Broadly speaking, a conversion narrative is a narrative that relates the operation of conversion, usually religious. As a specific aspect of American literary and religious history, the conversion narrative was an important facet of
Puritan
The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. ...
sacred and secular society in
New England
New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the Can ...
during a period stretching roughly from 1630 to the end of the
First Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening (sometimes Great Awakening) or the Evangelical Revival was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement permanently affecte ...
.
Definition
As defined by Patricia Caldwell, the conversion narrative was "a testimony of personal religious experience…spoken or read aloud to the entire congregation of a
gathered church
Under Charles I, the Puritans became a political force as well as a religious tendency in the country. Opponents of the royal prerogative became allies of Puritan reformers, who saw the Church of England moving in a direction opposite to what ...
before admission as evidence of the applicant's visible sainthood"
[Caldwell, Patricia. ''The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression.'' New York: Cambridge UP, 1983. p. 1] Edmund S. Morgan describes the typical "morphology of conversion" related in the conversion narrative as involving the stages of "knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance."
[Morgan, Edmund S. "Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea." Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1963. p. 72]
In Puritan New England
The conversion narrative was one of the distinguishing features of the Massachusetts Puritan churches; the relation of a conversion narrative emphasized their belief in "faith as the essence of the church: and they were to ensure the presence of faith in their members by a screening process that included narratives of religious experiences."
[Morgan, Edmund S. "Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea." Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1963. p. 104] In adopting this requirement for membership, Bremer argues that the New England churches were extending the beliefs of their English brethren that "admission to the communion table should be limited to those with saving faith."
[Bremer, Francis J. "The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards." Rev. Ed. Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1995. p.106] As Morgan goes on to point out, the adaptation of the conversion narrative as a requirement for church membership "was as important politically as religiously, for it altered not only the character of church membership but the character of
freemanship."
Freemanship was restricted to church members and with the adaptation of this requirement for church membership, given the force of law with an act by the
General Court in 1636, "the new system of church membership may be said to have reached full definition, legal establishment, and coordination with the civil government in Massachusetts"
[Morgan, Edmund S. "Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea." Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1963. p. 105]
A key figure in the development and adaptation of the conversion narrative to the New England Puritan churches was
John Cotton.
References
{{Reflist
External links
Forms of American Puritan Rhetoric: Jeremiads and Conversion Narratives
Congregationalism
English emigration
Pre-statehood history of Massachusetts
New England Puritanism
English Dissenters
Rhetoric