Timothy Dwight: Revolutionary Conservative Theologian and Educator
To combine the terms “revolutionary” and “conservative” is to introduce at the outset an element of paradox into the discussion. Yet these monikers must both be applied to Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), a chaplain-poet during the Revolutionary War, and the President of Yale instrumental in the emergence of the Second Great Awakening among American evangelicals. Indeed, his leanings toward “New Light” teachings, inherited from his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, must qualify the adjective “conservative.”[1] For while evangelicalism in 2017 represents too much of the rest of the body politic the “hard right,” in Dwight’s time it was seen as a scandalous fomenter of “enthusiasm” and as a liberalizing and radicalizing force relative to traditionalists across the religious landscape.[2] In my assessment of Dwight as a public theologian, I explore four elements of Dwight’s thought and influence: his conception of America as a new promised land, his promotion of college student religious revivals, his fierce fight against deists and infidels, and his Congregationalist establishmentarianism. Dwight’s powers of persuasion influenced a generation of students to conserve the revolutionary insights of Jonathan Edwards and take revivalist evangelicalism to the frontier, in an effort to render America a new “promised land,” purged of infidelity and immorality.
America: The New Promised Land
Historian Mark Noll describes Timothy Dwight’s life-change along two parallel tracks, namely, his conversion to Evangelical Christianity and his support of the cause of American political independence from Great Britain. Dwight joined the college church at New Haven in the heady days of the Boston Tea Party of 1774. Noll notes: “Dwight’s own father became a Loyalist, but for Dwight a second conversion (to the patriot cause) followed naturally from his first conversion (to Christ).”[3] The congruence between these impulses may be discerned in the fervor of the rhetoric Dwight employed to describe the rise of the revolution. In a 1777 poem, he ecstatically penned these words:
Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies;
Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.[4]
One biographer traces out the even earlier development of Dwight’s career as a patriot poet during his studies at Yale in the early 1770s. He points out that Dwight’s poetry, though overflowing with confidence in America, was not born in self-confidence. Dwight delayed publication of many of his poems for several years, instead circulating the verses in manuscript form. Dwight’s 1771 poem “America: Or a Poem on the Settlement of the American Colonies” was in fact derivative. He was inspired by a 1712 poem by Alexander Pope, who applied a similar lofty rhetoric to the promise of Hanoverian England, with praise for her wealth, architecture, and a messianic vision for the expansion of empire. Many of the same phrases Dwight applied to the upstart American experiment in an effort to inspire his fellow students and countrymen.[5]
Dwight’s most famous patriotic poem, “The Conquest of Canaan,” was started in 1771, but not published until 1785, after the Revolutionary War had been won. When it was published, it opened with an effusive dedication to “His Excellency, George Washington,” whom Dwight described as “The Savior of his Country,” and “The Benefactor of Mankind,” along with other lofty titles.[6]
In Puritan fashion, Dwight elided the successes of the colonists in taming the wilderness and bringing civilization to the West with the ancient Israelites’ conquest of the Promised Land. In structure, the poem was indebted to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and often used the same allegorical conventions. From a literary-critical perspective, the poem’s flourishes of rhetoric, as well as its torture of historical consciousness, have led later generations to treat it with some harsh criticism. Silverman laments, “Nothing can be seen or heard through the curtain of rhetoric . . . The repetitiousness serves to disguise the otherwise glaring mismanagement of the action, and the result is by turns tiresome and bewildering.”[7] He further points out that the poem was generally poorly received, in part due to the decline at the time of the popularity and prospects of epic poetry as a literary genre, in addition to the work’s inherent weaknesses.[8]
Our concern here, however, is not with Dwight as a poet per se, but with Dwight as a voice for public-theological themes, whether well or poorly executed under his quill. To offer but a brief sample, see the elision of biblical Canaan and revolutionary America in the following snippet of verse from Book 1:
Then o’er wide lands, as blissful Eden bright,
Type of the skies, and seats of pure delight,
Our sons, with prosperous course, shall stretch their sway,
And claim an empire, spread from sea to sea:
In one great whole th’ harmonious tribes combine;
Trace Justice’ path, and choose their chiefs divine;
On Freedom’s base erect the heavenly plan;
Teach laws to reign, and save the rights of man.
