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The Saving Remnant: Religion and the Settling of New England. By CEDRIC B. COWING. Urbana, Ill.: The University of Illinois Press, 1995. 351 pp. $39.95.
In a book which he describes as an essay in quest of the American national character, Cedric Cowing argues that two distinct American religiocultural types emerged in colonial New England, based on the religious cultures of the different British regions from which emigrants had come, and that these character types explain much about later American experience. The two British regions are the northwest and the southeast, separated by a line drawn from the Wash to Bristol and on to Exeter. The northwest was a pastoral land, and from it came a religious culture which was evangelical, prone to Calvinism, and favorable to liberty; from the agricultural cropland and commercial emporia of the southeast came a culture that was orthodox, rationalist-Puritan (but also Anglican), and favorable to order.
These differing regional cultural styles are linked to New Lights and Old Lights, the northwest giving rise to the former, the southeast to the latter; "the saving remnant" of the title refers to a New Light leadership which sparked commitment to fervent personal religion. In a series of...