33 Introduction: Testimony and Transcendence
To understand the significance of testimony and transcendence in American Literature, we must look to a particular group of early settlers, the Puritans. For the Puritans, testimony was evidence of transcendence.
To testify is to give witness or an account of the truth of a matter. It is a legal term and a sacred term. We still use the expression “testify” to mean giving an account in court under oath AND to mean giving an account of a religious, spiritual experience, usually of salvation and Divine Providence.
To transcend is to rise above something; in these readings we are looking at what this term meant for the Puritans and what it meant for later Americans, individuals who were very different in some ways but whose lives were still very much influenced by the imprint Puritan theology had on the American imagination and self concept. For the Puritans, transcendence was the result of being chosen by God—not the other way around. They were strict Calvinists, which meant they believed that before the creation of the world, God in his omnipotence and omniscience chose some people for salvation and others for damnation. Nothing a person did could influence that decision, which had been made eons before their birth. And so the Puritans constantly looked for evidence that they had been chosen by God, and then crafted that evidence into their testimonies. They kept detailed diaries where they recorded and examined what might seem to be apparently mundane experiences, mining them for confirmation of divine intervention, for proof that they were one of “God’s Elect.”
Who were these early settlers of territory that would one day become part of the original 13 colonies of the United States? How and why did they come to North America?
The United States owe part of our freedom to practice our chosen faith—or no faith—to the history of religious intolerance and violence in Europe, to the desire of the early New England colonists to practice Christianity according to their own convictions, and to the political wisdom of our founders who realized that the separation of Church and State protected those institutions as well as individuals.
Collectively, we often call the early English colonists the Pilgrims. But there were many different religious groups who came as pilgrims to North America. The Puritans were one of most important of those groups.
In 1628 or 29, King James I granted the Massachusetts Bay Charter to the Puritans, which gave them official permission to establish a colony in the New World. The Puritans reached New England in 1630, and after an inspiring (for them, at least) sermon given by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, they disembarked and began establishing settlements between the Merrimack and Charles Rivers. The Puritans worked hard and played hard—they danced (but no touching), they drank beer, they enjoyed good food, and they believed in having a hearty sex life—as long as you were having sex with your own wife or husband, of course. In fact, they viewed marriage as a civil contract, not a sacrament. Legal grounds for divorce not only existed, divorces were actually granted, most particularly in cases of desertion or infidelity. In other words, although their main focus was on the world to come, they still lived life fully and enjoyed earthly pleasures as long as they didn’t violate scripture. In fact, arguably our commitment to capitalism and the creeping mix of State and Christianity are due to the influence of the Puritans. What does this have to do with testimony?
Well, the government they set up was a theocracy—a form of government where religious rules and creed are the basis for law. Participation was open to church members only—and church membership was based, in the beginning at least, on a person’s ability to persuasively testify to their spiritual awakening and rebirth. This is where those detailed journals, where they documented their lives and searched for evidence of God’s hand, blessing or teaching them, came into play. The diaries helped Puritans make their case for the possibility that they were one of God’s Elect.
A brilliant example of this type of personal narrative is Jonathan Edwards’s. Edwards, who lived from 1703 to 1758, was one of the greatest theological and philosophical thinkers ever produced in North America. In addition to his detailed and moving Personal Narrative, he managed to take concepts from one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers, John Locke, as well as the scientific treatises of Isaac Newton and use deductive thinking to arrive at the ideas in his great work A Divine and Supernatural Light. God, Edwards reasoned, is knowable through his creation. The laws of the natural world reveal the nature of their creator, but for Edwards we must be given the grace of Divine Light to perceive and understand matters of the spirit, and it is Divine Light that leads us to transcendence.
One of the misconceptions we often have is that religious tolerance was practiced by the different religious groups that came over to the New World seeking their own freedom to follow their beliefs. Unfortunately, this is not at all true, and Puritans were particularly intolerant of others. Quakers, for instance, were often beaten, driven out of settlements, and actually hanged if they returned.
