Awakenings - Experimental Religion

Experimental Religion

Little Stevie was right: As soon as I left Ivanwald, I became It.
That is, I’ve been chasing the story I rst encountered there ever
since, trying to t the religious practice I found in that Arlington
cul-de- sac onto a spectrum of belief where it seems to have no place.
It was at once as ordinary as a game of golf and stranger than any-
thing I’d seen in years of reporting from the margins of faith. Maybe
it was nothing but country club fundamentalism, worth little more
attention than Rotary or the Freemasons. But experienced from
within, the Fam ily was as perfectly absurd and—granted its own
logic—as perfectly rational as the Catholic dirt eaters of Chimayo,
New Mexico, who consider the dusty soil in one small spot in the
mountains capable of curing any ailment; or Shinji Shumeikai, an inter-
national sect of religious aesthetes who believe that by bui lding mod-
ernist architectural masterpieces in remote places they’re restoring
the planet’s balance, literally. But such convictions are self-contained,
interested mostly in internal purity. Indeed, the more eccentric the
religion, the more sharply its followers tend to de ne themselves
against the rest of society.
And yet, despite the Family’s theological oddities—its concen-


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 57
tric rings of secrecy, its fascination with megalomaniacs from Mao to
Hitler, its conviction that being one of God’s chosen provides divi ne
diplomatic im munity—it is anythi ng but separate from the world. It
so neatly harmonizes with the political shape of worldly things, in
fact, that it’s nearly indistinguishable from secular conceptions of
social order. It’s “ invisible” not because it’s hiding, but because it’s
not. Dism issed as “civil religion” by observers who know it only by
the National Prayer Breakfast’s annual broadcast on C-Span, the
Family’s long-term project of a worldwide government under God is
more ambitious than Al Qaeda’s dream of a Sunni empire. Had I not
stumbled into its heart, I would never have seen it. Since I had, I be-
gan to ask basic questions. Was the Family’s vision simply a pious
veneer on business as usual? Do its networks actually in uence the
world the rest of us live in? Is it an aberration in American religion,
or the result of a long evolution?
This last is a very di erent question from the one usually asked
about radical rel igion: “What do the believers want?” An understand-
able concern, but one that obscures the true shape of fundamental-
ism. Those of us not engaged in “spiritual war” attempt to contain
fundamentalism by reducing its ambitions to a program, an agenda:
the abolition of abortion, homosexuality, or maybe sex in general.
If the fundamentalists ever won, we tell ourselves, we would all be
forced to live like Puritans, or worse—the Tal iban. Fundamental-
ism, we conclude, is therefore un-American and doomed to wither
on our democratic soil.
But faith, radical or tepid, gentle or authoritarian, is always more
complicated and enduring than a caricature. The Family has grown
and taken root directly at the center of American democracy, inter-
twining with the world as it is. “Business as usual” is the Family’s
business. The elite fundamentalism of the Family doesn’t lead us
back to Plymouth Rock, much less to the Taliban’s Kabul. The Fami-
ly’s faith is not that of a walled-o community but of an empire; not
one to come but one that already stretches around the globe, the soft
empire of American dollars and, more subtly, American gods. If we
want to understand this fundamentalism, we must ask not what it


58 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
wants to do but what it has done: how it has run parallel to and at
times owed into the main c urrents of history. We must solve the
equation presented by Doug Coe: Jesus plus nothing. J + 0 = X. To
solve for X, the role of elite fundamentalism, we’ll need to consider
our variables: American Jesuses, plural, and nothing. Nothing, in this
equation, stands for a great deal. All that fundamentalism has aban-
doned, the story it does not tell: the history of where it came from
and how it came to live so close to the center of American power.


