Piety and moralism

The term “New England Theology” was coined by the Congregationalist theologian and Andover professor Edwards Amasa Park in an eponymous article of 1852.Footnote ¹⁰ Park defined the New England Theology quite simply as “the formal creed which a majority of the most eminent theologians in New England have explicitly or implicitly sanctioned, during and since the time of Edwards.”Footnote ¹¹ The basic concept, however, of a distinctively American lineage of Reformed theology running from Edwards through a series of generations of disciples did not begin with Park. As Joseph Conforti has noted, the New England Theology was a highly contentious construct cocreated by a number of nineteenth-century theologians to legitimize their distinctive doctrinal positions through an appeal to the historical precedent of Edwards. “By 1852,” Conforti writes, “when Park published a lengthy and learned historical exposition in the Bibliotheca Sacra titled ‘New England Theology,’ the metonymic transformation of the label was far advanced; it had become widely recognized as denominating the hundred-year-old New Divinity movement—the doctrinal interpretation and ‘improvement’ of Edwards initiated by his closest disciples in the decades after the colonial awakening.”Footnote ¹²

Nevertheless, it was Park—sometimes himself referred to as “the last Edwardsian”—who gave the term scholarly currency. Park insisted that the New England Theology was defined by its affirmation of the moral agency of individuals and a rejection of imputed original sin.Footnote ¹³ One of Park’s students, George Nye Boardman, wrote A History of New England Theology in 1899, the first book-length study of the tradition. Like Park, Boardman insisted on “an elementary unity underlying” the various phases of the New England Theology.Footnote ¹⁴ Frank Hugh Foster’s A Genetic History of the New England Theology (1907) followed soon after. Foster’s work bore the stamp of the new theological liberalism of the early twentieth century, and tended to deprecate the more rigorously Calvinist early theologians in favor of the later, more humanistic Edwardsians of the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵

Whatever the merits of these early efforts, the single most important book on the New England Theology in the twentieth century (or any other) was written by Joseph Haroutunian, a precocious Turkish American theologian who taught at McCormick Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago. The book, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (1932), was published out of Haroutunian’s Columbia doctoral dissertation and it set the tone for all later efforts in the field. It would not be an exaggeration to call the view the book instantiated the Haroutunian paradigm. For Haroutunian, Jonathan Edwards had been a great, original religious thinker, whose thought was unspoiled by Enlightenment rationalism or sentimentalism. Unfortunately, Edwards’s disciples—men like Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy—betrayed Edwards by turning his inspired thought into a legalistic dogma. Despite the fact that Hopkins and Bellamy insisted that anyone who was not converted would spend an eternity in the fiery lake, Haroutunian provocatively claimed that they had acceded to the humanitarian spirit of the age. “As seen from the perspective of the theology of Edwards, the history of the New England Theology is the history of a degradation,” Haroutunian wrote;

For Haroutunian, writing after World War I, the relative humanism and optimism of the New Divinity (as he perceived it) seemed naive and tawdry compared to the excellence of Edwards’s “theocentric” worldview. This perspective shaped the other most significant interpreter of Edwards and his students in these years, the immensely influential Perry Miller. It is perhaps not often enough appreciated that Miller wrote his famous biography of Edwards in the wake of Haroutunian’s earlier work. But Haroutunian’s perspective clearly shaped the portrait of Edwards that Miller drew. For Miller, Edwards was a proto-modernist prophet. Unlike his contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, he was skeptical of an orderly world operated according to optimistic rationalism and free-market capitalism, and instead understood the tragic, limited character of human life and American destiny. “Edwards’ preaching was America’s sudden leap into modernity,” Miller claimed; even more controversially, in the area of psychology, Miller wrote, “it would have taken [Edwards] about an hour’s reading in William James, and two hours in Freud, to catch up completely.”Footnote ¹⁷ Edwards was such an imposing figure for Miller that he never even considered the ways in which Edwards’s disciples might have embodied his ideas in a durable tradition; that was not even a point worth considering for the attentive reader of Piety versus Moralism.