Then smiling Art shall wrap the fields in bloom,
Mine the rich ore, and guide the useful loom;
Then lofty towers in golden pomp arise;
Then spiry cities meet auspicious skies:
The soul on Wisdom’s wing sublimely soar,
New virtues cherish, and new truths explore:
Thro’ time’s long tract our name celestial run,
Climb in the east, and circle with the sun;
And smiling Glory stretch triumphant wings
O’er hosts of heroes, and o’er tribes of kings. [9]
The emphases on “art,” “wisdom,” “virtues,” and “truths” foreshadowed Dwight’s points of focus in his educational philosophy. His influential approach came to guide the new republic’s educated leaders during his times of tutorship, professorship, and ultimately the presidency at Yale. Theological and biblical concerns were echoed in poetic phrases such as “Blissful Eden,” “heavenly plan,” and “smiling Glory.” Though Dwight envisioned America as an empire, unlike previous empires, it was to be built with “justice,” with a foundation “on freedom’s base,” and in accord with “the rights of man.” In this fashion, the new nation would be built “o’er tribes of kings,” indicating a post-monarchical and republican future. As the poem concludes, with the Washington-like Joshua surveying the victory over Canaan and the prospect of building the Promised Land, the “Chief” of this conquered territory reminds the people:
Now God’s tremendous arm asserts his laws;
Now bids his thunder aid the righteous cause;
Unfolds how Virtue saves her chosen bands,
And points the vengeance doom’d for guilty lands.[10]
In this twin emphasis on blessings for righteousness, and curses for guilt, Dwight echoed the themes of the Mosaic Law, namely Deuteronomy 28. Beyond the biblical tropes, with his stress upon the saving power of virtue for the new country, with a warning of doom if the fledgling nation should lose its virtue, Dwight was not alone among the revolutionary generation. His Calvinist upbringing would not permit optimism unalloyed with a realization of human depravity and its tendency to subvert the best of intentions, in persons or in nations. Indeed, similar warnings are found in the writings of Dwight’s famous grandfather, Jonathan Edwards.[11] Of this mix of hope and dread, one Dwight biographer notes, “His Revolutionary optimism was tempered from the first by his belief in human frailty.”[12] The notion of revolution in Dwight is always tempered by his religious worldview. As another biographer, John R. Fitzmier argues, “Dwight’s religious system served a powerful, integrative function among what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of professional activities.”[13] Investigation of Dwight’s preaching reveals the centrality of virtue to Dwight’s homiletics, a form of virtue built “on the basis of Dwight’s peculiar social, political, social, political, and religious worldview.”[14]
Dwight’s promotion of the revolution as a Congregationalist preacher was not unique. In his meticulous work documenting the use of the Bible to promote the Revolutionary War, James P. Byrd observes that the denomination of Congregationalism alone produced some 2,000 sermons each week during the period of the War. Sermons, either oral or written, were more accessible to ordinary citizens; whereas pamphlets catered to elites. “The sermon buttressed the Revolution in ways that the pamphlet could not match,” Byrd argues. Even Thomas Paine’s famous Common Sense fit the rhetorical mold of a sermon, and this contributed to its popularity.[15] Whether by adopting the style of the epic poem, or the more accessible homiletical oration from the local pulpit, Timothy Dwight was a man swept up in a movement to chart a course of independence for the infant nation.
Dwight at Yale
Dwight mingled, in Mark Noll’s phrase, “a vocabulary . . . that combined republican convictions about liberty with notions about the moral sense.” In his 1790s lectures to his Yale students, Dwight held forth that God’s rule was “addressed to the understandings and affections of rational subjects,” with the hope of inducing them to “voluntary obedience.” Aside from such a divine government, only “force and coercion,” would remain, and such were to Dwight methods unworthy of the divine being. Echoes of the revolutionary debates over King George’s tyranny may be here discerned. In Noll’s interpretation, “these Americanized commitments were linked organically to (Dwight’s) theological convictions . . . .”[16] In such lectures aimed at the future leaders of the republic, Dwight’s emerging public theology, tinged by both political and dogmatic sources, forged the minds of a generation of theologians and public leaders for the American experiment.
