Reviewed by Mark Valeri | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4

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Reviewed by Mark Valeri | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. By Thomas S. Kidd. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. 412 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Mark Valeri, Union Theological Seminary, Virginia
In The Great Awakening, Thomas S. Kidd ambitiously attempts to refurbish an old paradigm for the eighteenth-century Protestant revivals: a singular, sustained movement that shaped America's religious history. Unlike previous interpreters who stressed the culmination of that history in sober Protestant piety, however, Kidd lines a trajectory toward what he describes as American evangelicalism. Eyeing our current fascination with that tradition and its political import (Kidd begins his book with references to Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and worldwide Pentecostalism), he provides a slim but workable enough definition of the evangelical style born in the Awakening: fixed on personal conversion, intense periods of revival, and the work of the Holy Spirit. Although this book provides few analytic innovations or archival discoveries, it synthesizes the best secondary literature on the revivals into an account that touches on evangelical preaching from Nova Scotia to Georgia.	1
Kidd presents a twofold thesis. First, following standard narratives originating with Joseph Tracy's The Great Awakening and expanded into a transatlantic drama by Michael J. Crawford's Seasons of Grace and W. R. Ward's The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, he maintains that many religious leaders promoted a religious movement—what he calls "the long First Great Awakening" (xix)—that lasted from the 1740s through the 1780s.¹ Second, different spiritual affinities gradually divided participants into two types of evangelicals: moderates who upheld Calvinist ideas and existing patterns of social authority and radicals who promoted ecstatic experiences and a protoegalitarian social ethic that challenged gender and racial hierarchies. His division between moderates and radicals echoes long-standing interpretations yet ranges across larger geographic and chronological fields. As Kidd's study reaches into the 1780s, his radicals capture much of the narrative, suggesting that the evangelical inheritance of the revivals endured chiefly in sectarian Baptist groups, independent visionaries, and Methodists who proliferated in the southern backcountry and inland regions of the northern colonies and states.	2
The Great Awakening centers on the religious conversions and subsequent ministries of dozens of preachers. Including a cursory review of precedents in late Puritan New England, Kidd gives nineteen brief chapters, many of which revolve around the itinerant preaching of George Whitefield. The first eight chapters and the tenth cover well-mapped ground: Jonathan Edwards and the revivals of 1734–35 in Northampton, Massachusetts; Gilbert Tennent and the Pietist-inspired preaching in New Jersey that evolved into criticism of the standing Presbyterian ministry; Whitefield's tours throughout New England and the middle colonies; the spread of the revival through New England towns; the controversies that attended Whitefield's increasingly strident critique of the established religious authorities; and the split between moderates such as Edwards and radicals such as Andrew Croswell, James Davenport, and Daniel Rogers.	3
The second half of the book explores less familiar territory, marked by evangelical extremes such as lay exhortation, mysticism, visions, criticism of religious authorities, and the inclusion of African American and women preachers. The latter chapters discuss the rise of different Baptist groups in Virginia and the Carolinas through the 1760s, missions to Native Americans, John Cleaveland and the separatist movement in New England during the 1760s, various revivalist reactions to the movement for independence, and the rise of Shakers and other marginal groups during a revival in New England during the American War of Independence.	. . .

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