Perry Miller's "Errand into the Wilderness"

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.

This post provides an overview of the "Preface" and of the leading chapter, "Errand into the Wilderness," in this classic collection by the great Perry Miller.

"Preface"

Miller says that while in central Africa he had an “epiphany” that revealed to him what he ought to do with his life. The task was thrust upon him. Since that time, he had spent 25 years studying “the innermost propulsion of the United States” (viii).

He tell us that, after all of that work, he and his generation of scholars have still not achieved anything like “the comprehensive understanding we presumptuously proposed” (ix), which is one reason he is so glad to see young scholars like Edmund S. Morgan and Bernard Bailyn coming along.

While acknowledging that "social" history can and does contribute to our understanding of the past, Miller is compelled to say that these sorts of probes really don't get at the essence of his subject. He seems to be saying that the most important facet in human history is intellectual history, and that the intellectual history of colonial America is essentially theological. Furthermore, people who think otherwise haven't examined the facts.

He describes the chapters of his book as “pieces,” not “essays.” The first word suggests a piece of work submitted by a deadline. The second word sounds like something much more definitive and timeless. Miller goes out of his way to mention that his pieces are incomplete. They are approximations. And since that’s the case, he’s glad to have had the opportunity to revise them. He comes across as a serious worker who does not take himself too seriously.

"Errand into the Wilderness"

In this fascinating piece, Miller begins with the seeming despair of the second- and third-generation preachers in New England. They seem to assume that their forebears, the first generation, were more devoted and much more capable than they were, and that the present generation had failed because they had not run as well as their predecessors. What, Miller wonders, was the source of this anxiety, and even dread?

He distinguishes between two connotations of the word "errand." These two meanings certainly would have been in the back of the mind of Samuel Danforth, the Puritan preacher who, in 1670, titled his election sermon "A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness.": On the one hand, someone might be "an errand boy," merely doing someone else's bidding. On the other hand, one might be running errands for himself or herself. In the first scenario, the one running errands is not responsible for the list of things to do, only for the doing of them. In the second scenario, the one running errands is responsible for both. In which of these two had New England failed (or so it seemed to them)?

Plymouth was simple in that the Pilgrims were driven there by their convictions. Plymouth was more or less a forced migration. The only way that the Separatists could have had it otherwise would be if they ceased being Separatists.

The Great Migration of 1630 was completely different. Those people chose to go. The "Massachusetts Bay Colony come on an errand in the second and later sense of the word: it was, so to speak, on its own business" (5). Later, again: "These Puritans did not flee to America; they went in order to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would quickly be accomplished if only the saints back there had a working model to guide them" (11).

A great section on the experience of change (economic and social) among the first generations of the Bay Colony, and how the jeremiad sermons of the preachers were a sort of ritualistic public venting, which took for granted that such change would continue and accelerate, and that sort of encouraged them, actually. Having grown up in little England, where no more land was to be had, Winthrop could never have imagined how the physical realities of the American experience would change everything for the residents of Massachusetts and their descendants. Expansion, which was impossible in England, was guaranteed in America (9).

Miller sets out to show that the migration connected with John Winthrop was intended “to vindicate the most rigorous ideal of the Reformation, so that ultimately all Europe would imitate New England” (12). In the words of Winthrop, the eyes of the whole world were upon them. The whole world would be watching to see whether or not a purified Christianity would emerge in the New World. And, because they were doing this for the Lord's honor and glory, there is a real sense in which their "errand" was being carried out in the first sense, i.e., at the behest of the Lord whose Word compelled them (11).

Miller says that this is precisely the reason why the second and third generations seem so dejected. What were the sources of this perception and problem?

1. Winthrop and his group had set the bar so incredibly high. To get the whole world to look on and to emulate New England as New England did everything right?

2. Not only that, there were many in England who took an interest in the American project, but who did not appreciate or approve of the policies and actions of the leaders in New England, namely the banishment of the likes of Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Anabaptists, and Antinomians. Any one of these types would have been welcomed into Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army. And, upon winning, Cromwell would insist on all these being able to enjoy liberty of conscience (13).

3. And, the Civil Wars in England during the 1640s distracted the English and took away the “audience” of those in New England.

People in New England in the mid-1600s were having what Miller describes as a crisis of identity, which was even more troublesome to them than all of the natural hardships. Miller suggests that these events were a real turning point in America. His last few sentences read, “Their errand having failed in the first sense of the term, they were left with the second, and required to fill it with meaning by themselves and out of themselves. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America” (15).

