The Reinvention of New England, 1691-1770

Abstract

AMONG the recent debates concerning the intellectual L history of the American Revolution, few have stimulated more controversy than the relationship between political ideology and religious thought. Most commentators agree that the peculiar rhetoric of the Revolutionary generation cannot be understood apart from the religious culture of eighteenthcentury America, but they have differed substantially on the timing and the manner in which sacred and secular modes of thinking converged. Alan Heimert, for example, argues that Edwardsean Calvinism provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical, even democratic, social and political ideology, and evangelical religion embodied, and inspired, a thrust toward American nationalism.' Nathan Hatch, on the other hand, locates the politicization of religious rhetoric in New England during the French and Indian War.2 Both Heimert