GREAT AWAKENING

Did the Great Awakening lay thegroundwork for the American

Revolution?

Viewpoint: Yes. The colonial religious revivals of the eighteenth centurypaved the way for the American Revolution by encouraging religious revi-talization, intercolonial unity, democracy, and anti-authoritarianism.

Viewpoint: No. The religious revivals did not produce the dramatic religiousand political changes ascribed to them. There was virtually no link betweenthe Great Awakening and the American Revolution.

The Great Awakening, a series of separate religious revivals thatswept through the colonies from the 1720s to the 1760s, was largely areaction against increasing materialism, religious apathy, and the cold for-mality and intellectual nature of established religion church services. Toinspire renewed piety and faith, revivalist ministers, often itinerant laypreachers, delivered emotionally charged sermons that appealed more tothe heart than the mind. Speaking in plain but often excitable language, theministers emphasized the depravity of human nature and the need forrepentance while depicting the emptiness of material wealth and the fury ofdivine wrath for those who had not attained true salvation. The appeal ofthese revivalist ministers cut across lines of class, race, gender, occupa-tion, and education.

However, by the early 1740s these religious revivals had caused bitterdoctrinal divisions within many established churches between "New Light"(revivalist) and "Old Light" (traditional) camps. Many traditional Old Lightclergymen, upset by the criticisms of their preaching method and religiousdoctrine, denounced the Awakening as a sham carried out by charlatanswith no theological training. To emasculate the movement, Old Lights insome New England colonies used their influence to get their legislativeassemblies to adopt anti-itinerancy laws and measures forbidding revivalistministers from performing marriages. These repressive measures gener-ally failed to have the desired effect; the enthusiasm of the religious reviv-als, which varied in intensity from region to region, fizzled out of their ownaccord. Despite their relative brevity, the religious revivals of the eigh-teenth century left a lasting legacy by promoting religious pluralism, tolera-tion of divergent ideas, separation of church and state, and highereducation with the creation of six parochial colleges.

Concerning these consequences of the Great Awakening, historiansare in general agreement. But some scholars go even further and claimthat the Great Awakening unwittingly helped lay the groundwork for theAmerican Revolution by empowering ordinary people to criticize those inauthority, to question dogma, and to speak out on behalf of basic liberties.This anti-authoritarianism was encouraged by itinerant revivalists who toldtheir listeners that God does not work through kings and bishops or the richand wellborn but through the people themselves. Filled with new feelings ofself-worth, New Light followers demanded and assumed greater responsi-bilities in religious affairs. The Great Awakening therefore not only facili-tated the democratization of religion in America but politics as well by 145

making more-acceptable demands for greater rights and resistance against established authority.At the same time, the Great Awakening, with its heavy use of itinerant preachers, also helped todevelop colonial unity and a new system of mass communication in America.

In contrast, other historians argue that the Great Awakening did not produce dramatic reli-gious or political changes. The revivals failed to democratize relations between the laity and min-isters, the latter of whom continued to stress the importance of deference and hierarchy incolonial society, especially within the churches. Indeed, there was no need to democratize furtherreligion as congregations throughout the colonies had already long exercised considerablepower over their ministers. Nor were the revivals responsible for the expansion of the colonialchurches during the eighteenth century; this phenomenon is more accurately attributed to dra-matic population growth and immigration. And as for the Great Awakening contributing to interco-lonial unity, the revivals simply appeared too erratically in too few colonies to have such an effect.For these reasons it is impossible to draw a connection between the Great Awakening and theAmerican Revolution. Instead, it was the secular Enlightenment and a rich colonial tradition ofpolitical dissent that shaped the revolutionary rhetoric and protest behavior of American Whigs.

Whether or not the Great Awakening contributed to the American Revolution, there werestrong religious overtones to the struggle for independence. Yet, were these spiritual overtonesmore a political than a theological construct? By 1776 Whigs everywhere started adopting a mil-lennial interpretation of the imperial crisis, especially following General William Howe's evacua-tion of Boston in March and Colonel William Moultrie's decisive defeat of Sir Peter Parker'sseemingly omnipotent expeditionary force in Charleston harbor later that June. These Americanvictories convinced many patriots that "the Almighty created America to be independent of Brit-ain" and that God favored the "righteous Americans" over the "despotic British." However, didWhig polemicists, knowing that colonial religious tradition made Americans predisposed towardviewing the world in millennial terms, sagaciously use this cosmic interpretation of theAnglo-American conflict simply as a powerful and effective means of selling the Revolution? Didthis millennial interpretation of the Anglo-American conflict assist the American cause?

Viewpoint:Yes. The colonial religiousrevivals of the eighteenth centurypaved the way for the AmericanRevolution by encouragingreligious revitalization,intercolonial unity, democracy,and anti-authoritarianism.

