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Questions about the spiritual meaning of America have become especially vital and engaged. In the presidential election of 1984, for example, both major party candidates professed a faith in Christianity and acknowledged the Christian sources of American history. Like their predecessors in high political office, they routinely invoked God’s blessing on America and spoke of American history as that of a “redeemer nation.”

While twentieth-century identifications of America with the “Promised Land” are common, the historical sources of this identity are less clear. Great evangelical leaders of our past are rightly celebrated for their fervent gospel preaching, but their views on America are generally ignored.

This is especially true of Jonathan Edwards, America’s foremost theologian and champion of religious revival. Most studies of Edwards focus on his evangelical preaching. But, Edwards also had a good deal to say about his native New England as a “covenant people” and a “New Israel.” In articulating these themes, he followed the lead of his Puritan predecessors and anticipated much of the language we hear spoken today by political and religious leaders.

Edwards was ordained at Northampton in 1726. Within a year of that date New England experienced the “Great Earthquake” of November 1727. The quake began, according to several accounts, with a “flash of light,” which was then followed by a “horrid rumbling” and “weighty shaking” that continued to reverberate throughout the evening. Weymouth’s Thomas Paine recalled the incident: “The motion of the Earth was very great, like the waves of the sea… . The strongest houses shook prodigiously and the tops of some Chimnies were thrown down…. It affected the People of N-E, especially those near the Center of it, with more Fear Amazement than ever is thought to have befallen the Land since it had that Name.” Awakened sleepers poured into the streets in huddled groups, certain that the day of judgment had come. The aftershocks continued for nine days which, Paine observed, “mightily kept up the Terror of it in the People, and drove them to all possible means of Reformation.”

On the day following the earthquake, fasts were called spontaneously throughout the land and repeated several times in the ensuing weeks. In Northampton, Edwards mounted the pulpit and preached a “fast sermon” from Jonah 3:10: “And God saw their works that they turned from their evil way and God repented of the Evil that he had said he would do unto them and he did it not.” Unlike regular (Sunday) sermons where Edwards’ primary concern was the individual soul, his concern on this occasion was the temporal estate of New England which, he believed, was governed by their corporate covenant with God. Even as his text was devoted to the nation of Nineveh and God’s mercy to them because they repented, so also was his concern that day with the nation of New England and the warning contained in their earthquake.

Like other ministers in 1727, Edwards perceived both natural and supernatural meanings in the great earthquake. On the one hand, he drew from the most recent scientific literature to explain that earthquakes were not, in themselves, miracles but natural convulsions that occurred when bodies of water met with “subterraneous Fires” in underground caverns to produce rumblings at ground level. On the other hand, Edwards explained, earthquakes were also used by God to warn a covenant people: “earthquakes and lights in the heaven may often have natural causes yet they may nevertheless be ordered to be as a forerunner of great changes and Judgments.”

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