The Great Awakening

The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America

Thomas S. Kidd

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300148251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the mid-eighteenth century, Americans experienced an outbreak of religious revivals that shook colonial society. This book provides a definitive view of these revivals, now known as the First Great Awakening, and their dramatic effects on American culture. Historian Thomas S. Kidd tells the absorbing story of early American evangelical Christianity through the lives of seminal figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as well as many previously unknown preachers, prophets, and penitents.

The Great Awakening helped create the evangelical movement, which heavily emphasized the individual's experience of salvation and the Holy Spirit's work in revivals. By giving many evangelicals radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people, the revivals helped breed the democratic style that would come to characterize the American republic. Kidd carefully separates the positions of moderate supporters of the revivals from those of radical supporters, and he delineates the objections of those who completely deplored the revivals and their wildly egalitarian consequences. The battles among these three camps, the author shows, transformed colonial America and ultimately defined the nature of the evangelical movement.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Prayer for a Saving Issue”: From Puritans to Evangelicals
• 2. “A Shower of Divine Blessing”: Jonathan Edwards and A Faithful Narrative
• 3. “Soul-Satisfying Sealings of God’s Everlasting Love”: Continental Pietism, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, and Early Evangelicalism
• 4. “Plentiful Effusions of God’s Spirit in These Parts”: George Whitefield Comes to America
• 5. The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry: Fractious Revivalism in the Middle Colonies
• 6. “A Faithful Watchman on the Walls of Charlestown”: Josiah Smith and Moderate Revivalism in South Carolina
• 7. “This Is No Other Than the Gate of Heaven”: George Whitefield in New England
• 8. “Blowing Up the Divine Fire”: Mass Revivalism in New England, 1740–1741
• 9. “Minds Extraordinarily Transported”: Testing the Limits of Revivalism, 1741–1742
• 10. “Under the Impressions of a Heated Imagination”: James Davenport, Andrew Croswell, and the Fracturing of New England Evangelicalism
• 11. “Beyond Any Former Outpouring of the Spirit”: Debating the Legitimacy of the Awakenings
• 12. “The Gospel Is Not Preached Here”: The Crisis of New England Separatism
• 13. “Bringing Them to a Subjection to the Religion of Jesus”: Native American Missions
• 14. “Ethiopia Shall Stretch Out Her Hands unto God”: Slavery, African Americans, and Evangelicalism
• 15. “Do the Holy Scriptures Countenance Such Wild Disorder?”: Evangelicalism in Virginia
• 16. “A Happy Revival of Religion in the Interior Parts”: Evangelicalism in the Carolinas
• 17. “There Is Really a Great Awakening in Those Parts”: The Evangelical Revivals of the 1760s
• 18. “The God of Glory Is on Our Side”: Evangelicals and the American Revolution
• 19. “Many Thought the Day of Judgment Was Come”: The New Light Stir of 1776–1783
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index