Taming Lust by Ben-Atar Doron S.; Brown Richard D.;

Author:Ben-Atar, Doron S.; Brown, Richard D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Figure 17. Timothy Dwight, by John Trumbull, 1817. Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

In Connecticut and much of New England these calls to arms reinvigorated the old faith. Renewed interest in scripture coincided with the outbreak of war in Europe—the number of treatises on the Bible published in the four years from 1793 to 1796 was many times greater than for all the years since 1760. Suddenly and seemingly independently, religious revivals erupted in the second half of the 1790s in the New England interior, shaping Christianity for a generation. Some ministers shed the cool, intellectual preaching style of their Puritan forefathers and aggressively embraced revivals, while in other congregations a new generation of evangelical pastors entered the pulpit. The result was transformative. What began as a “succession of heavenly sprinkling” turned into a flood sweeping over the interior of southern New England. In contrast, Boston and its eastern Massachusetts hinterland embraced liberal Unitarian Christianity; but inland the “old time religion” flourished. By 1799 Litchfield County pastor James Russell recalled, he could stand on his porch and “number fifty or sixty contiguous congregations laid down in one field of divine wonders, and as many more in different parts of New England.” Here Dwight’s followers came to lead one parish after another, dominating countywide ministerial associations.32

The religious revival joined with economic, political, and cultural upheavals to create a crisis of confidence among many in the ruling class. Established institutions—the church, the state, the law—they were sure, provided the strongest ark of security. Acting in light of these anxieties and governing according to these assumptions, justices of the peace like Simeon Strong in Amherst and Lynde Lord in Litchfield, as well as the jurists who sat on the highest courts, felt compelled to adhere to the law and to their states’ penal codes when householders came to them with accusations of bestiality against two old men. In other times officials had temporized, allowing delay and procedural obstacles to permit such bizarre accusations to fade. But now they responded to their neighbors forcefully, bringing into play the full power of government so as to prosecute these nonviolent sexual transgressors.

Farrell’s affair coincided with the first revivals that followed the start of Dwight’s evangelical missions across New England. Because town and church records for Leverett are sparse, it is impossible to know whether a revival was coursing through that community in the mid-1790s. We do know that the pastor, Reverend Henry Williams, was an evangelical and that when the Congregational clergy of the county organized a missionary society in 1802 it raised contributions of $1,163.77 in the first year and pledges of $4,130 for the following six years. So there is no question that the county elite embraced Christian revivals. But whether or not the people of Leverett were especially imbued with evangelical fire at the time of Farrell’s accusation and trial is beyond reach. Leverett’s clergyman, who held no college degree, published only a single sermon, an evangelical “call to thirsty souls” that

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