The plainest expression of the relationship between the theology
of Jesus plus nothing and the mundane world of secular democracy
may be found in the words of George W. Bush. Bush is not a member
of the Family, although his faith was shaped in a Bible study in Mid-
land, Texas, organized by a group the Family started in the late
1970s for the very purpose of bri nging in uential men into personal
relationships with each other and with a particular concept of Jesus.
In 1989, Doug Coe, addressing a private gathering of evangelical
leaders in Colorado Springs, assured them that Bush Senior—a secu-
lar sort whom they’d backed with reservations —was a Family rela-
tion, if perhaps a distant one. Moreover, he’d surrounded himself
with godly men such as James Baker and Jack Kemp and, yes, even
Dan Quayle, all associates of the Fam ily. Most promising of all, said
Coe, was Bush Junior, a good i n uence on his father.1 Twelve yea rs
later the younger Bush ran for president. At a 1999 debate in Des
Moines, Iowa, the moderator asked the then-candidate to identify his
favorite philos opher. His opponents had already named John Locke
and Thomas Je erson, but Bush said Jesus, because Jesus had changed
his heart. A murmur of surprise rippled through the crowd. The
moderator asked Bush to say more, implicit in his question the prob-
lem of how heart reconciles with the traditional province of philoso-
phy, mind. Bush answered as if the audience was not in the room.
“Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain.”
Pundits sco ed, but Bush’s response proved brilliant, a are in the
night for fundamentalist America—the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 59
irty 1980 remark to a convention of the National Religious Broadcast-
ers, “You can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.” And Bush’s words
meant more than those of Reagan, who seemed merely to promise politi-
cal favors. Bush avowed a strength of belief that must be felt to be fully
understood, a faith outside the tidy terminology of liberal religion. You
must be in the Word to get this powerful feeling. Well, if they don’t know,
it’s going to be hard to explain. It’s beyond rational de nitions. It’s an idea
that denies ideas, a xed intellectual position that rejects the primacy of
intellect and the signi cance of “positions.” Jesus plus nothing.
As a statement of philosophy, Bush’s rst answer—because He
changed my heart—insists on timelessness (Jesus in the present tense),
spacelessness (Jesus in Texas, in Des Moines, in Bush’s body), and
sel essness, though this last not in the sense of a modesty of spirit that
might lead one to help others, but rather in that of an inward gaze
that is simultaneously narcissistic and bl ind to the particulars of the
self it sees there, able only to perceive a heart remade by God. There’s a
word for this wide-eyed stare: piety. We are all familiar with the g-
ures of the pious church lady and the sanctimonious school marm, and
yet such characters fail to embody the meaning of piety as it has existed
for hundreds of years in Christianity and took root in America, rst
through the Puritans and then, in the fashion in which it l ives on to-
day, in the 1730s, in Northampton, Massachusetts, summoned from
the hearts of men, women, and children by the words of Jonathan
Edwards, the author of the Great Awakening.
Edwards’s legacy lies not in the Republic built on the Enlighten-
ment ideas of Locke and Je ersonian skepticism, but in the fact that
more than two centuries later, that nation remains one of the most re-
ligious on Earth, much of it devoted to a vision of Christendom that
originated with him. That this v ision was at its inception theocratic is
barely worth mentioning; among the elites of Edwards’s day, theocracy
was simply the “Calvinist scheme” which their forebears had come to
the New World to pursue. That the United States is, as much as ever, a
Christian nation, is a more controversial claim. “Historians of the
United States,” notes George Marsden, Edwards’s most perceptive bi-
ographer, “ have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin


60 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America.” That
oversight explains why most of American history cannot account for
the country’s ongoing rel igious fervor. Although American fundamen-
talism has lately attempted to claim Franklin as a forebear—a collec-
tion titled American Destiny: God’s Role in America trumpets three
apparently pious utterances of Franklin’s out of context and without
mentioning his equal enthusiasm for the sensual life and a Christless
deism—the legacy of Franklin’s ideas remains staunchly secular. But
the nation does not. Christ thrives in America not so much as an idea or
a deity as a mood: a feeling, a conviction, a sentimental commitment to
manifest destiny on a personal level, with national implications.
When I left Ivanwald, one of the se nior men, a former chief coun-
sel to Republican senator Don Nickles, told me I was making a terrible
mistake. “You may not be able to come back,” he said. He left it un-
clear whether that would be my choice or the Family’s, but I think I
know now what he meant. If I left, prematurely in his eyes, I would
literally no longer be within the mood. T he ideas I’d encountered
there might travel with me (as they have, in a manner the Family
didn’t anticipate), but the mood could not. After I left, I went to the
Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, where the Fam-
ily had deposited more than 600 boxes of documents, and I sifted
through these seventy years of its history in search of explicit theol-
ogy, an explanation for what I’d encountered. There were snatches of
argument, passages of theory, references and allusions which I have
since spent several years pursuing. But most of all there was the mood.
Oftentimes, in letters to one another, Family men wrote of it as a
“spirit” that spread like a disease, a “contagion,” they called it. Men
would come from around the world to spend time with Doug Coe, or
his pre deces sor, Abraham Vereide, to “catch the spirit of the work.”
Sometimes they’d talk politics; sometimes they’d make business deals.
But more often they simply basked together in the glory of “the work.”
One did not “learn” anythi ng; one found it in one’s own heart.
There is little taste for history among Family members, and the dis-
array of the 600 boxes it shipped o to the Billy Graham Center sug-
gests that nobody has ever been interested in looking backward. Not to


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 61
1935, when the Family began as a businessmen’s antilabor alliance in
Seattle, and certainly not farther back, to the roots of “the work.” Those
origins lie not in the New Testament, which is ultimately little more
than a fabric from which the Family constructs contemporary realities,
but in the dream of a Christian nation, “awakened,” as it was by Jonathan
Edwards in 1735, by a piety infused with enthusiasm and—an element
overlooked by most historians of the Great Awakening—an adoration of
power, divine and worldly, the intangible foundation of American em-
pire. The love of power—world-changing power, messianic power—is
not an American invention; but our civil religion, the belief that such a
love can coexist peacefully with both God and democracy, is.
Biographers of Edwards note the unlikely marriage within his
thought of the rigors of John Calvin—who argued that God cares so
little for good deeds or bad that he saves whom he will and damns the
rest of us—with the revelations of the Enlightenment, Locke’s political
ideas and the scienti c discoveries of Isaac Newton. But Edwards was
no mere synthesizer. His preaching and writing helped spark a re of
religiosity that swept the colonies and leaped back across the ocean to
the heart of the British Empire. Edwards rationalized religion; set it on
a course of wild re evangelism; and built a web of ideas in which the
radicalism of the American Revolution would be entangled with a spiri-
tual authoritarianism, an idea of God that did not so much emphasize
might rather than love as equate the two. Edwards’s Jesus was personal,
intimate, dedicated, like the Fam ily, to the slow breaking of souls.


Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with
respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.



—JONATHA N EDWAR DS, “OF INSECTS,” IN HIS PRIVATE JOUR NA L, 17162

Edwards’s genius was to describe his God not through declaration
but through observation. He wrote like a naturalist, of owers and
insects and cloud formations, all of creation bursting with revelation.
“And scarce any thing,” he confessed, “among all the works of nature,


62 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
was so sweet to me as thunder and lightni ng.” Edwards “felt God” at
the rst appearance of a thunderstorm: “I would x myself in order
to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic
and awful voice of God’s thunders.”
He was tall and slender, his face long and his features delicate, his
skin pale. He spoke i n a soft, lovely voice, and he liked to sing aloud
during storms, his lyrics the raw form of the prose he would later
com mit to writing. He began every day at four, because Christ rose
early, too, just three days after his cruci xion. Then he prayed, se-
cret prayers. Later, his wife, Sarah, would joi n him in his study, and
they would pray together in that light that rises before the sun, the
same blue light one nds at the heart of a ame.
He ate very little. He often studied for a dozen hours or more,
time passed “not in per usi ng or tr easur ing up the thoughts of others,”
wrote his nephew, but in wrestling with data from his own congre-
gation, tested agai nst ideas transm itted directly from God. “New
Light,” the believers at the time called the religion of Jonathan Ed-
wards. As a young man, he studied the Opticks of Newton, wrote pa-
pers about rainbows and twi nkl ing stars, and took delight i n science’s
discovery that the color of things in this world is not inherent but
merely a matter of perception. He loved to look at owers; he thought
often of how they would soon die. Fruit trees proved yet more re-
vealing. “That of so vast and innumerable a multitude of blossoms
that appear on a tree, so few come to ripe fruit.” So was it, he con-
cluded, with “the mass of mankind.”
He wrote of “true religion” as not of outward forms but of in-
ward emotion. He called this qual ity a ection and rated it more highly
than the thoughts and deeds of great men. He wrote about people
with whom powerful men had never concerned themselves.
One such was a woman named Abigail Hutchinson, whose last
days Edwards presented as a case study of conversion in the long es-
say that rst brought him trans-Atlantic fame. Edwards had the good
fortune to publish A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the
Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in 1736, just as developments in the
technology and economics of publishing were giving rise to that