At first glance, one might think that the tide began to turn with the first book of another major American religious historian, Sidney E. Mead. Mead took on the tall task of rehabilitating a figure who was the object of Haroutunian’s most focused opprobrium, the nineteenth-century Yale theologian Nathaniel William Taylor. In Nathaniel William Taylor: A Connecticut Liberal (1942), Mead argued that Taylor’s thought was not dry and legalistic, but rather constituted the basis of “one great strain of American theology.” But to demonstrate this, Mead had to argue not that Taylor was in fact a disciple of Edwards who had gotten his master’s teachings wrong, but rather that he was not an Edwardsian at all. Taylor was, for Mead, both an heir of the eighteenth-century “Old Calvinist” opponents of Edwards’s theology and an early “liberal” who paved the way for progressive Christianity. In sum, then, at this early stage, in the heyday of Haroutunian and Miller, to claim that an American thinker after Edwards was significant, one had to establish that they were not an Edwardsian!Footnote ¹⁸

The revisionist approach to New England Theology began in earnest with the work of Joseph A. Conforti, whose book on Samuel Hopkins sought to rescue that most crabbed of theologians from posterity’s condescension. To do this, he sought to establish Hopkins and his peers as genuinely creative followers of Edwards in their own right. Conforti claimed that “Hopkins and other advocates of the New Divinity established the first indigenous American school of Calvinism”—a statement often repeated and expanded by later writers.Footnote ¹⁹ Hopkins, he demonstrated, was both a nuanced and a progressive social theorist—he vocally opposed slavery well before most white Americans and diagnosed the disease of market-driven hyper-individualism already in the eighteenth century—and a theological innovator who even disagreed with Edwards, not always to the latter’s benefit. “The New Divinity,” he argued, “was much more than simply a theological vogue; it was also a protest movement with particular appeal to young, pietistic ministers. The New Divinity men were sharply critical of the established ministry, of the development of Puritan theology, and also … of the evolution of New England society.” Conforti also did pioneering work in mapping the dense social networks that enabled the spread of the New England Theology across much of New England through the new “schools of the prophets” and extended kinship networks formed by intermarriage within influential clerical families. All this eventuated in a much more positive appraisal of the New England theologians. “In short,” Conforti wrote, “the New Divinity men did not betray their origins in experimental religion by over-intellectualizing the piety of the First Great Awakening; rather they preserved and bequeathed to the next generation of revivalists its creative tension between social theory and social practice.”Footnote ²⁰

Conforti’s work authorized a general reassessment of New England Theology that flowered through the 1980s and into the 1990s. William Breitenbach, Bruce Kuklick, Allen Guelzo, David Kling, and Mark Valeri, among others, all wrote articles and books that took the New Divinity seriously as a sophisticated, creative intellectual and spiritual tradition. Of special note is Bruce Kuklick’s Churchmen and Philosophers (1985), which claimed that “The New England Theology … represents the most sustained intellectual tradition in the United States.”Footnote ²¹ Although Kuklick saw the Edwardsian theologians as in certain respects rather provincial and intellectually simplistic compared to their contemporaries in England or Germany, he nevertheless wrote about them as both the major American intellectuals of their day (much more culturally influential than liberal Unitarians or Transcendentalists) and ancestors of Deweyan pragmatism. Kuklick neither dismissed the New England theologians as obscurantists, nor sought to celebrate their Calvinist sensibilities. The professionalization of philosophy in the nineteenth century, the challenges of German historicism and scientific thinking, eventually rendered Edwardsianism obsolete; and yet, for Kuklick, the New England Theology, however unconvincing in its details, was a crucial building block in American intellectual history, a robust tradition of thought that laid the groundwork for the later explosion of American philosophy in its golden age.Footnote ²²

The other works in this revisionist strain, while not always agreeing in the details of their accounts of particular thinkers, all filled in gaps in the understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American religious history. William Breitenbach took on Haroutunian directly, arguing “that the so-called peculiarities and innovations of the New Divinity reveal Edwards’s most creative and important contributions to New England theology,” and that that tradition was not a barren legalism devoid of mysticism but rather a blend “of piety and moralism.”Footnote ²³ In another essay, he argued (contra Conforti) that New England Theology actually helped to pave the way for the dominance of a commercial ethic in New England.Footnote ²⁴ Allen C. Guelzo boasted that “the intellectual progression from Edwards to Hopkins to Emmons is perhaps the single most interesting phenomenon in the history of American thought,” assigning that tradition the (dubious) merit of undermining the older ideal of a national covenantal community premised on religious unity and civic belonging.Footnote ²⁵ David W. Kling explored the New England theologians’ relation to the revivals of the 1790s–1820s known as the “Second Great Awakening,” showing how extensively third-generation New Divinity preaching underlay that efflorescence of religious experience.Footnote ²⁶ And Mark Valeri did for Bellamy what Conforti had previously done for Hopkins. “Bellamy’s innovations on the theology of Jonathan Edwards made Calvinism significant for the Revolutionary generation,” Valeri argued. “Rather than rehearse Edwards, his mentor and the most sophisticated theologian in eighteenth-century America, Bellamy refashioned evangelical Calvinism.”Footnote ²⁷

