Once upon a time, the mid-eighteenth-century Great Awakening had a starring role in the run-up to 1776 and the explosive growth of evangelical Protestantism after 1800, or so we took for granted. We also took it for granted that great men, such as Jonathan Edwards, were crucial links in the sequence of events that carried us from the Puritans to Charles Finney, Lyman Beecher, and his sons and daughters. What remained mysterious—or at best, alluded to in studies of Whitefield as a theatrical performer—was why so many lay people and ministers in mid-eighteenth-century New England repudiated the religious culture of their parents and grandparents. Is this the real significance of the Awakening? Not the rise of democratic nationalism, nor the coming of diversity, but a new understanding of conversion and the practices—the “lived religion”—associated with that new understanding?

These are questions that permeate Douglas L. Winiarski's remarkable Darkness Falls on the Land of Light and make it the most compelling history of the Awakening in New England we have. Pieces of the book have been appearing in article form for some years; it has been twenty years in the making. Instead of revisiting the back and forth between Edwards and Charles Chauncey or noticing the “Separates” in passing, Winiarski fashioned scores of case studies using archives no one else has exploited—of churches, towns, and obscure ministers, as well as of such well known figures as Nathan Cole and Edwards. These archives yielded a treasure trove of “relations” made by candidates for church membership as well as spiritual testimonies of several other kinds, all of them deeply informative about the tensions that exploded at midcentury and beyond. Using church and town records and genealogical scholarship, Winiarski has also tracked the movements of thousands of people across a divisive religious and social landscape, following them as they leave one town or church for another and decide when or if to have their children baptized. Nowhere else in studies of religious practice in early America is social behavior so thoroughly mapped. And nowhere else have vernacular descriptions of religious experience been so acutely analyzed.

The book is divided into five parts arranged in a roughly chronological order. The first, titled “Godly Walkers,” describes the family and parish-centered culture that prevailed across most of New England by 1700. Here, Winiarski adds significantly to what Mark A. Peterson and others have discerned about renewal and continuity during the so-called “glacial age” of New England Puritanism. Using sermons by the unheralded Joseph Baxter as well as those of the more urban Benjamin Wadsworth and others, Winiarski fills out this story for the early decades of the eighteenth century: the story of a parish-style congregationalism centered on the incorporation of entire families and a routinized piety—the kind of congregationalism that existed in Northampton, Massachusetts in the 1730s, where, as Edwards pointed out in 1738, the church encompassed almost every family and children were routinely being baptized.

Part 2, “In a Flame,” traces the emergence of “awakenings” and the blows they rained upon the existing system. Here, the originality of the book lies in the closely detailed descriptions of agents that include Whitefield, Tenant, and Edwards but also others such as Nicholas Gilman of Exeter, New Hampshire, someone who, almost overnight, abandoned godly walking in favor of a Spirit-centered version of experience. What makes this part of the book so special is its description of how new networks for trading news and accumulating spiritual energies emerged. Meanwhile, ministers and lay people dispossessed from one church or town were moving to another that welcomed them or were open to their version of true religion. We revisit, as well, places, events, and people that are reasonably familiar to us—Nathan Cole, James Davenport, the bonfire in New London, the “Shepherd's Tent”—as well as others that, to me at least, were new.

Part 3, “Exercised Bodies, Impulsive Bibles,” overlaps with Part 2 but also expands the scope of the story to encompass an even greater range of experiences—visions, trances, and the like—epitomized in the history of a woman named Mary Wheeler. In Part 4, “Pentecost and Protest,” and especially Part 5, “Travels,” the narrative really takes off, as do the newly converted themselves, who break free of parish boundaries and a corporate, carefully controlled understanding of conversion. These sections are important because they disprove the assumption that “enthusiasm” waned as early as the mid-1740s once the ministerial establishment turned on Whitefield. Explosive disruptions and creative experiments continued into the 1780s and beyond, including, for the first time, perfectionist communities that accept spiritual marriage. Converts carried Holy Spirit-centered modes of worship and conversion to Vermont, and separate communities in eastern Connecticut and elsewhere threw over infant baptism. The outcome was an utterly different religious landscape from the one that prevailed almost everywhere in 1740: some old-style congregations close to dying but others flourishing, especially the New Light church in Newburyport, which became possibly the largest congregation in New England, and still others trapped in an obsessive quest for purity that fed an endless stream of schisms. Quietly, Winiarski suggests that this phase of the Awakening played a role in the origins of the Latter-Day Saints. I should add that these chapters remain acutely focused on religious experience and behavior, a “popular” version of both although this word is never dominating.

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light is about a prolonged sequence of awakenings that refashioned the Protestant culture of New England. All this would be sufficient, but the book also includes nine tables and one chart that detail affiliations, age of baptism for children, scriptural references, and the contents of “relations of faith,” a text-based analysis that breaks down this category into patterns that vary linguistically, geographically, and otherwise. The notes are an extraordinary resource for anyone wanting to do local histories. As well, they contain Winiarski's understated comments on others’ scholarship, some of it incorporated into his project and some dismissed as off the mark.

That Congregationalism in eighteenth-century New England fragmented in ways that foretell the conflicts and confusions of the nineteenth century is something we take for granted. Here, that story becomes a marvelously exact portrait of lived religion as fraught with alternatives that seemed incompatible. We owe a great debt to Winiarski for the work he did to make this book possible.