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 63
modern genre known as “current events.” Lengthy works m ight be
made widely available so quickly that narratives that had once been
“ history” now became part of an ongoing conversation. He hoped
that his careful case study of revival, played out in the microcosm of
one sick young woman’s ravaged body, would forge out of religion a
new natural science. He had experimented on himself toward this
end for years, recording day by day, sometimes hour by hour, the
most trivial workings of God and Satan within his own mind and
body. He monitored what he ate and how it a ected his prayers,
noted how many hours he slept and whether fatigue served as a good
tool with which to break his wil l. But his experiments, before 1735,
remained unreplicated, unveri ed. The Awakening of Abigail Hutchin-
son a orded him a guinea pig on whom to test the e cacy of devo-
tion, the science of mi nd, the subjugation of heart to power.


Abigail Hutchinson was a sickly, unmarried young woman who
worked in a shop. She lived with her parents, people known for intel-
ligence and sobriety, who were neither wealthy nor very poor. Their
house was smoky, dark, and cold. They measured time by the sun
and the sound of churchbells.
Before her conversion, Abigail was “still, quiet, reserved.” She
was gentle. There was, Edwards observed—with approval—nothing
fanciful about her. She was very thin.
The spark that lit the spiritual re which was to consume her
came not from scripture nor from Edwards’s pulpit but from the
news of another woman’s conversion, a young and popular and no
doubt pretty girl, “one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole
town,” Edwards described her, granted a “new heart” by God, “truly
broken and sancti ed.” The formerly loose woman’s popularity grew
as the men who once had courted her gathered round to hear the
sweet young thing testify. One Monday in the spring of 1735, as the
ice on the Connecticut River crackled and boomed and melted back
into cold black water, Abigail’s brother, a converted man, decided to
speak with Abigail about “the necessity of being in good earnest in


64 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
seeking regenerating grace.” Abigail fumed. Why did she need to be
told the necessity of being in “good earnest,” a quality now attributed
to a woman who went walking with men in the dark? Abigail was in
good earnest. Why did she not experience the grace—the joy—now
said to be visited upon a harlot?
Abigail decided to search for the answer in scripture, starting
from page one. She read about Eve, who took the devil’s fruit in her
mouth; Ham, who looked at his naked father and laughed; Lot’s
daughters, who raped their father. God ran javel ins through those
whose love was wrong, incinerated those whose gifts were not wor-
thy, broke infants beneath the hooves of horses ridden by in dels. No
one was spared. After three days of reading, Abigail was too terri ed to
continue. Before, she had listened to the Reverend Edwards’s sermons—
nearly all variations on a theme, damnation, delivered in tones, Har-
riet Beecher Stowe would later imagine, “calm and tender”—but she
had not heard. Now she saw: she was wicked, born wicked right from
the start, cursed as Eve. She had murmured against God. “Her very
esh,” Edwards recorded, “trembled for fear.”
She shuddered when she recalled the doctors she’d consulted.
Why had she believed her body deserved anything more than what
God had given?
What had God given?
Hunger. A craving for food. At the same time an inability to con-
sume. A slow strangling. The war of esh, of belly, of the throat that
closes, of the tongue that feels food’s texture, sweet and savory. Suf-
fering was the gift of the divine.
The next day she skipped ahead to Jesus, the New Testament, “to
see if she could not nd some relief there for her distressed soul.” By
Saturday, she could no longer read. “Her eyes were so dim,” observed
Edwards, “that she could not know the letters.” She had been pious
all her life, but now she knew that her devotions had availed her of
nothing in Christ’s eyes. She went to her good older brother. The
Bible had become like a weapon turned against her, a knife held to
her throat. It had revealed her to herself as lthy, de led by sin; she
was nothing, deserved nothing.


