What Happened to New England Theology?

Abstract The New England Theology"-the tradition of American Reformed thought originating in the work of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58)-was, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a subject of opprobrium and condescension. In the 1980s and 1990s a new wave of revisionist scholarship reassessed the New England theologians, arguing for their centrality to early American intellectual history. This article asks why, in the wake of these studies, almost no new work has been done on the New England Theology in more than a decade. It argues that the decline in the subfield is due to the capture of the subject by evangelical scholars at evangelical institutions, tying this phenomenon to the rise of the "new evangelical thesis" in academic history. Finally, the article seeks to chart a way forward for the study of New England Theology by going beyond evangelical readings of the sources.