The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  And then, revival—compared to its fervor, drunkenness must have seemed dull. God was wilder and more terrifying than the woodlands to the west, and also gentler, like late day winter sun turning the snow fields golden.

  Edwards exalted. In revival, the ecstasy of the thunderstorm was wed at last to the theology he had crafted in his years of studying scripture, science, and the work of spiders. Come in, come in, he’d say to the young men and women who knocked on his door. Men would scream and weep on his knee; women’s faces would flush, and they’d lay down before him. Such enthusiasm thrilled him, but it also frightened him. He knew about the tricks of the mind and the lies of the heart. Few said as much, but everyone knew: this could be Satan.

  Cotton Mather, a rival of Edwards’s grandfather, would have frowned and barred his door to the young revivalists. Edwards the pastor surely considered doing the same. But Edwards the scientist consoled, encouraged, and most of all, recorded. Page after page of data: “Some have had such a sense of the displeasure of God, and the great danger they were in of damnation, that they could not sleep at nights,” he wrote, “and many have said that when they have laid down, the thoughts of sleeping in such a condition have been frightful to them; they have scarcely been free from terror while asleep, and they have awakened with fear….”

  Such was Abigail. A sweet soul who had never before given offense to anyone, she had grown violent of spirit in her despair. Edwards sympathized with her anguish. As a younger man he, too, had often wondered if he could anticipate heaven, his fear greatest when he felt closest, could almost smell the milk and honey. He likened souls such as his and Abigail’s, those that paused on the cusp of salvation, to “trees in winter, like seed in the spring suppressed under a hard clod of earth.”

  This was how she blossomed: After three days of scripture reading and three days of terror, she awoke on a Monday morning before dawn. Her mind felt like a windless pond, clear and flat and still, reflecting the heavens. And then words filled her, language flowing in like water. “The words of the Lord are pure words, health to the soul, and marrow to the bones.” And: “It is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun.” A light so bright…

  Abigail exclaimed to her good older brother, I have seen! As she had suffered in terror for three days, so “she had a repetition of the same discoveries of Christ three mornings together.” Each time before dawn. Each dark morning, her frail body cold beneath layers of quilts, the sky blue-black in the window, her skin sallow and wed too closely to the bone, the light came—“brighter and brighter.”

  Her cheeks, no doubt pale like Edwards’s, would have reddened, her eyes, huge in her emaciated skull, opened wide and shone like dark lanterns. She bloomed. She became a visible saint of the Lord. She asked her brother to help her to the homes of unconverted neighbors, that they might, she said, “see and know more of God.” He was shining in her glassy eyes. She wanted to go right away! House by house! Now! Now! She wanted to be a warning.

  Death became her obsession; Edwards did not discourage her. Together they spoke of her body, its submission to the divine. Her sister tried to feed her. She could swallow nothing. I have been “swallowed by God,” she told her minister. He must have shivered; he had often thought of salvation in those very words.

  Did Edwards lust for Abigail? He was not an unsensual man. He was a writer of love poems for his wife, Sarah, said to be the most beautiful woman along the Connecticut River, and father of ten children. He’d confessed to running elaborate mathematical problems through his mind to resist temptation. And yet despite the devices with which he meant to defend his purity, the thought of Abigail penetrated his mind. “Once, when she came to me,” he wrote, “she was like a little child, and expressed a great desire to be instructed, telling me that she longed very often to come to me for instruction, and wanted to live at my house, that I might tell her what was her duty.”

  Did Abigail long for more than the pastoral care? She was not so ambitionless as she had once seemed. She wanted, most of all, to be seen, and the more she spoke of dying, rapturously, the more he saw her; indeed, seemed to stare at her, even wrote about her. “I am willing to live, and quite willing to die,” she told him, “quite willing to be sick, and quite willing to be well.” Anything for God.

  She stopped drinking water. Her sister cried; Abigail smiled. “O sister, this is for my good!” Her sister could not understand. “It is best,” explained Abigail, “that things should be as God would have them.”