When Timothy Dwight was hired as President of Yale in 1795, he faced a daunting challenge. One biographer describes the situation in dire terms. Often described as a ruined college, Yale’s “physical facilities were decaying, operating funds were desperately short, and instruction was haphazard and poor in quality.” Discipline among the students was at a low ebb, “with gambling and drinking more the norm than the exception,” and the threat of riots commonplace. Yet over the next few years Dwight’s attention to changing the curriculum and overseeing strategic faculty upgrades, as well as plying both alumni and legislators for needed funding, bettered university’s fortunes substantially. This transformation made Yale “a serious rival to Harvard.”[17]
Dwight’s religious influence at Yale can scarcely be overstated. Intellectual historian George Marsden notes that Yale led the way toward a vision of higher education imbued with a “New Light missionary spirit in American collegiate education.” Dwight’s 1802 college chapel sermon series against infidelity led to an unanticipated revival, “in which a third of the Yale students professed conversion.” This is widely taken as one of the leading sources of impetus to the famed “Second Great Awakening,” [18] though recent scholarship has challenged the centrality of Dwight to the movement.[19] Yale became a virtual sending agency for missionizing the western frontier. Her alumni took with them “the New England Puritan heritage,” and did so during the next generation with “missionary zeal.”[20] Primary accounts by figures such as Lyman Beecher and Benjamin Silliman marvel at the transformation brought by Dwight’s six months of preaching in chapel against infidelity, or his transformation of the campus into a center of prayer and praise.[21]
By 1814 Dwight had been instrumental in forging a whole generation of leaders for the westward expansion of New Haven theology and its vestiges of Puritan influence to tame the frontier. Nathan O. Hatch describes Yale’s alumni as “innovative and forward looking.” They were “revitalizing Calvinism as both an intellectual and a spiritual force.” The expansion of this vision may be seen in the founding of Andover Seminary (1808) with Dwight’s approval and guidance. This institution was intended to create “a strategic outpost for orthodoxy,” yet inflected with evangelical revivalism.[22]
The Battle with Intellectual Infidelity
Eminent church historian Sydney Ahlstrom, in surveying “the cult of reason, Rational religion, or deism” in the American intellectual milieu of the Revolutionary Era, has noted Timothy Dwight’s alarmed response. When Ethan Allen (1738-89) published his The Only Oracle of Man in 1784, Dwight labeled it “the first formal publication, in the United States, openly directed against the Christian religion.”[23] Yet Dwight indicated a strong belief that even inveterate “infidels” were candidates for Christian conversion. In a chapter on the theme of “Regeneration: Its Necessity and Reality” in his classic theology textbook, Dwight wrote of a young medical student who was “an open scoffer at the Bible, Christianity, Christians, and most other subjects of a religious nature.” After several years in this state, this individual became “alarmed” at his spiritual condition, and at length converted to Christianity, even changing his course of study from medicine to theology. Hinting at the wisdom of such a change, Dwight averred that “instances, of this nature generally, I could multiply extensively.”[24] Public theologian Dwight was also a personal pastoral spiritual director for his students at Yale.
When writing his most extensive challenge to the spread of infidelity, Dwight chose a medium which was familiar, but which also could obfuscate his arguments, namely, the epic poem. The Triumph of Infidelity, published anonymously in 1788, was a broadside against the intellectual threat of transatlantic skepticism then making inroads among the smart set of America. The poem opened with an extended soliloquy by the “prince of darkness,” bent on despoiling Dwight’s beloved “Eden,” which he described idealistically: “dress’d in beauteous day, the realms of freedom, peace, and virtue lay . . . .”
