The Separates
The
Great Awakening brought numerous schismatic movements to Connecticut
parishes, many of them resulting in new churches. These new congregations
were called Separate Congregationalists, or just plain Separates.
Many studies of them have been made.
Blake,
S. Leroy. The Separates or Strict Congregationalists of New
England. Boston:
Pilgrim
Press, 1902. Blake was the pastor of the First Church of New London.
Foster,
Stephen. “A Connecticut Separate Church: Strict Congregationalism
in Cornwall, 1780-1809.” New England Quarterly 39(September,
1966)3:309-33. This piece supplements that of Bumsted, above.
Foster shows that this very late separation—an episode he considers
typical—was based on a failed effort to fire the minister. It
started as a dispute over money, became a struggle for liberty,
and ended as a quarrel over geography, the dividing line between
the old and new parishes.
Jeffries,
John W. “The Separation in the Canterbury Congregational Church:
Religion,
Family and Politics in a Connecticut Town.” New England Quarterly
52(December, 1979)4:522-49. The separation in Canterbury in
1742 was the first in the colony. This article analyzes the reasons
for the division and, following the historiographic trend of
the 1970s, finds that family connections and political position
were at least as important as religious ideology.
Learned,
Robert C. “Separate Churches in Connecticut.” In Contributions
to the Ecclesiastical History of Connecticut. Edited by Leonard
Bacon. New Haven, 1861. A description and listing.
Onuf,
Peter S. “New Lights in New London: A Group Portrait of the Separatists.”
William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series 37(October, 1980)4:626-43.
Attempts to explain, by social analysis, “why so many mid-eighteenth
century Americans were prepared to respond to radical religious
and political appeals.” (p. 643)
Parker,
Edwin P. “The Congregational Separates of the Eighteenth Century
in Connecticut.” Papers of the NHCHS 3(1914): 151-61. A
descriptive essay focusing on the theological issues. Other studies
listed here make this one obsolete.
Walsh,
James P. “The Conservative Nature of Connecticut Separatism.”
CHS Bulletin 34(January, 1969) 1:9-17. Walsh early discerned
the movement away from a consensus approach to American history,
in particular within the context of the religious establishment.
Far from characterizing the Separates as radical democrats, as
some historians had, Walsh saw them as “on the whole extremely
conservative.” (p. 9) They were, in many cases, religious reactionaries
who wanted to return to the old seventeenth-century concept of
the “pure church” of regenerates only.
|