Looking back over the previous century and a half of work on the New England Theology in 1998, Douglas A. Sweeney declared the end of the Haroutunian paradigm. “Clearly … the historiography of the New England Theology has seen some important recent changes, not the least of which is that Haroutunian has begun falling precipitously from power.”Footnote ²⁸ Sweeney’s own work on Nathaniel William Taylor rested upon and further developed the revisionism of the 1980s and early 1990s. His Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (2002) reaffirmed Taylor’s central role in the New England theological pantheon and argued for the outsized importance of Edwardsianism in extending evangelical Christianity to thousands of Americans in the nineteenth century, even after the theology itself had become a relic.Footnote ²⁹

But it would seem that the Haroutunian paradigm’s alleged demise, ironically, coincided with the end of significant scholarship on the New England Theology as a whole. In the years since Sweeney’s book on Taylor, there has been much excellent work on Edwards, from deep theological analysis to biography and consideration of just about every angle of Edwards’s vast literary edifice possible. And yet, despite the revisionists’ attempts in the 1980s to establish the New Divinity as an intellectually significant tradition, no real boom in New England Theology ever came. If Edwards has to some extent remained a cottage industry, his heirs certainly have not. Many of them, important in their own day (e.g. John Smalley, Stephen West, Nathanael Emmons) have not even received modern biographical treatment. If the revisionist scholars were correct that New England Theology was a truly significant part of American history, why has it largely disappeared from view?

America’s evangelicals?

The most obvious answer to the foregoing question is that American religion as a discipline has by and large moved away from the theological, the canonical, the elite, and, above all, anything vaguely redolent of Puritanism. Already in 1997, Charles L. Cohen noted the formation of a “post-Puritan Paradigm” in American religious history. After Perry Miller’s outsized achievement, Cohen explained, the field “came to be seen as a set of variations played around the theme of Puritanism dominating the nation’s Protestant sensibility.” But “critics have pointed out how this seemingly expansive galaxy issued from a narrow preoccupation with one particular region, approach, occupational group, and theological tradition” (not to mention one race and gender).Footnote ³⁰ In recent years, the reaction against historical narratives that foreground colonial New England Protestants has only grown stronger. As only the most recent example, Thomas A. Tweed’s new field-defining survey Religion in the Lands That Became America (2025) begins its introduction with the line “There were no Puritans on my street in Philadelphia.” The explicitly stated aim of the book is to decenter white male Protestant theologians in favor of indigenous, black, female, and other nonelite white male points of view.Footnote ³¹

Cohen listed three factors that contributed to the formation of the post-Puritan paradigm: “the emergence of social history, the ‘discovery’ of popular religion, and the renewed awareness of the colonies’ transatlantic connections.” These elements remain in effect, as do more contemporary interests in the adverse effects on marginalized groups of imperialism and colonialism. This may all go a long way to explaining why the study of New England Theology seems to have died on the branch by the end of the twentieth century. But, in fact, general shifts in the field away from intellectual history or the study of elite culture do not adequately explain the phenomenon. Indeed, the “new social history” had already begun displacing top-down approaches in the field at least as early as the 1970s. For instance, Paul Johnson’s influential study A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, published in 1978, attempted to explain Charles G. Finney’s revivals in terms of economic factors in the industrial towns of upstate New York, eschewing theology in favor of statistical analyses of employment and population.Footnote ³² Johnson’s history was, of course, different from current approaches to American religious history that emphasize, for example, the racist dimensions of Protestant theological hegemony.Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, considerations of New England Theology persisted well past the advent of social history concerned with class, race, and gender, and some of the best revisionist work, such as Kling’s A Field of Divine Wonders, combined intellectual-historical approaches with social and cultural history that considered the audiences of the New Divinity’s sermonizing.

So then the question remains: what happened to New England Theology? I argue that if we pay close attention to the work being done on New England Theology from the 2000s onward, we can see a major shift in emphasis and motivation that helps to explain the decline of the subfield. Specifically, beginning in the 1990s and cresting in the 2000s and 2010s, work on Edwardsianism (and, indeed, American Protestant theology more generally) became the near-exclusive province of evangelical scholars who enlisted Edwards (and sometimes his heirs) in broader narratives about the history of evangelicalism, the history of America, or both, that sought to establish contemporary evangelicalism as a respectable intellectual tradition with a strong connection to the American project.