American clergyman Ezra Stiles, writingon the eve of Great Britain's victory in theFrench and Indian War (1754-1763), argued inprescient language for a union of dissentingProtestant churches in the colonies to rebuff aperceived threat to religious freedom in BritishAmerica. Believing that the Church of Englandplanned to establish a bishopric in the colo-nies, he feared that the abrogation of "the rightof conscience and private judgment" in reli-gious matters foreshadowed an eclipse of politi-cal liberty in America. Upon the conclusion ofthe war, Britain proceeded to reorganize theadministration of its American possessions,sparking waves of popular and official protestsfrom New Hampshire to Georgia. The provin-cial assemblies, flush with enlarged politicalinfluence, asserted themselves in a wayunheard-of before the outbreak of the war. His-torians have since wondered about the origins

of this phenomenon and have found evidencethat political criticism in English newspapersinfluenced Americans to scrutinize moreclosely the actions of Parliament, the colonialassemblies, and provincial governors. Othershave concluded that anti-authoritarian develop-ments in the religious arena sparked a similardynamic in colonial politics that found expres-sion in popular resistance to the authority ofParliament and the king. A process of democra-tization in the churches led to provincial lead-ers challenging British imperial policy and laterto casting it off forcefully in the War of Inde-pendence (1775-1783).

The British American colonies underwenta political maturation in the 1720s and 1730sunder the influence of a liberal political philos-ophy that arose during the seventeenth centuryin England. This ideology rejected the ancientbelief in the divine right of kings and placedultimate authority squarely in the hands of thepeople, from whom monarchs are granted theright to rule. Beginning in the 1720s, devoteesof this ideology, known as Whigs, began to crit-icize the government of Sir Robert Walpole ascorrupt. Members of the House of Commonstoo often joined members of the House ofLords in legislation that threatened the libertiesof the people, while others in the Commonsreceived lucrative posts, titles, and land fromKing George II. The British constitution,

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which supposed a delicate balance betweenLords, Commons, and the throne, had, accord-ing to Whig commentators, become unbalancedby influence peddling and bribery emanatingfrom George IPs court and the House of Lordsat the expense of the people, who were repre-sented in the House of Commons.

British journalists John Trenchard andThomas Gordon became famous for publishingletters in Whig newspapers exposing corrup-tion in Parliament. Using the pseudonym"Cato," Trenchard and Gordon's letters pub-lished between 1720 and 1723 in The Indepen-dent Whig expounded upon the corruption inWalpole's government. The cause of this cor-ruption, in their opinion, was what they calledthe "money interest" that, fed by England'scommercial success, led to enervating luxury,venality, and selfishness infecting both the elec-torate and the elected. The House of Commonswas believed to be especially prone to succumb-ing to such corrupting influences, as membersof the House of Lords and the king were sus-pected of soliciting favorable votes throughbribery. Similar notes were struck by HenrySaint John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who in theperiodical The Craftsman (1726-1736) accusedWalpole's government of sedition and the abro-gation of civil liberties. Members of the Houseof Commons, elected by the thin minority ofBritons who possessed the voting franchise,nonetheless represented all nonaristocrats, fromwealthy landowners down to the workingclasses. Once these representatives allowedgreed and place seeking to supplant their dutyto represent the people of Britain, according toWhig critics, the British constitution essentiallyceased to exist in its perfection.

Americans were as concerned as anyone inBritain about political corruption, and colo-nists read the opposition tracts reprinted inAmerican newspapers. Thinkers and laymenalike accepted the Calvinist and Hobbesianbeliefs that people are innately opportunisticand that increasing commercial success in thecolonies might well breed the same corruptionand inattention to civic duty in the provincialassemblies that seemed to be afflicting Parlia-ment. The rising merchant class in Americaappeared to be well placed to unduly influenceassemblymen, and both had to be watchedclosely in order to prevent the contagion fromsubverting American politics. The voting fran-chise was much more widely shared in the colo-nies than in Britain, with roughly 70 percent ofadult white males enjoying the right to vote,and this level of participation, coupled with arapidly increasing American population, meantthat the assemblies accumulated a great deal ofpower at the expense of the royal governors,

who relied upon the assemblies for their sala-ries. American commentators writing in thenewspapers began to worry about the growinginfluence of the merchant class as well as theincrease in factionalism that put assemblymenat odds with the governors and with each other.While an assembly could effectively check a des-potic governor's policies, smooth governmentdepended upon maintaining the same politicalbalance as was supposed to exist in Britain, andas the eighteenth century progressed, it seemedthat the "money interest" was becoming morepowerful. Still, colonial politics entered a quietphase in the first half of the eighteenth centurycharacterized by stability and unity. The burn-ing issues of the day centered much morearound religious developments.

The Great Awakening began in the late1720s when a few New England clergymenstarted to notice an increased religious sensibil-ity among their congregants. Led by JonathanEdwards of Massachusetts, they urged their col-leagues to abandon the lofty preaching stylelong practiced since the founding of NewEngland and to adopt instead a plainer methodthat utilized homespun metaphors and simplerlanguage more easily understood by tradesmenand farmers. These "New Lights" found kin-dred spirits in Presbyterian clerics in Pennsylva-nia and New Jersey, such as William Tennent

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Sr. and his sons Gilbert and William Jr., whofounded the "Log College" in Neshaminy,Pennsylvania, devoted to producing ministerswho advocated a more conservative, fundamen-talist form of Protestant Christianity. The gov-erning bodies overseeing denominationaldiscipline, according to New Light opinion,were made up almost entirely of worldly menaddicted to the social status and material per-quisites of clerical authority, and the sameworldliness had allowed liberal ideas to compro-mise the churches and endanger the souls ofthose who looked to them for salvation andguidance. A similar message was preached bythe English Methodist George Whitefield, whotoured the colonies intermittently between1739 and 1745, and whose sermons attractedtens of thousands of listeners. New Lightsinsisted that the prospering colonial economybred this materialism, which in turn fostereddeclining rates of church membership, doctrinalerrors, and atheism.

One sermon by Gilbert Tennent, The Dan-ger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740), suggestedthat the majority of Christian clergy had neverheard God's call to the ministry but instead fol-lowed selfish and acquisitive inclinations. Theseministers, Tennent argued, were bound for helland threatened to take everyone who had takencommunion from them to damnation, andtherefore must be exposed and expelled fromtheir pulpits. One New Light minister, JamesDavenport of Connecticut, gathered listenerson street corners and railed against the estab-lished Congregational clergy as valuing wealthrather than piety and materialism rather thanspirituality. He encouraged his followers to castaway their fine clothes, jewelry, and other "vani-ties" into bonfires he lit in town squares in Con-necticut and Rhode Island, for which he wasrepeatedly arrested as a disturber of the peace.Charles Chauncy of Boston's First Churchwrote stinging invectives against the revivalists,accusing them of heresy and chicanery; a toneechoed by other Old Lights. Denominations inNew England and the middle colonies experi-enced divisions that tore congregations apartbetween supporters and detractors of the reviv-als. Ministers who were deemed unfit for theirpulpits were expelled; itinerant ministerssteadily increased their credibility; and NewLights came to occupy positions once held byOld Lights. Jonathan Edwards, who had beenamong the first to publicize this "great and gen-eral awakening" as a possible precursor of theApocalypse, was nonetheless deeply troubledby the increasingly schismatic nature of theAwakening, and urged Old Lights and NewLights to seek common ground and form a "fra-ternal union" among the dissenting Protestantchurches. However, the empowerment of the

laity forced the clergy to concede some of theirauthority, and this conflict afforded a sort ofdress rehearsal for the popular local movementsthat later protested against changes in Britishimperial administration and eventually pushedfor independence.

The contest between Old and New Lightsignited political battles throughout the colo-nies. Presbyterians and German pietists in Penn-sylvania criticized the Quaker monopoly onprovincial government. Virginia's Anglicanestablishment used its influence over the Houseof Burgesses to constrict Dissenter growththrough the passage of laws against itinerancy,and saw to the arrests of unlicensed preachers.New England's establishment—Rhode Islandexcepted—similarly passed restrictive laws andtaxes against Baptists, Quakers, and others whodid not adhere to the standing order. As thebattle lines were drawn, denominational inter-est groups responded by drafting circular let-ters, forming committees of correspondence,disseminating petitions, and adjusting electiontickets to favor candidates sympathetic to theirviews. While clerics were certainly active inthese endeavors, the fervent participation of thelaity stands out as a trait of these movements.Although the revivals petered out after 1745,the debates between Old and New Lights con-tinued until the outbreak of the French andIndian War. Fear of encroaching RomanCatholicism from New France exacerbatedwidespread anti-Catholicism and began a heal-ing process that ended the contention withinProtestant denominations. Another cause forconcern was the potential establishment of anAnglican episcopate in the colonies, whichthreatened the existence of dissenting Protes-tantism. Thomas Seeker, archbishop of Canter-bury, made no secret of his desire to place aresident bishop over the colonies, and the mis-sionary arm of the Anglican Church, the Soci-ety for the Propagation of the Gospel inForeign Parts (SPG), was perceived by religiousdissenters in the colonies as working toward anAmerican episcopate. The accumulated effectwas a further politicization of American dissent-ing Protestantism. Stiles's keynote sermon forthe year 1760, A Discourse on the ChristianUnion (1761), called for the union of the Con-gregational Church with other dissentingchurches to stave off the SPG's missionariesand alerted his auditors to Seeker's designs. Tohim, episcopacy posed a grave threat not onlyto religious liberty but to political liberty aswell. "The right of conscience and private judg-ment is unalienable," he declared, "and it istruly the interest of all mankind to unite them-selves into one body, for the liberty, free exer-cise, and unmolested enjoyment of this right,especially in religion."

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The changes in imperial administrationtoward the American colonies that followedBritain's victory confirmed the clergy's fearsthat an American episcopate would soon beestablished. It was suspected that a portion ofthe revenue raised by the Revenue Act (1764),Stamp Act (1765), and Townshend duties(1767) was designated for the SPG, but whathelped to stir up popular resistance againstdirect taxation were religious interpretations ofthe Stamp Act. American dissenters connectedthe Stamp Act to the designs for an Americanbishop, as the Act implied that those taking col-lege degrees or accepting ordination requiredroyal approval, thus meaning the Church ofEngland's approval as well. They saw in thispolicy a means by which the George Grenvilleministry and Archbishop Seeker might rewritethe colonial charters and eliminate dissent, thussparking ensuing unrest and riots. Some laymensubmitted apocalyptic interpretations of theStamp Act, utilizing biblical imagery to raisecolonial indignation. Boston Patriot and silver-smith Paul Revere captured the apocalyptic fla-vor of the time in an engraving that features ademoniacal beast tearing the Magna Carta andcrushing a hapless victim underfoot while val-iant colonists struggle to fight the monster inemulation of St. George slaying the fableddragon. John Adams, in a series of articlesprinted in the Boston Gazette in August 1765called A Dissertation on the Canon and FeudalLaw, used millenarian and apocalyptic themesto paint the rule of kings and aristocrats as atool of the Antichrist.

The greatest concern to clerics and laity alikecame as a result of the passage of the Quebec Act(1774), which among its provisions for officiallyestablishing the Church of England there, guar-anteed religious toleration to the Catholic major-ity. The proximity of Quebec to New York andNew England made it a convenient bugbear, andanti-Catholicism reached a fever pitch during theSeven Years' War (1756-1763). For Calviniststhroughout America the defeat of the Frenchvindicated their anti-Catholicism, and the Que-bec Act seemed a disturbing betrayal ofAnglo-America's religious destiny. To thosemost alarmed by it, the Quebec Act could onlymean that Roman Catholicism had againinfected the Court of St. James. Indeed, it wasthe combination of civil and ecclesiastical powerthat most upset the colonists, who did not haveto think long or hard to realize that RomanCatholicism and the Papacy best represented theill effects of the blending of church and state.Daniel Barber, a nineteen-year-old private in theContinental Army writing at the beginning ofthe Revolutionary War, recalled the popularapocalyptic perception then "that this sameGeorge [III] ... had thereby become a traitor . . .

a secret Papist;. . . whose design it was to obligethis country . . . to be given up and destroyed,soul and body, by that frightful image with sevenheads and ten horns."

When the crisis in imperial policy turnedinto armed opposition to the presence of Brit-ish soldiers and the inflexibility of Parliament,religion provided a construct around whichAmericans interpreted the whirlwind of eventsfollowing the Battles of Lexington and Con-cord (1775). Ministers from most of the dissent-ing denominations roared their support for theRevolution from their pulpits, in the streets,and under the oaks. They volunteered to serveas chaplains in the Continental Army and statemilitias. Presses cranked out dozens of sermons,pamphlets, and broadsides declaring that theensuing conflict opened another chapter in theeternal war between heaven and hell. Loyalistand neutralist clergy likewise cast their politicalstances in religious terms, comparing the Revo-lution to the disastrous peasant revolts inReformation-era Germany. This religiosity inconnection with the resistance to British impe-rial policy and the Revolution itself was madepossible by the heightening of religious sensi-bilities that brought about—and were simulta-neously brought about by—the Great Awakening.The anti-authoritarianism of the 1760s and1770s had not arisen from the immediate cir-cumstances of the changes in British colonialpolicy but were a direct outgrowth of the anties-tablishment atmosphere of the Great Awaken-ing. The Revolution could not have occurred asit did without it.

-JOHN HOWARD SMITH,TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY AT COMMERCE

Viewpoint:No. The religious revivals did notproduce the dramatic religious andpolitical changes ascribed to them.There was virtually no link betweenthe Great Awakening and theAmerican Revolution.

