐five years of the life of James Lackington (1791), which mocks his own conversion as a young adult, followed by a re‐conversion narrative years later entitled The confessions of J. Lackington (1806) – a series that points to the ways that print could both stabilize and destabilize identities.
The dissemination of the evangelical conversion narrative had tremendous impact: it expanded into other popular subgenres such as the female deathbed memoir, the itinerant minister autobiography, and the missionary narrative. It also helped to formulate the narrative expectations of abolitionist writing, the slave and captivity narrative, and the sentimental, homiletic, and realist novel. It normalized a crisis of identity in a pre‐Revolutionary America. It relocated the production of authority in the early Republic’s democracy. It solidified experience as the basis for true religion. It required, and therefore encouraged, religious diversity. And it shifted the relative value of the past and the present, continuity and change, tradition and progress. In the words of the famous hymn “Amazing Grace!” penned by the slave trader turned abolitionist John Newton, “I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see.”
In Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative (c. 1740) he expresses an intense desire to know what God is doing not only in his own life and immediate community, but also around the world:
If I heard the least hint of anything that happened in any part of the world, that appeared to me, in some respect or other, to have a favorable aspect on the interest of Christ’s kingdom, my soul eagerly catched at it; and it would much animate and refresh me. I used to be earnest to read public news‐letters, mainly for that end; to see if I could not find some news favorable to the interest of religion in the world. (797)
In other words, when Edwards and other revivalists became sensitive to the movement of God and sought evidence of conversions, they sought news. Conversion was news: euangelion (literally “good news”) is the Greek word from which the term “evangelical” derives. As Evangelicals spread their message they created new networks and modes of distribution that scholars now recognize as playing a major role in creating a bidirectional transatlantic print culture that, as Richard Sher (2012) notes, “established the precedent and the paradigm for transatlantic literary studies” (15).
These networks began in the first half of the eighteenth century among pietistic ministers through letters that circulated primarily between England, Scotland, the American colonies, the West Indies, and Europe. Out of these communications arose a quite literal manifestation of “good news”: the evangelical periodical. Edwards and many other ministers encouraged a wide circulation of revival accounts to fan the flames of revival. Responding to this need came four major revival journals. John Lewis commenced as editor of The Christian’s Amusement (1740) in London, which soon became The Weekly History (1741) under the direction of George Whitefield. Shortly thereafter, William McCulloch began The Glasgow Weekly History (1741). James Robe produced The Christian Monthly History in Edinburgh (1743). And, in Boston, the well‐known minister of Old South Church, Thomas Prince, and his son by the same name, assembled The Christian History (1743). All of the journals went to print with nearly identical subtitles: “the Progress of the Gospel at Home and Abroad,” and each actively solicited accounts of revivals. The header of Prince’s Christian History underscores how evangelicals placed print within a long biblical tradition of proclaiming the movement of God by featuring Psalm 26:7: “That I may PUBLISH with the Voice of THANKSGIVING, and tell of all THY WONDROUS WORKS.”
Toggling between two senses of the word publish – verbal and printed proclamation – revival journals were enmeshed in both a renewed and vibrant culture of religious speech and performance as well as an emerging and uncharted world of mass religious print. When the excitement of revivalism hit, people who could read, recited; those who could exhort, spoke extemporaneously; and everybody who could hear, listened. Nicholas Gilman, a Congregationalist minister in Durham, New Hampshire, exhibited a local manifestation of the ways publishing (in both senses of the word) functioned in this much larger evangelical community. When Gilman learned of the spreading revivals in 1739, he began to compile an ever‐expanding library of evangelical material, which included Whitefield publications, earlier nonconformist works, and current periodicals, in order to share them with his parishioners, including reading aloud to groups who gathered at his home (Reilly and Hall 2007: 395–396). The early journals encouraged the experience of conversion across continents and were always intimately tied to oral events, such as designated days for concerts of prayer in which they were read aloud. Gilman performed in miniature the function of revival journals at large.
Because these first revival journals, as well as the many evangelical periodicals that followed at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, such as John Wesley’s long‐running Arminian Magazine (1778), featured an amalgam of letters, narrative accounts of revival, older pietistic works, and Christian histories, as well as the occasional poem, they provide insight into how evangelical readers navigated different genres and new forms of dissemination. For instance, reprints of older histories and pietistic works had a sense of immediacy: they too were revived, not superseded. At the same time that the contemporaneous texts contextualized the historical works, the historical works gave weight to the new. Bound copies of revival journals point to the ways that personal narratives, hymns, and seeming ephemera became a weighty testament to the unfolding of Christian history. W.R. Ward (2002) calls this the “characteristic achievement” of eighteenth‐century evangelicals: the accumulation of archives to legitimate the hand of the evangelical God in history (2).
