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Presbyterians in the Wake of the First Great Awakening by John Fea

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Article In Search of Unity: Presbyterians in the Wake of the First Great Awakening by John Fea This article explores the Presbyterian Church in the wake of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival commonly referred to as the First Great Awakening. This revival badly divided the Presbyterian Church into Old Side and New Side factions and tore at the very fabric of local Presbyterian communities. In the decades following the Awakening, Presbyteri- ans embraced Enlightenment views of morality and order to help them in their efforts to heal the revival wounds and restore unity to the church. Some of the most divisive evangelical Presbyterians during the 1740s repented of their schismatic practices, and Presbyterian communities experienced local awakenings stemming from a renewed sense of harmony and peace. By the 1760s, a strong and reunified Presbyterian denomination was ready to make a significant contribution to a revolutionary age. n 1743, Robert Jenney, the “Grand Itinerant,” united versial way in which the New Imissionary-priest assigned to colonists of different Protestant Birth was spread, and the witness the city of Philadelphia by the persuasions around a shared of the Presbyterian Church in the Society for the Propagation of the “born-again” experience. But British-American colonies had Gospel, informed his Anglican while this interpretation has been tarnished by this religious superiors in London that “The merit—the Great Awakening was culture war. The passions Presbyterians are almost broken indeed a unifying event for associated with revivalism, the to pieces.” 1 Jenney’s comment evangelicals—it fails to take otherworldly focus of religious must be understood as the seriously the divisiveness of the enthusiasm, and the divisive triumphant words of an eigh- revival, particularly as it affected nature of New Side preachers and teenth-century Anglican mission- American Presbyterians. As their followers contributed to the ary struggling to gain a foothold Jenney observed, the awakening “broken” state of the church in a for the mother church in the tore at the religious fabric of way that even the Presbyterian religiously diverse Delaware Presbyterian congregations, supporters of revivalism could Valley, but in the end he was communities and, of course, the not ignore. right. He wrote this letter in the entire denomination. Presbyteri- In the years between the First aftermath of the colony-wide ans were left reeling in the Great Awakening and the coming evangelical revival known as the aftermath of the revival. At the of the American Revolution, First Great Awakening. local level, among the congrega- Presbyterians set out to rebuild Recently, historians have tions and communities where the their broken church. They would explained this revival in terms of Reformed faith was lived, the be successful in their endeavors the unity it brought to religious Presbyterian landscape of the by making accommodations to life in the colonies. In this early mid-Atlantic was an the spirit of the age. The church, explanation, the preaching of ecclesiastical war zone. Congre- in other words, made its peace George Whitefield, the so-called gations were rent by the contro- with the Enlightenment. Be- John Fea teaches American history at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. His biography of eighteenth-century Presbyterian farmer Philip Vickers Fithian is entitled, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (2008). He is currently at work on a book about Christianity in the years between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution. Journal of Presbyterian History | Fall/Winter 2008 • 53 tween 1745 and 1770, the New Side Presbyterian- ism of the First Great Awakening was transformed. Enlightenment concerns with social order, the rational control of the religious passions, and the celebration of the things that united rather than divided human beings and their institutions meshed well with the concerns of both the opponents and the supporters of the revival. Presbyterianism converged with the Enlightenment in this era to provide the scaffolding necessary to rebuild the church and enable it to engage the surrounding culture. Two decades after the Great Awakening, evangelical Presbyterianism and the Enlightenment were hand-in-glove in a way that would have been inconceivable in the early 1740s—a time when the beliefs and behavior of Presbyterian evangelicalism were associated with an anti-intellectual piety less concerned with rational or confessional explanations of the faith, and more concerned with saving as many souls as possible from eternal damnation. Presbyterians and the First Great Awakening The First Great Awakening unleashed on the British Atlantic world a new style of Protestant religion that took to new heights time-honored Christian concerns with the spread of the gospel. The cenotaph in memory of George Whitefield in Old South Proponents of this form of evangelical Protestantism Presbyterian