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 65
The next morning, Sabbath-day, she was too sick to get out of
bed. But she needed to hear the Reverend Edwards. No, her family
said, and restrained her; so he came to her. Around thirteen hundred
people l ived in Northampton then, and no man was better known.
His grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, had built the congregation to
which he ministered, and, in many ways, had built the town. Its resi-
dents called him “the pope of the Connecticut Valley.” Edwards in-
herited the mantle, if not the full authority. Whereas Stoddard had
memorized his sermons the better to perform them, Edwards gripped
the pulpit and read softly, his pale face proof to his congregation of
his sincerity. At times, they felt they could almost see through him.
Before the Awakening, he had wasted no time on chatter and had
not often visited his ock in their homes. But in 1735, as revival
burned through the town, he began making rounds, taking notes,
aski ng questions, and shy Abigail became an object of great fascina-
tion to him. He visited her i n her home, she visited him in his. Some-
thing great was happeni ng in the valley; the fear of God had never
been more palpable. Travelers spent a night and left transformed,
carryi ng with them the spores of revival; stories would return to
Northampton of spiritual res lit across New England. In Boston,
they called it hysteria; Edwards believed that Northampton’s far re-
move secured it from dangerous ideas. To the west of the mountain
lay wilderness. To the east, church steeples scraped the underbelly
of clouds like thorns. Before Edwards’s ascension to the pulpit,
Northampton had reveled in its frontier freedom. It was a tobacco
town, the giant green leaves aged until brown and hung like bodies in
barns the sides of which opened l ike gills. Ale was more com monly
drunk than water.
And then, revival—compared to its fervor, drunkenness must
have seemed dull. God was wilder and more terrifying than the
woodlands to the west, and also gentler, like late day winter sun
turni ng the snow elds golden.
Edwards exalted. In revival, the ecstasy of the thunderstorm was
wed at last to the theology he had crafted in his years of studying
scripture, science, and the work of spiders. Come in, come in, he’d


66 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
say to the young men and women who knocked on his door. Men
would scream and weep on his knee; women’s faces would ush,
and they’d lay down before him. Such enthusiasm thrilled him, but
it also frightened him. He knew about the tricks of the mind and the
lies of the heart. Few said as much, but everyone knew: this could
be Satan.
Cotton Mather, a rival of Edwards’s grandfather, would have
frowned and barred his door to the young revivalists. Edwards the
pastor surely considered doing the same. But Edwards the scientist
consoled, encouraged, and most of all, recorded. Page after page of
data: “Some have had such a sense of the dis pleasure of God, and the
great danger they were in of damnation, that they could not sleep at
nights,” he wrote, “and many have said that when they have laid
down, the thoughts of sleeping in such a condition have been fright-
ful to them; they have scarcely been free from terror while asleep,
and they have awakened with fear. . . .”
Such was Abigail. A sweet soul who had never before given of-
fense to anyone, she had grown violent of spi rit in her despair. Ed-
wards sympathized with her anguish. As a younger man he, too, had
often wondered if he could anticipate heaven, his fear greatest when
he felt closest, could almost smell the milk and honey. He likened
souls such as his and Abigail’s, those that paused on the cusp of salva-
tion, to “trees in winter, like seed in the spring suppressed under a
hard clod of earth.”
This was how she blossomed: After three days of scripture read-
ing and three days of terror, she awoke on a Monday morning before
dawn. Her mind felt like a windless pond, clear and at and still, re-
ecting the heavens. And then words lled her, language owing in
like water. “The words of the Lord are pure words, health to the
soul, and marrow to the bones.” And: “ It is a pleasant thing for the
eyes to behold the sun.” A light so bright . . .
Abigail exclaimed to her good older brother, I have seen! As she
had su ered in terror for three days, so “she had a repetition of the
same discoveries of Christ three mornings together.” Each time be-
fore dawn. Each dark morning, her frail body cold beneath layers of