These archives were initially shared through large networks of correspondence that then became the basis for revival journals, which usually featured letters written by ministers (Durden 1986). Even so, epistles often provided avenues for women and evangelicals of color to enter print. For instance, the recently recovered influential religious teacher and leader Sarah Osborn, who wrote thousands of pages in her diary, first saw print when the Christian History editor, Thomas Prince, published her letter to a friend as a tract entitled The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity (1755). The aura of privacy surrounding letters more easily allowed women to act as spiritual directors in print, such as the English Baptist Anne Dutton who advised revivalists, including George Whitefield, through printed letters. Letters were also some of the earliest evangelical print directly influenced or, as has been argued, “co‐written” by black slaves (Pisano 2015: 83). And because conversion narratives were often cast as letters and then mixed with histories and accounts of missionary work, the sisters Elizabeth Hart Thwaits and Anne Hart Gilbert, freed slaves who spread Methodism in the West Indies, wrote their own memoirs within their history of Methodism (Ferguson 1993).
This rich mixture of genres shared within widening evangelical networks has been crucial for rethinking both the place of print in the awakenings and the structure of the early transatlantic public sphere. There have been long and lively debates about the relative importance of orality and print in early American religious culture, as well as the influence of evangelicalism on the rise of democracy and vice versa. Perhaps most divisive has been the split between scholars who have minimized evangelicalism – the most dramatic being Jon Butler who argued that the Great Awakening was no more than a fiction created by nineteenth‐century historians – and those who have broadened the geographic, cultural, and temporal scope of revivalism and evangelicalism. As this latter category has expanded in the last few decades, it seems that Butler’s argument, which might have dismantled a whole area of study and a cherished origin story for a thriving religious movement, instead reenergized discussions over the place of print in forming an early evangelical imaginary and, in turn, the secular. This is in large part due to Frank Lambert’s Inventing the Great Awakening (1999), which extended Butler’s argument by focusing attention on early evangelical agency rather than on a critique of religiously motivated historians and demonstrated how revival participants themselves produced the idea of a great, transatlantic movement of God in large part through printed forms, such as revival journals.
Ironically, an emphasis on the importance of communication networks and print technologies in the invention of a transatlantic evangelical imaginary has helped to dismantle the secularization thesis (the idea that as modernity progresses religion disappears) that had undergirded most early American historiography. It has becoming increasingly clear that evangelicalism and enlightenment are not oppositional forces, but arose through the same media and communication norms. Benedict Anderson’s (1983) influential description of imagined communities enabled by print capitalism depended upon the assumption that eighteenth‐century newspapers instituted a community through a type of modern, empty time rather than extending sacred time. Revival journals and evangelical newspapers reveal this to be false. The usefulness of Jürgen Habermas’s (1962) prolific model of the public sphere, which had been the dominant paradigm for analyzing the formation of the public sphere through print in early America, emphasized the place of the rational rather than the affective in public discourse and assumed the rise of the secular and the decline of the religious in modern society. Instead, revival journals and the larger print culture of evangelicalism enabled an expanded sense of a religious public that reached beyond the local parish, sect, or denomination.
Scholarly works such as David Nord’s Faith in Reading (2004) and Candy Gunther Brown’s The Word in the World (2004) have offered detailed historical accounts of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century American evangelical publishing, including the rise of successful tract societies, and there appears to be a swath of very useful studies on the horizon that further illuminate the writing, printing, publishing, and reading networks of early evangelicals. Understanding these developments through sustained attention to larger theoretical questions about the nature of religion and the secular – such as those articulated in Formations of the Secular (2003) by Talal Asad and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) – will move the field beyond the lingering false dichotomy of enlightenment and evangelicalism. Michael Warner (2010), who overlooked the importance of the religious in the formation of the public sphere in his early work, offers a compelling revision as he turns his attention to the discourse culture of evangelicalism in order to argue that the importance of what evangelicalism brought to American religion was not heartfelt religion but rather a dependence on the “conversionistic address to strangers” (382). In doing so, he argues, evangelicals produced the very conditions of secularity that fix secularism as the default for the social. Such work on the secular has sweeping implications for our understanding of American literary history. It now seems that the real interpretive fiction has been an American literary history committed to an unidentified secularity that precludes the study of its own genealogy in large part by marginalizing one of the largest producers and readers of American print.
In the Weekly History, the editor John Lewis (1742) published the Baptist poet Anne Dutton’s poem, “The Printer’s Hymn,” which begins:
I Give this Service LORD, to Thee;
Myself I dedicate:
Accept myself, my feeble Work,
And grant thy Blessing great.
O Prince of Grace, Send from above,
And take and bless this Bread:
That so thy needy Children dear,
By Thousands may be fed!