  Her brother read to her from the Book of Job, pausing as he came upon a passage about worms feeding on a dead body. No, go on. “It was sweet to her,” Edwards mused, “to think of her being in such circumstances.”

  Her eyes sank into her skull, her nostrils collapsed. Her hair became brittle. For three days she lay dying. Young men and women came to her bed and leaned in close to her dry lips to hear her. “God is my friend!” she’d whisper. Over and over. God is my friend!

  He had finally made her a woman. “Her flesh,” wrote Edwards near the end, “seemed to be dried upon her bones.” On Friday noon, June 27, 1735, her “weak clog” of a body submitted to Christ’s desire. She was, at last, beautiful in the eyes of God, and of Jonathan Edwards.

  YEARS AFTER THE revival, not long before his church purged him in 1750, Edwards wrote a reevaluation of what he had wrought—in essence, an appeal to reason, one that laid the foundation for the hybrid of science and faith that would become the cornerstone of fundamentalism: “As that is called experimental philosophy, which brings opinions and notions to the test of fact,” Edwards formulated, “so is that properly called experimental religion”—not in the sense of innovation, but of the science of sainthood—“which brings religious affections and intentions, to the like test.”

  Such tests were for the most part exercises of the mind. For example, Edwards was fascinated by atomic power. Not nuclear, of course, but what he perceived as the indivisibility of atoms, about which he had learned from Newton. The smallest of particles, he concluded, was also the most powerful, for it alone was possessed of the power of resistance; one could not break it down any further, surely proof of an animating force, a creator.

  And then, Edwards surpassed Newton. In 1723, thinking of light and color, perhaps the green leaves of summer—which, Edwards had come to understand, were not really green, had no color at all—he leaped centuries ahead to imagine an indivisible atom divided, the power that binds it broken, an almost incomprehensible reversal of creation. That is, imagined the mind of God as he knew it removed from the green of the leaves, the blue of the sky, our bodies that are not our own. “Deprive the world of light and motion,” he wrote, “and the case would stand thus with the world: There would be neither white nor black, neither blue nor brown, bright nor shaded, pellucid nor opaque, no noise or sound, neither heat nor cold, neither fluid nor wet nor dry, hard nor soft, nor solidity, nor extension, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor proportion; nor body, nor spirit. What then is become of the universe? Certainly, it exists nowhere but in the divine mind.”

  In Boston and London he was judged a genius or a fanatic. In the little towns around Northampton, people thought of him as either a new Moses, leading them to the Promised Land they had long believed the colonies to be, or vulgar Ahab—angry, obsessed, ignorant of the compromises one must make to get along. His own relations among the so-called River Gods of the valley—powerful merchants and more conventional preachers—rebuked him. He would not have survived in his pulpit as long as he did had he not been protected by a cousin, John Stoddard, another grandson of Solomon Stoddard. But whereas Edwards followed his grandfather to the pulpit, Stoddard followed his grandfather’s example to power. The wealthiest landowner for miles, he made himself magistrate, representative to the assembly, and colonel of the militia. He was a feudal lord, and Edwards was the high priest of his benefactor’s authority.

  His religion was radical, available to all classes and even to slaves, an inspiration to the n
ascent sense of individual liberty that would become the American Revolution, but his politics were warlike and controlling. Empire struck him as an ideal vessel for the Gospel. He preached often against envy, but named as envy only that feeling which filled those of lesser wealth, or lesser land, or lesser status, who determined to band together to wrest power from above. Such less-privileged men gathered in taverns—Northampton had three—and instead of contemplating Christian harmony, conspired in “party spirit” to reshape not their souls but their fields. The wealthiest few of the valley owned at least a quarter of its arable ground.