After surveying Satan’s victories against faith through the centuries, Dwight arrived at the modern era, where he, according to gendered rhetoric common to the era, personified “Fashion” as the dark lord’s female consort tasked with deceiving would-be sophisticates:
She moulded faith, and science, with a nod;
Now there was not, and now there was, a God,
“Let black be white,” she said, and white it seem’d,
“Hume a philosopher;” and straight he dream’d
Most philosophically. At her call,
Opinions, doctrines, learn’d to rise, and fall;
Before her, bent the universal knee . . . .[25]
With the death of Yale president Ezra Stiles, Dwight was approached to take on the position of leadership at his beloved alma mater. At first refusing out of loyalty to his local congregation, eventually church authorities released him to take on the prestigious post. Though 1795 saw Yale with only 110 students, Dwight brought considerable energy to his post. He added faculty in the fields of law, languages, church history, and hired talented chemist Benjamin Silliman to strengthen the sciences. Long known as a workaholic, Dwight himself took on duties as professor of divinity on top of the demands of the presidency.[26] Despite appointing faculty that largely agreed with his political and religious ends, he still had to contend with unruly students, whose rioting had served a role in driving out the previous president. Seeking a combination of discipline and persuasion, he set about urging upon the students the benefits of New Light, Calvinist Christianity, and warning them of the ill effects of infidelity. “Taking on all comers,” writes Silverman, “he tried to expose the irrelevancies and illogic of infidel arguments.” He was also willing to fire “instructors suspected of infidel leanings.”[27]
Dwight showed himself quite willing to name names in his battle with infidelity. For Dwight infidelity was not, in the final analysis, an intellectual foe but a moral one. The following section in his 1788 epic indicates that he saw infidelity as holding to a hidden agenda, moral turpitude, and he sought to expose its true purpose with biting poetic pen:
My leaders these; yet Satan boasts his subs,
His Tolands, Tindals, Collinses, and Chubbs,
Morgans and Woolstons, names of lighter worth,
That stand, on falshood’s list, for &c.
That sworn to me, to vice and folly given,
At truth and virtue growl’d, and bark’d at heaven.[28]
He would go on to describe a clerical enemy, the Unitarian preacher of some renown, and his grandfather Jonathan Edwards’ religious nemesis, Charles Chauncy, as the dupe and instrument of Satanic deception as well. Through Chauncy’s leadership, Satan was able to spread European infidelities and doubts about Christianity to America.[29] This easy combining of outright skeptics and philosophes with believers of questionable orthodoxy weakened the persuasive power of Dwight’s rhetoric beyond the halls of Yale.
Doubtless such fare was a delight to Dwight’s religious readership. But ad hominem is quite limited as a means of persuasion when its barbs are aimed at the unpersuaded of a decidedly different viewpoint. In a 1798 oration on the occasion of the Fourth of July, Dwight railed against a wide range of sins, and urged his hearers to separate themselves from fellow-citizens of low moral caliber. In this he targeted the intellectual sources of the drift into sin thus:
Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins? Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families? Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?[30]
Dwight saw the plagues of the Book of Revelation as a very real threat to America if the people did not separate themselves completely from influences of French infidelity and the secretive society of the Masons. At this time John Adams had published recent documents exposing an alleged Illuminati plot involving Prussian and French as well as Jesuit endeavors to overthrow Christianity, with branches of plotters in America.[31] He feared that divisions in the fledgling republic could lead to self-destruction, and mentioned several woeful examples from the European past as a warning. Dwight held a strongly providential view of his homeland. He believed the blessings of obedience to the divine order were still available. He read from the victories of the patriots during the revolution the approbation of the deity. Victories on the battlefield against England had given Dwight some measure of optimism, but always tinged with the fear of reversion into European-inspired infidelity and the removal of the divine blessing. Still, he could assure his Connecticut audience that “He has been your fathers’ God, and he will be yours.”[32]
Yet for all this fevered rhetoric, Dwight could show hints of a mindset bordering on rationalism. As Holifield has noted, it is hard to find agreement where precisely to situate Dwight on the theological continuum. On the one hand, his theology aligned with that of his famous grandfather on many important emphases. He separated natural and moral ability as had Jonathan Edwards. He rejected the halfway covenant, thus demanding individual conversion for full church membership. He believed in “regeneration as an instantaneous change, not a gradual transition.”[33] Where he departed from his grandfather was in having a more optimistic view of the power of religious education as a nurturing force to serve as a restraint on the tendencies toward sin among children. This was in part due to Dwight’s embrace of Scottish Common-Sense realism, which was then sweeping the institutions of higher learning in America. This style of reasoning used a “Baconian appeal to ‘fact,’” and persuasion by appeal to “evidences of Christianity.” Though Dwight often contrasted secular philosophy as producing uncertainty with Christianity as producing certainty, still he held a respect for the intellect alongside, and in concert with, divine revelation.[34]
Dwight’s Critics
In arguing that internal dissensions over the role of the intellect among Calvinists weakened their ability to fight off deism, historian Kerry S. Walters nonetheless notes the important educational contribution of American Calvinism. “Calvinism in America enjoyed a long tradition of emphasizing the cultivation of the intellect. Calvinist clergy were noteworthy among American clerics for their training in languages, theology, and natural philosophy.” He further admits that the theological impetus for such pursuits was an Edwardsian “demand for incessant self-examination.”[35] Even with such an introspective formation, Dwight followed a strong impetus toward public theology, including mingling of religious and political themes. This naturally led to some public skirmishes over his views.