Oh All‐sufficient God, Thou dost
None of my Service need:
Ten Thousand Thousand, LORD, Thou canst
Without thy Creatures Feed! (4)
The biblical story of Jesus miraculously feeding 5000 people with only five loaves of bread and two fish becomes replicated – even improved – through the media of mass print. This is, perhaps, the clearest expression of the evangelical vision of print as a new and remarkable messenger of God.
That Lewis encapsulates this vision with Dutton’s poem is not coincidence, for it, more than any other form of evangelical writing, fulfilled its purpose of multiplication. Evangelicalism was at heart a revival of verse. While periodicals helped create the initial evangelical imaginary, poetry and hymn were central to its longevity. In fact, the greatest amount of ink was used for verse; Isaac Watts’s hymns alone exceeded all other evangelical printed books. The revered hymn writer Charles Wesley, brother of the founder of Methodism John Wesley, inspired countless imitators. Writing hymns exercised the newfound freedom to express personal and communal faith in everyday words and images, rather than only biblical paraphrase. Its effects were akin to the vernacular translation of the Bible in that it removed one more layer of mediation between the presence of God in history and the contemporary moment.
If hymns, spiritual songs, and poems elevated ecstatic worship and moved the passions in line with God’s Spirit, it is no wonder that the famous Presbyterian preacher Samuel Davies (1752) declared that they had the unique capacity to “diffuse celestial Fervor through the World” (viii). That is, hymns and poems were not merely personal expression but the exercise and confirmation of the work of the Holy Spirit at large. This is in keeping with a broader understanding of verse in the eighteenth century which saw it as an active part of the social and political realms. If, in the world of evangelicalism, conversion was news, hymns were essential to both its instigation and its reporting.
This can be seen in the sheer number of converts who are moved by evangelical verse to seek after Christ and then mark their moment of new birth with verse. Many evangelicals emphasized that an aesthetic change accompanied true conversion, which included one’s taste for a kind of verse that could reach what Watts called in Horae Lyricae (1706) “the plainest capacity” (xxii). This populist aesthetic, along with the long history of rhyme as an aid to memorization, helped make Watts’s hymnal the primary tool for those working to achieve slave and indigenous literacy.
Evangelical verse was second only to the Bible. Believers easily memorized verse and the words became authoritative of Christian experience and true belief. But unlike the Bible, hymns were not difficult to change. In fact, while whites followed a racist line of thought that linked so‐called primitive peoples with orality and rhythm, in actuality the increased participation of Africans and Natives was enabled by the space hymns and songs opened. At camp meetings wandering verses could be adapted to new circumstances, people improved upon stanzas or added or omitted them at will, and oral, manuscript, and printed adaptations circulated. The changes in hymnbooks and specific poems can reveal a good deal about struggles for authority in theology and social order in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
For instance, nineteenth‐century hymnody became more refined to reflect middle‐class concerns over respectability. Hymnbooks such as Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings’s Songs for Social Worship (1832) were designed to displace the inappropriate passion of frontier revivalism expressed in hymnbooks like Joshua Leavitt’s The Christian Lyre (1830). Watts’s reliance on espousal imagery (the marriage of Christ and the believer or Christ and the church) influenced a vast array of revival verse, even though he backed away from the controversial language in his own lifetime. In fact, nineteenth‐century American sentimentalism, which Claudia Stokes (2014) argued was made possible by the Second Great Awakening, can also be traced to the earlier fascination of evangelicals with passion and feeling embodied in espousal. New churches or movements issued their own or revised hymnals to redirect congregants. The founder of the first African American denomination, Richard Allen, issued A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs from Various Authors (1801), which included his own verse and many hymns not found in the white Methodist hymnal.
Evangelicalism in general – and, I argue, verse in particular – opened up avenues for exhortation and preaching that were traditionally closed to women and non‐white believers. The number of women authors in America went up with the revivals, and it is not by coincidence that the first American woman to include her name on her publication – Martha Brewster, Poems on Divers Subjects (1757) – was a poet engaged in revival work. Most of the first authors of African descent in America were associated with evangelicalism and referenced verse in some form in their writings. Jupiter Hammon, a slave and poet from New Jersey, wrote in hymn form; Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister, both contributed to and edited the first Native American hymnal, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774); and the first internationally acclaimed black American female poet, Phillis Wheatley, earned her reputation by writing for and about evangelicals.
Strangely, hymns are conspicuously absent from the history of American poetry because they have not been considered literary. The largest studies of hymns have been predominantly written by religion and music historians, and, as a result, hymns have been mainly analyzed as sung poetry while non‐hymnal eighteenth‐century American evangelical poetry has largely gone missing. Only recently has the practice of reading rather than singing hymns begun to be explicated at length (Phillips 2012). And, though literary scholars have taken some account of the influence of Watts on early American poetry, none has addressed the best‐selling evangelical poetry book Gospel Sonnets by Ralph Erskine. Hymnodists may have catalogued Elhanan Winchester’s hymns, but no one has analyzed his 12‐book epic The Process and Empire of Christ (1805) (Roberts 2010: 126–127). As I argue, seventeenth‐century Puritan poetry was not the height of Protestant verse in America; the rise of evangelicalism guaranteed it only went up from there. Or, as Winchester (1805) writes to commence his epic:
WHILE others sing the monarchs of the globe,
Their feats in war, their courage, strength, and sk’ll,
I sing the rising Empire of my Lord,
[…]
Tremendous theme indeed! august! immense!
