Mark Noll has claimed that “the foundation of American theology was European theology.” This foundation was, for the most part, confessionally oriented in the Westminster Standards. This confession was, not only a reference for New England churches, but also an authority in the meetinghouse between minister and magistrate.
The New Light effort to overthrow the Half-way Covenant had the unintended effect to provoke the Old Lights to suppress an issue of conscience. New Lights like Edwards, Bellamy, and Samuel Finley who did circuit preaching in the early-1740s were affected. In other words, the Old Lights leveraged their powerful partnership with magistrates to limit the younger New Light’s freedom of conscience.
The Great Awakening of 1740-42 caused a rift in the social order in which authority was threatened. Religious liberty is often thought to have its origin in the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut who petitioned Thomas Jefferson in the Early Republic for relief. While this is a common presumption, the desire for liberty of conscience goes back to tensions in the New England meetinghouse generated by the Great Awakening.
The key findings of this paper indicate that creedal authority was used by New and Old Light alike to suppress their opponents in civic life. But this in turn aroused dormant feelings for liberty of conscience. This research will specifically look at key discussion through three decades immediate after the Great Awakening.
1) 1740s: The writings of Elisha Williams and Jonathan Mayhew will show how a desire for religious liberty created unlikely bedfellows over liberty of conscience.
2) 1750s: A publicised debate over the future funding of Yale College gave opportunity for these Old and New light tensions to return as Jonathan Edwards’s disciple Joseph Bellamy and William Hart debated creedal authority.
3) 1760s: Finally, out of frustration with the separate churches among the Narraganset Indians, Joseph Fish fell into debate with the famed Isaac Backus on the location of authority.
This paper, if accepted, shows how New England Creedalism was used as a way to exert authority in the meetinghouse by New and Old Light alike, and ironically, sowed the seeds of religious liberty in an age of reason.