Jonathan Edwards’s White Theology

This article reconceives the impact of Jonathan Edwards in American cultural history by describing his role in the development of an eighteenth-century evangelical historical imaginary that can be described as a “white theology.” It reads Edwards’s “History of the Work of Redemption” alongside other evangelical histories of the 1740s as documents of legitimation of an innovative religious movement. Edwards and others developed a new mode of historicity, which they understood as rational and civilizational, arguing that the revivals were both consistent with ancient biblical history and that they initiated the coming of the kingdom of God. Edwards and others imagined these end times as the expansion of British Empire through the global spread of printed books and English manners, articulating a “white theology” that initiated a segregation of American theologies. Understanding the evangelical Edwards in American culture helps to dismantle familiar, but problematic, “continuity narratives” of Edwards’s influence and to negotiate the theological problematics of racial politics in the contemporary US.