But God can teach the humblest mind to soar;
Can send prosperity to one like me,
Unskill’d in epic muse, and teach my pen
To paint Messiah’s triumphs o’er his foes. (5–6)
In Peggy Dow’s A Collection of Camp Meeting Hymns (1816), the “Cosmopolite’s Muse” proclaims, “O THAT poor sinners did but know, / What I for them do undergo!” (5). The travails of the itinerant minister – traveling thousands of miles on horseback and often dying young as a result – were endured for the hope of conversion through the preaching of the gospel. Given this, perhaps the most obvious and infelicitous absence in this short overview is the evangelical sermon. Evangelicals placed a premium on heartfelt, extemporaneous delivery. A range of orators and practices filled the evangelical soundscape, from the revered Whitefield who was said to make a crowd weep by simply pronouncing the word Mesopotamia, to unruly lay exhorters who interrupted the appointed minister’s sermon, to the inarticulate wailing and bodily convulsions of those undergoing conviction of sin. Methodists and Baptists regularly ordained ministers who had no formal education and shunned demonstrations of learning, such as references in Latin. Exhorting slaves in America and the West Indies started the earliest black churches, which have had lasting influence; to this day African Americans make up the largest percentage of twenty‐first‐century American evangelical Christians.
It is certainly true that evangelical print culture cannot be adequately explained without attention to the sermon – the most famous in literary circles being Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). Even though the number of printed evangelical sermons had declined by the middle of the nineteenth century while the overall presence of evangelical print in the American market had increased, this decline does not take into account that the concept of the sermon had expanded into multiple print forms, from the novel to the periodical to poetry (Brown 2004: 50–51). This then is my only defense for omitting the genre from my consideration here: all evangelical print is an extension of the sermon. The rise of the itinerant minister and evangelical sermon, I argue (Roberts in press), centralized the conception of print for evangelicals as a “print itinerant,” which came to full fruition in the booming tract industry at the turn of the century. That the American Tract Society memorialized their most famous tract, The Dairyman’s Daughter, alongside Whitefield’s portable pulpit is a powerful crystallization of this fact (Roberts 2006: 270). Along with the growth of tract and other parachurch societies came increased distribution – not only in bookstores, but from hand‐to‐hand proselytizing between neighbors, the advent of the large camp meeting, and an ever‐expanding circuit of itinerant ministers on horseback. The production of printed maps, itinerant circuits, and engraved portraits of itinerant ministers are part of a sprawling print culture of evangelicalism founded on the biblical metaphor of sowing the seeds of salvation.
This gendered and agricultural language was fertile ground for the expansion of settler colonialism. It was also ripe for other uses – which occurred both in and out of print. For instance, “the Mulatto Rebecca,” as she was known in her own time, was responsible for the early spread of Christianity in the West Indies. Though Rebecca Protten is the first known woman ordained in Western Christianity, and her story redirects the genesis of evangelicalism through Moravian missions and Afro‐Christianity, she did not publish the message of God through print, but through oral proclamation (Sensbach 2006). The relationship of women and people of color to early evangelicalism’s print, manuscript, and oral cultures offers some of the most auspicious work in early American studies.
In the same year that Nathan Cole and his wife ran to hear Whitefield preach, another one of the famous itinerant’s white hearers kept a religious journal that he entitled “Mind the Margins” (1740). Next to each day’s entry, the author scribbled the same phrase in the margins – “Very Prec Abund Evang Fr,” (meaning “Very Precious Abundant Evangelical Favour”) (Anonymous 1740). This convert’s devotional ritual is also an apt directive to the study of evangelicalism, whose various forms have always demanded both response and extension. Minding the margins – whether geographically, socially, generically, materially, or theoretically – promises to transform and deepen our understanding of evangelical print culture. And, perhaps more importantly for Americanist literary scholars, attending to early evangelical writings in all of their range, diversity, and complexity has the potential to unravel a largely invisible thread that runs through narratives of American literary history (with its attendant assumptions about authorship, readership, community, materiality, aesthetics, and the like) that has depended upon the decline and irrelevance of religion.
See also: chapter 4 (the puritan culture of letters); chapter 10 (acknowledging early american poetry); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 13 (the varieties of religious expression in early american literature); chapter 15 (writing lives); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods).