THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING: REDEFINING RELIGION IN BRITISH AMERICA 1725-1775. By John Howard Smith. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 35; tables. Paper, $34.95

The first "Great Awakening" took hold of all British colonies in North America in the 1730s-1750s and developed contemporaneously with the Enlightenment movement, which had a significant impact on all aspects of life in the colonies, influencing religion, politics and ideology. The inhabitants of the colonies, professing different religious views, for the first time experienced a general spiritual upsurge. The colonies had never seen anything like the Great Awakening in scale and degree of influence on society. This was the first movement in American history that was truly intercolonial in nature, contributing to the formation of a single religious and partially ideological space in British America. The beginning of the Great Awakening in British America was instigated by both the colonial traditions of religious renewal (the so-called "revivals") and new ideas coming from Europe, hence this religious movement cannot be understood without considering its European roots nor not taking into account its transatlantic nature. The development of pietism in Holland and Germany and the unfolding of Methodism on the British Isles greatly influenced Protestant theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the differences in understanding the nature of the Great Awakening by its two leaders - J. Edwards and J. Whitefield.

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Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385896 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 26 (4) ◽

pp. 361-397 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Michael J. Crawford

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

New England ◽

Reform Movement ◽

Western Society ◽

Great Awakening ◽

Cultural Contexts ◽

First Great Awakening ◽

Revival Movements ◽

British Colonies

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.

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What Christianity?

10.1093/oso/9780197579237.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 31-44

Author(s):

Kathleen Wellman

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Martin Luther ◽

John Calvin ◽

Great Awakening ◽

First Great Awakening ◽

Christian Perspective ◽

Broad Variety ◽

Christian Thought ◽

Political Right

This chapter teases out many strands of Christian thought that inform the “Christian perspective” these curricula bring to bear in narrating history. It contends that they are unequivocally but narrowly Protestant. They reflect fundamental tenets of Martin Luther and John Calvin but incorporate facets of evangelicalism’s history from the eighteenth-century First Great Awakening to the present. Although the publishers do not acknowledge it, their understanding of “Christian” reflects every important evolution of evangelicalism and the battles fought both within that tradition and with external foes. The chapter highlights the broad variety of religious ideas contributing to these curricula’s undifferentiated “Christianity,” including providentialism, millennialism, and fundamentalism as well as narrower, minority religious views, notably dispensationalism, dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism. These minority views were influential in shaping the contemporary alliance of the religious and political right.

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“The Glorious Day is Coming On”

A Dream of the Judgment Day ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197533741.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 47-78

Author(s):

John Howard Smith

Keyword(s):

American Identity ◽

Great Awakening ◽

First Great Awakening ◽

The Awakening ◽

Anglo American ◽

Second Coming

Anxious that God was preparing them for Christ’s second coming, Euro-Americans experienced an unprecedented revival known as the First Great Awakening—an intercolonial phenomenon that infused Protestantism in America with extraordinary heights of millenarianism and apocalypticism. The Awakening was a watershed event in the formation of a distinctive Anglo-American identity. While this identity was not always deeply pious, as economic and political concerns occasionally eclipsed religious matters, there is no doubt that the “vital piety” that had defined radical Protestantism in Europe found new and vibrant expression in America, particularly in its eschatological aspects. These came into sharpest focus when the Seven Years’ War broke out between Britain and France in 1754. Usually considered only in military and geopolitical terms, this war was also a war of religion in which the Anglo-Americans cast themselves in the heroic role of God’s chosen people striving against the forces of the Catholic Antichrist.

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