Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  Although Sarah did not know the formal rules of spelling, capitalization, or punctuation, she wrote with such raw power that her words seem to speak from the page. Rather than wasting time puzzling over where to put commas or periods, she wrote in a stream of consciousness style that anticipated later writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Pouring out her thoughts in long, flowing sentences that spill into one another without a single pause or break, she recaptured the immediacy and intensity of her experiences. There are no white spaces on her pages, no moments of silence that invite readers to take a breath or collect their thoughts. Instead there is only her quiet, insistent voice telling story after story about the experiences that had shaped her understanding of God.

  Sarah’s faith influenced every facet of her life: her understanding of suffering, for example, and her attitude toward slavery. It affected how she thought about her gender, how she spent her money, how she educated the children in her school, and how she coped with the loss of loved ones. Although she imagined God as too sovereign and mysterious to be fully grasped by the human mind, she searched for his presence in all her experiences, hoping to come to a deeper understanding of how he was directing her life. He was the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end—the reason her life bore meaning.

  A history of Sarah Osborn’s life and times, this book traces both her own individual story and the rise of the evangelical movement in the decades before the American Revolution. Although many people associate evangelicalism with modern religious leaders like Billy Graham and Rick Warren, its roots can be traced back to the eighteenth century.4 In response to social, political, economic, and intellectual transformations that were transatlantic in scope, eighteenth-century Protestants throughout the Atlantic world gradually created a new kind of faith that we now call evangelicalism. The word itself was not new, and its roots stretch back to the Greek evangelion, meaning “gospel.”5 The sixteenth-century Protestant reformers used evangelical to emphasize the their reliance on the gospel message they found in scripture. Yet during the eighteenth century the word became increasingly identified with revivalists who emphasized a personal relationship with God, the joy of being born again, and the call to spread the gospel around the globe. Although Sarah described herself simply as a Protestant, she seemed to sense that her faith represented something new, and like other converts she settled on the adjective evangelical to describe it. After a night of prayer, for example, she wrote about her experience of “true evangelical repentance.”6

  Sarah’s manuscripts offer a unique vantage point on the rise of the evangelical movement that can help us understand how and why it emerged in the eighteenth century. Most books about evangelicalism focus on male leaders like Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield, but historical change takes place from the bottom up as well as the top down, and Sarah Osborn’s story can help us appreciate why so many people in the eighteenth century were searching for a new kind of Christianity, a Christianity that would better meet their spiritual needs. Like thousands of other converts, Sarah was drawn to evangelicalism because it helped her make sense of changes in everyday life that did not yet have a name. Words like capitalism, individualism, Enlightenment, and humanitarianism were not coined until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but language often lags behind reality, and Sarah seems to have recognized that the austere Puritanism of her childhood was under attack by a growing faith in human goodness and individual freedom. She admired evangelical ministers because of her belief that they offered convincing answers to the most pressing questions of her day—questions about the nature of God, the meaning of suffering, and the definition of truth. Sarah wanted to know what sort of God had created the world, why evil exists, and whether there is any inherent goodness in human nature. She wondered why “the poor are always with us” (in the words of the apostle Matthew) and whether slavery could be just. She wondered whether the pursuit of happiness should be the ultimate goal of human life. And most of all, she wondered what her individual story meant in the larger scheme of the universe.

  A letter from Sarah Osborn to Joseph Fish, dated September 5, 1759. Her letters were written on folio pages measuring 9 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

  Explaining the rise of evangelicalism is not an easy task, but it is clear that the movement emerged in response to momentous changes in politics, economics, intellectual life, science, and technology that laid the foundations for our modern world. The rise of merchant capitalism sanctioned economic liberty and self-interest; a consumer revolution gave people greater freedom to make choices about their material lives than ever before; the 1689 Toleration Act in Britain guaranteed Protestants (though not Catholics) the right to worship freely without fear of state violence or persecution; technological advances led to improvements in the standard of living; scientific discoveries inspired a new faith in human progress; and ordinary people insisted that they had the right to govern themselves. In 1700 no one would have imagined that revolution was imminent, but by 1800 both the United States and France had violently rejected the divine right of kings.

  Accompanying these changes were new currents of thought that historians have termed the Enlightenment—an intellectual movement that was premised on the assumption that individuals had the freedom to create a better world. As the historian Peter Gay has explained, the Enlightenment was committed to “freedom in its many forms—freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one’s talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world.” As we shall see, Gay’s masculine language obscures the profound effects of the Enlightenment on women, but his central point remains important: Enlightenment thinkers hoped to liberate people from the shackles of the past by insisting that every hypothesis about human nature and society had to be tested by both reason and experience. With its critical spirit, its faith in progress, and its celebration of the individual, the Enlightenment marked the creation of our modern world.7