  Sin fermented in such taverns, charged Edwards, listing a catalog of crimes of the spirit that might just as easily come from the mouth of a fundamentalist today. He railed against the common man’s propensity toward lawsuits, against young women who carried themselves like men and young men who dressed in an unmanly style. Pornography was another vice that preoccupied him. His downfall began when he rebuked a group of boys—converted Christians, no less—for stealing and reading midwives’ manuals and applying their studies with hands-on investigations, the science of groping. The boys got off, so to speak, because they were wealthy, but another story surfaces when we consider that the boys in turn rebuked the reverend. Don’t you point fingers, they said; we know where yours have been. Did you hold Abigail’s hand as she lay dying?

  The spring of Northampton’s revival, Edwards spent much time counseling his uncle, Joseph Hawley, who under his nephew’s tutelage began to see secrets within himself, and worse—the meaninglessness of self, of “Joseph Hawley.” The hand of God dangled him over the pit by a spindly leg as if he was nothing but a spider. An angry God, yes, but what was worse—overlooked by historians who emphasize the wrath of Edwards’s sermons—He was also a loving God. “Majesty and meekness joined together,” wrote Edwards, “…an awful sweetness.” Edwards cared little for the Calvinism of his forebears when put next to the vision of God he seemed to most favor, that of a giant mouth awaiting your submission—waiting to swallow you, Edwards would write in his diaries, to make you one with everything. Which is to say—nothing. Only your sense of being kept this from happening now, now. Not hellfire but the temptations of self—what later generations of evangelicals would rage against as secular humanism—birthed Joseph Hawley’s despair.

  Hawley stopped sleeping. He stayed up at night in the still of his home, “meditating on terror.” In March, another man in a similar state slit his own throat, but he was in such a hysteria—a man of such weak character—that he botched the job and survived, blocked from entering hell as well as heaven. Joseph Hawley was not such a fool. He was a seller of guns and tobacco, a man of substance in Northampton. But his nephew Jonathan revealed to him a deeper reality, in which substance itself became suspect. In May Edwards preached to the congregation as he might have spoken to Hawley in private settings: “You have seen the filthiness of toads…” You, declared Edwards with great and compelling certainty, are even lower. Next to the souls of the unchosen, even “putrefied flesh” smells sweet to God. Hawley, a man “of more than common understanding,” took the lesson. Using what must have been a sharp blade—he also sold knives—he opened beneath his firm chin a bright red smile.

  The pious and the melancholy, those who were saved and those were waiting, those who did not care at all—every sort of person came now to Jonathan Edwards, knocking on the pastor’s door. Can I come in? I heard something…He knew what they’d heard. He’d been hearing it from them for days now, each testimony so much like the last that he must have forgotten who was giving voice to the words, man or woman, ancient or child, saying this: I heard a strange voice in my mind; it seemed so compelling and right (like yours, Reverend Edwards).

  Edwards recorded the data. Cut your own throat, the voice without a body whispered into the ears of his flock. Cut your own throat! Now! Now!

  He did not count the bodies of those who did so.

  SALVATION WAS FOR Edwards a science, worthy of careful record keeping. The twin shadows of righteousness and purity—hatred and self-loathing—he dismissed as undeserving of the scrutiny of his amazing mind. Or did he? “Remember,” he wrote to himself once, “to act according to Prov. 12:23, ‘A prudent man concealeth knowledge.’” He did as much in his Faithful Narrative, weaving a web of logic and argument beneath the surface of a story that attracted a popular audience drawn by its portrait of sin and tragic account of redemption. In so doing, Edwards staked out a political position as well as a spiritual one, a subtly elitist conception of knowledge as a property to be possessed in different portions according to a divine hierarchy. The wise man of Christ knows that only to some does God give a calling, the power to draw closer to Him and understand His grand plan.

  In 1750, Edwards’s congregation purged him. Not for the blood that flowed from his revival, but simply as a result of the power he’d unleashed. To preserve the old Puritan order, Edwards had destroyed it; but he was ill prepared for what the new believers—fiercer in their faith than ever Puritans had been—would build from the ruins, not just in Northampton but across the colonies. Edwards’s books enflamed men to burn other books on town commons, his tale of Abigail Hutchinson gave license to women to tear at their dresses on the cobblestoned streets of cities, screaming for contact with a God as intimate as Edwards’s story. In Northampton, the believers turned against him not for the pain his religion drew forth but for shying away from the radicalism of the revolution he had inspired.

