Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
structure. This belief system followed the principles of Empiricism by asserting that
religious belief should derive from reason rather than tradition. Deists believed in
God, rationally deducing the existence of a Creator from the orderliness of nature
observed through their senses. As Thomas Paine, perhaps the most famous deist in
America, asserts in “The Existence of God” (1797), “The Universe is the bible of a
true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs
of his existence are to be sought and to be found.” However, deists did not see God
as behind every tiny working of nature. Unlike the Puritans, who might describe
any natural event as occurring because God was pleased or displeased with them,
deists believed that nature operated itself along the orderly principles created
by God and revealed by science. Finally, deists, like the period in general, were
humanist, following a philosophy which prioritized human concerns and needs in
its ethical beliefs. Whereas a Puritan would judge an action based on whether it
was in accordance with or contrary to God’s will, a humanist deist would judge it
according to its eect on people.
Unitarianism was a more moderate religious belief of the time period, attempting
to strike the preferred middle position between Calvinist beliefs and Enlightenment
beliefs. Unitarianism grew out of the Congregationalist denomination—one of
the major denominations of the Puritans who settled in the English colonies.
Unlike deists, Unitarians valued the Bible as a sacred text; however, inuenced
by Empiricism, Unitarians argued that the Bible and religious traditions must
be subjected to reason and accepted or rejected on that basis. One such tradition
Unitarians felt did not pass rational muster was the belief in a three-person God,
and their name is taken from this position. Also in accordance with Empirical
beliefs, Unitarians rejected the Calvinist views of corrupt human nature and the
inevitability of damnation for the majority and believed, in a religious version of
human perfectibility, that all souls were capable of working toward salvation.
Colonial membership in Calvinist Protestant denominations experienced a
resurgence in the eighteenth century especially from the 1730s to the 1750s when
the Great Awakening, a movement of revitalized piety originating in Europe,
arrived in America. While continuing to hold many tenets in contradiction to
Enlightenment emphases, the Calvinism of the Great Awakening showed signs of
the inuence of that intellectual movement. Their views still held that man was
born corrupt and unworthy of the salvation that God granted to some. However,
the movement pushed back against the prioritization of rationality with the idea
that one could prepare oneself to be open to God’s grace by a public and emotional
testimony about one’s religious experience. For some of the foremost ministers of
this movement, it was not enough to understand Biblical teachings intellectually;
to truly understand God’s will and prepare oneself for the gift of grace, should
one be saved, one needed to feel those teachings emotionally. The movement
also directed its adherents to evangelize (publicly testify about one’s religious
experience) to help others arrive at that deeper understanding and in that way,
shows some inuence of humanism.
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