Inventing the "Great Awakening"

Frank Lambert

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691086910, 9780691043791
• eBook ISBN: 9780691223995
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This book is a history of an astounding transatlantic phenomenon, a popular evangelical revival known in America as the first Great Awakening (1735-1745). Beginning in the mid-1730s, supporters and opponents of the revival commented on the extraordinary nature of what one observer called the "great ado," with its extemporaneous outdoor preaching, newspaper publicity, and rallies of up to 20,000 participants. Frank Lambert, biographer of Great Awakening leader George Whitefield, offers an overview of this important episode and proposes a new explanation of its origins.


The Great Awakening, however dramatic, was nevertheless unnamed until after its occurrence, and its leaders created no doctrine nor organizational structure that would result in a historical record. That lack of documentation has allowed recent scholars to suggest that the movement was "invented" by nineteenth-century historians. Some specialists even think that it was wholly constructed by succeeding generations, who retroactively linked sporadic happenings to fabricate an alleged historic development. Challenging these interpretations, Lambert nevertheless demonstrates that the Great Awakening was invented--not by historians but by eighteenth-century evangelicals who were skillful and enthusiastic religious promoters. Reporting a dramatic meeting in one location in order to encourage gatherings in other places, these men used commercial strategies and newly popular print media to build a revival--one that they also believed to be an "extraordinary work of God." They saw a special meaning in contemporary events, looking for a transatlantic pattern of revival and finding a motive for spiritual rebirth in what they viewed as a moral decline in colonial America and abroad.


By examining the texts that these preachers skillfully put together, Lambert shows how they told and retold their revival account to themselves, their followers, and their opponents. His inquiries depict revivals as cultural productions and yield fresh understandings of how believers "spread the word" with whatever technical and social methods seem the most effective.

Part One

OPENING EVENTS:

THE “GREAT AWAKENINGS” OF

THE 1730s

IN THE mid-1730s, colonial revivalists surveyed the religious landscape around them and found it to be in a deplorable state. They saw men and women attending worship services, but they witnessed little practice of genuine piety. They feared that, for many, faith had been reduced to an intellectual acceptance of certain propositions rather than a life-changing conversion experience. Rather than despairing, the awakeners took hope in the midst of spiritual decline. Their reading of the Scriptures convinced them that when spiritual light is almost extinguished, God sends an extraordinary effusion of his spirit to arouse his people in a mighty awakening.

The first great revival in Christian history had occurred in the first century A.D. on the day of Pentecost under the apostle Peter’s preaching, and the second was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Both epochal events produced thousands of converts who experienced salvation by faith. And, for evangelicals of subsequent generations, those glorious occasions represented hope that God would once again dispense his grace in an extraordinary way. During the first third of the eighteenth century, two groups of hopeful colonial revivalists—several New England Congregationalists and a few Middle Colony Presbyterians—began praying for a great awakening and initiated special preaching emphases on the necessity of regeneration or, as they called it, the New Birth. Unusual numbers of men, women, and children came under conviction of their sins, and many experienced conversion. The expectant revivalists, ever alert to signs of God’s grace, declared the events to be the work of God. While this was not the first revival in the colonies, what separated it from earlier awakenings, however, is that it became widely known outside the remote corners of America where it occurred. Through a carefully constructed narrative, a published account reached like-minded evangelicals in Britain who concurred that this indeed was a genuine work of God and, they hoped, the beginning of a revival that would spread throughout the Atlantic world. Thus the “great awakening” in Northampton, Massachusetts, became the “first fruits” of what would come to be known as The Great Awakening.

CHAPTER 1

“. . . that Religion may revive in this Land”

THE GEOGRAPHY of the “great awakenings” in colonial America during the 1730s and 1740s follows a checkerboard pattern. While revival fire burned brightly in the Connecticut River Valley, for example, it was barely discernible along the Hudson River Valley. At a time when Massachusetts and Connecticut witnessed huge crowds at preaching services and reported thousands undergoing a New Birth, New York displayed little evidence of interest in the awakening outside initial curiosity over novel religious practices and venues. Similarly, throngs of men and women followed itinerant preachers in Pennsylvania and Delaware, but in neighboring Maryland the same men delivering the same sermons with the same fervor attracted only tiny gatherings of people who greeted them with a restrained, polite reception.

