Saturday, January 9, 2027: 3:30 PM
Studio 4 (New Orleans Marriott)
Kirsten Macfarlane, University of Chicago
Spurred by contemporary politics, the genesis of the evangelical movement has received intensive attention since the 1970s. The result has been a curious historiographical bifurcation. Historians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries have increasingly argued that it is irresponsible to speak of evangelicals before c.1900, with some even suggesting that we drop the term until after World War II. At the same time, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians have coalesced around identifying the origins of the evangelical movement in the eighteenth century, with the fraught title of ‘first evangelical’ increasingly granted to Cotton Mather, the New England clergyman born in 1663.
There are powerful arguments on both sides. Those who argue for a post-WW2 emergence have valid concerns about the extent to which studies of ‘pre-modern’ evangelicalism have been used to decouple contemporary evangelicalism from partisan politics, white nationalism, racism and distinctively twentieth-century cultural commitments. Historians of earlier periods, meanwhile, have legitimate anxieties over whether jettisoning the term is an overcorrection. They worry that this elides the genuine theological breach within colonial puritanism c.1700, ignores the fact that men like Mather believed they were instigating a new form of piety that constituted an ‘evangelical movement’, and concedes too much to the present by defining the term around a single group of contemporary actors.
Focusing on Cotton Mather, this paper suggests that an approach informed by the history of knowledge can offer a rapprochement. Specifically, it argues that this approach can avoid the irresponsible readings criticised by historians of later periods, while also providing a more powerful account of the ways in which early evangelicalism both broke with and emerged from puritanism. This, it posits, can function as a grander argument for the importance both of studies of pre-modernity as well as the history for scholarship for major questions within American history.
