Weekly Article

In the early 1700s, religion was in decline in the British Atlantic world. Two centuries of near-constant religious warfare and intellectual and emotional conflict over the right way to worship and know God left Europe bloodied and exhausted in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. As scientific understanding grew, many people wondered if religion was merely a harmful superstition that could be left in the past. 

The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening

The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, emerged partly from this disillusion with religion. In longer estimates, this era lasted from 1680-1820, a period known as the Long Eighteenth Century. Working from a generally secular mindset, Enlightenment thinkers valued rational thought and logic and developed systematic processes for organizing knowledge and understanding the world. 

Theologians (especially those based at major universities) were not immune to the influence of the Enlightenment. During this time, the Protestant religious experience became more institutional and less personal. This perhaps suited those disposed to systematic study, but it proved less popular with the people in the pews and church attendance dropped.

Partly in response to the Enlightenment, a religious revival called the Great Awakening swept the British Atlantic world in the 1730s and 1740s. The Great Awakening was characterized by revivals in which charismatic itinerant preachers worked attendees into an emotional fervor leading to an awareness of personal sinfulness and need of salvation to escape eternal damnation. Great Awakening preachers emphasized the need for a personal, often emotional, conversion experience and a personal relationship with God and downplayed the importance of religious institutions.

It’s tempting to think of the Enlightenment as a secular movement and the Great Awakening as a religious movement. However, that ignores the complexity of the times and the personalities involved, especially among Presbyterians, as the traditional Presbyterian emphasis on education required clergy to undergo rigorous academic training, typically at institutions steeped in the values of the Enlightenment.

Presbyterians had long regarded formal study and its resulting knowledge to be both the primary qualifications for ministers and the primary path to knowing God. At the time of the Great Awakening, ordination required education at a divinity school and subscription to the Westminster Confession. Presbyterian ministers could receive training at the University of Edinburgh, and later at Harvard or Yale. Most Presbyterian ministers in North America either emigrated directly from Scotland or Ulster or traveled there for their education. Even an education at Harvard or Yale removed potential clergy members to New England, far from the centers of Presbyterian population in the Mid-Atlantic colonies.

The Old Light/New Light Schism

Under these conditions, it’s not surprising that fully qualified Presbyterian ministers were scarce in the colonial backcountry, where Scots-Irish Presbyterian communities pressed against the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia. The lack of called pastors left many pulpits open to itinerant preachers. These men often had not met the requirements for ordination or received permission from the local presbytery to preach to congregations under its care, and they generally preached the gospel according to the Great Awakening.

Predictably, conflict arose, not only among the Presbyterians but among all Protestant denominations in North America. Those members of the clergy and the laity who continued to hold study and knowledge as the primary way to know God and who continued to value the corporate nature of the church and the processes of the institution became known as “Old Lights.” On the other hand, “New Lights” believed that knowledge of God was revealed by the Holy Spirit through a personal conversion experience that saved the converted person’s immortal soul. They privileged the personal relationship with God over participation in a religious community.

In the battle for hearts and minds, Old Lights favored the mind, while New Lights favored the heart. Both clergymen and congregations took sides. (Sometimes the conflict is referred to as “Old Side” and “New Side.”) Each group bitterly accused the other of leading people astray.

In 1741, the year Derry Church acquired a land grant from Thomas and Richard Penn, the Synod of Philadelphia broke into Old Light and New Light factions, and a slim majority of Old Lights managed to evict the New Lights from the synod. (Moderates, perhaps uncomfortable with the way the eviction played out, chose to depart with the New Lights.) The conflict centered on two issues: itinerant preaching and ministerial qualifications. If that sounds dull, the personalities involved were anything but. Marilyn Westerkamp writes, “An outsider might well think that this reasonably small population and geography could have been managed by a single synod, but such an observer would be forgetting the large personalities involved—personalities too vibrant, too doctrinaire, too righteous, to govern themselves together” (3).

One of those personalities belonged to William Tennant, Sr., who arrived from Ireland in 1718. Within ten years, he opened a small, informal school that offered the only training for Presbyterian ministers south of New England. Scoffed at as the “Log College” by those who doubted its ability to produce qualified ministers, Tennant’s school emphasized New Light values. Filled with their mentor’s evangelical piety, Tennant’s students often preached outside their own jurisdictions, sometimes even preaching to congregations with called pastors. 

In another blow for the Old Lights, by the 1730s, pastors who were unable to secure calls in Scotland and Ireland looked to the North American frontier for positions. From an Old Light point of view, both these circumstances meant that unqualified pastors were able to gain membership in presbyteries, where they exercised the same amount of power as anyone else. In other words, the vote of a graduate of the Log College counted the same as the vote of a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. These were the major issues at play in 1741. 

Nor were these issues confined to Presbyterians. Across British Colonial America, clergy and congregations of all denominations self-identified as Old Light or New Light and reached across congregational and even denominational lines to align with those who shared their beliefs.

In Derry’s own Presbytery of Donegal, almost every congregation either left the presbytery entirely or split along Old Light-New Light lines. Derry Church experienced its own schism in these years. As the battle between Old Lights and New Lights was largely a battle between strong personalities, the dates of Derry’s schism indicate that something similar happened here. 