The uneven pattern of revival enthusiasm suggests the importance of context in any attempt to explain events of the Great Awakening. Certainly revival promoters worked to spread the awakening into every corner of the colonies, sending itinerant evangelists walking and riding on preaching tours that spanned hundreds of miles. Ministers and laymen alike distributed tracts, broadsides, and pamphlets across New York and Maryland as well as Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Scores of titles proclaimed unfolding religious events to be a new Reformation. But responses differed greatly from colony to colony and region to region. Why? Surely it was more than geography. There is nothing intrinsic about a provincial boundary or a riverbed to explain why the awakening was “great and general” on one side and barely visible on the other. What is more plausible is a more impervious divide that separated colonies: religious culture—the web of expectations, beliefs, values, traditions, and ideas through which people in a given province or community made sense of their lives and events that occurred around them. Events are not self-explanatory. People name them and give them meaning. In the 1730s and 1740s some people in some parts of colonial America reflected on the religious happenings and called them a revival. Others saw evidence of disorder. This chapter examines why some persons could see revival so clearly while others could not.

To see revival in the events of 1735-1745, someone or some group had to discern a pattern called “revival,” adduce convincing evidence of its reality, and convey that evidence to an audience whose experiences made the interpretation plausible. In other words, revival as an explanation for the “present Work”—the term contemporaries preferred—was an invention, especially in the eighteenth-century sense of something uncovered or found. It was a patterned response to events whose meaning was not self-evident.

To some evangelicals in Britain and America, there was never any doubt that the “Work” was God’s extraordinary outpouring of grace. For the loose-knit transatlantic evangelical community that had been exchanging news about the gospel’s progress for decades, the Work was clearly the long-awaited religious revival. To them it was a revival in two respects. First, it was an awakening of individuals to what was variously called “vital” religion as opposed to a dead faith, “experimental” Christianity that one experienced instead of contemplated, and “practical piety” that transformed how persons spent their time and money. That kind of revival was God’s work. But the Work turned into revival in another sense. It became an organized strategy or program (presentday revivalists call it a “crusade”), consisting of meetings and publications that promoted awakenings. While its proponents always identified the revival as a work of God, they also believed in human agency: men and women assisting God in promoting revivalism. Thus revival was both spiritual awakening itself and the instrumentalities that promoted it.

Revivals are extraordinary religious events, and to flourish they require a particular context. First, they originate where there is a culture that expects a periodic showering of God’s grace and recognizes the signs of a genuine revival when it appears. Second, they occur when people within that culture perceive a need for revival, a time when the state of religion is thought to have sunk to a low point. And third, revivals result when ministers and laypersons employ means designed to prepare men and women for a special outpouring of divine mercy. For revival to emerge, all these factors must converge. For example, revival is unlikely in a culture without a perceived need for a spiritual awakening. And revival is improbable if a need is recognized but means are not employed.

In the mid-1730s, all the necessary factors converged in parts of colonial America to spark evangelical revivals. Awakenings emanated from two geographic centers steeped in rich revival traditions: one in New England and the other in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (see table 1.1).

TABLE 1.1

Revival Geography: Colonial America, 1739-1745 Place-Names Prominent in the Great Awakening Listed by Revival Center

Revival Center	City or Town	No. within Colony	Pct. of Total within Colony
New England—Centered at Boston and Northampton:		50	63.3
Massachusetts	Attleborough, Berkly, Boston, Bridgewater, Brookline, Cambridge, Concord, Dedham, Gloucester, Hallifax, Hampshire County, Harvard, Ipswich, Martha’s Vineyard, Marblehead, Medfield, Medway, Middleborough, Natick, Northampton, Norton, Plymouth, Raynham, Reading, Roxbury, Salem, Sherbourne, Somers, Sudbury, Suffield, Sutton, Taunton, Worcester, Wrentham	34	43.0
Connecticut	Groton, Hartford, Lyme, Middletown, New London, New Salem, Norwich, Stonington, Wallingford	9	11.4
Rhode Island	Charles-Town, Westerly	2	2.5
New Hampshire	Gosport, Hampton, Newcastle, Portsmouth, York	5	6.3

Each of these districts was heavily populated with men and women who rejoiced in those thrilling moments of salvation history when God had poured out his grace in extraordinary ways. Pentecost was the first of those great events: three thousand souls were added to God’s kingdom in a single day. The Protestant Reformation was another, when hundreds of thousands of Christians reaffirmed the biblical truth that salvation comes by faith alone and not through works or institutions or sacraments. To evangelicals in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts and in the Raritan Valley of East Jersey, revival was more than something they read about in the remote past. Each region had periodically experienced awakenings under the leadership of dynamic preachers who knew how to “preach up” a revival: Solomon Stoddard and Jonathan Edwards in the former and Theodore Frelinghuysen and Gilbert Tennent in the latter. But evangelistic preaching alone is an insufficient explanation for the areas’ revivals. In both, revivalist traditions predisposed men and women to expect periodic awakenings and alerted them to the signs of an extraordinary outpouring of God’s Spirit.

