by Larry Kramer
Faith, long dwindling in popularity and becoming increasingly rote for all—forget the Hookers and the Mathers, timid fellows—is now passionately resuscitated. Too many are the scholars of this sort of thing who look upon the Edwards phenomenon as nothing short of “a landmark of American religious history,” as too many biographers and historians also note. Would that someone called his gatherings orgiastic. Laundresses and all those who washed clothes report men’s underpants as semen-stained and the periods of women brought on prematurely. This guy is tuned in to his crowd and is giving them what they want.
“The God who holds you over the pit of hell abhors you.” Yes, there is something about this blackest of appraisals of man on earth that evidently appeals and no one questions it, then or since. It’s not so much that the soul’s poisonous vapors are vented, freed at last from interior captivity, as it is that Edwards seems to know something no one else does about his audiences and their fears and souls, indeed their needs and desires, careening unmoored ever since this lot of The American People first set foot in America. The previous lot of preachers evidently didn’t do the trick. Yes, sir. The American People have not been yelled at, hell, excoriated effectively for almost a hundred years now, and here comes the Reverend Jonathan Edwards to snap the newest conscripts back into shape. He is telling each man and woman: You are a piece of shit. And each man and woman is answering: Yes, I am! I beg for mercy! Yes, I am a piece of shit!
Hate, fear, these are what have always kept the troops in line and they haven’t been planted, watered, and fertilized for too long.
Oh, the blackness of it all. Oh, the willingness of it all. That self-hate can come so easily to the souls of The American People. However are we to be saved—from this?
Why, just to hear his words, just to have their worst inner fears confirmed, the masses weep, they pray and plead piteously for help and hope.
But Edwards never ends on a note of hope. He leaves them weeping, crawling, mewling, orgiastically begging for mercy.
For some perverse reason this period in our history is called the Great Awakening. Who thought that one up?
Cleverly, Edwards’s prescription for living each day is less physically exhausting than any earlier Puritan preacher’s. Perhaps this is its appeal. (His wife was Thomas Hooker’s great-granddaughter and his daughter married the father of the future Aaron Burr: few major characters in American history escape being effectively related.) Numerous Hookers told you what you had to do for punishment. It took a lot of time. Edwards just tells you you’re a piece of shit and go home and live with it. Numerous Mathers told you that God hates you unless you do this and that and x and y. Edwards just tells you that God hates you. Bad deeds, evil thoughts, sex and carnality, all equal a wretched life “in after death.” Hookers and Mathers told you to stop doing them in this one. Edwards tells you you have them, you do them, and you will never stop, you hideous person. But you don’t have to go out after church and do anything except feel awful.
America’s population is growing rapidly toward its first million. Imagine: that at this time and place, which we still choose to see today in our minds’ eyes as a landscape scarcely populated, there are so many here already! And no one’s even counting the Indians. Or the slaves. Or the hushmarkeds. But then no one knows what they look like; they can pass even better than most Jews. Is the secret to our success that nothing keeps folk working harder than feeling so bad that only work can cure the pain?
The number of home incarcerations of family members deemed crazy after hearing Edwards is impressive. After his appearance near the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, out of a population of 3,412 in 1745, 567 family members are confined to their rooms “for reasons of unhealth in mind and spirit,” according to the records of the Congregational Church on the Green. If sex is the great sin, how can a young country procreate its future? Why is procreation acceptable but the pleasure that attends it not? Are people having trouble telling the two apart? You betcha. As Dr. Sister Grace has said, “I know these are questions that have been asked by every age. I add one to them: Why has no one answered them satisfactorily? Does that mean people want to feel terrible? Does that mean no one has brains enough to shout out, ‘Fucking hell, enough already!’?”
This new America is a hell on earth and it is proud of it. Go figure. Edwards will come to be held in high favor by East Coast academicians, particularly at Yaddah, which he entered at fourteen and graduated at seventeen and at which he was a tutor, and where one day a dorm will be named for him. Yaddah is proud of this man.