The argument that the Great Awakeningconstituted a key factor leading to the Ameri-can Revolution entered colonial American his-toriography only during the 1960s. Twocontemporary intellectual and cultural currentshelp explain both why and when it did. First,Perry Miller had by then focused historians'attention on eighteenth-century revivalism,characterizing Jonathan Edwards, a nearly for-gotten figure, as a world-class philosophical

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theologian and casting the Great Awakening asthe final act in American Puritanism'slong-running cosmic drama. Second, in the1960s demonstrations, riots, "happenings,"and a cult of ecstatic spirituality-large-scalepopular phenomena-contested the power andpolicies of established political and culturalelites. Suddenly, the ideological fervor anddemotic protest of the Awakening—an interco-lonial event that drew crowds never before(and seldom thereafter) seen in Anglo-Amer-ica—seemed to presage the Revolution. Thatthese two great mass movements had occurredonly three decades apart seemed too strikingfor coincidence.

Alan Heimert laid the foundations forthis interpretation. In Religion and the Ameri-can Mind, from the Great Awakening to the Revo-lution (1966), he contended that the GreatAwakening rent the New England clergy intotwo permanent factions, evangelical and ratio-nalist. Calvinistic, biblicist, heedless of station,and devoted to expounding Scripture's God,evangelicals encouraged revivalism, piety, egali-tarianism, and, ultimately, resistance to theCrown. Arminian, rhetorically tepid, consciousof their social place, and hymning Nature'sbenevolent deity, rationalists supported theAmerican rebellion reluctantly if at all. TheAwakening, according to Heimert, created apowerful and popular clerical presence whosepreachments led parishioners to challenge thestatus quo, particularly the rule of sinful andcorrupt tyrants.

Building on Heimert's work, other histo-rians elaborated the anti-authoritarian ele-ments of revivalism. Revivalists, they noted,insisted that God calls sinners directly regard-less of their denominational affiliation, hencesalvation depends on personal receptivity tothe Spirit independent (and sometimes inspite) of ministerial authority. Audiences gath-ered and converted by George Whitefield, Gil-bert Tennent, and other itinerants gained anincreasing sense of their importance as individ-uals and their capacity to achieve salvation out-side established church orders. Armed with arighteous sense of self and perceiving a lack ofgrace in their old churches, these New Lightsleft to form new ones; their willingness todeclare ministers devoid of grace and to secedefrom their congregations rather than com-mune with unregenerates evinced theanti-authoritarianism that would then fuelassault on British rule.

Scholars also attached the Revolution tothe Awakening's chiliastic, political, and socio-logical legacies. Some asserted that millennialism—expectations of Christ's imminent thousand-yearrule—excited visions of America as God's most

favored nation, spawning a protonationalistpatriotism. Others descried direct politicalinfluence. In Connecticut the Awakening crys-tallized partisan divisions between Old andNew Lights; when a prominent Old Lightagreed in 1765 to serve as the colony's stampdistributor, New Lights seized on the resultinguproar to win the governorship in the nextelection. Striking a social scientific stance,Patricia U. Bonomi maintained that the Awak-ening's connection to the Revolution wasmore institutional than theological. Observingspecies of Congregationalists vying to controlthe Connecticut legislature; Quakers, Presbyte-rians, and Lutherans giving battle over thefuture of Pennsylvania's proprietary govern-ment; and Presbyterians and Baptists in Vir-ginia lobbying the assembly to stop Anglicanpersecutions, she devised a general theory inUnder the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, andPolitics in Colonial America (1986) to accountfor colonists' increasing engagement in poli-tics. The Awakening's broils brought religiousissues into the political arena and taughtchurches to leverage their influence by organiz-ing as ecclesiastical pressure groups—in essencepolitical action committees. "Denominationalpolitics," she concluded, "forms the bridgebetween the Great Awakening and the Ameri-can Revolution."

Just as a consensus that the Awakening fac-tored mightily into the Revolution emerged,however, Jon Butler published a highly contro-versial and influential article, "EnthusiasmDescribed and Decried: The Great Awakening asInterpretative Fiction" (1982). Butler inveighedagainst the concept of "the Great Awakening"and denied that revivalism nurtured the Revolu-tion. The more closely scholars now looked, theless met their eyes.