Report on "Second Great Awakening" article by Donald G. Mathews

In an ongoing effort to chronicle some of my reading, to preserve the work and make it accessible to mainly me, I'm posting a few notes like this. The articles and books I'm reporting on are typically seminal works, important secondary sources in my historical research.

Mathews, Donald G. "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis." American Quarterly 21 (Spring 1969): 23-43.

Mathews begins by suggesting that "present interpretations" of the Second Great Awakening may not be "sufficiently comprehensive" (23).

Scholars typically choose between two places of the SGA: the west or New England (24). And, it truly was not the same in those two different locales.

Mathews notes that the very term revival(ism), with its prefix "re," indicates that something (faith, churches, etc.) is already there.

Mathews says that there was a continuity between the "end" of the Great Awakening and the "beginning" of the SGA. The discontinuity between the two was that whereas the First "demanded a rethinking of church authority without subsequent general expansion of the churches, the Second Awakening was most noticeable in the undeniable quantitative fact that the Methodist and Baptist sects were not restructuring church life so much as extending it-- . . . by the tens of thousands" (26).

"It is . . . the thesis of this paper that one of the major determinants of the Second Great Awakening was irrelevant to theological issues and can be studied apart from them, that the Awakening in its social aspects was an organizing process that helped to give meaning and direction to people suffering in various degrees from the social strains of a nation on the move into new political, economic and geographical areas" (27).

The SGA characterized by unity

Mathews criticizes Perry Miller's interpretation of the SGA by saying that Miller investigated intellectual facets of the Awakening and (surprise, surprise) identified intellectual (theological) sources or causes of the Awakening. Miller's work "leaves out the social patterns and untidy non-intellectual events of the Second Great Awakening" (28). (Mathews appears to be speaking primarily about the Miller article, "From the Covenant to the Revival"). Mathews also says that Miller's analysis does not really account for all of the SGA, only for New England, not for "the South, West, and Chesapeake" (28).

The SGA as "a vast process of organization" (29)

Mathews has criticisms for W. W. Sweet, but also credits him for recognizing that religious expansion had to do with more than just religion (29). Likewise, an extension of and corrective to Sweet, the work of T. Scott Miyakawa (Protestants and Pioneers, 1964), "demonstrated how, in a mobile society, the churches could become" places of integration, where they found social unity (29-30).

The SGA as "a movement" (30)

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (1937, footnote 8, on p. 30 of Mathews).

"We know that [the SGA] was a movement that converted hundreds of thousands of people and that it had some kind of profound social implications. But too often scholars have examined religion without taking its dynamism and stability seriously as social phenomena--a mistake that should be corrected" (30).

Toward that end, Mathews says that what he's going to say next is a suggestion, "a hypothesis" (31). Returning to the theme of organization, he points out that the SGA had to have been more than crazed activity and camp meetings. There was organization. Leaders at the local level had to define what it meant to be a member of a church. There was discipline and order established, etc. Boundaries were created, and observed, that distinguished insiders from outsiders, the saved from the damned (31).

Theory of social movements resulting from undefined social strain (32-33). Mathews suggests that the post-American Revolution era was characterized by social strain and that that "created a general susceptibility to social movements" (33).

As a result, the new U.S. became the scene of a specialized-society craze; all sorts of special interest societies. Mathews says that what emerged then was "a more persuasive and pervasive organizing force under which the societies themselves could be subsumed, i.e., the Second Great Awakening" (34).

In his book The Psychology of Social Movements (1941), Hadley Cantril said that people are open to suggestion when:
1. they have no adequate worldview for explaining the way things are (now? how they've come to be).
2. they experience a special event, something unique.
Cantril also said that the opposite is true. People are susceptible when everything is so very rigid as well as when they are painfully open-ended (34).

p. 35, Mathews continues to explicate how it was that the SGA was a social movement, and why that meant it was such a juggernaut.

The real question of the "success" of the SGA had to do not with the length of a camp meeting, but with how many viable churches came out of the revivalism. The SGA was a recruiting force. But what about subsequent devotion, organization, life together in the church. The group most ready and able to meet that challenge was the Methodists. They had the right sort of vision and organization for the job (36). No settled ministers. Mathews says the Methodists did not have a strong intellectual, theological tradition. What they had was a system and procedure that led to organizing people (36). Between 1781 and 1791, they went from approximately 10,000 members to 75,000.

Mathews gives more stats re. the growth of the Methodists (37) and says that the Baptists learned from the Methodists how it was done.  The incredible success and growth of the Methodists and Baptists in the the 1780s and 90s is quite a contrast to the dearth of religion in America in the wake of the Revolutionary War (37-38). Things had been in a shambles.