As early as 1988, attentive students were beginning to note the rise of a new school in American religious history. Sometimes labeled “observer-participant historians,” these scholars were avowed “evangelicals” who wrote magisterial histories of American religion from an explicitly Protestant point of view. Leonard I. Sweet (himself among this group) celebrated “one of the most arresting phenomena in American religious scholarship today: the emergence in academe of a group of evangelical historians to a position of dominance in fundamentalist/evangelical historiography and to a front-rank position within scholarship on American religious history generally.”Footnote ³⁴ The scholars in question were centered around Wheaton College’s Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, founded in 1982, and headed up by Mark Noll and Nathan O. Hatch. In addition to Noll and Hatch, George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, Grant Wacker, Harry Stout, and several other eminent historians were associated with the group.

In particular, Marsden and Noll led the charge to redefine the way “evangelicalism” was studied in the American academy. But saying that does not go far enough—for in seeking to establish “evangelicalism” at the center of American history, these scholars also largely invented “evangelicalism” as a category of scholarly analysis and a theological heritage going back to the eighteenth century. As D. G. Hart presciently pointed out in 2004, the “observer-participant” historians were in fact importing a conception of the American religious past into the academy first spearheaded by the “neo-evangelical” leaders of the 1940s, Harold Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry. These were Protestants who in the wake of the scandal of the Scopes trial (1925) sought to give fundamentalism a face-lift by shedding the image of anti-intellectual sectarianism that it had acquired in American culture. To do so, they rejected the term “fundamentalist” in favor of a term with more ecumenical, positive connotations: “evangelical.”Footnote ³⁵

As several recent scholars have demonstrated, the current meaning of the term “evangelical” as it is used in American culture was a creation of these neo-evangelicals and their academic compeers. Linford D. Fisher has shown that from the sixteenth century through the early twentieth, “evangelical” simply referred to Protestants and was used to establish one’s credentials as a “true Christian.” Even such seemingly non-evangelical groups as Christian Scientists, Unitarians, and Universalists considered themselves to be evangelical. Fisher argues that it was only in the 1970s that the current conception of “evangelicals” as a term for a specific set of Protestants with a core of beliefs distinguishing them from other Christians emerged and was generally accepted. As he puts it,

For years, the most influential definition of “evangelicalism” was David Bebbington’s “quadrilateral of priorities,” as articulated in his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989). Bebbington’s synopsis, accepted and propagated by American evangelical historians, posited evangelicalism as a theological tradition marked by distinctive beliefs—the title alone made a claim for a continuous evangelical line from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. Bebbington’s quadrilateral included “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 what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.”Footnote ³⁷ These beliefs united early Protestant revivalists, such as John Wesley and George Whitefield, with modern preachers like Billy Graham. More recently, Bebbington’s paradigm has come under heavy fire. The rallying point has been the awareness, generated by white evangelicals’ support of Donald Trump in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, of the highly political and cultural character of the movement. In Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s best-selling Jesus and John Wayne, the intellectualist definition of evangelicalism is denied outright. “In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith,” Du Mez writes. “For conservative white evangelicals, the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.”Footnote ³⁸

Matthew Avery Sutton has recently turned attention to Marsden, Noll, Hatch, and their colleagues, arguing that, beginning in the 1970s, these historians constructed a historically continuous, theologically based definition of evangelicalism in order to distance their own brand of Protestantism from the contentiousness of the ascendant religious right. “Over the course of their careers,” Sutton contends, these historians

This “new evangelical historiography” came to dominate the field of American history—something already noticed by the Yale historian Jon Butler in 1992, who lamented that recent religious historians had “shaped nothing less than a ‘new evangelical thesis’ in American historiography, a thesis that argues for evangelicalism’s centrality to nearly every important distinguishing characteristic of American life and especially to those characteristics that we find positive and valuable, both now and in the past.” Sutton goes so far as to recommend that contemporary historians drop the label “evangelical” altogether for the period before the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ³⁹

One aspect of this story that has not yet been thoroughly explored—though it is highly relevant both to narratives like Fisher’s and Sutton’s and to the story of the decline of scholarship on New England Theology—is the way in which Jonathan Edwards became the single most important figure for establishing the legitimacy of the new evangelical thesis (to use Butler’s term). As Hart has noted, the renaissance of academic studies of Edwards coincided with a recovery of Edwards by various evangelicals, some of whom—most notably, John Piper—were affiliated with Wheaton and friendly with the observer-participant historians. According to Hart, the evangelical discovery of Edwards began with John Gerstner’s Steps to Salvation: The Evangelistic Message of Jonathan Edwards (1959). Other influential English and American evangelicals, including Iain Murray, Richard Lovelace, and John Piper, all turned to Edwards as an important source of doctrine for contemporary evangelical Protestants. “This born-again Protestant recovery of Edwards’s legacy functioned as the subtext to the monographs and critical editions that began to surface in the 1950s within academic circles,” Hart proposes.Footnote ⁴⁰