Roger Williams was a Puritan minister who was expelled from the Bay colony after being tried in 1635. He escaped before he could be sent back to England. His “heresy” included treating the Native Americans fairly and advocating for the separation of church and state. After his escape he was able to purchase land from the Narragansett tribe, and found Providence in what would become Rhode Island. He isn’t a particularly well known figure in American history, but his convictions influenced the founders of our republic and are enshrined in our constitution.
Another Puritan who was expelled for bucking the Puritan theocracy was Ann Hutchinson, an exceptionally well-educated woman who taught a popular Bible study in her home. Because of her intelligence, charisma, and popularity she was feared by Puritan leaders like John Cotton and John Winthrop. In 1637 she was put on trial, and for beliefs that—ironically—now form the basis of American Evangelism, she and her family were cast out of Boston and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Finally, although the Puritan practice of keeping a diary or journal began as a devotional exercise to record experiences and document a personal conversion narrative showing evidence both of God’s hand in one’s life and one’s own spiritual “awakening,” it evolved into a genre that became an important part of a very different spiritual movement—Transcendentalism. And as a powerful and persuasive narrative form, it was then brilliantly co-opted by former slaves, such as Frederick Douglass, to demonstrate that they, too, could be chosen by Divine Providence and that they, too, could show evidence of the hand of God in their own lives.
In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass shows that he has thoroughly assimilated the lessons of these testimonies and he offers his own, telling the story of his life to show, in part, that Divine Providence (God) choses and elevates black individuals with African heritage, not just white European ones. His powerful account of his journey from slavery to emancipation is the epitome of testimony and transcendence, and his life and calling as an advocate of justice for all is one that all Americans should be unequivocally proud of and inspired by.
In Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau writes his memoir of the “two years, two months and two days,” he spent in the woods from a more universalist, non-religious spiritual perspective. His slim book focuses on the lessons he learned from direct experience of Nature and then reflecting on that experience, testifying to the transcendent insights he had while living in a small cabin he built in the woods around Walden Pond. Thoreau, in fact, built that cabin on the property of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of American Transcendentalism.
To this day, these ideas of testimony and transcendence are deeply embedded in the American psyche and cultural experience across many demographics. Three songs that use the term testify in ways that illustrate a range of its meanings are Testify by Maverick City, Stand Up by Mel McDaniel, and Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show by Neil Diamond. “Testify” is a contemporary hymn with roots in the tradition of the African American Spiritual folk songs. Recorded in 2021, it shows how the tradition of testifying brings transcendence is a vital part of American Christian faith today. The second song, “Stand Up” by Mel McDaniel is a classic 1987 country music song that combines both the legal meaning and the tent show revival history of the term for humorous effect. And if you are wondering what tent show revivals were, the music and lyrics of Singer-Songwriter Neil Diamond’s 1969 hit “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” will give you an idea. Diamond is a practicing Jew, but his experience at an actual tent revival meeting allowed him to capture the spirit of these services, a tradition that stretches back to The Great Awakening, which might better be called The Great REawakening.
Over time, the Puritans and other devout Christian pilgrims began to get comfortable in their new land and to lose the fervent, spiritual drive that brought their parents and grandparents to North America. Church membership became less about testimony and more about a type of inheritance. If your parents were church members, you were pretty much guaranteed membership even if you weren’t very devout.
In the 1730s and 1740s, church leaders including Jonathan Edwards sought to revive this waning spiritual fervor of the early Pilgrims and Puritans and to inspire a personal, emotional connection with God. The efforts of Edwards and his fellow preachers indeed sparked a great wave of revival. The style of preaching changed as well. Instead of a sermon crafted as intricately as a legal argument, preachers became much more expressive. Also for the first time, people of African descent converted to Christianity and began their own journey in the faith, one that by necessity included Since then the United States has gone through many cycles of striving for spiritual experience, inspiration, and liberty, each of them bringing both testimony and transcendence.
