Do we need another book on the Great Awakening? This is the most obvious question that comes to mind when confronted with John Howard Smith's recent volume on that subject. A host of historians have analyzed several aspects of the Great Awakening in the last fifty years alone, and it is hard to imagine anyone writing a more detailed account of this season of spiritual resurgence in America than Thomas Kidd's seminal monograph, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, published by Yale University in 2007. Smith, however, contends that historians in particular have been negligent in properly assessing the context and breadth of the Great Awakening, arguing that in his book “the traditional definition of an ‘awakening’ is challenged, eschewing the idea that it was exclusively an event in the history of Protestant Christianity in British America” (9). According to Smith, historians should consider how other religions and marginal groups, such as the syncretistic Afro-Christianity and Native American rituals and practices, had a shaping effect on religion in America during the eighteenth century.

Smith's book consists of twelve chapters that are divided into three parts. In the first section, the first four chapters provide background material on continental pietism, English puritanism, and the Scotch-Irish covenanting tradition, concluding with a chapter on the awakening that occurred at Jonathan Edwards's parish in Northampton, Massachusetts in the mid-1730s. The next four chapters, forming the second section in the book, discusses such familiar topics as the ministries of the Anglican itinerant George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, Old and New Light interpretations of the 1740s revivals, and radical versions of evangelicalism present in the colonies. The final four chapters are devoted to some of the less familiar aspects of the Great Awakening, including African American forms of Christianity and the reception of evangelical protestantism among slaves and free blacks, the role that the French and Indian War played in uniting Old and New Lights against the spread of Catholicism, Native American absorption of American versions of Christianity, and the permeation of evangelicalism in the South during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Smith concludes his book by revisiting the notion of a “great” awakening in America, calling for “an expanded definition” of this period of revivalism (301).

One of the major strengths of Smith's book is the extensive list of published sources that he cites. Throughout the volume, Smith draws from a deep well of scholarship as he navigates through each of the chapters. In his early chapters on continental pietism, Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, and English puritanism, he references the work of such notable scholars as W. R. Ward, Ned Landsman, Jon Butler, David Hall, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Marilyn Westerkamp. As expected, when he transitions to the ministry of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and the heart of 1740s American revivalism, he relies on George Marsden, Kenneth Minkema, Frank Lambert, and Thomas Kidd. At some point, however, one would expect Smith to posit an original argument. But instead, these chapters simply synthesize scholarship on the Great Awakening, rather than offer any fresh perspective. Because much of the contextual information in these first few chapters can be found in an earlier survey of eighteenth-century evangelicalism by Mark Noll entitled, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, published by InterVarsity Press in 2003, one is left wondering how valuable a rehashing of this information is to our understanding of the Great Awakening.

More interesting are the final four chapters by Smith, in which he attempts to expand the boundaries of the Great Awakening to include African Americans, Native Americans, and female contributors. But here again, Smith often resorts to restating the pioneering arguments of other scholars. Smith's ninth chapter on the Christianization of African America, for instance, relies heavily on the work of Albert Raboteau, and his explanation of how African forms of religion merged with protestant theological beliefs and practices to form a distinctly African American brand of Christianity. Smith's eleventh chapter on the Native American pushback towards evangelicalism is dependent on the foundational thesis in Linford Fisher's 2012 book on The American Great Awakening, published by Oxford University Press. Even his final chapter on the expansion of evangelicalism into the American South during the latter half of the eighteenth century mirrors the argument that Thomas Kidd posed in his book on the Great Awakening. Smith retraces the steps of Kidd and others to show how the Baptists infiltrated the South, capitalizing on the waning influence of the Anglican Church in the years before and after the American Revolution. Curiously, Smith does not mention the other major religious movement that competed with the Baptists in its claim of dominance in the South. While one might expect to read about the diffusion of Methodism alongside the Baptists, the work of such scholars as Christine Heyrman and Cynthia Lyerly is nowhere to be found in this chapter.

Arguably, the most significant contribution that Smith makes to our understanding of the Great Awakening is his tenth chapter on the influence of the French and Indian War, which he previously published as a separate essay within an edited volume by Brill in 2004. In this chapter, Smith issues example after example of American preachers casting this particular war in religious and apocalyptic terms. Here, Smith's citation of the work of Fred Anderson and other historians of the Seven Years' War serves only to support his provocative and convincing thesis that anti-Catholicism in America brought together anti-revivalists and revivalists in their quest to oppose a common enemy.

In sum, Smith's book offers a lengthy synthesis of the major religious movements and influences on American religion, before and after the 1740s revivalism that most scholars associate with the Great Awakening. While Smith has helpfully reminded historians to expand their horizons beyond the 1740s, and to consider the impact of alternative perspectives besides those of white protestant evangelicals, it is tempting to think that he could have used his extensive bibliography as a foundation to posit some new insight into the Great Awakening, rather than reiterate what has already be stated.