Here is part of his sermon given on Northampton Green in 1749, as reprinted in The Complete and Unedited Sabbath Sermons and Diatribes of the Good Reverend Jonathan Edwards (The Presses of Yaddah at New Godding and Guilford, 1845).
True, God loves you. True! True! True, God hates you! More true! Do not fool yourself this hate of God’s is love in some disguise! It is Hate! True and fearful Hate! And you deserve this Hate! Your thoughts each day and night, through sleep and work, through toil and sweat and dreams are wretched thoughts, filled with carnal desire for every other living thing. You lust for her, you lust for him, your lust and need are indiscriminate and everlasting and impossible of eradication. You are doomed to lust for life and unto death, when only bitter peace will come at last to sever pain before you are consigned to everlasting Hell, and for that we thank you, Lord.
We thank you, Lord, for barring all escape.
I list here the names of all our brethren I have seen or heard to lust since we met last. I name Ogilvie, John, for lusting after his neighbor, Aberdeen, Richard. I name Stiles, Martin, for lusting after his oldest son, Stiles, James. I name Murano, Philip, for lusting after his fellow student, Underling, Tom. I name Fewling, Adam, for lusting after his fellow student, Ash, Anthony. I name …
There are one hundred men named in this way, all lusting after other men.
Then begins the listing of lustings of men for women. There are four hundred of these.
Then begins the listing of lustings of women for women. There are forty-five of these.
The sermon and namings are followed by another sermon, after which begins the listing of lusting children. There are mercifully fewer of these, but their naming takes longer because mothers faint. A certain pride in the ability to faint with honest, loud, repentant fervor is considered a plus. Fathers, of course, fiercely and loudly slug their kids.
In the wake of each Sunday’s bleatings, there are also “some dozen strokes, conniption deaths, and suicides, each and every week with sureness” among the faithful flock (see Records of the Towne of New Haven, Colony of Connecticut, for the Years Before the Declaration). On one particularly arduous Easter Sunday, the naming of names and the callings to the Lord take nine hours and the death toll following the service rises to forty-two, in part because a number of parents stab their sinning children to death as gifts to Jesus. Three young Negro children are also found dead from stabbing.
By 1750, the Awakening has been put to sleep. Liberal members of Edwards’s congregation, along with an organized opposition no doubt whipped up and controlled by rival preachers tired of empty pews on Sunday, joined by a growing number of people returned to relative sanity and able to speak out against Edwards’s single-mindedness in damning simply everyone as so confoundedly awful, force him to resign his calling in the east.
But that doesn’t stop him.
He goes west.
Edwards is enamored of the philosophy of the German Meister of Lehmbruck. The Meister’s beliefs involve such surrender to God as to convulse the body until a sign is received from God. What this “sign” might be is not specified. In Germany some followers summon snakes, others speak suddenly in strange tongues, yet others succumb to what can only be called orgiastic fervor, usually imprecisely described but often said to involve immolation and dead bodies. “You will know it when you are called to it,” the Meister is said to have counseled, “just as you will know those only pretending to be
called.” Religion as excessive orgy thus receives a resuscitating stimulation from this Meister of Lehmbruck, with his coreligionists now arriving in America in increasing numbers and commingling with Edwards and his lot. It is this combined group of zealots that then travels farther and farther west, establishing wilderness settlements to accommodate their increasingly fervored and fevered lettings-go, farther from the view of whatever leavening civilization is settling in more eastern states. I’m talking about such northwestern outposts and townships as Fedenta, Roundabout, Sequentia, Snake Pass, Revolta, and later Partekla, each and every one still there to this day. Partekla, in what will become Idaho, close to the Canadian border, will prove to be of singular importance to our plague. Stay tuned. Follow the bouncing ball.
Jonathan Edwards is a handsome firebrand, a movie-star type of his day, with piercing eyes. His wife is a dog, and all Jonathan can say about her is that she is “always full of joy and pleasure,” neither of which he appears to approve. He genuinely believes he is preaching love. “Salutary terror,” he calls it, quoting from Revelation 21:5: “Behold, I make all things new.”