Within the academy, Marsden and Noll’s influential construction of an evangelical tradition depended heavily on a certain portrait of Jonathan Edwards. As Mark Noll famously put it in his coruscating The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” But as Noll noted, “the condition of the evangelical mind in contemporary America could not be described as a scandal unless an earlier history existed to show that serious intellectual labor had been the norm for at least many Protestants in the evangelical tradition.” The evidence for this claim was quite simply the existence of Jonathan Edwards. “The early history of evangelicalism in America is notable for the career of Jonathan Edwards, for Edwards was the most powerful intellectual in American evangelical history,” Noll argued. Edwards “undertook [his] work from the most explicitly evangelical convictions.” He “was an evangelical thinker because he held strenuously to the conviction that God’s action was the basis for human reaction in every area of life.” But, Noll argued, drawing implicitly on Haroutunian, “this greatest of evangelical thinkers was left without successors.” Noll lamented that Edwards’s life and thought, and his place in American culture, had been over the twentieth century primarily the purview of secular academics. “In the great recovery of Edwards’s reputation that has taken place in the last generation, the lead was taken by secular scholars for secular purposes,” Noll averred, “while evangelicals have played only a secondary role in the recovery. Apart from a few noteworthy exceptions such as Richard Lovelace and John Piper, evangelicals continue to neglect Edwards, with the result that the riches of his thought—as spiritually invigorating as it is intellectually challenging—remain virtually unknown among the hordes of evangelicals who are his religious descendants.”Footnote ⁴¹ In sum, for Noll, Edwards was the evangelical par excellence, and despite the fact that the New Divinity failed to uphold his magnificent legacy, it was precisely evangelicals who should learn from Edwards, rather than (or, at least, in addition to) secular or non-evangelical Christian academics.Footnote ⁴²

In his grand tour of early American religious history, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), Noll turned his attention from Edwards to his New Divinity followers. In Noll’s account, the Edwardsian theologians (in addition to Methodists, Baptists, and some other revivalist groups) took elements of Edwards’s thought and transmuted it into a new “American synthesis” that combined evangelical religion with republican political sentiments and Scottish commonsense moral reasoning. Throughout, Noll emphasizes that these New England theologians were evangelicals, who were largely responsible (again, along with Methodists) for making “evangelicalism … the unofficially established religion in a nation that had forsworn religious establishments.” Noll’s final estimation of the “evangelical” disciples of Edwards was mixed. While he forthrightly stated in his conclusion that Edwards was the most profound religious thinker in American history, he also stressed that his narrative was not one of “decline.” “Jonathan Edwards’s thought was more rigorously doxological than the thought of any nineteenth‐century religious thinker,” Noll wrote, “but evangelists of that latter period did more to Christianize and civilize unchurched Americans in a free‐form liberal society than Edwards could ever have done.” For Noll, then, the New England theologians were a civilizing force that effected the nation’s conversion to evangelicalism. If not as brilliant as Edwards himself (a claim few would contest), they were nevertheless more successful than Edwards in spreading the evangelical gospel.Footnote ⁴³

The most significant Edwards scholar of the twenty-first century, perhaps, has been George Marsden, whose authoritative biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003) won the prestigious Bancroft Prize. The justification for Marsden’s work is the (quite reasonable) criticism advanced by various historians after Perry Miller that the mid-twentieth-century analysis of Edwards was based more on presentist preoccupations, insisting on making Edwards modern, than on a disciplined attention to the eighteenth-century cultural context in which Edwards existed. Marsden sagely wrote in his biography that “Edwards anticipated some traits of later evangelicals, but the facts that he was a Calvinistic thinker, that he was rigorously intellectual, and that he was working in an eighteenth-century context make him very different from his evangelical heirs.” But he also made it clear that Edwards was indeed an evangelical Christian who “was a saint according to the highest Reformed spiritual standards to which he aspired.” At the end of the book, Marsden admitted that “one of my hopes is that this book may help bridge the gap between the Edwards of the students of American culture and the Edwards of the theologians.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And despite the claims to a studied historicism that Marsden makes in his big book, his later work explicitly positions Edwards as a theological resource for Christians in opposition to the naive secular assumptions of Edwards’s contemporary Benjamin Franklin.Footnote ⁴⁵ Like Noll, then, Marsden sees Edwards as the source of a revivified evangelicalism, one that rejects the rabble-rousing populism of a Whitefield in favor of an Edwardsian intellectualism and sophistication.

