Reclaiming Jonathan Edwards for Political Progressivism

Am I alone in having grown up with this image of Jonathan Edwards? — a wrathful Puritan, preach­ing a narrow, intellectually primitive Calvinism, smugly assuming his own place in the ranks of God’s predestined elect, with eternal damnation awaiting most of his parishioners, even as he insist­ed that they toe the rigid moral line in the here and now; still worse, a man of privilege and status who, to justify the social order of his day, blithely equated New England Puritans with God’s new Chosen People, thus advancing a doctrine that led, in the short run, to vile treatment of the Indians and, permanently, to a morally arrogant messianic strain in American foreign policy.

Certainly that is the image of Edwards the scholarly community has sustained through most of this century. Literary critics and progressive historians such as Carl Van Doren and Vernon L. Parrington have tended to dismiss him as irrelevant to our day or even to his own. The epilogue to Henry B. Parkes’s 1930 book, The Fiery Puritan, charges, for example, that “if Edwards had never lived, there would be today no blue laws, no societies for the suppression of vice, no Volstead Act.”

In truth, Edwards’s life and thought were vastly different from the caricature. He was a man of the establishment, yes, but one who defied and was brought down by the establishment, both ec­clesiastical and financial. He was a man of religion, but he probed the frontiers of avant-garde physics and psychology. He was an orthodox Calvinist even though he doubted his own salvation and feared the flames of Hell. He was an intellectual who, in the hierarchy of values, placed the impulses of the heart above the reasoned judgments of the mind. He was from birth a comfortable and prosperous man who, late in life, moved to the barren outer reaches of the frontier to work among the Indians.

Above all, Jonathan Edwards was an early 18th-century conservative who by his thought and by his personal courage has much to teach those of us who profess to be late 20th-century political lib­erals. For Edwards’s lifelong labors resulted not on­ly in brilliant books and essays but in the leading event of American colonial history, the First Great Awakening. The Awakening was marked by wide­spread and often frenzied religious conversions, which alone makes it something from which many modern liberals recoil. Such a response is utterly foolish. Written in the record of 18th-century re­vivalism is the nexus that, in American culture, has undergirded every important period of lasting re­form, the nexus between religious transformation, personal kindness, and social progress.