New Light Family Values: Sex & Salvation in Revolutionary New England

During the past half century, Protestant evangelical Christianity has become synonymous with conservative social issues. From abortion to same-sex marriage, contemporary evangelicals seem singularly focused on regulating the reproductive bodies and sexual practices of their neighbors and fellow citizens. But why? What are the historical roots of this distinctive cultural worldview?

American evangelicals haven’t always been conservatives. Join award-winning historian Douglas Winiarski as we look back to the Revolutionary era in which the most radical evangelicals questioned everything: family structures, gender roles, sexual identities, and marital arrangements.

In this illustrated presentation, Winiarski argues that the people called “New Lights” in New England—progenitors of the modern evangelical movement—experienced problems involving the dualism of mind and body with greater intensity than other kinds of Protestants. If the Whitefieldian new-birth experience engendered a sense of certitude among revival converts about the state of their elect, born-again souls, it also made them acutely aware of the persistent failings of their all-too-earthly bodies. Sexuality, marriage, and family structures thus became issues of deep and abiding concern for many lay men and women in Revolutionary New England. Solving the conundrum of immortal souls constrained by mortal bodies became a lifelong obsession.

Focusing on a unique 1824 pamphlet published by a Maine woman named Olive Junkins, this talk will place Junkins’s extraordinary religious experiences in the context of similar examples drawn from the sprawling network of Congregational separatists, separate Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists that emerged in Greater New England during the period between 1750 and 1820, along with those of upstart evangelical sectarians such as the Allinites, Dorrellites, New Dispensationists, Publick Universal Friends, Shakers, and Vermont Pilgrims.

About the Speaker

Douglas L. Winiarski is professor of religious studies and American studies the University of Richmond. His first book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, won the 2018 Bancroft Prize. Doug's current research examines the spiritual worlds of the early American religious sectarians known as the Shakers. Articles from that larger project have appeared recently in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and his edited volume, Shakers at the Center: Manifesting Spirits and Spectacles in Nineteenth Century America, which was published earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts Press.

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The Communities In Conversation Series - Sponsored by the Central New York Library Resources Council
August 20, 2026 - Communal History IS American History, Thomas A. Guiler, Oneida Community Mansion House

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November 24, 2026 - Sex, Communalism, and Utopia: How a 70s Commune Took Oneida into the Future, Cheryl Coulthard – Vice President, Communal Studies Association

January 26, 2027 - New Light Family Values: Sex & Salvation in Revolutionary New England, Douglas L. Winiarski – University of Richmond

April 1, 2027 - Unexpected Colonial American Composers: The Sisters of the Ephrata Cloister, Christopher Herbert – William Paterson University

April 15, 2027 - Camphill and the Ever-Changing Face of Intentional Community, Dan McKanan – Harvard Divinity School

April 27, 2027 - From Oneida to Ithaca: Enduring Themes in Intentional Communities, Jen Myers – Thrive EcoVillage Education Center / Center for Transformative Action

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