As Kenneth Minkema rightly noted in 2004, the historicist accounts of Edwards that scholars like Marsden (among many others) were producing actually coincided with, rather than contradicted, the frankly theological and religious use being made of Edwards by conservative evangelicals like Gerstner or Piper. That is because the “historical Edwards” (unlike the “neo-orthodox Edwards” of Haroutunian or Miller) was forthrightly biblicist and utterly convinced of the supernatural character of the Christian religion. Edwards as a devotee of the Bible (literally read) and heavily invested in apocalyptic and eschatological contemplation was both a historical fact and another facet of his usefulness for contemporary evangelicals. Accordingly, Minkema was one of the first to note the ascent of evangelical scholarship on Edwards and Edwardsianism:

In pointing out this conjunction, Minkema celebrated it: “Not Church vs. Academy, but Church and Academy. That’s the kind of conjunction we need to see more often, because it recognizes that scholars and practitioners in the two spheres can and should learn from each other,” he wrote.Footnote ⁴⁶

To put it simply, a prominent group of evangelical historians of the late 1970s and onward leaned on Edwards as the definitive proof that a smart, modern, intellectually respectable form of evangelical Christianity was possible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Douglas Sweeney explained, “more than any other thinker, Edwards has aided evangelicals in gaining credibility and in furthering their agenda in American public life.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Edwards, positioned as America’s foremost philosopher and theologian—and also as an evangelical—demonstrated that evangelicalism had intellectual bona fides that were undeniable by even the standards of the secular academy. And while some scholars at the time, such as Jon Butler and Bruce Kuklick, pushed back on this conflation of theological commitment with critical history, by and large the “new evangelical thesis” with Edwards as its emblem and poster boy carried the day.Footnote ⁴⁹ The evangelical scholars succeeded better than they knew—Edwards became the near-exclusive purview of evangelical scholars in evangelical institutions. By the opening decade of the twenty-first century, Edwards was “America’s Evangelical.” With Edwards thus cordoned off, the New England theological tradition to which his work gave rise, as we have seen in the case of Noll’s America’s God, also fell under the shadow of evangelicalism’s wings, and was thereby rendered largely unpalatable to any scholars who did not want to celebrate the (supposed) evangelical heritage.Footnote ⁵⁰

We can see this more clearly if we attend to the (scanty) scholarship produced on New England Theology in the twenty-first century. The major worker in this field since the mid-1990s has been Douglas A. Sweeney of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Samford University. As already noted, Sweeney published the last major historiography of the tradition in 1998. His book Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (2002), which came out of his Vanderbilt dissertation, was the most thorough monograph on Edwards’s legacy since Valeri’s 1994 book on Bellamy. Yet all of his impressive work is premised on the evangelical view of Edwards and his followers. He defines evangelicalism tendentiously as “orthodox Protestantism transformed and reconfigured by the transatlantic awakenings of the early eighteenth century” and writes of the Edwardsians that they “championed an evangelical view of religion, calling parishioners to personal faith, genuine conversion, and self-sacrifice in service of the needy.”Footnote ⁵¹ Sweeney’s coedited volume After Jonathan Edwards: The Courses of the New England Theology (2012), an exceptionally helpful resource, also overwhelmingly contained contributions by evangelical scholars, many of whom taught at evangelical institutions such as Trinity, Regent College, and Fuller Theological Seminary.

The most recent single-authored scholarly book on the New England Theology, Catherine Brekus’s Sarah Osborn’s World (2013), is subtitled The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America, and explicitly links Osborn’s brand of Edwardsian Christianity to contemporary evangelicalism. “Although many people associate evangelicalism with modern religious leaders like Billy Graham and Rick Warren,” Brekus writes, “its roots can be traced back to the eighteenth century. In response to social, political, economic, and intellectual transformations that were transatlantic in scope, eighteenth-century Protestants throughout the Atlantic world gradually created a new kind of faith that we now call evangelicalism.”Footnote ⁵² Even in expanding the canon of the New Divinity to include an influential laywoman, Brekus nevertheless adopts the framing of the observer-participant historians who posit a continuous evangelical tradition.

