The Congregational Church

The Congregational Church was the official ecclesiastical instrument of the government until 1818 and the bulwark of the Standing Order that dominated society, education, and politics throughout the colonial and early national periods. A great deal has been written about it. A most useful List of Congregational Ecclesiastical Societies Established in Connecticut Before October 1818 with their Changes (Hartford: CHS, 1913) was compiled by Albert C. Bates. The list has been charted on five maps by Richard Bushman in “Appendix I” of From Puritan to Yankee. The everyday hum­drum of a typical eighteenth-century minister’s life can be seen in the 150 pages of Diary of the Reverend Daniel Wadsworth Seventh Pastor of the First Church of Christ in Hartford, edited by George C. Walker (Hartford: Case, Lockwood and Brainard, 1894). A biography of Wadsworth (1704-1747) is included in the introduction, and the Diary, which begins in 1737 and continues to his death, is indexed. There are other similar works, most notably the wonderful work of Ezra Stiles noted in the “Biographies” section of this bibliography.

The largest concentration of doctoral dissertations in Connecticut his­tory is in the area of colonial religion. We include six that cover the subject in a general way:

Cohen, Sheldon Samuel. “The Connecticut Colony Government and the Polity of the Congregational Churches, 1708-1760.” New York University, 1963. Cohen describes first the welding and then the weakening of the church-state tie with the establishment and then the virtual abandonment of the Saybrook Platform. The rise of dissenting churches and spiritual decline within the Con­gregational church caused the government to make “a significant withdrawal from interference in ecclesiastical affairs. By the close of 1760, Connecticut maintained only a remnant of its once strong Church-State ties, while Congre­gational order remained in a disrupted state.” (from the abstract)

Mann, Bruce Hartling. “Parishes, Law, and Community in Connecticut, 1700-1760.” Yale, 1977. This focuses on church organization, not theology, and is discussed above in the “Colonial Government” section. Mann sees the parish rather than the town as the dominant center of community focus in the period studied.

Moran, Gerald Francis. “The Puritan Saint: Religious Experience, Church Mem­bership, and Piety in Connecticut, 1636-1776.” Rutgers, 1974. Moran studies all sorts of local records from ten parishes: Woodbury First, Milford First, New London First, Stonington First, Windsor First, Preston First, Canterbury First, Suffield First, North Stonington, and Stonington East. “The prolongation of religious experience provides a frame of reference for viewing patterns in church membership. The normative age of attaining communion—25 to 35 years—often marked the range between peaks in admissions with new membership reaching high points in the 1630’s and early 1640’s, in some churches in the late 1660’s, in the late 1680’s and 1690’s, and in the late 1720’s through the early 1740’s. Thereafter most of the established churches were unable to sustain their membership.” (from the abstract)

Norick, Ronald H. “To Turn Them from Darkness: The Missionary Society of : Connecticut on the Early Frontier, 1798-1814.” University of California at Riverside, 1975. Discussed below.

Rankin, Samuel Harrison, Jr. “Conservatism and the Problem of Change in the Congregational Churches of Connecticut, 1660-1760,” Kent State University, 1971. Rankin depicts Connecticut parishes as more autonomous than those in Massachusetts and therefore less susceptible to such unifying institutions as the Saybrook Platform. Factionalism, which climaxed in the 1740s, “involved basic differences in theology as well as ecclesiastical practices, [and] any resolution short of dissolving the establishment would and did involve the acceptance of diversity within the pale of established religion. The consensus that emerged from the debates over evangelical religion was broad enough to encompass a plural definition of orthodoxy [by 1760].” (from the abstract)

Walsh, James Patric. “The Pure Church in Eighteenth Century Connecticut.” Columbia, 1967. The Puritan ideal was a church consisting only of those who had had a regenerative—that is, conversional—experience. This ideal con­flicted with the concept of an established church. Various institutional and ideological efforts to rationalize the resultant tension failed, and finally even most Congregational clergy saw the efficacy of a voluntary church and thus could accept disestablishment in 1818.

Another relevant dissertation has been published: Paul R. Lucas, Valley of Discord: Church and Society Along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725 (Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New England, 1976). Lucas shows that intra-Congregational bickering had a long history well before the Great Awakening tore the Establishment apart. He surveys the con­flicting interpretations of the old Progressive historians and the consen­sus interpretations of the post-World War II historians and notes that the older historians emphasized people and institutions, while the newer ones looked at ideology. Lucas stands with the even newer—or neo-Progressive—school characteristic of the 1970s. “Connecticut’s Puritans,” he writes, “recognized early and often that many of their cherished ideals were contradictory. They tried to reconcile differences but discovered that efforts to forge consensus only sharpened conflict. Their efforts bred factionalism and social discord. Dissension, in turn, modified ideals. The result was an institutional structure that never found stability.” (p. xi) Robert M. Bliss emphasizes these early conflicts in “A Secular Revival: Puritanism in Connecticut, 1675-1708,”Journal of American Studies 6(August, 1972): 145-51. Bliss’s work is in the old consensus tradition: he calls the Saybrook Platform a successful effort to promote order, piety, and authority “by giving institutional and secular form to the old covenanted government and society.” (p. 151) Few recent historians agree that the Platform created order or cohesiveness, since many—perhaps most— parishes did not adhere to it.