Derry Church’s Schism

In 1741, Derry’s first called pastor was in the ninth year of a “harmonious and spiritually profitable” tenure (“Reverend William Bertram”). Derry Church was lucky to get William Bertram. In many ways, Bertram seems to have been the ideal Presbyterian minister for his era. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and served in Ulster for many years before immigrating to North America for personal reasons. He had a long career prior to the upheaval of the Great Awakening, and perhaps he served as a stabilizing force. However, the fact that his salary was not always paid suggests disagreement, if not outright dissension, with church leadership. Lawsuits of the era indicate that the laity were known to withhold salaries in an attempt to control clergy. In any case, while Bertram was alive, Derry mostly weathered the schism in the larger church. Still, as early as 1745, Derry’s New Light faction attempted to bring in an energetic, talented young preacher newly arrived in the Susquehanna Valley.

Upon Bertram’s death in 1746, the New Light majority at Derry Church called John Roan. Roan could not have been more different from Bertram. For a start, he was 43 years younger and of a different generation and mindset. His early training as a weaver also indicates a class division. Born in Ulster in 1717, he immigrated to Pennsylvania in his early twenties. He received his training at William Tennant’s Log College and earned a reputation as a troublemaking preacher in Virginia before arriving in the Presbytery of Donegal.

During Roan’s tenure, Derry became a solidly New Light congregation. The Old Light minority left to join an Old Light majority at Paxton Presbyterian Church, which had been served by John Elder since 1738, after an overworked Bertram asked to be relieved of his duties to that congregation in 1736. Like Bertram, Elder was born in Edinburgh and educated at the University of Edinburgh and had emigrated to join family members. Roan served several local New Light congregations, including Derry, until his death in 1775. Synod records indicate that Roan’s career was marked by “points of difficulty” (“Reverend John Roan”). He appears to have been a polarizing figure, and he left all the congregations he served with deep debts.

Reconciliation

The actual divisions between Old Light and New Light clergy were never as deep as they appeared, or as their impassioned preaching must have had their congregations believe. While there were extremists on both sides, a strong contingent of moderates remained, and they served as peacemakers who succeeded in bringing the estranged factions together only 17 years after their initial split. Reconciliation came as tempers cooled, as some incalcitrant personalities joined the church triumphant, as some New Light ministers became alarmed by the extent of the emotional piety they had unleashed among the laity, and as some Old Light ministers found themselves able to compromise.

The Synod of New York and Philadelphia’s Plan of Union of 1758 attempted to address the issues of ministerial qualifications and itinerant preaching that split the Presbyterians in 1741. Some of its major points are familiar to us today:

• Candidates for ministry must produce evidence of education and theological knowledge as well as an experience of personal salvation through grace.
• Clergy must not attack each other publicly but follow the appropriate disciplinary process if they feel a colleague is in error.
• Clergy must ask permission of the called pastor or the presbytery (in case of a vacancy) before preaching outside their own congregations.

Finally, the Plan of Union affirmed the Great Awakening as “a gracious work of God, even tho’ it should be attended with unusual bodily commotions…whenever religious Appearances are attended with the good Effects above mentioned, we desire to rejoice in and thank God for them.” (Synod of New York and Philadelphia qtd. in Westerkamp 15).

Perhaps the most significant indicator of reconciliation was the recognition, upon reunion in 1758, of both sides of the schism of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) as an acceptable location for ministerial education. Founded by New Lights in 1747, that institution’s first decades were marked by instability. However, with the recruitment of Jonathan Witherspoon in 1768, the Presbyterians finally had a leader of national prominence who could serve as a unifying symbol as the head of a respected educational institution located in the heart of North American Presbyterianism.

Derry Church experienced its own reconciliation. Upon the death of John Roan in 1775, Derry called John Elder. Thirty years after the churches along the Swatara split into Old Light and New Light congregations, they reunited. John Elder served as pastor of both churches until his retirement in 1791. For another century, Paxton and Derry would frequently be served by the same pastor.

Division has always been a part of Presbyterian—and American—life and history. As we live through our own era of deep division, may it encourage us to know that reconciliation is also part of our story.

Bibliography

Fea, John. “In Search of Unity: Presbyterians in the Wake of the First Great Awakening.” The Journal of Presbyterian History (1997-) 86, no. 2 (2008): 53–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23338196.

“Reverend John Elder (1706-1792)” Church Timeline. Derry Presbyterian Church (USA). 2024. https://www.derrypres.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Elder.pdf

“Reverend John Roan (1717-1775).” Church Timeline. Derry Presbyterian Church (USA). 2024. https://www.derrypres.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Roan.pdf

“Reverend William Bertram (1674-1746).” Church Timeline. Derry Presbyterian Church (USA). 2024. https://www.derrypres.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Bertram.pdf

Synod of New York and Philadelphia, Minutes, 22 May 1758, printed in Klett, ed., Minutes of the Presbyterian Church, 340-43, citation, 342.

Westerkamp, Marilyn. “Division, Dissension, and Compromise: The Presbyterian Church during the Great Awakening.” The Journal of Presbyterian History (1997-) 78, no. 1 (2000): 3–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23335294.