The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (review)

Not another book on the Great Awakening in American history! No. This is a book to end all books on the Great Awakening, substituting a powerful new force in American Christianity: evangelicalism. We will be able to discard the old terminology of the First and Second Great Awakening as outmoded and irrelevant. The "First"never ended, and the "Second"is merely subsumed under the larger label of the evangelical movement. If all this requires some rethinking and reordering of priorities, Thomas Kidd's probing and persuasive book provides the justification.

Over fifty pages of detailed endnotes demonstrate that this new structure has not been arrived at quickly nor without the widest reading. The author has read everything, both the older classics and the freshest interpretations, and he has brought keen insight and careful integration to the whole. With a lively style, Kidd runs the risk of giving "monographic research"a good name. He also demonstrates that this kind of careful reflection and analysis still has its rightful place of highest priority in historical writing.

Roughly the first half of the book treats material that one would expect to find in a book carrying the main title of "The Great Awakening." But the treatment bristles with new insights and unexpected sources. One insight is that the Awakening did not arrive suddenly and then depart in a similar manner. The revivalist excitement may have caught many by surprise in its intensity and seeming spontaneity, but it did not come to an abrupt halt—and perhaps to no halt at all. The author speaks of the first outbreak as "a long Great Awakening," and it is that longevity that permanently reshapes the character of Protestantism in America. Although Kidd does not neglect the impact of English Puritanism, Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, and Continental Pietism, he acknowledges that "once the American revivals began in earnest, around 1740," the internal dynamics of the American side take over (p. xiv).

The author does such a good job with these "dynamics" (a nice word for contention, controversy, and mutual recrimination) that the wonder is that evangelicalism attained the status of a movement at all. Just as participants in the eighteenth century found much to argue about, so modern-day survivors in the twenty-first century will not all agree on where evangelical Christianity has come from or exactly where it is going. But all this just testifies to the vitality and significance of the subject.

In the second half of the book, Kidd narrows his focus a bit to give special attention to the Separatist movement, to Native Americans and African Americans, to the "interior parts" of early America, to the flashy growth of Baptists and then Methodists, and to the role of religion (especially millennialism) in the American Revolution. If on occasion, the reader feels that the author is getting carried away, then careful attention to the endnotes affirms that the solid ground of history has not been traded in for the sinking sand of thesis joyriding. Throughout this fine book, the reader has not been cheated in any way, only richly rewarded.