other ways, the popularity and power of the Faithful Narrative depended on its transformation by the evangelical public.
This process of transformation would come to be typical of the 1740s evangelical public, in which evangelical communities of letters, contributions to secular periodicals, and book publishing increased and were augmented by new evangelical periodicals in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Boston. The periodicals, consisting largely of letters from British Dissenters, traveling missionaries, itinerants, and settled colonial ministers, offered news of “extraordinary” affective religious performances, including fainting, visions, trances, and ecstatic speech.46 In the American colonies, such performances incorporated immigrant and creole English women’s spiritual practice as well as traditional spiritual practices from Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, Native American, African, and other communities variously marginalized and constrained.
Accounts of converts’ “feminine” performance sometimes cover over these multiple cultural influences on revival practice, in part because the language of revival conversion was structured by the sexed norms of Puritan religious performance.47 Conversion had been a cornerstone of Puritan social organization since the 1630s, when Puritan communities on both sides of the Atlantic began requiring accounts of religious experience for church membership and voting rights within the church. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New England Puritans often spoke or wrote and recited their accounts of conversion in front of congregations they hoped to join, with ministers occasionally recording and publishing those accounts. They usually described conversion as a movement from knowledge of sin to conviction, faith, mortification and penance or spiritual combat, and true but imperfect assurance of salvation. Well into the eighteenth century, Puritans and other dissenters emphasized the uncertain nature of assurance, often operating within a preparationist model in which conversion was one step in a spiritual journey charted along an emotional circuit running from anxious doubts about salvation to assurance and back to doubt.48
In both England and the colonies, seventeenth-century Puritan men’s conversion narratives idealized willing submission to divine and earthly authorities by invoking biblical tropes of women’s submission and servants’ loyalty filtered through the Pilgrim’s Progress, other popular nonconformist narratives, and contemporary spiritual biographies.49 In a long mystical theoerotic tradition, Puritan ministers established their fitness to lead by figuring themselves as “nursing fathers,” maternally devoted to their divine charges, and “brides of Christ,” desiring erotic union with divinity.50 Thomas Shepard’s journal, for example, records his need to “desire Christ and taste Christ and roll myself upon Christ” or “lie by him and lie at him,” though often, as he wrote in his Autobiography, “Christ was not so sweet as [his] lust.” For Shepard and others, conversion was an uncertain, circular process in which doubt and grace intertwine in a drama of competing desire. Even when “the Lord made himself sweet to me and to embrace him and to give myself unto him,” Shepard wrote, “yet after this I had many fears and doubts.”51 The Puritan glorification of openness to God as typically feminine engaged the one-sex model of gender that also predominated in contemporary medical and philosophical traditions, so that, as Elizabeth Maddox Dillon observes, this “sexualized rhetoric” articulates “power differentials that did not necessarily inhere in bodies.”52 Lower forms of bodily lust, marked as female, figure the higher desire for union with the divine.
The revivals participated in this shift away from this one-sex “feminine” model of piety broadly but unevenly. As New England’s economy and society became more closely integrated with England’s in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the ideal of erotic “female” subjection and servants’ loyalty lost ground among many men and wealthier women in favor of “gentler ideas of piety and suffering” appropriate to those virtuously brought up. In more prosperous towns, sermons, which often reflected a consensus of community ideals, moved toward the English post-Restoration latitudinarian norm of rationality and persuasion and emphasized Jesus’ love rather than God’s wrath.53 Though continuing to evoke emotion, they abandoned erotic “female” piety as a master trope for human relationships with God.54 In other ways, though, the revivals resisted the shift away from the one-sex model, describing conversion as divine impregnation and insisting on the convert’s humiliation and suffering.55 In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentler notions of suffering became more narrowly associated with middle-class whiteness and female difference.56
In New England, these changes in notions of race, gender, and sexuality were precipitated or accompanied by the separation of conversion from church membership and church membership from civil privileges.57 With fewer legal inducements to encourage full membership, established ministers in New England leaned more heavily on rhetorical and ritual techniques such as open communion. Solomon Stoddard was a public champion of these techniques, which helped corrode the link between the conversion narrative and religious or civil privileges. Edwards eventually attempted to restrict communion and reinstate the conversion narrative as a requirement for full membership—a fiasco precipitating his 1749 dismissal—but for most of the 1730s and 1740s, he embraced Stoddard’s use of rhetorical and personal means of persuasion to evoke and manage conversion.
The transformation of Edwards’s narrative in the evangelical public chipped away at traditional Reformed limits on grace and thereby transformed the meaning of Edwards’s converts’ suffering, which, even as it incorporated newer sentimental modes, was firmly rooted in earlier notions of sex, bodily control, and ministerial and community oversight. Edwards’s pastoral interest in reinstating conversion as a means of reasserting ministerial control was shaped, in part, by his inability to maintain traditional ministerial and community regulation of sexuality.58 Edwards insisted that conversion demanded public accountability for a range of bodily behaviors, including religious performances, sex, and other erotic practices, that could only be addressed within a gathered congregation of the faithful.
The controversy over conversion, sex, and publicity that led to Edwards’s 1749 dismissal was, in some way, prefigured in the Faithful Narrative’s accounts of conversion as a substitution of gracious affective practice for “licentious” bodily practice. Edwards’s innovative incorporation of sentiment into his conversion narrative participated in the wider attempt to attract “gentler” converts, but he embedded sentimental conversion in earlier models of conversion, such as Shepard’s and St. Francis’s, directed at controlling a broad array of fleshly lusts. The Faithful Narrative begins by describing the salutary effect of small-group “social religion” on young people overly fond of “licentiousness,” “night-walking,” tavern drinking, “mirth and company-keeping,” and other friendly or erotic practices outside church or family. One of the “greatest company-keepers,” a young woman, offered Edwards her conversion narrative, and “News” of her conversion “seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning, upon the hearts of young people.” The “licentious” convert shared her narrative with “many” others, who “went to talk with her, concerning what she had met with.” They formed vanguards of young converts, not unlike Wesley’s early bands, who led a “general” revival encompassing all ages and ranks of European creoles and immigrants, “several Negros,” and neighboring Indians.59 Even after the revival cooled, Edwards wrote to Colman in 1737 that converts did not “return to ways of lewdness and sensuality.”60
Edwards’s “flash of lightning” offers a key into the new importance and challenges of performances, narratives, and published “News” of conversion. It also reminds us of the difficulty with reading eighteenth-century revival practice as either sexual or purely spiritual and therefore outside the bounds of the erotic. The flash or dart of lightning on the heart was a traditional Reformed trope for the convert’s sense of God’s power. Traceable to Augustine’s “light of confidence” and subsequent rejection of fleshly “lusts,” this metaphorical “flash” moved conversion away from older, visionary experiences of revelation such as Paul’s “great light” from heaven.61 Seventeenth-century Puritans followed Augustine