  He went west—to an Indian mission in Stockbridge, a town even closer to the edge of British civilization than Northampton, itself a city considered by proper Bostonians still half-wild. Among the Mahican Indians he pondered the vicissitudes of the mood he had stoked, its brightness and its darkness, its hymnody and its screeching, the new birth it offered and the death’s-head that grinned alike on the saved and the damned. He was a man given to the study of oneness. Perhaps he recognized that the heart full of feeling and the calculating mind full of knowing, like the thunder and lightnings he so adored, were simply two expressions of the same phenomenon, an American religion, one so well suited to the brutal demands of the building of a new Jerusalem—conquest; unrestrained capital; the rights of men and women to speak for themselves; and the rights of stronger men to command their submission for the greater cause—that it would still insist, two and a half centuries later, that all the world is a frontier, in dire need of revival, and a new chosen people.

  3.

  THE REVIVAL MACHINE

  THE MYTH PERSISTS,” WROTE the historian Timothy L. Smith several decades ago, “that revivalism is but a half-breed child of the Protestant faith, born on the crude frontier, where Christianity was taken captive by the wilderness.”1 Like all myths, it is almost true. But the captive taken was wilderness itself, and the captor was the American religion. Jonathan Edwards—and, later, Charles Grandison Finney—did not so much tame the wilderness of the American mind as tap its secret power. Nearly a hundred years after Edwards awakened Northampton, Finney would lead a series of revivals across the Northeast and Britain that would win for his populist vision of evangelicalism not the hundreds who were converted under Edwards, but uncounted multitudes. In what was then the heart of Manhattan he built the Broadway Tabernacle, the country’s first megachurch. It seated 2,500, and often close to twice that number crowded into the sanctuary—a pillared theater in the round like a Roman stadium—for Finney’s orchestrations of scripture and sentiment, moralism and sensation. Crowds fell like wheat before his beautiful, terrifying, consoling voice. Most receptive to his message were the new little big men of the nation, the petit bourgeoisie, physicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, self-made men and their wives, wealthier than the old Puritan aristocracy. “Under my preaching,” Finney boasted of just one of his many revivals in the new city of Rochester, “judges and lawyers and educated men were converted by the scores.”2

  Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, extended the vote to men without property. Charles
Grandison Finney, whose early career strangely mirrored Jackson’s presidency, extended the passionate God of the frontier, the pious morality of hellfire and certainty, to the men and women who would lay the foundations of the Gilded Age. Here we find the origins of evangelicalism as we know it: the marriage of new money and “new life” that would stoke the furnaces of industrial empire. It was a different expression of democracy than Jackson’s, but just as potent. And, overlooked by the successive generations of evangelicals and fundamentalists who study Finney’s revivals to this day—Billy Graham insists that “no one can read [Finney] without being challenged by his passion for evangelism”3—we find also an intimacy, a love of secret feelings that Edwards would have understood and that we can recognize in the blend of masculinity and sentiment, muscle and tender self-regard, that suffuses fundamentalism even now.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of October 7, 1821, after yet another church service that left him bored, Charles Grandison Finney decided to settle the question of God. “A splendid pagan of a man,” in his grandson’s description, he was, at twenty-nine, six-two, thick-chested, could wrestle any challenger to the ground.4 Women thought him the most elegant dancer in Adams, a farming hamlet on the rough western edge of New York. His sandy hair was thin on top but given to a rakish curl, and his violet eyes were so bright they leap out even from black-and-white photographs, “intense, fixating, electrifying, madly prophetic eyes,” wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, “the most impressive eyes—except perhaps for John C. Calhoun’s—in the portrait gallery of nineteenth-century America.”5