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 67
quilts, the sky blue- black in the window, her ski n sallow and wed too
closely to the bone, the light came—“brighter and brighter.”
Her cheeks, no doubt pale like Edwards’s, would have reddened,
her eyes, huge in her emaciated skull, opened wide and shone like
dark lanterns. She bloomed. She became a visible saint of the Lord.
She asked her brother to help her to the homes of unconverted neigh-
bors, that they might, she said, “see and know more of God.” He was
shining in her glassy eyes. She wanted to go right away! House by
house! Now! Now! She wanted to be a warning.
Death became her obsession; Edwards did not discourage her.
Together they spoke of her body, its submission to the divine. Her
sister tried to feed her. She could swallow nothing. I have been “swal-
lowed by God,” she told her minister. He must have shivered; he had
often thought of salvation in those very words.
Did Edwards lust for Abigail? He was not an unsensual man. He
was a writer of love poems for his wife, Sarah, said to be the most
beautiful woman along the Connec ticut River, and father of ten
children. He’d confessed to running elaborate mathematical prob-
lems through his mi nd to resist temptation. And yet despite the de-
vices with which he meant to defend his purity, the thought of Abigail
penetrated his mind. “Once, when she came to me,” he wrote, “she
was like a little child, and expressed a great desire to be instructed,
telling me that she longed very often to come to me for i nstruction,
and wanted to live at my house, that I might tell her what was her
duty.”
Did Abigail long for more than the pastoral care? She was not so
ambitionless as she had once seemed. She wanted, most of all, to be
seen, and the more she spoke of dying, rapturously, the more he saw
her; indeed, seemed to stare at her, even wrote about her. “I am will-
ing to live, and quite willing to die,” she told him, “quite willing to
be sick, and quite willing to be well.” Anything for God.
She stopped drinking water. Her sister cried; Abigail smiled. “O
sister, this is for my good!” Her sister could not understand. “It is best,”
explained Abigail, “that things should be as God would have them.”
Her brother read to her from the Book of Job, pausing as he came


68 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
upon a passage about worms feedi ng on a dead body. No, go on. “It
was sweet to her,” Edwards mused, “to think of her being in such cir-
cumstances.”
Her eyes sank into her skull, her nostrils collapsed. Her hair be-
came brittle. For three days she lay dying. Young men and women
came to her bed and leaned in close to her dry lips to hear her. “God
is my friend!” she’d whisper. Over and over. God is my friend!
He had nally made her a woman. “Her esh,” wrote Edwards
near the end, “seemed to be dried upon her bones.” On Friday noon,
June 27, 1735, her “weak clog” of a body submitted to Christ’s de-
sire. She was, at last, beautiful in the eyes of God, and of Jonathan
Edwards.


Years after the revival, not long before his church purged him in
1750, Edwards wrote a reevaluation of what he had wrought—in es-
sence, an appeal to reason, one that laid the fou ndation for the hybrid
of science and faith that would become the cornerstone of fundamen-
talism: “As that is called experimental philosophy, which brings opi n-
ions and notions to the test of fact,” Edwards formulated, “so is that
properly cal led experimental rel igion”—not in the sense of innova-
tion, but of the science of sainthood—“which brings rel igious a ec-
tions and intentions, to the li ke test.”
Such tests were for the most part exercises of the mind. For ex-
ample, Edwards was fascinated by atomic power. Not nuclear, of
course, but what he perceived as the indivisibility of atoms, about
which he had learned from Newton. The smallest of particles, he
concluded, was also the most powerful, for it alone was possessed of
the power of resis tance; one could not break it down any further,
surely proof of an animating force, a creator.
And then, Edwards surpassed Newton. In 1723, thinking of light
and color, perhaps the green leaves of summer—which, Edwards
had come to understand, were not really green, had no color at
all—he leaped centuries ahead to imagine an indivisible atom di-
vided, the power that binds it broken, an almost incomprehensible


