Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England by Douglas L. Winiarski (review)

Douglas L. Winiarski's award-winning book (Bancroft Prize; Book of the Year by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; etc.) traces the breakdown of the "New England Way"—how Congregationalism was organized in the first century of Puritan settlement—amid the rise of religious fervor that would become American evangelicalism. He argues that this transition, which has been explored by David D. Hall, Harry S. Stout, Susan Juster, Erik R. Seeman, Mark Valeri (et al.), was more sudden and dramatic than previously thought: lived religion in the 1740s should be seen as a radical break with the past rather than as a coda to Puritanism. Winiarski's methods, relying on thousands of diaries, church testimonies, letters, and other manuscripts to show how the language of laypeople changed throughout this shift, make this book not only innovative but also something of a multidisciplinary model. Multidisciplinary because his intense attention to language and specific devotional tropes adds a literary component to the historian's habit of combing through and categorizing expansive (church) records. Winiarski asserts that "all experiences are mediated by, or, to be more precise, constructed through language. Examining the religious lives of provincial New Englanders demands paying close attention to the changing vocabularies, grammars, tropes, idioms, and story frameworks they inscribed in their… personal papers" (12). The single most powerful trope that people used time and again to describe the religious transformation they saw around and within them was darkness and light coming over the land, as in Winiarski's title. Thanks to his sweeping and inclusive view of lay (and sometimes ministerial) discourse, we hear people from all walks and stages of life interpreting the spiritual significance of everyday events. His argument that religious and historical change is structured and made manifest by how believers adjust their representative and exegetical strategies is ingenious and convincing.

Organized in five chronological parts that hinge on events (such as George Whitefield's 1740 tour of North America and the New London bonfires of 1743), the book uses older studies of New England life focusing on particular towns and congregations, but mainly Winiarski's own painstaking archival sleuthing to compile a veritable chorus of changed believers. For every well-known voice, such as Nathan Cole's (133–39), there are at least a dozen lesser-known ones such as Marston Cabot (145–46), Andrew Croswell (148–49), Daniel Rogers (152–53), and Joshua Bowles (153). Although cataloguing responses to a particular event is often an easy way of asserting its importance, Winiarski actually takes a much longer view because he goes back in time to see how these occurrences changed people's expressions and interpretations. Take the governing trope of the first chapter on New England congregationalism: Christian life meant "walking in the ways of holinesse" (117). Incontestable as this may seem, Winiarski shows how Whitefield's sermons convinced people that prayerful habits and good deeds alone will not save them. Itinerant ministers (including Whitefield) explicitly attacked the idea of a godly walk, which had become shorthand for studying one's Bible, catechism, and other holy books, while engaging in devotional ritual and leading an upright existence. Instead, the profound inner change that attends an emotional coming to Christ is required. As Nathan Cole writes: "My hearing him [Whitefield] preach, gave me a heart wound My old Foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness would not save me. … [I had] built his house upon the sand" (139). "Cole's erosional metaphor," as Winiarski calls it, which he helpfully traces to Matt. 7:26, draws attention to just how much the new spiritual experiences depended on a dismantling of the older religious establishment both in theory and everyday practice.

Using so many unknown lay sources—from the personal religious history of Cambridge...