The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History

Abstract

P RONOUNCING recovery of American religious possibly |the most important achievement of last thirty years for understanding American culture, Henry F. May in i964 highlighted six topics restored to the historical front parlor, including three-Puritanism, Edwardsian Calvinism, and revivalism that had much engaged colonial specialists.1 Revisiting this list in late i990S brings to mind how much early American scholarship had contributed to larger resurgence May noted. It also prompts thoughts on degree to which prevailing view of this trinity had come to color expositions not only of New England ways but also of entire colonial period. Now is as good a time as any to take stock of how early American religious history has changed in interim. Credit for bringing religion to forefront of colonial historiography belongs principally to Perry Miller, who remade New England studies in three decades following publication of Orthodoxy in Massachusetts in 1933. Asserting analytic superiority of intellectual history, Miller took writings of New England's ministers as seriously as they did themselves. Perceiving in their theology and literature means for comprehending region's past, he reconstructed powerfully coherent ideational system infusing New England's creed and turned efforts of a clerical clique on Europe's Atlantic periphery to solve their provincial conundrums into intellectual melodramas evoking timeless human strainings to raise God's veil. In process, he vivified study of American Puritanism, refigured Jonathan Edwards from raging arachniphobe into enlightened intellect, and discovered purposive discourse among revivalists where others had found merely rant or cant. In Miller's tale, New England saints designed an