Church, Newburyport, Massachusetts, was preached the necessity of the New Birth, or the belief designed by Strickland and cut in marble by Strothers of that one could be regenerated by the spirit of God Philadelphia. From George Whitefield, the Awakener by A.D. immediately, apart from the communal nurturing of Belden (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1930). a local congregation. Revival evangelicalism divided the Presbyterian Church. Factions developed among one’s soul. Old Side clergy did not think that New the clergy over how to respond to this new emphasis Side preachers behaved in an orderly way. They on individual and immediate conversion. On the one complained that the New Side displayed little hand, ministers who came to be called “Old Side” concern with the proper state of the church in this refused to allow the evangelical conversion experi- world, because they were too busy winning converts ence to trump conformity to the Westminster to the spiritual fellowship of the next world. Confession of Faith as the distinguishing mark of the The differences between these two factions Presbyterian Church. They emphasized the impor- were played out in fierce battles over the practice of tance of a visible church made up of all who were itinerant preaching and ministerial education. The baptized into the community and willing to conform Old Side believed educated ministers of local to the teaching of the Westminster Confession and congregations, working in conjunction with submit to the authority of the synod, presbyteries, presbyteries and synods, were best suited to keep an and local church sessions. The church, they argued, orderly Presbyterian Church. Itinerancy often would always include the converted and the uncon- undermined the authority of these local guardians verted. Clergymen labeled “New Side,” on the other of Presbyterian communities. Much of the Old Side hand, claimed to be members of an invisible church disgust with this practice was directed toward of the converted. New Siders believed that subscrip- Gilbert Tennent, the minister of the New Bruns- tion to the Westminster Confession was important, wick, New Jersey, Presbyterian Church. In his but that the intellectual assent to a body of correct sermon, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, theology, without the New Birth, could not save Tennent exhorted New Side itinerants to identify, 54 • In Search of Unity: Presbyterians in the Wake of the First Great Awakening in public orations, local ministers who could not testify to an evangelical conversion experience. He then encouraged the parishioners of these uncon- verted pastors to leave their churches and seek out a congregation with a minister who was preaching a message in sympathy with New Side concerns. Old Side clergymen were often willing to admit that some of their number could not testify to a conver- sion experience. Some even saw this as a serious problem. They disapproved, however, of the way that New Side ministers exposed this problem by outing unregenerate pastors in public sermons, rather than from behind the closed doors of the This illustration of the log meetinghouse where Faggs synod or presbytery. Manor Presbyterian Church met from 1740 to 1742 is The New Side countered by arguing that based on historical records that described the original itinerancy was necessary because Presbyterian building. From A History of Faggs Manor United laypersons were spiritually perishing under the care Presbyterian Church, 1730-1980 (Cochranville, Pa.: Faggs of “graceless and unfaithful Ministers.” The Manor United Presbyterian Church, 1980). salvation of souls, they believed, was a higher priority than the preservation of order.2 The England (Harvard or Yale) college. Resistance to Philadelphia Synod, which was controlled by Old this decree came from the newly formed New Side clergy, did not see it this way. In May 1737, the Brunswick Presbytery, a haven for Log College synod declared that probationary clergymen (or graduates. Since the synod’s education proposal those licensed but not ordained or installed in a meant that alumni of the Neshaminy school would specific church) would no longer be permitted to not be permitted to serve the church as clergymen, preach in vacant pulpits without the permission of the New Brunswick ministers refused to abide by it. the specific Presbytery that had authority over the In defiance of the order, they continued to ordain congregation with the vacancy. The following year Log College men. The synod responded, after much the synod became even more specific, directing its debate and several attempts to reach a compromise, decree to those clergymen who traveled within the by expelling the rebel presbytery in 1741. Following bounds of presbyteries other than their own and had its expulsion, the New Brunswick Presbytery—and a “Tendency to procure Divisions and Disorders.”3 its supporters in other presbyteries, the most The debate over itinerancy was related to a significant being the Presbytery of New York— similar battle over how to define the historic united in 1745 to form the Synod of New York.
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