For one thing, although the New Englandclergy's schism into evangelical and liberalwings during the 1740s had enormous conse-quences for American religious and intellectuallife, it did not, as Heimert thought, segregatethem politically. Ninety-five percent of the"black regiment"—Loyalist Peter Oliver's with-ering epithet for New England's clergy—linedup behind the Revolution, with liberals suchas Samuel Cooper and Charles Chauncy back-ing resistance as fervently as any evangelical.Support for the Revolution cannot meaning-fully be traced to post-Awakening theologicallineages. Nor can the evangelical/liberaldichotomy account for events in Virginia, asmuch a breeding ground for rebellion as Mas-sachusetts but, unlike the Bay Colony, hardly aseedbed of revivalism. It is true that SeparateBaptists and evangelical Presbyterians infil-trated the southern interior after 1750 and

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PROMISES OF GRACE AND SALVATIONIn a 1740 sermon Presbyterian minister Gilbert Tennent,one of the important Great Awakening preachers alongwith George Whitefiefd, commented on nonevangelicatmtni&tem:

... having no Experience of a specialWork of the Holy Ghost, upon their ownSouls, are therefore neither Inclined to, norfitted for, Discoursing, frequently, clearly* andpathetically, upon such important Subjects.The Application of their Discourses, is eithershort, or indistinct and general. They differ-ence not the Precious from the Vile, anddivide not to every Man his Portion, accord-ing to the Apostolical Direction to Timothy.No! they carelessly offer a common Mess totheir People, and leave it to them, to divide Itamong themselves, as they see fit, This Isindeed their general Practice, which is badenough; But sometimes they do worse, bymisapplying the Word, through Ignorance, orAnger. They often strengthen the Hands ofthe Wicked, by promising him Ufa. Theycomfort People, before they convince them;sow before they plow; and are busy in raisinga Fabrick, before they lay a Foundation.These fooling Builders do but strengthenMen's carnal Security, by their soft, selfish,cowardly Discourses, They have not theCourage, or Honesty, to thrust the Nail of Ter-ror into sleeping Souls; nay, sometimes theystrive with all their Might, to fasten Terror intothe Hearts of the Righteous, and so to matethose sad, whom GOD would not have madesadt And this happens, when pious Peoplebegin to suspect their Hypocrisy, for whichthey have good reason, I may add. That fnas-much as Pharisee-Teachers seek after Righ-teousness as it were by the Works of the Lawthemselves, they therefore do not distinguish,as they ought, between Law and Gospel \ntheir Discourses to others. They keep Driv-

ing, Driving, to Duty, Duty, under this Notion,That it will recommend natural Men to theFavour of <3OD, or erttftte ifiern to tie Prom-ises of Grace and Salvation: And thus thoseblind Guides fix a deluded World upon thefalse Foundation of their own Righteousness;and so exclude them from the dearRedeemer, All the Doings of unconvertedMan, not proceeding from the Principles ofFaith, Love, and a new Nature, nor beingdirected to the divine Glory as their highestend, but flowing from, and tending to Self, astheir Principle and End; mm dowbtteisly dam-nably Wicked in their Mtnntr of Nffer-mance, and do deserve the Wrath and Curseof a Sin-avenging <3OD; mNtar oan anyother Encouragement be justly given them,but this, That In tie Way of Duty, mere Is aPeradventura or Probability of obtainingMercy.

I may add, that sad Experience verifieswhat has been now observed, concerning theUnprofitableness of the Ministry of uncon-verted Men, Look into the Congregations ofunconverted Ministers, and see what a sadSecurity reigns there; not a Soul ootwfncedthat can be heard of, (pf way Yitr$ alto-gether; and yet the Ministers are easy; forthey say they do their ihiiyl % a small Mat-tar will satisfy us in the Want of that, which wehave no great Desire after. But when Personshave thtlr Eyes optfttd, tfM fWr frtearts setupon the Work of God; they art hot so soonsatisfied with their Doings, and with Want ofSuccess for a Time,. , «

Source: "Gilbert Tennent Presents the Danger of anUnconverted Ministry, 1740," in Karen Kupperman,ed., Major Problems In American Colonial History,second edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp.3$&-33$,

that they perceived British policies as condu-cive to social disorder as was sin, but those bod-ies figured only marginally in launching andsustaining the Revolution. Virginians belongedoverwhelmingly to the Church of England.Strikingly, many, perhaps most, of their priestssupported the Revolution. Taking into accountthose Baptists who preferred neutrality in orderto protest Virginia's establishment and thehandful of Methodists who took their lead fromJohn Wesley's Loyalism, one might plausiblyassert that, in the Old Dominion, Heimert's cat-egories operated in reverse: religious rationalism

fostered patriotism more readily than did evan-gelicalism.

Nor do they help explain the actions ofVirginia's leadership, comprised primarily ofpeople who assumed liberal (in some cases,Deist) theological stances and, conversely,abhorred the emotionalism and spiritual ran-cor of the revivals. How importantly can theAwakening have mattered if its impact onGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, JamesMadison, Richard Henry Lee, and their ilk wasnil? Nor was Virginia alone in this regard. Dur-ing the Revolutionary period religious liberal-

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ism influenced the American political elite,especially in the South, far more than did evan-gelicalism. The Revolution's chiefs for themost part owed allegiance to moderatingcreeds that de-emphasized the Awakening'snew birth. That the Awakening does notexplain the composition of the patriot leader-ship weakens the case for its significance.

