For over 150 years, the Great Awakening has been an important topic in surveys of American religion and early American history. It has long merited at least a day – if not a week – on the typical syllabus of an introductory course. Read Jonathan Edwards's account of the revival in Northampton; discuss George Whitefield's preaching prowess; consider how the anti-authoritarianism of the Awakening paved the way for the American Revolution. An upper-level seminar might consider the Awakening in more historical and historiographical detail, analysing, on the one hand, the ways in which revivals offered new opportunities for Christian women and slaves to participate in the religious life of their communities and, on the other, how scholars have shaped our interpretive lens of ‘the’ Awakening and its participants, geographical scope, significance and singularity. John Howard Smith seeks to bring together longstanding narratives with more recent interventions and debates and to offer a new synthesis. Moreover, Smith wants to offer a ‘secular’ synthesis, arguing for the need to counter contributions by confessional scholars, who, Smith argues, are prone to overly optimistic interpretations of the Awakening as ‘great’ in an implicitly Christian sense (pp. ix–x, 7–8). As an historian, Smith connects the eighteenth-century revivals to important social and political contexts, including slavery, colonist-Native American relations, and the heated anti-Catholic and apocalyptic rhetoric of the Seven Years’ War in its American theatre. In addition to his overarching argument on form and perspective, Smith makes two further arguments. First, relying on the work of Alan Heimert and William McLoughlin, Smith finds in the Great Awakening the roots of a ‘pietistic impulse’, radicalism and ‘fractious sectarianism’ that transformed American ‘character’, ‘mentality’ and history, not only leading to the American Revolution but also shaping the exceptionalism that has defined American foreign policy and diplomacy ever since (pp. 1, 4–5, 8, 150, 300). Second, Smith claims to incorporate more recent scholarship on women, slaves and Native Americans into this otherwise rather traditional interpretation. He does so by suggesting parallels in their radical ‘mystical’ tendencies, anti-authoritarianism, fundamentalism, ‘inner directedness’, hope of unity through apocalyptic violence, and so on (pp. 7, 150–68, 219–20, 265). In his pursuit of a ‘secular’ approach focused on social and political contexts, Smith has unfortunately overlooked tools from the discipline of religious studies that would be invaluable to his broader argument about ‘pietistic’ tendencies. A more critical and historical understanding of terms like mysticism, fundamentalism and conversion, for example, would help to prevent problematic generalisations and refine his analysis of the religious experiences of Native Americans, women and African slaves (see particularly pp. 55–6, 150–68, 213, 216, 252). Smith's greatest contribution is his exhaustive coverage of existing scholarship; with careful attention to the chapters’ endnotes, the reader can use the text, at times, as an annotated bibliography of the extensive and often unwieldy scholarship on eighteenth-century revivalism. This coverage, however, also yields the text's main weakness: Smith's narrative and contributions are occasionally subsumed by his attention to past scholarly syntheses and debates.