If one looks at dissertations from the twentieth century to the present, the trend I have laid out becomes even clearer. Dissertations from the 1970s that mention New England Theology include Conforti’s Brown University thesis on Hopkins, E. Brooks Holifield’s Yale study of covenant theology, Patricia Wilson’s study of the concept of grace in Edwards from the University of Iowa, and other studies from the University of North Carolina, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and other predominantly secular universities. Turning to the decade from 2010 to 2019, three of the first five dissertations displayed come out of Trinity International University (all students of Sweeney’s), with the next two originating from projects by students at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Other projects come from Dallas Theological Seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, Regent University, and Wheaton College.Footnote ⁵³ In other words, while there were perhaps, numerically, just as many dissertations (if not more) being written about the New England Theology in the 2010s as there were in the 1970s, these studies are predominantly housed within evangelical seminaries and divinity schools, many of which have a strong bent toward Reformed theology. That is not, of course, to say that recent studies are less valuable or meritorious than earlier ones. But it does show that, to a great extent, the subject has been siloed into the world of evangelical history and theology and has significantly lost its hold on the mainstream secular academy.

Recent critics of the evangelical historians have perhaps been over-harsh in their condemnations of these scholars. They have done much of the best work in the field, correcting many historical misconceptions and uncovering important aspects of the American past’s turbulent relationship with Protestantism. The problem is not with the work itself; rather, the issue is that these writers, almost all based at evangelical institutions, have been so successful in establishing Edwards and his heirs as influential evangelicals that they have unintentionally made these figures seem unsuitable subjects for many non-evangelical or secular scholars. Where once Edwards and the New Divinity were treated seriously and respectfully by atheist historians like Perry Miller or Edmund Morgan, in the twenty-first century they tend either to be disdained or, more usually, ignored. And if Miller was misguided to treat Edwards as a modern secularist, it may be that the neo-evangelicals are just as partial in treating Edwards and the Edwardsians as the progenitors of later evangelicalism.

If scholarship on the New England Theology did not dry up until the 2010s—and then only in secular colleges and universities and in published works (but not evangelical divinity school dissertations)—then this fact still demands explanation. How could “the most sustained, systematic, and creative intellectual tradition produced in this country” not receive a single monograph or edited volume in over a decade? The answer now seems clear. Evangelical scholars, in taking over the subject from the broad mainstream of American religious history, appropriated it for their own religious and political purposes. Many students who write dissertations on Edwards in an evangelical divinity school will go on to take up work in the church rather than in the academy, in which case there may be little incentive to publish their dissertations. Having branded Edwards and his generations of students “evangelicals,” the evangelical historians unintentionally seeded the demise of the New England Theology as a serious field of study for American history in an age grown increasingly skeptical of the evangelical historiography—and of evangelicalism.

A new approach

By way of conclusion, I wish to address two questions. First, why does it matter if scholarship on the New England Theology has gone by the wayside? Second, if that area of research has any future whatsoever outside evangelical academies and divinity schools, what might it look like?

In answer to the first question, I would suggest that unless one believes that claims like Conforti’s, Kuklick’s, and Guelzo’s are inflated, the scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s on the New England Theology demonstrated the cultural and intellectual importance of that tradition for late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans. If historians and religious-studies scholars are still fascinated by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and other Transcendentalists for what they can tell us about American spirituality, then so should they continue to study Hopkins, Taylor, and Osborn. Despite earlier caricatures of these latter figures as so many Casaubons avant la lettre, in fact they were serious intellectuals engaged with the problems and tensions of their contemporary culture, who handled questions (albeit in a technical religious language) still of real importance to us today: fate and freedom, inheritance and self-determination, the meaning of virtue and morality, and the problem of evil. Indeed, no other American intellectual tradition carried on a livelier debate about these questions in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Their answers are sometimes frustrating, but they are also intelligent and provocative. Moreover, the Edwardsians form the background for the rebellions of more respected figures like Channing, Emerson, and the architects of the Social Gospel, the context for whose thought is indecipherable without some awareness of the New England Theology. On the level of popular culture, it is clear that, by whatever name, revivalistic religion and organized benevolence characteristic of the Edwardsians and Hopkinsians were an important strand of American life for many people across differences of race, class, and gender in the early republican and antebellum periods. To ignore the formal thought of the figures who drove these movements is to hamstring any attempts at understanding the phenomena more broadly.

