Was there a Great Awakening? Historians of colonial American religion have debated this question for more than twenty-five years, since Jon Butler recommended, in his controversial article “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” that the term “Great Awakening” be abandoned because it misrepresents not only the extent of the revivals but also their explanatory power (Journal of American History 69:2 [September 1982]: 322). As the title of Thomas Kidd's new book illustrates, however, this recommendation has not received universal support.
Maintaining that “there actually was a Great Awakening in the eighteenth century,” Kidd rejects Butler's argument on its face (xviii). In narrating the history of the eighteenth-century revivals, however, Kidd only rarely engages Butler's thesis or the arguments of subsequent historians, like Joseph Conforti and Frank Lambert, who also view the Great Awakening as a socially constructed event. Emphasizing narration over analysis, he draws on the wealth of primary source materials that document the emergence of evangelicalism in colonial America and the controversy this new religious movement generated. By allowing the voices of revivalists and their opponents to speak for themselves, he tells a story of the eighteenth-century revivals that is both familiar in its general outline and rich in new detail. This narrative is Kidd's argument; through his construction of this story, he attempts to demonstrate that the Great Awakening is not, in Butler's memorable phrase, “interpretative fiction.”
Kidd's dating of the story, however, suggests that he accepts Butler's view that, as commonly defined, the Great Awakening cannot bear the interpretive weight traditionally placed on it. He pushes the starting point of the Awakening back into the seventeenth century and brings it to a close in the last decades of the eighteenth century. This chronological framework permits him to expand the Great Awakening both temporally and geographically beyond the New England revivals of the early 1740s. The earliest stirrings of revival occurred in New England parishes in the 1670s, Kidd observes, as a result of covenant renewal ceremonies or the powerful preaching of such “early evangelicals” as Solomon Stoddard and Samuel Torrey (8). The end point of the Awakening being more difficult to identify, he picks the New Light Stir of 1776–1783 as the “arbitrary point” at which to end his narrative (321).
During this “long First Great Awakening,” revivals occurred in Protestant parishes “from Nova Scotia to Georgia,” but their geographical distribution was not spread evenly throughout the colonies (xix, xvi). Given that the largest and best-documented series of revivals occurred in New England in the 1740s, Kidd cannot escape devoting close to half his book to this region. While George Whitefield, James Davenport, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncey remain central to this part of the story, Kidd complicates the narrative by also focusing on the contributions of such lesser known revivalists as David McGregore and Samuel Buell. Kidd also brings to life such fascinating figures as Samuel Davies and Elhanan Winchester in his description of the revivals that occurred outside New England in subsequent decades in several of the middle and southern colonies. Also included within the scope of the early evangelical movement are Native American and African American missions. In two of the book's most interesting chapters, Kidd traces how evangelicalism generated a new commitment to bringing these marginalized peoples into the Christian fold. And throughout his account of the eighteenth-century revivals, he emphasizes evangelicalism's “spiritually inclusive mandate” as a central theme (212).
In telling the story of the “long First Great Awakening,” Kidd has provided historians of early American religion with the “comprehensive general history” that Jon Butler noted a quarter of a century ago was lacking in the scholarship on the Awakening (Butler, 306). He has not, however, escaped the force of Butler's critique. Kidd's expansive definition of the “Great Awakening” effectively eliminates the usefulness of the concept. “There was,” Kidd admits, “really, no Second Great Awakening, but rather a long-term turn toward Baptist and Methodist piety from the American Revolution to the Civil War, punctuated by new revivals like the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801” (321). Without the Second Great Awakening, however, the concept of the First Great Awakening loses its coherence. Furthermore, although Kidd clearly documents that a series of revivals occurred throughout the colonies in the eighteenth century, he does not demonstrate that these local and regional events constituted one unified intercolonial awakening. Recognizing these objections, Kidd acknowledges that the term “First Great Awakening” is “misleading” (321). In retaining this term he signals his commitment not so much to the “firstness” of the Awakening as to its “greatness.”
Kidd accepts Butler's view that “the link between the revivals and the American Revolution is virtually nonexistent” (Butler, 324). In the book's most closely reasoned chapter, he shows “that there was no one evangelical response to the American Revolution” (306). Some revivalists remained loyal to the crown, while others took a neutral position. And even the many “evangelicals that became Patriots,” Kidd asserts, “did not necessarily become Patriots because they were evangelicals” (289). Having severed the connection between the Awakening and the Revolution, Kidd attributes to the eighteenth-century revivals a twofold historical significance.
First, this new religious movement contained within itself a “powerful egalitarian impulse” (289). A “defining characteristic of early evangelicalism,” Kidd notes, was its “tendency to take ethnic and racial boundaries lightly” (30). This tendency manifested itself in George Whitefield's ministry to slaves in Georgia, David Brainerd's mission to the Delaware Indians, and the empowerment of poor, female, and uneducated exhorters throughout the colonies. Kidd acknowledges, however, that the spiritual equality preached by many early evangelicals rarely challenged the legal or social subordination of marginalized groups; George Whitefield, James Davenport, and Jonathan Edwards were, after all, slave owners. And although inclusion is a dominant theme in Kidd's story of the rise of evangelicalism in early America, so also is conflict. Old Lights viciously attacked their revivalist opponents, while New Lights split into hostile camps to debate the limits of revivalism itself. Believing that the converted formed a new spiritual elite, evangelicals maintained an uncompromising approach to religious difference whether it occurred within or without the fold.
A less contested effect of the eighteenth-century revivals is the establishment of evangelical Protestantism itself. As Kidd observes, “The Great Awakening can be acknowledged as ‘great’ because it produced the evangelical movement” (323). The revivalists who preached conversion to sermon-hungry congregations throughout the colonies, and who defended the gospel of the new birth against its critics, defined a style of piety that quickly grew to dominate the American religious landscape. This legacy is more obvious today than it was several decades ago. When Heimert linked the Awakening to the Revolution, the political mobilization of evangelical Protestants was in its infancy, and when Butler placed this link in question Ronald Reagan was still in his first term. No religious historian can now, however, ignore the significance of evangelicalism in modern American culture. The roots of this movement lie, as the subtitle of Kidd's volume suggests, in the revivals of the eighteenth century. Whether this lineage is sufficient to justify retaining the term “Great Awakening” is less clearly established.
