American Jeremiads Characteristics

The American Jeremiads are sermons, speeches, visual texts, or essays that unify a people by creating tension between ideal social life and its real manifestation. The traditional jeremiad first includes a biblical or a spiritual ideal for behavior, then it describes the ways that individuals and communities have not met the standards of those ideas. The jeremiads then provide a vision for an ideal public life that will result in the individuals and communities meeting the high standards that were originally created. The jeremiads get their name from the biblical lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem because the Israelites had turned their back on the Lord and were worshipping false idols, …show more content…
The American form has continued to find a home in American discourse because of the high standards and ideals that are outlined in the nation’s founding documents and a strongly optimistic belief in progress. Jeremiads are effective in general because they help to unify people through the mourning of their society and its morals. Jeremiads can be tools that encourage civility because they encourage societies to come to an agreement on what issues they should really be focused on. They can be used as tools that encourage engagement because it would help people in society to participate more in getting what they want and they can be used as tools that encourage personal growth because they unify the people in societies together and allows each person to grow in their social life because of the conversations that they would have to participate in. The jeremiads each are effective in their own way and each possess their own use of rhetoric such as ethos, logos, and pathos. The use of rhetoric inside the jeremiads make the topics more effective and help to get their point across better (Conversations …show more content…
Jonathan Edwards was a Congregational minister whose education was influenced both by the open-mindedness of the Enlightenment and the strict Calvinist theology of Puritanism. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was a typical sermon of the Great Awakening, which was a movement that emphasized the positive and negative images of God’s power. A huge point of the Great Awakening was the belief that hell was a real place and not just an idea that people made up and that it was the fate of those who did not embrace or recognize the majesty and power of God. Edwards uses lots of emotion to scare his audience with his thoughts of hell and makes the audience think about the way they are acting and if hell is their fate or not. Edwards also personalizes hell for his audience by leaving thoughts open about what hell is like so that his audience would have to then elaborate o the topic themselves. Throughout this sermon, Edwards keeps mentioning God, and refers to him as a wrath or a merciful God, instead of a loving and forgiving God. These ideas that Edwards brought into his audience's mind really affected them because he lived in a Puritan society where they would see God as forgiving and kind. All these ideas that Edwards has unifies his audience because they all have to try and understand what is hell is really like now that Edwards gave them an