Other connections between the Awaken-ing and the Revolution are equally tenuous.Revivalists' appeals to converts as single per-sons rather than as members of particular con-gregations might have instilled individualswith a sense of their own importance beforeGod and an awareness that they could be savedwithout their local clergyman's ministrations,thus diminishing their loyalty to their owndenominations. However, no one has demon-strated how this inchoate anti-authoritarianismagainst ecclesiastical institutions carried overinto opposition to imperial officials. Thealleged "democratizing" tendencies of theAwakening have been highly overestimated. Itdid not, for instance, much change the powerallocations within church governments. NewLights challenged the authority of some minis-ters (those deemed graceless) but not the minis-try per se. Such "democratization" and itsattendant anticlericalism, Nathan O. Hatchcontends in The Democratization of AmericanChristianity (1989), occurred only when radicalegalitarian ideas permeated American society atthe end of the eighteenth and the beginning ofthe nineteenth centuries, a consequence of theRevolution rather than a cause.

Furthermore, the denominational politicsthat, according to Bonomi, bridged the Awak-ening and the Revolution turn out to havedone nothing of the sort outside Connecticut.Church members indeed entered politics morereadily to defend their interests as the eigh-teenth century wore on, but their involvementneither created factional alignments based onattitudes toward the Awakening nor necessarilyheightened discontent with the imperial rela-tionship. In Pennsylvania the Awakeningplayed no part in catalyzing the Quaker andPresbyterian parties that during the 1760sfought over whether the province shouldbecome a royal colony; their names notwith-standing, ethnic and regional identity explainstheir composition better than denominationaladherence. The positions staked out by SamuelWard and Stephen Hopkins's factions inRhode Island over the Stamp Act (1765) hadnothing to do with the Great Awakening's leg-acy. The same can be said about partisanshipand resistance to Britain in New York.

The alleged sociological and millenniallinks of the Awakening to the Revolution prove

similarly suspect. Colonists channeled theirprotest through organizations such as assem-blies, town meetings, militias, and crowds—all ofwhich had their provenance in Anglo-Americanpolitical and constitutional traditions, not theGreat Awakening. Tellingly, when colonistsprotested British measures, they acted throughand identified themselves with secular, notecclesiastical, bodies. Colonists facing downthe empire in 1765 called themselves "Sons ofLiberty," not "New Lights Opposed toStamps." One can discover certain millennialthemes in revolutionary ideology, but their tiesto the Awakening are gossamer; as Ruth H.Bloch has shown in Visionary Republic: Millen-nial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800(1985), eighteenth-century millennialism tookvarious forms, many of them apolitical. Whatimpact the chiliasm of the Awakening mighthave had on the Revolution was diffuse.

It is hard, then, to detail specific ways inwhich the Awakening might have helped leadto the Revolution; yet, the argument has aneven more fundamental flaw because it pre-sumes instead of proves the cogency of its cen-tral concept. Suppose, however, that the "GreatAwakening" were merely an "interpretative fic-tion," a signifier with no valid referent? If therewere no such thing as the "Great Awakening,"then "it" clearly could not have helped causethe Revolution. As noted above, Butler hasfamously argued that historians cut the "great"awakening from whole cloth, telescoping local-ized revivals having little connection to eachother, much less the Revolution, into a unify-ing construct. His formulation may be tooextreme—Frank Lambert in Inventing the"Great Awakening" (1999) defends the legiti-macy of the term, at least when applied torevivals in the 1740s, because, he notes, it isitself a historical datum: contemporaries under-stood themselves as participating in a "greatand glorious awakening" of grace. Neverthe-less, Butler is right that collapsing thirty yearsof revivals into one event is conceptuallyunwarranted. The notion of a "Great Awaken-ing" has validity only to the extent that it desig-nates the revivals generated and influenced byWhitefield's tours around Anglo-America andBritain during the 1740s.

Given this more rigorous formulation, his-torians wishing to assert the influence of theGreat Awakening on the Revolution must showhow a specific set of midcentury revivals struc-tured and encouraged American resistance toBritain. Here another difficulty arises. TheAwakening occurred some three decades beforethe Revolution; even those who flocked tohear Whitefield as young adults were approach-ing old age in the 1770s. By far the greatest

152 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

part of the people who claimed to have beenborn in liberty belonged to a different genera-tion than those claiming to have been born inthe Spirit. That the Awakening and the Revolu-tion as mass movements exhibit certain struc-tural affinities does not in itself prove that thefirst helped cause the second; scholars mustadduce specific mechanisms by which theAwakening's spiritual, ideological, political, orecclesiastical impact influenced revolutionaryaction. They have not succeeded in doing so.

