grace work itself out creatively in ways that build up community that put the Christian in the path of God’s wrath.20
Jonathan Edwards’s powerful intellect and writings strengthened the trend in Protestantism toward conversion as a willful response to God’s love, not just a passive acceptance of divine love. Other eminent nineteenth-century preachers carried on the trend. Many, if not most of them, had been trained at Yale Divinity School, where faculty members like Nathaniel Taylor built the Edwardian strain of theology into a reformed Calvinist curriculum.
Nathaniel Taylor became one of New England’s leading Protestant thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century, teaching and writing a system of Christian thought known as New Haven Theology (also known as New England Theology). Appointed to the Yale faculty in 1822, he taught there for the rest of his life. During his tenure New England was caught up in the Second Great Awakening, a widespread religious revival in America, generally east of the Mississippi and contained within the years between 1790 and 1830. The Second Great Awakening occurred primarily in Protestant churches. The denominations engaged in the revivals were principally Baptist and evangelical Methodist congregations and pastors, but the movement was embraced by a number of Congregational churches as well, including some prominent congregations in New England. Although the transformative power of the movement dissipated after 1830, the passion for conversion in the United States lingered until the Civil War.
Of interest to our narrative is the fact that the center of Nathaniel Taylor’s approach was a theological perspective contrary to the Second Great Awakening, utilizing the insights of the Enlightenment and open to the new sciences being developed. The New Haven Theology, which Taylor taught at Yale Divinity School for several decades, featured an increased optimism about the human capacity to choose the direction of personal and societal life, including religious beliefs. Such a modification of Calvin’s idea of the total depravity of humans stirred theological controversy, but it was in harmony with the diversified culture developing in the new nation. Taylor also promoted another novel concept for the time, the obligation of the church to be involved in society’s problems through participation in voluntary associations as well as through personal charitable acts. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his tour of the United States in 1833–34, proclaimed voluntary societies to be one of the principle features of American democracy, seen in connection with hospitals, schools, and even prisons. “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”21
Rev. Horace Bushnell is the final religious voice that we will cite in the era leading up to 1875. In Taylor and Bushnell (1802–76), the tolerant spirit of Thomas Hooker was continued and expanded through the new knowledge being derived from modern sciences like biology and astronomy. The result was a very different form of Christianity. The basic teachings of John Calvin had stressed the total sinfulness of humanity and its total dependence on God’s creativity and saving grace for redemption as well as every phase of daily life. Bushnell’s body of work supplemented the stance of Nathaniel Taylor as a staunch defender of free will over predestination in his explication of human nature. Both also chose benevolence over wrath as the chief metaphors to describe the character of God portrayed in the Bible. Taylor’s theology classes at Yale New Haven produced over three generations of seminary students who filled pulpits in Connecticut and other New England colonies in the nineteenth century. They conveyed a more liberal and progressive approach to both church and social issues.
Central to the message of the New Haven Theology was the desire to go beyond the restoration of the individual sinner. In a radical shift this new theology proclaimed that the true ministry of the church was the transformation of society by charitable deeds. The shift from personal salvation to the renewal of the world placed a part of the responsibility for salvation from sin firmly on the individual. This point of view, rooted in the work of Jonathan Edwards and the philosophical treatises of John Locke, adopted the idea that humanity exercised freedom of the will from the beginning of creation. The proponents of the new biblical perspective gradually abandoned the concept of original sin. Sin itself was increasingly considered to be a human choice, rather than the work of the devil or any other bad spirits. The work of the church was to respond to the needs of one’s neighbor, not excluding those in prison. Given that Jonathan Edwards preached for years in North Hampton, Massachusetts; Nathaniel Taylor taught at Yale; and Horace Bushnell was a stalwart presence at a Hartford Congregational Church, Connecticut was a prime recipient of the changing theology and changing culture. The state’s criminal justice components in the nineteenth century changed along with the rest of society, and the basic change was a fundamental tendency toward rehabilitation of offenders in the midst of the perennial pressure to focus on pure punishment. Together with Taylor, Horace Bushnell helped to shape a new Calvinism by the end of the century. Centered around practical, pragmatic Christianity, it eventually displaced the old, more rigid and more salvation-centered Calvinist approach.
The importance of these competing theological worldviews should not be underestimated. The prevailing understanding of human nature is crucial in determining the approach any given society takes to criminal justice. It makes all the difference whether offenders are considered a salvageable part of humanity, worth the effort to rehabilitate and return to free society as productive citizens, or are perceived as lost souls locked into sin or, worse, as subhuman, born of “bad seed” whose particular race, nationality, behavior, or other characteristics place them in a category of disposables.
The positive understanding of human nature provided by Edwards, Taylor, Bushnell, and other Protestant teachers and preachers was not a minor eddy in the Protestant current flowing through nineteenth-century America. It was one of the most powerful aspects of the culture. The change in attitude toward evil and sin permitted a much more empathetic and hopeful view. Prisoners were now persons worthy of visitation by people willing to assist them in their pursuit of personal salvation rather than preach to them about eternal salvation. Three features of Puritanism are pertinent to our portrait of the cultural soil in which significant aspects of the choice between a justice of retribution and a justice of rehabilitation could flourish.
A RETRIBUTIVE AND REHABILITATIVE MIX OF MORALITY
One of the earliest estimates of the Puritan impact on American values and social systems came from an outsider, Alexis de Tocqueville. His impression of the various prisons he had visited, including Connecticut’s Wethersfield State Prison, is centered on the ambiguous commitment to retribution and rehabilitation that he witnessed. His conclusion underscored the deep connection between criminal justice and religion: “When I reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, methinks I see the destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man.”22 Part of that mission and destiny was a response to crime and wrongdoing that modeled the divine retribution to sin outlined in the Bible and the divine concern for the salvation and restoration of every soul. Puritanism and the subsequent American criminal justice system have struggled to balance the two faces of justice ever since.
A COMMITMENT TO THE RULE OF LAW
Based on scripture, the law superseded any one individual’s wisdom or power. No human tyrant could ever replace God’s laws. The law, however, depending on its perceived purpose, can also become tyrannical. The Puritan gift could be used. On the one hand, the application of the punitive aspect of the law, to enhance public safety by retaliation against the offender, became one of the most compelling factors in establishing a retributive system in America. Rehabilitative reform, on the other hand, invariably involved attempts to the make the punishment redemptive.
A CONCERN FOR PROPORTIONALITY IN PUNISHMENT
Puritans were judicious in their analysis of wrongdoing and lawbreaking, insisting on the basis of the scriptural lex talionis that the punishment fit the crime. Although some Puritans advocated that punishment be visible not only temporarily but forever after (as in branding with an appropriate letter or cropping the nose or
