Re-reading Liberalism: Omission, Ambiguity, and Anomaly in New England Sermonic Literature, 1699–c. 1750

Abstract

Religious Liberalism in colonial New England is famously hard to pin down. The Liberals' public, occasional sermons, however, point to their core commitments if due attention is paid to overall context and to the various sermonic conventions these productions gleefully flout. What emerges from this analysis is not covert heterodoxy but a principled critique of the very idea of orthodoxy.