"barbarous," "grotesque," and "unintelligible"—it is necessary to understand the decay of Calvinism in New England. The Great Awakening of the I740s had interrupted the steady drift "from piety to moralism," in Joseph Haroutunian's helpful phrase, but advocates of a milder, reasonable religion eventually carried the day. If anything, the Great Awakening itself contributed to the humanitarian reaction against Calvinism, as Haroutunian points out, by popularizing a crude conception of original sin according to which Adam's sin was "imputed" to his descendants. The idea that mankind literally inherited the consequences of Adam's disobedience defied reasonable explanation. Why should upright men and women in the eighteenth century, even spotless infants, share the punishment—eternal damnation—properly inflicted on Adam alone?

Jonathan Edwards tried to explain that sin was not to be thought of as analogous to crime. It lay not in specific transgressions so much as in a rebellious, disbelieving heart. Thus even infants had a "malignant nature, though incapable of doing a malignant action." Such subtleties eluded even Edward's followers. The more they upheld the "vindictive" character of divine justice—as when Joseph Bellamy, his most important successor, defended the seeming paradox that "vindictive justice in the Deity has nothing in its nature inconsistent with his infinite goodness"—the more their religion offended those who equated sin with crime and God's justice with "corrective" discipline and assumed, therefore, that God punished sinners only for their own good, the way a loving parent corrects a child in the interest of its moral development. Infant damnation— and the opponents of Calvinism gladly harped on this issue, sensing their advantage—was inconsistent with the "lovely character of our compassionate heavenly father," as Samuel Webster put it. Reasonable men and women who believed that "sin and guilt are personal matters," in the words of another liberal minister, found increasingly incomprehensible a doctrine that treated them as inherent conditions of human life, universal and inescapable facts of human history. Opponents of Calvinism accused it of undermining rational incentives to good conduct. According to Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century Connecticut Anglican, Calvinist determinism destroyed "civil and family government—for what signify all laws and rules of action, all motives taken from praise and blame, hope or fear, reward or punishment, while every thing we do is under a fatal necessity, and we can do no otherwise than we do?"

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