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 69
reversal of creation. That is, imagined the mind of God as he knew it
removed from the green of the leaves, the blue of the sky, our bodies
that are not our own. “Deprive the world of light and motion,” he
wrote, “and the case would stand thus with the world: There would
be neither white nor black, neither blue nor brown, bright nor shaded,
pellucid nor opaque, no noise or sound, neither heat nor cold, neither
uid nor wet nor dry, hard nor soft, nor solidity, nor extension, nor
gure, nor magnitude, nor proportion; nor body, nor spirit. What
then is become of the universe? Certainly, it exists nowhere but in
the divine mind.”
In Boston and London he was judged a genius or a fanatic. In the
little towns around Northampton, people thought of him as either a
new Moses, leading them to the Prom ised Land they had long be-
lieved the colonies to be, or vulgar Ahab—angry, obsessed, ignorant
of the compromises one must make to get along. His own relations
among the so-called River Gods of the valley—powerful merchants
and more conventional preachers—rebuked him. He would not have
survived in his pulpit as long as he did had he not been protected by a
cousin, John Stoddard, another grandson of Solomon Stoddard. But
whereas Edwards followed his grandfather to the pulpit, Stoddard
followed his grandfather’s example to power. The wealthiest land-
owner for m iles, he made himself magistrate, representative to the
assembly, and colonel of the mil itia. He was a feudal lord, and Ed-
wards was the high priest of his benefactor’s authority.
His religion was radical, available to all classes and even to slaves,
an inspiration to the nascent sense of individual liberty that would
become the American Revolution, but his polit ic s were warlike
and controlli ng. Empire struck him as an ideal vessel for the Gospel.
He preached often against envy, but named as envy only that feel-
ing which lled those of lesser wealth, or lesser land, or lesser status,
who determined to band together to wrest power from above. Such
less-privileged men gathered in taverns —Northampton had three—and
instead of contemplating Christian harmony, conspired in “party
spirit” to reshape not their souls but their elds. The wealthiest few
of the val ley owned at least a quarter of its arable ground.


70 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Sin fermented in such taverns, charged Edwards, listi ng a catalog
of cri mes of the spirit that might just as easi ly come from the mouth
of a fundamentalist today. He railed against the common man’s pro-
pensity toward lawsuits, agai nst young women who carried them-
selves like men and young men who dressed in an unmanly style.
Pornography was another vice that preoccupied him. His downfall
began when he rebuked a group of boys—converted Christians, no
less—for stealing and reading m idwives’ manuals and applying their
studies with hands-on investigations, the science of groping. The
boys got o , so to speak, because they were wealthy, but another
story surfaces when we consider that the boys in turn rebuked the
reverend. Don’t you point ngers, they said; we know where yours
have been. Did you hold Abigail’s hand as she lay dying?
The spring of Northampton’s revival, Edwards spent much time
counseling his uncle, Joseph Hawley, who under his nephew’s tute-
lage began to see secrets within himself, and worse—the meaning-
lessness of self, of “Joseph Hawley.” The hand of God dangled him
over the pit by a spindly leg as if he was nothing but a spider. An an-
gry God, yes, but what was worse—overlooked by historians who
emphasize the wrath of Edwards’s sermons—He was also a loving
God. “Majesty and meekness joined together,” wrote Edwards,
“. . . an awful sweetness.” Edwards cared little for the Calvinism of
his forebears when put next to the vision of God he seemed to most
favor, that of a giant mouth awaiting your submission—waiting to
swallow you, Edwards would write i n his diaries, to make you one
with everything. Which is to say—nothing. Only your sense of being
kept this from happening now, now. Not hell re but the temptations of
self—what later generations of evangelicals would rage against as
secular humanism—birthed Joseph Hawley’s despair.
Hawley stopped sleepi ng. He stayed up at night in the still of his
home, “meditating on terror.” In March, another man in a similar state
slit his own throat, but he was in such a hysteria—a man of such weak
character—that he botched the job and survived, blocked from en-
tering hell as well as heaven. Joseph Hawley was not such a fool. He
was a seller of guns and tobacco, a man of substance in Northampton.