  Since some of its most prominent thinkers were hostile to institutional religion, the Enlightenment has often been imagined as skeptical and anti-Christian.8 Yet even though there is no doubt that the Enlightenment heralded the birth of modern secularism, it also transformed Christianity from within. (Since some historians have suggested that the Enlightenment grew out of the critical spirit of the Reformation, such cross-fertilization is not surprising.) As the historian J. G. A. Pocock reminds us, there was no single, monolithic Enlightenment in the eighteenth century but rather “a family of Enlightenments, displaying both family resemblances and family quarrels (some of them bitter and even bloody)”—and one of those quarrels centered on religion. In contrast to the French Enlightenment, which tended to be particularly radical and anti-clerical, the British Enlightenment led to the emergence of a new, liberal form of Protestantism that emphasized tolerance, reason, free will, human goodness, and God’s benevolence.9 (Since “liberal” Protestants in the eighteenth century believed that the Bible should be read literally, including the creation account in Genesis, readers should be careful not to confuse them with the political or religious liberals of modern America. Liberal is always a relative term.)

  Historians have often portrayed evangelical Protestantism as reactionary and backward looking, a backlash against new currents of Enlightenment thought. Like its liberal counterpart, however, it has endured for more than three centuries because it represented a vector of modernity, a creative response to the transformations that were reshaping everyday life. Evangelicals condemned Enlightenment skeptics for daring to question the literal truth of the Bible and the divinity of Christ, and because they felt as though their beliefs were under attack they could sound more extreme than earlier generations of Protestants. American evangelicals, in particular—most of whom were Calvinists in the years before the American Revolution—fiercely denied that humans were free to choose their own destinies. (In England, by contrast, th
e Wesleyan stream of the evangelical movement preached a gospel of free will.) Emphasizing the doctrine of original sin, American evangelicals described humans as inherently inclined to evil. “I bewail the depravity of my nature, so totally corrupt,” Sarah Osborn lamented in her diary in 1760.10 Evangelicals also set themselves apart from Enlightenment thinkers by emphasizing the redemptive power of suffering and the reality of hell. Rejecting the humanism of the age, they insisted that God had created the world to glorify himself, not to make people happy.

  Yet evangelicals could not ignore the intellectual challenges to their faith, and as they tried to adapt to a changing world they absorbed many Enlightenment ideas as their own. As David Bebbington has argued, “The Evangelical version of Protestantism was created by the Enlightenment.”11 Influenced by the long Christian interest in religious experience, evangelicals were especially attracted to John Locke’s emphasis on firsthand experience as the basis of knowledge. “All our knowledge is founded [on] Experience,” Locke wrote. If the Enlightenment was an Age of Reason, it was also an Age of Experience, and Enlightenment thinkers insisted that knowledge must be based on empirical proof rather than clerical authority or inherited tradition. “How do I know this God is mine; and that I myself am not deceived?” Sarah Osborn asked. “By the Evidences of a work of grace wrought in my Soul.”12 Ironically, evangelicals defended their faith against the skeptical and liberal strains of the Enlightenment by appropriating an enlightened language of experience, certainty, evidence, and sensation as their own. Unlike earlier Protestants, who had been hesitant to appear too confident about their salvation (lest they be guilty of pride), the new evangelicals of the eighteenth century claimed that they could empirically feel and know whether they had been spiritually reborn.

  With Christian roots stretching back to Bernard of Clairvaux and the Protestant Reformers, this emphasis on personal religious experience was not new, and seventeenth-century Puritans had often scrutinized their lives for visible proof of God’s grace. But evangelicals spoke the language of experience with a fervor that few other Christians could match.13 They claimed that an intellectual, rational understanding of doctrine was less valuable than a personal experience of the Holy Spirit. By arguing that nothing was more important than being “born again,” they gave ordinary people—including women, slaves, and Native Americans—a powerful language to justify their religious authority. Even though evangelicals (like most Enlightenment thinkers) portrayed women as naturally subordinate to men, they also argued that converts were transformed by their rebirth in Christ. Despite her fear of going beyond her “line,” Sarah Osborn claimed to have been called to lead prayer meetings for slaves and to become a published author, a rare distinction for women at the time. According to surviving church records, the majority of evangelical converts in the eighteenth century were women, a pattern that has continued to our own day.

  Historians have usually depicted the Enlightenment as an elite, masculine movement that marginalized women, but once we recognize that there were multiple “Enlightenments” that took place within Protestantism as well as against it, a more complicated picture emerges. Influenced by the empiricism of the Enlightenment, evangelicals crafted a theology with a potentially radical edge. By the end of the eighteenth century growing numbers of female authors would defend their right to participate in the public sphere on the grounds of their firsthand experience of God’s grace.