The second question, regarding the future of New England theological history, is more difficult to answer. To liberate the New England theologians from their status as representative “evangelicals,” first we must adopt Sutton’s recommendation to abandon the label for the period prior to the mid-twentieth century. After all, it is entirely unclear whether Edwards really was an “evangelical” by modern standards. While it is true that his emphasis on conversion and experimental religion connects him with nineteenth-century revivalists and twentieth-century neo-evangelical figures, that focus is far from the whole of Edwards. For one thing, his philosophical and theological writings tend to be far more concerned with God the Father and with “being in general” than they are with a personal encounter with Jesus. Later liberals, such as Horace Bushnell (who penned a famous tract entitled The Character of Jesus: Forbidding His Possible Classification with Men), were far more Christocentric and, indeed, even “crucicentric” than Edwards.Footnote ⁵⁴ Then, too, historical actors themselves, who lived much closer to Edwards’s time than we do, were never sure exactly how to classify him. In 1899, George Nye Boardman wrote that “it is well known that there has been a tendency of late to claim Edwards as the leader of the liberals in theology.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In the mid-twentieth century, prior to the evangelical interest in Edwards, his main promoters were solidly mainline Protestants with modernist sensibilities such as H. Richard Niebuhr and Haroutunian.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet more recently, the eminently liberal Protestant novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has expressed her indebtedness to Edwards’s book on Original Sin.Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, there was nothing inevitable about Edwards or his followers becoming evangelicals.

If there is any chance at all for a renewal of interest in this subject, historians and religious scholars must seek new frames of reference and ask different questions of the sources. Students should question the existence of an easy continuity between Edwards, Hopkins, Taylor, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham. We should not turn to these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts to discover something about contemporary evangelicalism—for they can tell us little about that—but rather to get a deeper glimpse of the distinctive religiosity and intellect of their own time. In doing so, we may indeed uncover new, creative linkages that go beyond modern conservative Protestantism and neo-evangelicalism.

I can only offer a few suggestions here. The first concerns the ways in which the Edwardsians debated problems that are still of philosophical moment, and that are rarely historicized. We may find, for instance, that the polemics around Edwards’s Freedom of the Will bear a striking resemblance to more recent discussions in analytic philosophy about free will and determinism, as in Harry Frankfurt’s work challenging the principle of alternative possibilities, which is nothing if not Edwardsian in its argument.Footnote ⁵⁸ Or, still in the precincts of philosophy, we might consider the complexities of Edwards’s (in)famous arguments about personal identity, in which he challenged the Lockean view that the integrity of a person’s self was premised upon their continued consciousness of being that self. Those interested in the neo-Lockean arguments of Derek Parfit, for instance, may well be interested in the discussions touched off by Edwards’s rebuttal of Locke.Footnote ⁵⁹ In short, the New England theologians can provide a sense of background and historical context to philosophical debates that resound up to the present.

Apart from formal thought, there is also occasion for a second look at the New England Theology’s role in American culture and religiosity. By moving beyond stock images of evangelicalism, we might be surprised to find what else these figures can tell us about the country’s past. I am particularly interested, for example, in the ways in which the New Divinity interacted with and occasionally forcefully resisted the rise of more autonomous, secularized conceptions of the self in nineteenth-century America. Even as some New England theologians—most notably Nathanael Emmons—preached a radical theory of the individual’s power to choose, others, like Emmons’s mentor, John Smalley, held that the will was in thrall to sin until God intervened to enable it to choose rightly.Footnote ⁶⁰ More remarkably yet, New Divinity stalwarts Samuel Hopkins and Stephen West claimed that the children of believers would inevitably inherit godliness in this life and salvation in the next—an idea that belied the liberal notion that free individuals in a free society could choose their own life course.Footnote ⁶¹ And virtually all New England theologians insisted that individual self-interest, including economic gain, must be subordinated to the common good. In several respects, then, these figures, readers of Enlightenment philosophes and Reformed scholastics both, may tell us much about the bumpy road to a secular picture of the individual and a secular society in the United States (to the extent that either has ever prevailed). They exemplify how ideas often associated with the secular Enlightenment were in fact frequently put to avowedly religious purposes, as well as how Calvinism continued to spawn meaningful resistance to secularized modes of thought, including the notion of the autonomous individual, through the nineteenth century.

Other students of the subject will find different questions to ask. What was the relation of New England Theology to market capitalism? Was the New Divinity a spur to liberalism or an attempt at an organic theory of society? Did the Edwardsian emphasis on “moral government” impact how ordinary Americans thought about their own earthly government? How did individual figures, like Emmons, who argued that God was the efficient cause of sin, change the ways Americans thought about evil and suffering in their lives?

In their clinging to traditional communal and familial forms, resistance to the unfettered market, supernatural religiosity, and intellectual curiosity and promiscuity, these pastors and theologians are, if not typical, then at least exceptionally illuminating examples of one major path that the life of the mind and of the spirit took in early America. Many new connections remain to be made, many texts have not yet been studied, and many historical personages affiliated with this movement, who ministered to hundreds of souls and wrote tracts read far and wide, call out for more extended biographical treatment. Beyond the confines of evangelicalism, the New England Theology needs a new generation of interpreters.