Much of the hymnbook’s success in the latter half of the eighteenth century lies in a central tension in the genre: while the book’s various texts could fire the emotions, its paratexts—stanzas, numbering systems, indices—gave a collective sense of control, of system, and thus of rationality. In this sense, the hymnbook exerted its influence at the cutting edge of secularism in an age of both revival and reason. These books were unquiet, in the sense developed by Colin Jager, containing and distributing energies and emotions in their texts and the performances they afforded; these energies resisted control or explanation. As Jager argues, “a simple but crucial fact” often neglected in studies of early American and transatlantic religion is “that secularism is not first and foremost about religion but concerns instead power.” As religious change in the eighteenth century led to “new forms of social significance,” Jager writes, those forms readily appeared in “noisy” or “unquiet” ways, from large revival meetings to heightened individual affect.[1] And few religious practices in early America were as noisy as hymn-singing.
While singing was always a central worship practice among Reformed Protestants, from Anglicans to Huguenots to Baptists, the Book of Psalms was the congregational repertoire across the spectrum. As John Mason and Isaac Watts began to introduce contemporary, human-authored hymns into public worship in the early eighteenth century, even ministers who advocated for reform in singing practices rejected the new songs untethered by strict adherence to biblical source texts. Could clergy seriously entertain opening the floodgates of personal expression into the worship service?
George Whitefield and the Wesleys did much to lead the evangelical movement to answer “yes” to that question, using hymns widely in their preaching and church-planting efforts. Yet the Methodists’ reputation for lower-class membership and for public displays of emotion that often embarrassed their beholders gave a social stigma to hymns. A text that allowed the individual to voice his or her deeply held, possibly erotic emotions amidst a crowd of others was not so much unorthodox as unseemly; it was a major reason Misty Anderson identifies for eighteenth-century attacks on Methodistic excess.[2] Hymns went from a fringe practice of questionable orthodoxy to a mass practice of compromised respectability. To sing “Jesus, lover of my soul, / Let me to thy bosom fly” in mixed company was more than many Protestant leaders could handle.