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 71
But his nephew Jonathan revealed to him a deeper reality, in which
substance itself became suspect. In May Edwards preached to the
congregation as he might have spoken to Hawley in private settings:
“You have seen the lthiness of toads . . .” You , declared Edwards
with great and compelling certai nty, are even lower. Next to the
souls of the unchosen, even “putre ed esh” smells sweet to God.
Hawley, a man “of more than common understanding,” took the les-
son. Using what must have been a sharp blade—he also sold
knives—he opened beneath his rm chin a bright red smile.
The pious and the melancholy, those who were saved and those
were waiting, those who did not care at all—every sort of person
came now to Jonathan Edwards, knocking on the pastor’s door. Can I
come in? I heard something . . . He knew what they’d heard. He’d been
hearing it from them for days now, each testimony so much like the
last that he must have forgotten who was givi ng voice to the words,
man or woman, ancient or child, saying this: I heard a strange voice in
my mind; it seemed so compelling and right (like yours, Reverend Edwards).
Edwards recorded the data. Cut your own throat, the voice without
a body whispered into the ears of his ock. Cut your own throat! Now!
Now!
He did not count the bodies of those who did so.


Salvation was for Edwards a science, worthy of careful record
keeping. The twin shadows of righteousness and purity—hatred and
self-loathing—he dismissed as undeserving of the scruti ny of his
amazing mind. Or did he? “Remember,” he wrote to himself once,
“to act according to Prov. 12:23, ‘A prudent man concealeth knowl-
edge.’ ” He did as much in his Faithful Narrative, weaving a web of
logic and argument beneath the surface of a story that attracted a
popular audience drawn by its portrait of sin and tragic account of
redemption. In so doing, Edwards staked out a political position as
well as a spiritual one, a subtly elitist conception of knowledge as a
property to be possessed in di erent portions according to a divine
hier archy. T he wise man of Chr ist knows that only to some does God


72 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
give a calling, the power to draw closer to Him and understand His
grand plan.
In 1750, Edwards’s congregation purged him. Not for the blood
that owed from his revival, but simply as a result of the power he’d
unleashed. To preserve the old Puritan order, Edwards had destroyed
it; but he was ill prepared for what the new bel ievers — ercer in
their faith than ever Puritans had been—would build from the ruins,
not just in Northampton but across the colonies. Edwards’s books
en amed men to burn other books on town commons, his tale of
Abigail Hutchinson gave license to women to tear at their dresses on
the cobblestoned streets of cities, screaming for contact with a God
as intimate as Edwards’s story. In Northampton, the believers turned
against him not for the pain his religion drew forth but for shying
away from the radicalism of the revolution he had inspired.
He went west—to an Indian mission in Stockbridge, a town
even closer to the edge of British civilization than Northampton, it-
self a city considered by proper Bostonians still half-wild. Among the
Mahican Indians he pondered the vicissitudes of the mood he had
stoked, its brightness and its darkness, its hym nody and its screech-
ing, the new birth it o ered and the death’s-head that grinned alike
on the saved and the damned. He was a man given to the study of
oneness. Perhaps he recognized that the heart full of feeling and the
calculating mind full of knowing, like the thunder and lightni ngs he
so adored, were simply two expressions of the same phenomenon, an
American religion, one so well suited to the brutal demands of the
building of a new Jerusalem—conquest; unrestrained capital; the
rights of men and women to speak for themselves; and the rights of
stronger men to command their submission for the greater cause—
that it would still i nsist, two and a half centuries later, that all the
world is a frontier, in dire need of revival, and a new chosen people.