America's Political Dynasties by Hess Stephen

Author:Hess, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-04T23:00:00+00:00

The Frelinghuysen Dynasty

“Come hither, ye careless, at ease in sin, yet carnal and earthly minded, ye unchaste whoremongers, adulterers, ye proud, haughty men and women, ye devotees of pleasure, drunkards, gamblers, ye disobedient, ye wicked rejectors of the Gospel, ye hypocrites and dissemblers, how suppose ye it will go with you?”

—Rev. Theodoras Jacobus Frelinghuysen to his congregants.1

THESE were words of the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept the country in the mid-eighteenth century and became the first spontaneous mass movement in American history. Its leaders were George Whitfield, Methodist; Jonathan Edwards, Congregationalist; William and Gilbert Tennent, Presbyterians; and Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen of the Dutch Reformed Church. They preached an evangelical piety, a denunciation of formalism, and a reformation of morals.

Another young man who reached America at the height of the movement was Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, who thoroughly agreed with the aims of this new guard. It is probable that Muhlenberg met Frelinghuysen, for the German Lutheran minister twice visited Raritan during Frelinghuysen’s lifetime.2 The ecclesiastical founders of these two great political dynasties had much in common. Muhlenberg, The Patriarch of the German Lutheran Church in America,” and Frelinghuysen, “The Apostle of the Raritan,” had both been trained in the doctrine of German pietism. But Muhlenberg was to make his mark as a church administrator, while Frelinghuysen was primarily an evangelist

Frelinghuysen preceded Muhlenberg to America by eighteen years. The Frelinghuysens were also from Germany, living in Westphalia on the Dutch border, but they were purely Dutch in culture and religion, and it was the Dutch Reformed Church that sent the first Frelinghuysen to America to take charge of four congregations in the Raritan Valley of New Jersey.* Theodorus Jacobus settled in January 1720 at what is now Somerville, and is today in the district represented by Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen, his great-great-great-great-great-grandson.

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