Revival Center	City or Town	No. within Colony	Pct. of Total within Colony
Middle Colonies—Centered at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania		25	31.6
New Jersey	Amwell, Basinridge, Cohansie, Elizabeth-Town, Freehold, Hopewell, Maidenhead, Neward, New Brunswick, Salem, Woodbridge	11	13.9
Pennsylvania	Abingdon, Chester, Derby, Fogs Mannor, German Town, Neshaminy, New Londonberry, Nottingham, Philadelphia, Whitely Creek, Whitemarsh	11	13.9
Delaware	Christian Bridge, Newcastle, Wilmington	3	3.8
Colonies outside Revival Centers:		4	5.1
New York	New York City, Staten Island	2	2.5
Maryland	Bohemia	1	1.3
Virginia	None	0	0.0
North Carolina	None	0	0.0
South Carolina	Charleston	1	1.3
Georgia	None	0	0.0
Total		79	100%

Sources: Place-names are cited in the two works that best describe the geographic sweep of the American revival: the Christian History and Whitefield’s Journals. Names from the former include all listed in an index of place-names; those from the latter are restricted to those sites where crowds of at least 1,000 assembled.

Outside those revival regions, the awakening found few followers and fewer leaders. Only an occasional congregation expected extraordinary effusions of God’s grace. Most believed that the Almighty worked in a more predictable way, through the ordinary means of regular church services and sacraments. In their interpretation of Scripture and their reading of church history, ministers found nothing suggesting that revivals were anything other than human enthusiasm. Thus they and their parishioners perceived no need for an awakening; nothing vital was asleep.

The story was different in the revival regions. There, the idea of “great awakening” made sense only in the wake of decline. In other words, as they saw it, something once vital must be deemed lifeless if there is to be revival. To eighteenth-century revivalists, Protestantism in the late 1700s and early 1800s was in trouble, weakened by indifference and apathy, and assaulted by heterodoxy. Wherever they turned, concerned evangelicals saw decay in the practice of piety. Culprits abounded: rationalism that elevated human reason above divine revelation; commercialism that beckoned people to countinghouses instead of meetinghouses; formalism that reduced religion to ecclesiastical observances rather than spiritual experiences. By any measure, most settled ministers, revivalists contended, failed to propagate the gospel to the masses because of vapid, ineffectual messages and methods.

The solution was both backward-looking and forward-thinking. Revivalists wanted to return to the gospel message and convey it through means such as the powerful preaching of the apostle Peter at Pentecost and John Calvin during the Reformation. They wanted to confront men and women with the necessity of a spiritual new birth, or conversion experience, as the only means of salvation. While advocating an old message, they embraced innovative methods to convey it. That meant new messengers, or at least ones who could demonstrate that they themselves had undergone a new birth and could preach with conviction to others. It also meant strategies designed to reach audiences far beyond parish, provincial, and even national boundaries.

REVIVAL TRADITIONS

The roots of colonial revival traditions reached deep into English and Scottish Protestant history and beyond, originating in Calvin’s Geneva. Indeed, eighteenth-century revivalists in colonial America’s “great awakening” considered themselves Calvinists. In general, this meant that they embraced the theological tenets set forth by John Calvin and subscribed to the fundamental beliefs of one of the Reformed Protestant traditions, including such churches as the English Puritan (referred to as Independent in seventeenth-century England, Congregational in America), Scottish Presbyterian, German Reformed, or Dutch Reformed. More specifically, it meant the acceptance of unconditional predestination whereby God, before all time, predestined some persons to salvation and others to damnation. The grace of God alone determined the election of some and the rejection of others. Moreover, contrary to the teachings of Arminians and others who introduced human agency into the drama of salvation, Calvinists believed that the merit of an individual’s good works, no matter how pure and noble the conduct, played no role whatever in one’s redemption.

The place of evangelism within a Calvinist tradition is puzzling for many, given the doctrine of predestination. Why preach the good news of Christ’s sacrificial death to all if God, before human existence, predestined some to salvation and others to damnation? Calvin’s answer was that the gospel must be preached to all persons everywhere because the visible church could not distinguish between saint and sinner. Moreover, while the church could not guarantee salvation for anyone, it was, in Calvin’s theology, “the only route to grace.” Unlike some of the eighteenth-century revivalists, Calvin taught that regeneration was a lifelong process rather than a sudden, wrenching “new birth.” Growth in grace rested on “a rational understanding of [God’s] word as well as on illumination by the Spirit.” And the Christian in his or her daily behavior was to strive always for the elusive goal of moral perfection, believing that a life of disciplined faith ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Opening Events: The “Great Awakenings” of the 1730s
• Part Two: Wider Connections: An Intercolonial Great And General Awakening, 1739-1745
• Part Three: Contested Inventions, 1742-1745
• Epilogue. “The late Revival of Religion”
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index