Some of Dwight’s more intemperate remarks on public occasions have rendered him an easy target, in his own day and beyond, for criticism as an autocratic or, to use a favorite epithet of the era, “tyrannical,” leader. Certainly, his high visibility as a public speaker made it possible for his persona to devolve from a public theologian to something lesser—a political, or even a partisan, theologian. A recent study has cogently investigated a favorite nickname for Dwight among his detractors: The Pope of Federalism. Rival pastors and republican-minded newspaper editors both within and outside Connecticut had a colorful array of barbed accusations and criticisms for Dwight. His leadership at Yale, with its heavy-handed orthodoxy, led to dismissals of professors whose views might well have been tolerated by his predecessor Ezra Stiles. His applications to the state legislature for money to bail out Yale in times of financial stress also opened him up to the criticism of using the state to buttress a church institution. Especially in the last years of the 18th century, when Thomas Jefferson’s star was on the rise leading to his election to the presidency in 1800, Dwight’s opposition to the American Sphinx garnered him political enemies. His invective toward infidelity, broad and sweeping as it was, seemed to Jefferson’s supporters merely thinly-veiled attacks on the famous founder. Dwight’s open and caustic detestation for virtually anything French stood in rather obvious contradiction of the love Jefferson was known to hold for French thought and culture. Dwight believed that government should favor religion, but he also supported church affiliation as voluntary association, not as coercive enforcement. He strongly opposed disestablishment in Connecticut (1818), perhaps helping to delay it till after his death (1817). This position arrayed Dwight firmly against Jefferson’s famous philosophy of separation and disestablishmentarianism.[36]
For all his potential to become entangled in the vipers’ nest of politics, Dwight was known to caution ministerial students not to use the pulpit to foster partisan positions, and he often decried the divisions in society fomented by politics. The picture that emerges is that Dwight was the most public religious figure in Connecticut, and he did support continuation of the established position of Congregationalism as the official church of Connecticut. This led his detractors to analogize him to figures like the Jesuits, or to lump him in with the Catholic church. Thus the “Pope” moniker could easily stick.[37] Yet painting one’s religious enemies as similar to Catholics, or sympathetic to anything remotely hierarchical, was a ubiquitous argument stratagem among Protestants embroiled in internecine pamphlet wars over many centuries. While a factor not dispositive, one cannot rule out good old-fashioned jealousy of Dwight’s prestige, and envy’s green-eyed role in such a portrayal by his contemporaries. Those unsympathetic to Dwight’s politics or his theology were distressed to see his successes in influencing not merely pastors but lawyers, politicians, scientists, and cultural leaders across the disciplinary spectrum during his tenure as Yale President from 1795 to 1817. Such ill-will as a commonplace human motive notwithstanding, his own vituperative style readily invited his being paid back in kind, and opponents were eager to oblige.
Connecticut disestablishment fervor may be attributed to growing Protestant diversity in the state. Mary Kupiec Cayton notes that there was a thriving religious pluralism in Connecticut from the 1750s forward. She writes: “Despite the homogeneity of Connecticut’s people in so many respects, many contested the legitimacy of the religious establishment” by the middle decades of the 18th century. Not all factors in the wake of disestablishment fostered fragmentation, as “revivalism came to be the common coin of the realm in part in response to pluralizing impulses within the state—some of which, ironically, began themselves in revivalism.”[38] Revivalism and an established church appear to be conflicting ethoi; since Dwight favored both, this stands as an unresolved dissonance worthy of further exploration.