The delimited conceptualization of theGreat Awakening underlines the need for defin-ing terms carefully. Some arguments linking theAwakening and the Revolution point more toreligious or ecclesiastical activity in general thanto revivalism in particular. Religious thoughtand affiliation, without doubt, inspired colo-nists' resistance to Britain. In an age whenmany people learned about events by talkingand listening rather than by reading or watch-ing, preachers served as both sources and inter-preters of news. Especially in New England,ministers glossed current events in familiar cov-enantal tropes, intoning that God was usingBritain to chastise the colonists for their sinsbut that repentance—which in this contextmeant cleansing themselves of Britain's corrup-tive influence—would restore the compactbetween him and his people. Theologicalinquiry fed into political ideology: liberals'adoption of Enlightenment theories supportedthe Whig insistence on natural rights; evangeli-cals' insistence on God's sovereignty reinforcednotions that he sanctioned resistance to tyrants(a theme upon which American political philos-opher Thomas Paine played cleverly in CommonSense, 1776); and, across the doctrinal spectrum,clerical injunctions for people to behave mor-ally melded with Real Whiggery's depiction ofparliamentary politics as frighteningly corruptto strengthen Americans' perceptions of them-selves as a moral people who could maintaintheir virtue only by quarantining themselvesfrom Britain's contagion. Throughout the colo-nies, religious dissenters worried that installingan Anglican bishop in America augured a dimi-nution of their rights, and they regarded talk ofdoing so as just more evidence of the Britishplot to deprive them of liberty. Within the colo-nies, dissenters from local establishments, mostnotably the Baptists, agitated for freedom ofconscience, reinforcing notions that any threat—whether from a nearby clerical consociation or aking across the water—should be met with civildisobedience.

Yet, to discover religious activity permeat-ing revolutionary America does not prove theproposition that the Great Awakening—con-ceived as a specific revivalistic event—was a key

factor leading to the Revolution. At best, onecan note that the Awakening configured Con-necticut's response to the Stamp Act or suggestwith Bloch that the "call to rebellion, equality,and mass participation—laid an ideologicalgroundwork for the American Revolution." Amore concrete connection is difficult to prove.Moreover, a cogent explication of the Revolu-tion's coming does not require reference to theAwakening: such phenomena as colonists' fearthat the British ministry was conspiring todestroy their liberty; their insistence that theyenjoyed the rights of Englishmen; their resis-tance to imperial measures by petitions, nonim-portation agreements, and crowd actions—allcan be explained without taking cognizance ofthe Great Awakening. They cannot, however, begrasped without referencing Anglo-Americanpolitical, constitutional, and ideological heri-tage. The Awakening might have helped disposeAmericans to adopt certain lines of thought andbehavior that were also being developed byother means, but it bears no responsibility forspawning the American Revolution.

-CHARLES L. COHEN,UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

References

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of theAmerican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1967).

Daniel Barber, The History of My Own Times, 3volumes (Washington, B.C.: Ustick, 1827-1832).

Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: MillennialThemes in American Thought, 1756-1800(Cambridge & New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1985).

Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven:Religion, Society, and Politics in ColonialAmerica (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1986).

Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee:Character and the Social Order in Connecti-cut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1967).

Jon Butler, "Enthusiasm Described and Decried:The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fic-tion," Journal of American History, 69 (Sep-tember 1982): 305-325.

Charles L. Cohen, "Onward Christian Politicos,"Reviews in American History, 15 (December1987): 550-556.

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 153

Michael J. Crawford, "Revivalism and the GreatAwakening," in Encyclopedia of the NorthAmerican Colonies,, volume 3, edited byJacob Ernest Cooke and others (New York:Scribners, 1993), pp. 665-684.

Melvin B. Endy Jr., "Just War, Holy War, andMillennialism in Revolutionary America,"William and Mary Quarterly, 42 (1985): 3-25.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of Ameri-can Christianity (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1989).

Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind)from the Great Awakening to the Revolution(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1966).

Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awak-ening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis andIts Consequences (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1967).

Frank Lambert, Inventing the "Great Awakening"(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1999).

William G. McLoughlin, "Enthusiasm for Lib-erty: The Great Awakening as the Key to theRevolution," in Preachers and Politicians:Two Essays on the Origins of the AmericanRevolution, by Jack P. Greene and McLough-lin (Worcester, Mass.: American AntiquarianSociety, 1977).

John M. Murrin, "No Awakening, No Revolu-tion? More Counterfactual Speculations,"Reviews in American History, 11 (June1983): 161-171.

Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union:The Substance of Which was Delivered beforethe Reverend Convention of the Congrega-tional Clergy in the Colony of Rhode-Island;Assembled at Bristol April 23, 1760 (Boston:Edes & Gill, 1761).

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