Why does it not occur to anyone that what Edwards goes on about so is harmful, and accomplishes little that is good? “I am ready to say,” Yaddah’s Professor of Early American History Perry Miller gushes, “that the Great Awakening was … a transformation, a blaze that consumed the theological universe of the seventeenth century, and left the American wilderness to rake the embers for a new concept of meaning.” Perry Miller is held in his own great esteem for rescuing all these preachers from obscurity, in the literary and cultural sense. He thinks they’re just swell. Why do so many “great” teachers and scholars and academics fail the test of reason, of perception, of the true sense of the hideousness they are extolling for its originality, for its transformative energy, for its “newness,” for its contribution to our becoming The American People? When is anyone of any repute going to start saying “Hogwash.” Newness is not enough, never ever.
It is not to be. The religious duties and obligations of The American People are being codified and set in stone. Preachers spring up everywhere, no longer needing the college education of their colonial predecessors. The never-ending revivalist movements—to be called the Second Great Awakening—undermine the old established religious orders of Congregationalists and Anglicans and create a religious world dominated by evangelical Methodists and Baptists. In 1811 alone more than three million Americans will attend revivalist camp meetings.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jonathan Edwards is a hallowed name. He is assessed as full of humanity, a loving man and husband, and possessed of “an awareness of joy.” “The famous image of Puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be happy’ is a caricature that needs laying to rest, however amusing it might be.” What rock did this Brit who wrote this in the Times Literary Supplement live under? Amusing? Well, YRH is not amused.
Let us move on, battered but unbowed.
Now, and next: Who asks, If God is so terrifying what else is left but money?
But how can money, and the seeking of it, and the acquisition of it, be made less sinful?
We shall see.
* * *
I’ve got to say business was pretty good, here and there, but it was spotty. Lots of you guys went to these Great Awakening things but when you got home you were all tuckered out, as I heard you describe it, and so I still could not get the purchase, the traction, the grab-on, the hold on you that I need to make a really big-bang all-out all-American winner for me. So my cases were scattered hither and yon and nobody paid much attention to me or the cause and effect of it all when some people did catch me and leave their life on earth.
Your “straight” men are terrible fuckers. Up and at ’em and into her and out of her and all to sleep in five minutes. I give a top-quality job and that takes more time. I have to prepare myself and go into his dick and slither and grease hither and yon in his immune system, and I am the only one at present who even knows what an immune system is. Not that this makes any difference to what I’m trying to say here. Just wanted to stick it in. Sticking it in is the problem. There is for many early years in your New World a real problem with really sticking it in. Men have a fearfulness about plunging in too deep for some reason, maybe for fear of hurting the missus, or like some kid afraid to go into the water lest it to be too deep and the tide will swallow him. Also the missus, she is not so comfortable with being penetrated too deeply herself. Afraid of possible pain, of getting hurt, of “being cleft in twain,” as I’d hear some of them say, or probably just of getting pregnant yet again. Neither one of them, man and woman, had learned yet about the pleasure principle, the let-yourself-go-and-it-feels-better principle. As I say, no one seems to be enjoying themselves or know how to.
A VERY IMPORTANT LECTURE
What makes a rich man? What makes him worthy of remark? What of envy? And how does he get away with it? God does not like the greedy, or so we are told.
Silver, not gold, is what it’s all about in colonial America. Most of the gold has been looted and sent to Spain to finance more of whatever they’re doing over there at the moment to make the rest of the world, including their own people, miserable. So silver it is, and fortunately there are big strikes around and about (the biggest in Bolivia, which Joseph Conrad will write about in Nostromo), all south of the border, or what will one day soon become the border, but it trickles north, the silver does, since things of value never stay in one place for long. Silver becomes a currency of sorts, but not in the form of coins: coins won’t come along until we have a Constitution that authorizes a U.S. Mint. Silver in bulk, in lumps, something of heft that can be weighed and transported, that’s the ticket.
