The Great Awakening and the Contested Origins of American Evangelical Christianity

Historically Speaking September/October 2007 Historically Speaking September/October 2007 Vol. LX No. 1 Contents The GreatAwakening and the Contested Origins ofAmerican Evangelical Christianity Thomas S. Kidd LordDacre ofGlanton Remembers: A Portrait ofthe Historian as a Young Man at Oxford in the 1930s William Palmer Why Did the Cold War End Peacefully? The Importance ofEurope Vojtech Mastny Moral Progress in History: A Forum Revisiting the Idea of1 1 Progress in History Wilfred M. McClay Moral Progress and Early13 Modem Science Peter Harrison American Liberal Protestantism and the 1 5 Concept ofProgress, 1870-1930 Jon H. Roberts Religion, Progress, and17 Professional Historians Bruce Kuklick The World of Whiteness20 Hasla R. Diner American Historyand23 Classical Hollywood Jennifer Smyth Reconstruction and the25 American West: An Interview with Heather Cox Richardson Conducted by Randall J. Stephens Little Rock at 50: A Roundtable LMe Rock and the History ofthe28 Civil Rights Movement John A. Kirk Little Rock Betrayed31 Sara Bullard The Emerging Conservative32 Court Majority Richard H. King Antoine Roquentin, Historian?A Critical34 Look at Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea Paul Sonnino Gemika in Context36 Rob Stradling Taking My Lumps in an Ever39 Flattening World PeterA. Codanis The Historical Society's 2008 Conference: 43 Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History The Great Awakening and the Contested Origins of American Evangelical Christianity Thomas S. Kidd From 1740 to 1743 a series of religious revivals known as the Great Awakening swept through America's British colonies, energizing the personal faith of thousands but also jeopardizing the traditional religious order. By 1743 the fervor of the Great Awakening had begun to cool, and evangelical leaders sought to memorialize the season of spiritual excitement by publishing accounts of the revivals. Signs of strain within the new evangelical movement appeared in those accounts. Many writers assured readers that the awakenings in their churches had remained sober and controlled. From NewJersey, Jonathan Dickinson wrote to the evangelical magazine The Christian History that his church had seen very litde of the "irregular heats" that had plagued other congregations. Only in two or three instances had disorderly "enthusiasm" broken out, and those cases were "easily and speedily regulated ." Jonathan Parsons wrote from West Lyme Parish, Connecticut, that the joys displayed in the revival meetings were not "wild, enthusiastick Whims." An assembly of mosdy evangelical ministers meeting in Boston in 1 743 agreed that while the revivals on the whole had been godly, Satan had injected some "Irregularities and Extravagancies" into them. They warned other evangelicals against following "secret Impulses" as revelations from God, setting up untutored laymen as preachers, or opening illegal Separate congregations.' Historians have typically understood the contest generated by the Great Awakening as a feud between "Old Lights" and "New Lights," but that dichotomy cannot account for the tensions expressed in these revival narratives. To be sure, there was a debate between Old Lights and evangelical New Lights about whether the revivals were legitimate at all. This discussion was capped by the verbose clash between Boston's Charles Chauncy and Northampton's Jonathan Edwards, whose positions are often regarded as defining the Awakening's competing sides. But the Old Light versus New Light dispute actually has limited explanatory value and obscures the most interesting struggle over the origins of evangelicalism . That contest proceeded between different kinds of evangelicals, the moderates and the radicals. Old Lights like Chauncy could denounce the awakenings as entirely bogus, but his protests were futile. The evangelical movement in America had been born, and once born, rhetorical protests could not stop it. The more compelling question was: What kind of movement would evangelical Christianity become? Although moderates held the preponderance of power, radicals kept working to make the movement more mystical, populist, and democratic. While it often did not fulfill its potential, the radical impulse within evangelicalism supplied pre-Revolutionary America with one of its strongest resources of egalitarian thought. Instead of Old Lights and New Lights, I propose that we should understand responses to the Great Awakening as three points on a continuum. In the middle were the moderate evangelicals, who originally supported the revivals but became concerned about the chaos they appeared to breed. On one end were the antirevivalists, or Old Lights, who...