An enduring temptation in the historiography of the Second Great Awakening is to reify it as a rather monolithic phenomenon. The tendency is to seek out patterns and commonalities between, for example, the Yale student revivals of the 1790s, and the frenetic events in Bourbon County, Kentucky in the Cane Ridge Revivals of 1801-1804. However, the differences must have been to those living in that era at least as stark, if not more so, than the similarities. To take one example, the Yale student body would have been comprised almost entirely of financially stable white males; whereas Cane Ridge brought together men, women, poor, wealthy, black slaves, and white slavemasters. Baptists and Methodists would have been rather scarce at Yale, while these were abundant at Cane Ridge. Ellen Eslinger observes that the social factions over issues such as slavery, denominational divisions, as well as economics created a crisis in Kentucky, leading to a widespread yearning for some form of communitas, or unifying source of social cohesion. This runs somewhat counter to the standard emphases in descriptions of the Cane Ridge events as chaotic or individualistic in character. Yet “most conspicuous” for Eslinger is the “ecumenical character” of the early camp meetings. She is able to cite testimonies from persons present who defended to their co-religionists back home this dropping of sectarian barriers as the movement of the Spirit in the camp revivals. Additional barriers of age, gender, and race also seemed to fade from view in the fervor of the outdoor meetings of this period.[39] The notion of disestablishment, with its leveling or democratizing effects, therefore, was not merely a legal or legislative codification, but a social, cultural, and theological phenomenon. This pluralization took longer to effectuate policy change in staid New England, thus delaying Connecticut’s disetablishment until 1818.
Dwight’s star clerical pupil, Lyman Beecher, penned a lament for the 1818 severing of church and state in Connecticut. To call it a lament is not quite accurate, though it contains the pathos of a lamentation. For example, Beecher mourned: “It was as dark a day as ever I saw. The odium thrown upon the ministry was inconceivable. The injury done to the cause of Christ, as we then supposed, was irreparable.” Yet Beecher, a late convert to the virtues of voluntary church membership, finally came to admit that in this defeat lay the seeds of later victory. He continued: “For several days I suffered what no tongue can tell for the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”[40]
Disestablishment led to a renewed vigor and spirit of competition among the various sects and denominations. While posing a tremendous challenge to unity among Christians, it did remove the added bitterness of the official entanglement of the church with political feuds in an increasingly democratic and entrepreneurial era of the early republic. However, many Christians lamented the seeming hopelessness of division among the various Protestant sects, and yearned for a more unified public face for the Christian faith.[41] On the frontier there were efforts to reach agreements and even some shared leadership between denominations. Especially between transplanted New Englanders, some Congregationalist and Presbyterian cooperation was attempted in an effort to reach the frontier with the gospel message. Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858) was perhaps the prominent theologian to don the mantle of Timothy Dwight into the middle of the nineteenth-century. Of Taylor, Mark Noll observes that after Taylor fought and lost the battle to retain Congregationalism as the state church of Connecticut, he shifted his attention to cooperation among denominations. As an oft-noted feature of the Second Great Awakening, Taylor’s emphasis on “promoting revivals and voluntary societies as a substitute for the formal ecclesiastical establishment” proved effective in shaping an evangelical ethos broadly appealing among frontier Protestants.[42]
Conclusion
Timothy Dwight’s vocation as a public theologian influenced a significant number of his students to take the vision of his grandfather seriously, and to spread New England theology to the West. He spoke passionately against infidelity, even though his attacks on free thought were rather too strident for a young America optimistic about the new republic and its new constitution. As a renaissance man, who could organize for success and growth institutions in fields ranging from agriculture to poetry to legislation to pulpit ministry to the university, Dwight set the bar high for social leadership in his beloved Connecticut. Indeed, Dwight was such a public man, that biographers have struggled to uncover a personal core, a mere human, beneath all the demanding roles upon his shoulders. This raises, for another time, the interplay between public and private theologizing, between the clarion voice of the public square and the quiet or desperate whisper encountered on the sleepless night. Prophet, moralist, poet, chaplain, tutor, professor, president, and more, at the end of the day Dwight, like all of us, was a frail mortal, trying to make his way home, to a dreamed-of-promised land in the howling wilderness of a frightening and changing new world.
