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 What was the impact of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?

Impact on individuals

The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. Participants became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights", while the preachers who remained unemotional were referred to as "old lights". People affected by the revival began to study the Bible at home. This effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation.

Impact on American Revolution?

Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) argues that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom. However, Heimert has been criticized for not recognizing the differences between educated and uneducated evangelists, and for not recognizing the significance of Separate-Baptists and Methodists.[3]

Some historians, in particular, Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible (1986), have seen the First Great Awakening as a means by which humbler colonial Americans were able to challenge their 'social betters'. Harry Stout (1986) has even suggested that the first Great Awakening radically democratized mass communication in the colonies, setting the stage for new popular politics later in the revolutionary decades that followed.

Christine Leigh Heyrman (1984) and Christopher Jedrey (1979) and others have been highly critical of this interpretation, arguing instead that The First Great Awakening was an essentially conservative movement a continuation of other, earlier religious traditions.

 





Here s a portion of what Edward J. Gallagher has to say about "Sinners":

NEITHER in the height of popularity enjoyed while living nor in the fall from grace experienced thereafter does Jonathan Edwards approach the literary trajectory of a Longfel- low. Still, one cannot help but conclude that Edwards is a casu- alty of the decentering of Puritanism and the devaluing of reli- gious writing signaled by Philip Gura over a decade ago.' Though the editors of the Jonathan Edwards Reader, published since Gura issued his vade mecum, rightly label Edwards "colo- nial America's greatest theologian and philosopher . . . the tow- ering figure of an age in which religion predominated,"2 the study of our early literature now begins in pre-Columbian Na- tive America and ranges from charms to corridos. Such a broadening of focus has necessarily had its effect on the atten- tion we devote to the Great White Fathers of our past. Thus we watch Edwards's presence in an oft frequented literary mu- seum like the Heath Anthology of American Literature shrink from nine selections over sixty-seven pages to four over thirty- four just across the three editions published in the 1990s.3 Whatever the vagaries of critical whittling, however, I think it is still safe to say that there will never be an American literature without "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It is simply too compelling. And, in my opinion, it has not yet yielded all of its secrets. Edwin H. Cady asked what he rightly called "the fundamen- tal question" over fifty years ago in the pages of this journal: '"Why, then, was 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' so suc- cessful in its mission of reducing previously blase Enfield, Con- necticut, to shuddering terror? Why has it become the classic of hell-fire and brimstone preaching. ... [W]hat made the sermon so very effective? Where lie the springs of its success?"4 Ac- counting for the demonstrable efficacy of "Sinners" in the pub- lic sphere ultimately involves analyzing the tricky relationships among text, times, occasion, and the specific audience, but Cady limited his sights, as do I, to the sermon itself. What can we see in the work that seems to trigger its impact? What strategies mounted by Edwards, the conscious literary artist, can we detect? Admittedly, such concerns may seem a bit old- fashionedly formalistic in our era of sophisticated literary the- ory and cultural studies, but I think they will remain the basic ones that readers, especially new readers, bring to the text. And thus though modern scholars from Edward H. Davidson to J. A. Leo Lemay, but especially William J. Scheick and Willis J. Buckingham, have followed Cady and studied "Sinners" in de- tail, I don't believe their valuable insights yet exhaust meaning- ful answers to his fundamental questions. So I would like to en- courage a fresh look at the anatomy of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by taking up the unfinished business of how it is constructed-by teasing some more information out of prior in- sights and by offering some new ones of my own

"Sinners" is synonymous with the Great Awakening, that time in the early eighteenth century when the spiritual lid blew off New England. This so-called spider sermon was preached most famously to the hard-case congregation of Enfield on 8 July.1741, at what Ola Winslow has called "the height of revival ex- citement."5 Edwards's text, "Their foot shall slide in due time," yields the doctrine that "There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God."6 An overwhelming sense of God's sovereignty, Edwards was calculating, would awaken the unconverted in the congre- gation. The means he unabashedly chose to inspire awe was, quite simply, horror: "Since there is a hell man must be fright- ened out of it." "Some talk as if it is an unreasonable thing to fright persons to heaven," Edwards wrote, "but I think it is a reasonable thing to endeavor to fright persons away from hell. They stand upon its brink, and are just ready to fall into it, and are senseless of their danger. Is it not a reasonable thing to frighten a person out of a house on fire?"7 And so the challenge to understanding the power of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" has always been in discerning the character of that horror and the ways in which it is evoked.




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