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Now, it is true that there was some chafing under that hierarchical system. So Edwards was coming into conflict, in the 1740s, with those who wanted to see change. But he did sometimes break the old molds. Like his father, Timothy, he worked against some of the prerogatives that men had and women did not. He encouraged his sisters, wife, and daughters to pursue education—though this did not include college, since women did not go to college in his day.

On the other hand, like most in his age, he had a blind spot toward slavery. Though affirming a kind of spiritual equality by welcoming slaves into his congregation, he himself held slaves and saw no need to set them free. In the decades after Edwards's death, though, during the era of the American Revolution, Edwards's closest disciple, Samuel Hopkins, became an anti-slavery leader.

If we can get past some of these things, how should we understand the legacy of Edwards? Do we see his fingerprints on American religion today?

He was the first person to publicize revival on a large scale, and he became part of the wider movement that, during his lifetime, birthed what we now know as evangelicalism. His was not an itinerant or mass-meeting revivalism, however, but a local, church-based one.

His legacy can be most clearly seen in the many churches today that still have ongoing and renewing "revivals." He was also the great theoretician of revivals; he analyzed them, seeking to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate revivals. Revivalists ever since have referred back to that work.

His fingerprints are also seen in American education. Most of the important colleges and even state universities founded in America in the first half of the nineteenth century were founded by New Englanders seeking both to educate and to evangelize the nation. They moved into the Midwest, taking ideals of education with them inspired directly by Timothy Dwight, Edwards's grandson and president of Yale. Many of these college founders looked to Edwards himself as one of their inspirations.

Many of those same people pursued a related program of national social reform, founded on Samuel Hopkins's notion of "disinterested benevolence"—a reworking of an Edwards idea. Their efforts profoundly shaped the nation.

What can we learn today from Edwards about religious experience?

Edwards spent his whole life working on the question of discerning which religious experiences were valid and which were not. At first, he defended most of the extravagant manifestations of revivals, the physical things, on grounds that they don't prove anything one way or another.

But by the time he wrote Religious Affections, he was more cautious. The signs of true affections he offers in that book are all about how your experiences play out in the quality of your Christian life—in attitudes, fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, and so forth. He argues that people are missing the point if they say that there is some sort of physical manifestation that is characteristic of true Christianity.

He still wants to say that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with such manifestations. But his principle is that every revival will be imitated by Satan—that's why it's hard to tell whether revival experiences are really benefiting those involved. The long-run test was the qualitative change in your life, not the joy bells ringing for a while.

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