NOTES:
[1]A recent biographer has cautioned that: “Although Dwight has often been typecast as an intractable, conservative zealot, his views developed over time.” John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 6.
[2] Indeed, as historian Thomas S. Kidd has cogently written, “The evangelical revivals caused the greatest social upheaval of any movement in the colonies prior to the Revolution. This ‘massive defiance of traditional authority,’ must have exercised some shaping influence on the Revolution.” Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 289.
[3] Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 89.
[4] Cited in Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 6-7.
[5] Kenneth Silverman, Timothy Dwight (New York: Twayne, 1969), 20-22.
[6] Timothy Dwight, “Conquest of Canaan: A Poem,” March 1, 1785. Online at URL: http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/conquest-of-canaan-a-poem/.
[7] Silverman, “ 29.
[8] Ibid., 43.
[9] Dwight, “Canaan,” Vol. 1.
[10] Dwight, “Canaan,” Vol. 11.
[11] See Gerald R. McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and the National Covenant: Was He Right?” in D. G. Hart, et. al., eds., The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 147-157, esp. 152.
[12] Silverman, 39.
[13] Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator, 20.
[14] Ibid., 104.
[15] James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16.
[16] Noll, America’s God, 230, see note 9.
[17] Dowling, 7:193.
[18] George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 82-3.
[19] Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator, 17.
[20] Marsden, 82-3.
[21] Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator, 228-9. Fitzmier, 101, acknowledges some recent scholars who have called into question the importance of the Yale revivals to the overall phenomenon of the Second Great Awakening.
[22] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 17.
[23] Ahlstrom, Religious History, 366-7.
[24] Timothy Dwight, Theology: Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons, With a Memoir of the Life of the Author (Middletown, CT: Clark & Lyman, 1818), 58-59.
[25] Timothy Dwight, The Triumph of Infidelity: a Poem (Hartford, CT: n. p., 1788), 11. Online at URL: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/N16405.0001.001.
[26] Silverman, Timothy Dwight, 96.
[27] Ibid., 97.
[28] Ibid., 16.
[29] Ibid., 85-94.
[30] Timothy Dwight, The Duty of American, at the Present Crisis: Illustrated in a Discourse, Preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 by the Reverend Timothy Dwight, D. D., President of Yale-College; at the Request of the Citizens of New-Haven (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1798), 21.
[31] Silverman, Timothy Dwight, 99-100. In the July 4, 1798 oration he described the Illuminati thus: “This order is professedly a higher order of Masons, originated by himself, and grafted on ancient Masonic institutions. The secrecy [sic], solemnity, mysticism, and correspondence of Masonry, were in this new order preserved and enhanced; while the ardour of innovation, the impatience of civil and moral restraints, and the aims against government, morals, and religion, were elevated, expanded, and rendered more systematical, malignant, and daring.”
[32] Ibid., 29.
[33] E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 352-3.
[34] Ibid., 353-4.
[35] Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 19.
[36] See Robert J. Imholt, “Timothy Dwight: Federalist Pope of Connecticut,” in The New England Quarterly 73 (September, 2000) 396-406.
[37] Ibid., 404-11.
[38] Mary Kupiec Cayton, “The Connecticut Culture of Revivalism,” in Peter W. Williams, ed., Perspectives on American Religion and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 360.
[39] Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 225-35.
[40] Lyman Beecher, “The Voluntary Principle: Disestablishment,” in Edwin S. Gaustad, ed., A Documentary History of Religion in America to the Civil War (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 318. Emphasis is in the original.
[41] Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address (Washington, PA: The Christian Association, 1809), passim.
[42] Noll, America’s God, 270. On controversies over Taylor’s theology, namely whether he was a true “Edwardean,” see Holifield, Theology in America, 354-61.
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