  Evangelicals absorbed other aspects of Enlightenment thought as well—including its faith in human progress, its humanitarian ideals, its emphasis on the affections, and its individualism—but always with their own distinctive stamp. They were fervent believers in progress who dreamed of a millennial age of peace and prosperity, but they denied that progress was possible without God’s grace. They shared the humanitarian zeal to alleviate suffering, but they argued that there was no greater suffering than to be alienated from God—a conviction that made them more zealous about “saving” sinners than virtually any other group of Christians before them. They assumed that virtuous behavior flowed from the “affections” (the emotions), but they argued that the heart was naturally corrupt; hence true virtue depended on being born again. And perhaps most striking, they elevated the importance of the individual by defining Christianity as a personal relationship with Jesus but denied that individuals were free to determine their own destinies. Unlike Adam Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers, they condemned self-interest as another name for selfishness. True Christians should be willing to sacrifice their individual interests for the common good.

  As these examples illustrate, the relationship between evangelicalism and the Enlightenment was fraught with tensions. Although early evangelicals absorbed many aspects of Enlightenment thought, they also tried to resist optimistic ideas about innate human goodness, the sufficiency of human reason, and the benefits of self-love. In many ways the evangelical faith that emerged in the eighteenth century was an “enlightened” one that was at home in an increasingly individualistic and religiously pluralistic society. Yet evangelicalism, like the Enlightenment, was never a single, coherent movement, and evangelicals often stood in an uneasy relationship to the modern world that they had helped create.

  Historians like to provide precise dates for events, but major historical developments tend to emerge gradually over time, and evangelicalism was no exception. For lack of a better term I have identified evangelicalism as a movement, but it would be more precise to describe it as a loose coalition of leaders, ideas, and practices that took decades to come together. In the late seventeenth century, a small group of Lutherans and Reformed Protestants tried to recapture the vitality of the Protestant Reformation by emphasizing heart-centered experience over dry, systematic theologies, but their efforts did not come to fruition until the transatlantic revivals of the late 1730s and the 1740s.14 Even then, evangelicalism remained closely connected to older forms of Protestantism, and in America there were clear continuities between seventeenth-century Puritans and their eighteenth-century evangelical descendants. Looking backward as well as forward, evangelicals were linked to the Puritans by their emphasis on God’s sovereignty, their dark view of human nature, their vivid belief in heaven and hell, their reliance on the Bible, and their ambivalence about the value of everyday life. Yet in order to meet the new spiritual needs of their age, evangelicals also set themselves apart from earlier Protestants in several crucial ways: they placed more trust in the reliability of firsthand experience; they expressed greater assurance about their ability to know whether they had been “saved”; they made the converted individual, not the community or the church, the main locus of authority; they emphasized that all Christians were called to spread the gospel through missions and evangelism; they defined true religion as a matter of the heart or affections; they had a robust faith in progress; and they borrowed the techniques of the consumer revolution to spread the gospel.

  In brief, evangelicalism was a heart-centered, experiential, individualistic, and evangelistic form of Protestantism that was intertwined with the rise of the modern world. Although evangelicals from different religious backgrounds sometimes disagreed on doctrinal issues (including free will and predestination), they shared a common faith in biblical authority, human sinfulness, God’s sovereignty, and the possibility of redemption, and they drew firm boundaries between those who had been born again and those who had not.15 Although other Christians were often offended by their assurance, evangelicals boldly proclaimed their salvation. Sarah Osborn, for one, was absolutely certain that she had experienced the “new birth.”

  Part One

  A MEMOIR, 1743

  Chapter 1

  Never Despair

  Having been for some years under strong inclinations to write some thing of what i can remember of the dealings of god with my soul from a child hoping it may consist with the glory of god at which i trust through grace i sinceirly aim and the good of my own soul as a means to stir up gratitude in the most ungratefu
ll of all hearts even mine to a glorious and compatinate Saviour for all his benefits towards so vile a monster in sin as i am and for the incouragement of any who may providentialy lite on these Lines after my discease to trust in the Lord and never dispair of his mercy since one so stuborn and rebellious as i have thro the sovereighn riches of free grace obtaind it [I have begun this memoir] but oh Let all tremble at the thought of abusing a saviour so Least god should say Let them alone they shall never enter in to my rest.1

  1743. Revivals are the talk of every tea table, sewing circle, and tavern in New England. George Whitefield, the young evangelist famous for his crossed eyes and honeyed tongue, preaches to thousands of people up and down the eastern seaboard, leaving many in tears. James Davenport, another young evangelist, protests against the “idolatry” of material things by stripping off his breeches and throwing them into a bonfire, leading to speculation that his “wild, frantic, and extravagant” behavior might be the result of a mental breakdown. After several Massachusetts ministers complain about “disorderly Tumults and indecent Behaviors,” others insist that “there has been a happy and remarkable Revival of Religion in many Parts of this Land, thro’ an uncommon divine Influence.”2 Jonathan Edwards, later renowned as one of America’s greatest theologians, publishes a book defending the revivals as a genuine work of God, perhaps even a harbinger of the millennium. Charles Chauncy, his fiercest critic, retorts that the revivals are nothing more than the product of overheated “passions.”3 The excitement grows as newspapers and periodicals report that revivals are taking place not only in New England but also in Scotland, England, Switzerland, and Germany.