Believe it or not, things are not moving as swiftly on the other side of the ocean, where you’d think they’d have had their money organized centuries ago. “The honor of creating Europe’s first freely circulating banknotes goes to the Livonian Johan Palmstruch, who founded the Stockholm Banco in Sweden…” but that was in 1656 (Money: A History, edited by Jonathan Williams, 1997). The British send over lots of “bills of exchange” for trade. And France will soon issue a ton of paper promises to help finance the American Revolution. But silver in lump form is in short supply and the colonies are desperate for some sort of local circulating currency. The big year is 1690. The Massachusetts Bay Colony puts out some paper bills.
Money is at last, as the British say, “to hand.”
Not much has been written about the role of wealth in early America. The concept of money, the sense of entitlement, the jealousy of the have-nots, all categories dear to the heart of modern economists, remain relatively unexplored by historians of our beginnings. We forget that many settlers arrive well-off, or well-enough-off, to have the necessary stake to become even better-off. It is difficult for a white man not to earn decent money. There is so much to do! Land needs to be bought and tamed. People need help. It would be the laziest of men who could not move forward, if only bit by bit.
To be considered rich a man would have today’s equivalent of $40,000. A very rich man would have access to money, land, and goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars today. It is difficult to pin down precise amounts. There are no banks, or when there are, no one puts everything into just one. Bookkeeping is private, and ledgers are often stashed away with valuable family papers—a Bible, a marriage certificate—and hence quite often lost to time.
What becomes increasingly visible, albeit so gradually that not much oohing and aahing goes on, is the manifestation of money. Houses become bigger; they are built with more-elaborate materials such as imported bricks; they are furnished with more things made by artisans who are closer to artists than to carpenters. Families have been so accustomed to living in barren saltboxes, with little room for comfortable chairs or sideboards or bedsteads, that when it dawns on the father of the house that there is now enough money for him and the missus to have
their own bedroom, he adds one. All of this is, as The American People will find themselves aware over and over from this moment on, an idea whose time has come.
It is a simple notion: to spend the money one is accumulating.
Up and down the East Coast, and increasingly inland, villages and towns are accumulating handsomely. Most visible wealth belongs to gentiles. Jews try not to show their worth in any way, going so far as to live humbly, if not wretchedly, to attract less notice.
Where are the hushmarkeds? Well, they are not called hushmarkeds for no reason. And there are no run-down neighborhoods yet for them to reclaim and redo and move into.
From few pulpits in the land are the accumulations of wealth condemned or chastised.
Pause to let this last statement sink in.
How does it happen, in a population approaching 2,250,000, that there are at least 7,300 households with assets worth today’s equivalent of $100,000 (The London School of Economics Handbook of Worldwide Wealth, 83d edition) and few men of God are screaming, “Cease, you worshipper of Mammon!”? What gives? Are these God über alles guys on the take? More likely they want to spend their own money, if possible, guilt-free.
There are two distinct and divergent schools of economic thought at play here. One school holds that from the start there is plenty of everything for everyone here in America—raw materials, land, good soil, good growing weather, food, timber, and of course freedom from interference—so everyone prospers mightily. (Today’s foremost exponent of this view is Britain’s Paul Johnson, called by The New Gotham’s Adam Gopnik “just too far out and cranky.”) The opposing school maintains that life is hard, labor is scarce, weather is defeating, Indians are untrustworthy, soil is rocky, crops are sporadic, and everyone is poking their nose down your throat and saying, “You can’t do that!” and if you get through to next week, much less next winter, you’ll have nothing but more of the same. It’s a hard life, it remains a hard life, and it won’t be long before the poverty and depression of urban areas, which all of the above failures drain into, will blight the growing nation. (The popularizer of this view is Howard Zinn, “too to the left for even the most rabid Marxist,” according to Professor Howard Lamar Guthrie of Yaddah University.)