To an extent, Methodists and Baptists became more like each other; whatever accommodation there was had the purpose of organizing and nurturing the movement.

Methodists faltered in 1792, debates over the ecclesiastical elite, delegation of power (38-39) FVB wonders: is this a reference to the O'Kelly Schism only, or to more than that? Anyway, says Mathews, the Awakening itself did not falter. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians all continued to thrive.

Mathews says that the essential sameness, the universality of the SGA made it a nationalizing influence. Its effect was anti-provincial.

"[T]he Revival helped make religion one of the major determinants of public discourse everywhere in the country. And it is not surprising that the period 1794-1825 was the great period of founding religious magazines and papers" (40).

SGA "as an organizing process and social movement" (42).

Mathews ends by saying there are other vistas of his idea that just can't be covered in an article:
1. class contours of the story. Specifically, it seems that who was being organized by the SGA was "a rising middle class."
2. More specifically, it seems that the SGA was "the greatest organization and mobilization of women in American history."
Other questions as well (42).

Conclusions:

1. SGA "began as an organizing movement, not as a Calvinist reaction"
1.b. was successful because it adopted the Methodist way of organization
2. SGA began in the 1780s, continued to grow for more than a generation and "enveloped the entire country" (42).
3. Related to point 2, the SGA generated a 'common world of experience' (42). A strong national organization was not its secret. It didn't have that. What it had going for it was that it was a network of churches "that shared common values and norms with their counterparts throughout the United States" (42-43).

Significantly, Mathews refers to his article as presenting a "new thesis" (43).

"To explain the Revival in this manner enables students to see the social impact of what is too often presumed to be a purely religious movement . . . " (43).

Note that this article by D.G. Mathews is one of seven sources in the bibliography of Thomas H. Olbricht, "Great Awakenings" in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement.

Two Sorts of Puritans?

Knight, Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

In this carefully-researched and well-written book, Janice Knight argues that the standard scholarly portrait of American Puritanism stands to be corrected and supplemented. She begins by observing that from Cotton Mather to Perry Miller, historians have portrayed American Puritans as a unified group that upheld a coherent orthodoxy. Knight, on the other hand, hears what she calls “significant differences and alternative voices within Puritan culture” (2). In fact, she identifies two distinct groups with well-known leaders in each one. Knight distinguishes between what she terms the “Intellectual Fathers,” roughly equivalent to Miller’s orthodoxy, and the “Spiritual Brethren.” In contrast to the first group, the “Spiritual Brethren” embraced a “mystical strain of piety” that was “associated with Augustinianism.” Another distinction was that, contrasted with the first group, the second emphasized “divine benevolence over power” and “converted biblical metaphors of kingship into ones of kinship” (3).

Knight says that the “Intellectual Fathers” were represented in England by William Perkins and, above all, William Ames. In America, the Amesian tradition was carried forward by Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Peter Bulkeley, John Winthrop and most of the ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The “Spiritual Brethren,” on the other hand, were led in England by John Preston and, above all, Richard Sibbes. In America, the Sibbesian tradition was upheld most prominently by John Cotton, John Davenport, and Henry Vane.

Assuming for the moment that Knight’s distinction is valid, someone might ask how it could have been so consistently overlooked in the past. In response, Knight observes that in England, in spite of their differences, Puritans were held together by common enemies like Catholicism and High Anglicanism. In America, following the Antinomian Controversy (1636-1638), the apologies written by Shepard and Winthrop actually began the process of establishing what Perry Miller would eventually identify as a univocal Puritanism. That is to say, from very early times, differences among American Puritans were white washed and suppressed. From the time of Miller forward, scholarship on the Puritans has tended to simply reinforce his reigning interpretation, while investigating some aspect or another. Even those historians who have identified something different in John Cotton have typically seen him as exceptional. But, again, Knight interprets Cotton as representative of a dissenting tradition that originated in England and of which several other popular leaders were a part.

For the remainder of the book, Knight explains and illustrates how her thesis is no mere academic distinction, but that it actually serves as a kind of interpretive master key. Her basic insight, she says, is vital to a full understanding of historic episodes like the Antinomian Controversy and Henry Vane’s loss of the governorship in 1637. But more than anything else, Knight’s distinction shines a light on significantly different ideas, beliefs, and practices within Puritanism. These include the following: the attributes of God, theological anthropology, the nature of sin, the process of conversion, preaching styles, love for God, self, and neighbor, and pastoral roles and responsibilities. From beginning to end, Knight attempts to show that on each of these points, we can readily perceive what she identifies as two different and coherent traditions.