The Great Awakening : The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America / Thomas S. Kidd.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kidd, Thomas S., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Great Awakening.

Revivals--United States--History.

Revivals.

United States--Church history--To 1775.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (412 p.)

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [2008]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the mid-eighteenth century, Americans experienced an outbreak of religious revivals that shook colonial society. This book provides a definitive view of these revivals, now known as the First Great Awakening, and their dramatic effects on American culture. Historian Thomas S. Kidd tells the absorbing story of early American evangelical Christianity through the lives of seminal figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as well as many previously unknown preachers, prophets, and penitents. The Great Awakening helped create the evangelical movement, which heavily emphasized the individual's experience of salvation and the Holy Spirit's work in revivals. By giving many evangelicals radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people, the revivals helped breed the democratic style that would come to characterize the American republic. Kidd carefully separates the positions of moderate supporters of the revivals from those of radical supporters, and he delineates the objections of those who completely deplored the revivals and their wildly egalitarian consequences. The battles among these three camps, the author shows, transformed colonial America and ultimately defined the nature of the evangelical movement.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. "Prayer for a Saving Issue": From Puritans to Evangelicals

2. "A Shower of Divine Blessing": Jonathan Edwards and A Faithful Narrative

3. "Soul-Satisfying Sealings of God's Everlasting Love": Continental Pietism, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, and Early Evangelicalism

4. "Plentiful Effusions of God's Spirit in These Parts": George Whitefield Comes to America

5. The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry: Fractious Revivalism in the Middle Colonies

6. "A Faithful Watchman on the Walls of Charlestown": Josiah Smith and Moderate Revivalism in South Carolina

7. "This Is No Other Than the Gate of Heaven": George Whitefield in New England

8. "Blowing Up the Divine Fire": Mass Revivalism in New England, 1740-1741

9. "Minds Extraordinarily Transported": Testing the Limits of Revivalism, 1741-1742

10. "Under the Impressions of a Heated Imagination": James Davenport, Andrew Croswell, and the Fracturing of New England Evangelicalism

11. "Beyond Any Former Outpouring of the Spirit": Debating the Legitimacy of the Awakenings

12. "The Gospel Is Not Preached Here": The Crisis of New England Separatism

13. "Bringing Them to a Subjection to the Religion of Jesus": Native American Missions

14. "Ethiopia Shall Stretch Out Her Hands unto God": Slavery, African Americans, and Evangelicalism

15. "Do the Holy Scriptures Countenance Such Wild Disorder?": Evangelicalism in Virginia

16. "A Happy Revival of Religion in the Interior Parts": Evangelicalism in the Carolinas

17. "There Is Really a Great Awakening in Those Parts": The Evangelical Revivals of the 1760s

18. "The God of Glory Is on Our Side": Evangelicals and the American Revolution

19. "Many Thought the Day of Judgment Was Come": The New Light Stir of 1776-1783

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780300148251

0300148259

OCLC:

1024021698