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both England and the colonies, seventeenth-century Puritan men’s conversion narratives idealized willing submission to divine and earthly authorities by invoking biblical tropes of women’s submission and servants’ loyalty filtered through the Pilgrim’s Progress, other popular nonconformist narratives, and contemporary spiritual biographies.⁴⁹ In a long mystical theoerotic tradition, Puritan ministers established their fitness to lead by figuring themselves as “nursing fathers,” maternally devoted to their divine charges, and “brides of Christ,” desiring erotic union with divinity.⁵⁰ Thomas Shepard’s journal, for example, records his need to “desire Christ and taste Christ and roll myself upon Christ” or “lie by him and lie at him,” though often, as he wrote in his Autobiography, “Christ was not so sweet as [his] lust.” For Shepard and others, conversion was an uncertain, circular process in which doubt and grace intertwine in a drama of competing desire. Even when “the Lord made himself sweet to me and to embrace him and to give myself unto him,” Shepard wrote, “yet after this I had many fears and doubts.”⁵¹ The Puritan glorification of openness to God as typically feminine engaged the one-sex model of gender that also predominated in contemporary medical and philosophical traditions, so that, as Elizabeth Maddox Dillon observes, this “sexualized rhetoric” articulates “power differentials that did not necessarily inhere in bodies.”⁵² Lower forms of bodily lust, marked as female, figure the higher desire for union with the divine.

      The revivals participated in this shift away from this one-sex “feminine” model of piety broadly but unevenly. As New England’s economy and society became more closely integrated with England’s in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the ideal of erotic “female” subjection and servants’ loyalty lost ground among many men and wealthier women in favor of “gentler ideas of piety and suffering” appropriate to those virtuously brought up. In more prosperous towns, sermons, which often reflected a consensus of community ideals, moved toward the English post-Restoration latitudinarian norm of rationality and persuasion and emphasized Jesus’ love rather than God’s wrath.⁵³ Though continuing to evoke emotion, they abandoned erotic “female” piety as a master trope for human relationships with God.⁵⁴ In other ways, though, the revivals resisted the shift away from the one-sex model, describing conversion as divine impregnation and insisting on the convert’s humiliation and suffering.⁵⁵ In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentler notions of suffering became more narrowly associated with middle-class whiteness and female difference.⁵⁶

      In New England, these changes in notions of race, gender, and sexuality were precipitated or accompanied by the separation of conversion from church membership and church membership from civil privileges.⁵⁷ With fewer legal inducements to encourage full membership, established ministers in New England leaned more heavily on rhetorical and ritual techniques such as open communion. Solomon Stoddard was a public champion of these techniques, which helped corrode the link between the conversion narrative and religious or civil privileges. Edwards eventually attempted to restrict communion and reinstate the conversion narrative as a requirement for full membership—a fiasco precipitating his 1749 dismissal—but for most of the 1730s and 1740s, he embraced Stoddard’s use of rhetorical and personal means of persuasion to evoke and manage conversion.

      The transformation of Edwards’s narrative in the evangelical public chipped away at traditional Reformed limits on grace and thereby transformed the meaning of Edwards’s converts’ suffering, which, even as it incorporated newer sentimental modes, was firmly rooted in earlier notions of sex, bodily control, and ministerial and community oversight. Edwards’s pastoral interest in reinstating conversion as a means of reasserting ministerial control was shaped, in part, by his inability to maintain traditional ministerial and community regulation of sexuality.⁵⁸ Edwards insisted that conversion demanded public accountability for a range of bodily behaviors, including religious performances, sex, and other erotic practices, that could only be addressed within a gathered congregation of the faithful.

      The controversy over conversion, sex, and publicity that led to Edwards’s 1749 dismissal was, in some way, prefigured in the Faithful Narrative’s accounts of conversion as a substitution of gracious affective practice for “licentious” bodily practice. Edwards’s innovative incorporation of sentiment into his conversion narrative participated in the wider attempt to attract “gentler” converts, but he embedded sentimental conversion in earlier models of conversion, such as Shepard’s and St. Francis’s, directed at controlling a broad array of fleshly lusts. The Faithful Narrative begins by describing the salutary effect of small-group “social religion” on young people overly fond of “licentiousness,” “night-walking,” tavern drinking, “mirth and company-keeping,” and other friendly or erotic practices outside church or family. One of the “greatest company-keepers,” a young woman, offered Edwards her conversion narrative, and “News” of her conversion “seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning, upon the hearts of young people.” The “licentious” convert shared her narrative with “many” others, who “went to talk with her, concerning what she had met with.” They formed vanguards of young converts, not unlike Wesley’s early bands, who led a “general” revival encompassing all ages and ranks of European creoles and immigrants, “several Negros,” and neighboring Indians.⁵⁹ Even after the revival cooled, Edwards wrote to Colman in 1737 that converts did not “return to ways of lewdness and sensuality.”⁶⁰

      Edwards’s “flash of lightning” offers a key into the new importance and challenges of performances, narratives, and published “News” of conversion. It also reminds us of the difficulty with reading eighteenth-century revival practice as either sexual or purely spiritual and therefore outside the bounds of the erotic. The flash or dart of lightning on the heart was a traditional Reformed trope for the convert’s sense of God’s power. Traceable to Augustine’s “light of confidence” and subsequent rejection of fleshly “lusts,” this metaphorical “flash” moved conversion away from older, visionary experiences of revelation such as Paul’s “great light” from heaven.⁶¹ Seventeenth-century Puritans followed Augustine in using the phrase to signal moments of assurance, while Edwards and other revivalists specifically associated it with the new perceptual capacity (the “Divine and Supernatural Light”) granted to converts. The Faithful Narrative characterizes lay performances and accounts of conversion as themselves imbued with this divine power, implicitly justifying print publication as an extension of that process. At the same time, by obscuring Edwards’s role in spreading the news of her conversion, it imagines evangelical publicity as a disembodied emanation into an empty field. Standing as the Faithful Narrative’s first individual account of conversion, the “licentious” convert helps establish the meaning and significance of the book’s subsequent sentimental conversions, which also attempt to describe affective revivalist speech, organization, and performance as a substitute for illicit sexual practice.

      Like many revival conversion accounts, the Faithful Narrative could be read as a case study of sublimation, with the important qualification that it explicitly promotes the substitution of embodied, affective “social religion” for illicit sexuality associated with problematic lay religious expression. Social religion, which was evoked, guided, and promoted by Edwards but modeled and dependent on women’s speech, conversation, and organizing, was crucial to Northampton’s shift from illicit erotic activity outside the bonds of marriage to intense spiritual feeling inside the bonds of faith.⁶² Edwards’s two exemplary converts, delineated through new sentimental models of female piety, lapse into silence, while the “licentious” convert, delineated through older models of bodily lust and corruption, undergoes a moral transformation and achieves an important role in promoting social religion. Rather than straddling a cultural-historical boundary after which point sublimation can occur, sentimental narrative extends and continues an older model of converted selfhood in which fleshly lusts are replaced by embodied affective social performances of faith as part of the process of forming an evangelical public.

      Letters, Tears, and Being “Swallowed Up in Christ”

      In a preface to Edwards’s 1738 Boston edition of A Faithful Narrative, four Boston ministers took special note of Edwards’s

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