Over the past few years, there have been reports of a “quiet revival” on both sides of the Atlantic. While commentators differ on what the data proves, one fact should be clear to New Englanders: our region has been deeply shaped by Protestant convictions and past seasons of spiritual revival.
You can’t get very far in Concord —or in New England more broadly—without vivid reminders of this Christian legacy, etched into our institutions, architecture and civic life.
Drive down Pleasant Street, and you’ll see the South Congregational Church whose roots go back to the fiery and fervent Puritans who sought to bring spiritual reformation to the Church of England.
Less than a mile away, note the namesake of Concordia Lutheran Church — the 16th-century German Reformer whose bold preaching of salvation by grace alone triggered what is arguably the most significant religious movement since the time of the Apostles.
And while you’re out, swing by the Wesley United Methodist Church on Clinton Street, and observe the name of the great 18th-century revivalist, John Wesley, who famously declared: “I want the whole Christ for my Savior, the whole Bible for my book, the whole Church for my fellowship, and the whole world for my mission field.”
But the fingerprints of Christian fervor go deeper and wider than steeples and stained glass. Even the logic behind your compulsory public education has its roots in a distinctly Protestant belief. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts lawmakers believed that literacy was a critical bulwark against the Devil’s most baneful weapon — ignorance. Lest there be a chink in society’s spiritual armor, everyone needed to learn how to read the Bible.
Accordingly, in 1647, they enacted a law known as the “Old Deluder Satan” Act, requiring towns of a certain size to provide schooling so that children could learn to read the Scriptures. This established the principle, quite radical for its time, that communities were responsible to educate their children so they could read, reason and exercise moral judgment. That religious motivation helped lay the groundwork for New England’s enduring commitment to public education.
Consider also the elite colleges and universities of New England. Today, Dartmouth College is hardly known for its evangelistic fervor, but when it was founded in 1769, its mission was explicitly Christian: to train ministers, including Native Americans, for pastoral service in the wake of the First Great Awakening. The college’s seal still bears the Latin phrase, “Vox clamantis in deserto,” or “A voice crying in the wilderness,” a direct biblical reference to John the Baptist. (The College’s namesake, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, was a devout Methodist and a close friend of John Newton, the slave-trader-turned-abolitionist who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.”)
Dartmouth was no exception. Harvard, Yale and Brown, despite differing origins and emphases, were founded with the shared aim of educating pastors and Bible teachers to serve the church. To their founders, the realities of heaven and hell — and of Jesus’ death and resurrection to save humans from sin — were not “bugs” in their institutions’ charters, but their raison d’être. These convictions formed the bedrock of meaning itself, and fueled revival. If these claims were not true, then nothing was.
It followed, then, that the study of the Bible was not just one academic discipline among others. Quite the opposite: logic, ethics, politics and the study of the classics were subservient to theology, the “queen of the sciences.” Nothing could be more important, either in this life or the next, than to nurture and share a heartfelt, scripturally informed relationship with God.
Whatever one thinks of those convictions today, they were the taproot of institutions we continue to benefit from. They were the fuel for the revivals that swept this region in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries. And it is worth asking whether New England is better off for having largely abandoned them.
At the height of the revival of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin remarked on its uplifting effect: “It was wonderful,” he marveled, “to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seem’d as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.” In Northampton, Mass., the effect was similar. Its minister, Jonathan Edwards, observed that as a result of the revival, “People had soon done with their old quarrels, backbitings, and intermeddling with other men’s matters. The tavern was soon left empty. . . . It was a time of joy [for] families.”
This is not to smear over the difficulties that came with the revivals — as the people of that day were well aware. Rather, it is to acknowledge that many people experienced these revivals as a time of much-needed communal spiritual renewal, and that its driving motivation was not social reform for its own sake, but a deeper reckoning with humanity’s need for God.
One can only imagine what effect another revival might have on New England today. Might a region struggling with drug addiction, homelessness and, above all, spiritual emptiness, do well to hope and pray for revival to come again?
Jonathan Threlfall lives in Bow and serves as the lead pastor of Trinity Baptist Church.