Satan in the Pulpit: Popular Christianity during the Scottish Great Awakening, 1680–1750

This essay places one of the most important events of recent Christian history, the First Great Awakening, into context with another, seemingly unrelated experience: the end of Scottish witch hunting. Beyond the fact that many enemies of the revivals labeled them as demonic, the ordinary people who participated in them frequently encountered Satan, sometimes in physical form, who tried to win their souls as he had done with witches and demoniacs in the previous century. These individuals struggled to find a path to God, but were deluged with doubts and temptations that made them believe, in some cases, that they were slaves of Satan. The Great Awakening cannot be understood if we ignore the era of witch hunting because revivals proved, on the whole, a successful, nonviolent substitute for the earlier tradition. The Enlightenment should not receive sole credit for burning away the darkness and violence that preceded it. Christians substituted an externally oriented, violent tradition for an internally focused, nonviolent one. This essay uses an important collection of more than 100 spiritual autobiographies of ordinary Scots who attended the revivals in the 1740s, shortly after the old witchcraft laws were abolished in the British Isles. It also places the Scottish religious experience within the broader context of spiritual discernment in Europe.