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America’s colonial period literature and that of its early settlers are marked by a deep sense of religion. This is discernible through the various authors' writings that relate to religion (Gjelten, 2017). For that reason, the evolution of the colonial American literature is thus more seen as a mirror of the religious virtues that were observed by the colonialists as this was assumed to be a means of advancing ethics and morality at the time. Colonial American literature is full of apparent expressions of faith and its redeeming powers and the recognition of its mighty to help humans overcome difficulties and triumph adversity.
This paper will, therefore, analyze the literary works of authors Jonathan Edwards, William Bradford, and Henry David Thoreau to show how their religious views shaped their literary writings and the interpretation of historical and political events.
Jonathan Edwards was one of the most famed preachers and philosophers in colonial America. He wrote many books and made quit many sermons.
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Despite that, it is the sermon of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” that Jonathan is most renowned of (Edwards, 1741). He preached with conviction and fury of how Great God is to us all. The philosopher preached for those lost in faith and the wanderers. Throughout his literary work, the writer uses numerous figurative language and rhetoric techniques to summon the unregenerate believers to bless their lives and live in the image of God with respect and fear. By his renewal, recognition, and allusion to God, Jonathan’s sermon exemplifies the idea of the age of the great awakening.
Edward was not only a religious man but also an educated one as well.
As such, the writer believed in personal purity and he would later become the leader of his father’s church just after he had passed away. As a Puritan, Edward stressed to restore his Puritan beliefs in Christians of the colonial times. Other than being Christian believers, Edward wanted to convert the Christian believers of his time into people who were motivated by their faith. Reasonably, this is the single most important reason why his literary works have any sort of religious impetus. As such, many of the writing he wrote are filled with sermons to persuade Christian followers to believe more in religion. In his literary work “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards’s writings are far more representative of the aforementioned dialects. In this sermon, the writers embed the expression of hell to alert readers that if one does wrong, then he/she is fated for hell (Edwards, 1741). In the end, this scared many Christians in his time as many of these did not know what hell was as they thought that it was a place underground where sinners would be estranged and spend the eternity of their lives burning in pits of fire.
William Bradford’s "Of Plymouth Plantation" chronicles a story where he served as a governor on the Plymouth plantation. The author starts with a description of the pilgrims they faced and the religious persecutions they faced in England, their result to move to the Netherlands, the financial challenges they tolerated in Holland, and finally their resolution to sail to the United States. Largely, his writing shares conceptions of the nationalist religious beliefs. In depiction of the hurdles they encountered while sailing to America, Bradford excerpts that “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye perils & miseries thereof, again to set their feet on ye firmer and stable earth, their proper element” (Bradford, 1651).
By this, the author gives an example of God’s caring as often he intervened to protect and provide for them for example when they were attacked by the sea pirates, this Bradford claims that they got punished by God through either death or illness. He goes ahead to praise the lord on how good he was to them by delivering them from oppression as he quotes “praise the Lord, because He is good, and His mercies endure forever…let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, show how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor” (Bradford, 1651). In general, Bradford commits to memory the persecution in England and the struggles they endured in the Netherlands for which he is grateful for the new world that God led them to where they were able to practice a trade and unwaveringly praise the lord.
In John Winthrop’s account of “A Model of Christian Charity”, he described how the Puritans ventured into a new land to establish a new society. Winthrop asked for patience and cooperation in this transition. He instilled the virtues and faith in God’s guidance and providence. John starts off by stating that all men were not created equal. His reasons were that God set aside gifts for the affluent to show the glory of God, circumstances arise to examination character, and differences in social statuses create community dependency within each other. He rallied around the principles of impartiality and compassion. A passage from this sermon stuck out to me. It states, “Therefore let us choose life, that we and our seed may live by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.” It speaks to me in a sense that the Puritans migrated for the sole purpose of serving their God. Their success depended on their obedience to the God they served (Winthrop, 1630).
Until the dawn of the 17th century, American literature was more dedicated to religion, politics, and documented events. Although many of these literary works lacked and were dry into the authors’ views, they did much to induce the transmission of religious attitudes at the political stage and the traditional society as a whole. Any writing at the time that did not fulfill any of the former purposes was more or less of a waste of time and indeed this can be reflected through the literary works of William Bradford "of the Plymouth Plantation," "A Model of Christian Charity” by John Winthrop, and Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
Bradford, W. (1651). Bradford's History "Of Plymouth Plantation". https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/nereligioushistory/bradford-plimoth/bradford-plymouthplantation.pdf.
Edwards, J. (1741). Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards. Retrieved from https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/edwards_jonathan/Sermons/Sinners.cfm
Gjelten, T. (2017). To Understand How Religion Shapes America, Look To Its Early Days. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2017/06/28/534765046/smithsonian-exhibit-explores-religious-diversitys-role-in-u-s-history
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1 Selections
American Literature and Religion. (2020, Sep 22). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/american-literature-and-religion-essay
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