| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation. By Jerome Dean Mahaffey. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007. xiv, 295 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-932792-88-1.)
How could the most religiously lax generation in American history employ religious metaphors so easily to enlist God on the side of the American revolutionaries? How did the deists who founded our nation persuade God to join the Continental army? Jerome Dean Mahaffey finds the answer to those puzzling questions in a detailed analysis of the rhetoric of George Whitefield's sermons, which he delivered to adoring and hating crowds on seven tours of the American colonies between 1740 and 1770.	1
Many historians, most notably Richard Bushman, Alan Heimert, Rhys Isaac, and Harry Stout, have found some of the origins of revolutionary radicalism in Great Awakening revivalism. Itinerant preachers, those scholars argue, created a culture that challenged deeply entrenched regional religious establishments, and, in doing so, they created an aggressive, questioning collective personality that was similarly willing to challenge Britain's new imperial policies in the 1760s. Thus, the New Lights or New Sides—the proponents of the awakening—easily metamorphosed into revolutionary Whigs.	. . .

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