Charles Chauncy (1705-1787)

Charles Chauncy (1705–1787) was an American Congregational clergyman in Boston. He was ordained as a minister of the First Church, Boston, in 1727 and remained in that pulpit for 60 years. Next to Jonathan Edwards, his great opponent, Chauncy was probably the most influential clergyman of his time in New England. As an intellectual he distrusted emotionalism and opposed the revivalist preaching of the Great Awakening in his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743) and other pamphlets. He became the leader of the "Old Lights" or liberals in theology in the doctrinal disputes following the Great Awakening. He was also the leader in the opposition to the establishment of an Anglican bishopric in the American colonies, writing his Compleat View of Episcopacy (1771) and other works on the subject. A firm believer in the colonial cause, he clearly set forth the political philosophy of the American Revolution in sermons and pamphlets during the period. After the war he defended the doctrine of Universalism in two anonymous tracts: Salvation for All Men (1782) and The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations (1784).

Charles Chauncy was the leading opponent of the Great Awakening, the Protestant evangelical movement that swept through the British North American colonies between 1739 and 1745.

Chauncy was born into the elite Puritan merchant class that ruled Boston. His great-grandfather, Charles Chauncy, after whom he was named, was the second president of Harvard. His father was a successful Boston merchant. As one biographer puts it, "Chauncy was first and foremost a traditional Puritan cleric.... As a rule, Chauncy throughout his life supported the clergy who observed the traditional decorum of the New England [ruling elite] way" (Charles H. Lippy, Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981, p. 12). Although this Puritan stock had been dissenters in England (thus the liberals), in America they were the Standing Order, the ruling elite (and thus the conservatives against other religious groups like the Baptists and Quakers). Chauncy was thus a staunch and loyal supporter of the political, social, religious, and economic merchant class status quo.

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