Puritans in 1630s New England admitted only visible saints to full church membership. From about 1634 in Boston, candidates had to give a public conversion narrative that the congregation judged, and only full members could take the Lord’s Supper, vote on church business and have their children baptized. By the 1650s the second generation, baptized as infants but lacking conversion experiences, could not baptize the third, and the churches faced shrinking influence. Early warnings included a Dorchester grandfather’s 1634 request to baptize a grandchild, Robert Child’s protests in the 1640s and Samuel Stone’s 1650 call for a synod, which led to a ministers’ meeting in 1657 and the synod of 1662.
Under what critics called the Half-Way Covenant, members who owned the covenant could baptize their children but could not take communion or vote, because Puritans believed taking the Lord’s Supper unworthily invited damnation. A pamphlet war followed, Increase Mather opposed the plan and later supported it, Connecticut in 1669 allowed divided churches to split, and minister Abraham Pierson led his congregation from Branford to New Jersey. After King Philip’s War and the Salem witch trials, the Reforming Synod of 1679 to 1680 helped spread the practice to about 80 percent of Massachusetts churches. Solomon Stoddard then opened communion to everyone, his grandson Jonathan Edwards rejected both positions, and Boston’s liberal churches moved toward Unitarianism.
- Supporters preferred the name large congregationalism.
- When Boston’s First Church replaced John Wilson with anti-covenant John Davenport in 1667, 28 members left to form the Third Church, now Old South.
- First Church and Third Church refused to share communion for 14 years.
- One 1708 estimate found halfway members outnumbering full members four to one in some places.
- Perry Miller saw the covenant as decline, while Robert G. Pope and Edmund Morgan argued the second generation was too scrupulous to claim a false conversion.
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