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Chris Masone
History 141
In his recent blog post, Sherwood says “In the colonies, the advent of evangelical Christendom can be plausibly linked to heightened paranoia regarding witches on the grounds of their common “experimental” nature.” He argues there is a correlation between evangelical religious revival and the increasing number of witchcraft accusations specifically in fairly isolated New England colonies in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Although I will put this argument in a slightly different context, I absolutely agree with him.
Taylor describes in Chapter 15, that it was difficult for New England colonies to find priests in the 1700’s because the only way to become ordained was to sail to England and seek out a bishop. Costly and time-consuming, I assume that many priests either lacked the funding or didn’t want to risk the long journey. The lack of priests may have contributed to the decline in full church membership of colonists and also to the rise of rationalism and evangelicalism that Sherwood mentions.
With the Great Awakening, energetic ministers wanted to revive full memberships in their congregations by preaching emotional, soul-searching sermons. Their shock-and-awe mentality, mainly describing both the greatness of heaven and the perpetual agony of hell, targeted the colonists’ emotions and virtually forced them to abandon rational thought. This zealous phase was short-lived as Davis describes on page 346, with the waves of suicides of those colonists who were stuck in limbo between salvation in “new birth” and misery in unknowing their ultimate fates.
Davis juxtaposes perhaps the most shocking suicide of Joseph Hawley, uncle to the evangelical preacher Reverend Jonathan Edwards, with the fervent Anglican minister George Whitefield. Unfortunately, besides his own word Davis cites no evidence that Joseph Hawley committed suicide out of despair in his search for salvation, this evidence would have truly illustrated the damaging effects of evangelical hysterics on the colonists.
Davis seems to argue that George Whitefield was single-mindedly focused on his career and perhaps too fixated on his reputation rather than the message. Having befriended many influential figures such as Ben Franklin who helped spread his message through newspapers, Whitefield toured controversially across the east coast and seemed to have kindled evangelical revivalism very quickly, possibly with little regard to the consequences of widespread emotional preaching. Davis concludes that this revival “accelerated a religious dialectic that pulled seekers and their congregations between the spiritual hunger to transcend world and the social longing for respect in it.” (Davis 362)
I think that the emotional hysterics and zealousness of the Great Awakening and the controversy that surrounded it proves Sherwood’s point. The shocking amount of suicides during this time of Whitefield’s controversy and spiritual panic illustrates a direct causation of emotional instability (as seen in the witchcraft accusations that Sherwood argues) as a result from the rise of evangelical Christendom in the New English colonies.