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Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2017

Michael J. Crawford
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Extract

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.

Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 1987 , pp. 361 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1987

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5 I have chosen England and New England for this comparison rather than another likely pairing—England and the middle colonies—because there was a significant similarity in context between New England and England: the Evangelical Revival in both arose within the dominant, established churches in each area, whereas the awakening in the middle colonies occurred in a much more fully developed context of denominational competition among equals; in England and New England, the Revival was the product of an attempt to revitalize long-standing churches, whereas, in the middle colonies, the Revival had as much to do with organization of churches among recent settlers as it had with revitalization.

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53 For the transatlantic evangelical connection during the Great Awakening, see Crawford (n. 3 above); Durden (n. 3 above); and O'Brien (n. 3 above). For the British periodicals, see Durden, Susan, “A Study of the First Evangelical Magazines, 1740–1748,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 255–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the revival periodical published in Boston, see Van de Wetering, John E., “ The Christian History of the Great Awakening,” Journal of Presbyterian History 44 (1966): 122–29Google Scholar.

54 Michael N. Schute summarizes the arguments that call into question a link between the throat distempter and the Great Awakening, while he shows how a group of evangelical ministers in New Hampshire, campaigning against rationalism, made use of the epidemic to emphasize God's absolute sovereignty and to minimize the power of man's reason (“A Little Great Awakening: An Episode of the Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 [1976]: 589–602 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed). Élie Halévy suggests that a “temporary crisis of overproduction” in England in 1739 triggered the Revival there ( The Birth of Methodism in England, trans, and ed. Semmel, Bernard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971]Google Scholar, originally published in Revue de Paris [August 1 and 15, 1906], pp. 519–39, 841–67Google Scholar). Walsh, J. D. effectively challenges Halévy in “Élie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 25 (1975): 1–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the role of the Land Bank crisis in the Great Awakening, cf. Miller, John C., “Religion, Finance, and Democracy in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 29–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bumsted (n. 9 above).

55 Goen, C. C., “Editor's Introduction,” in Goen, , ed. (n. 41 above), pp. 4–18, 18 Google Scholar.

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62 M. Watts (n. 6 above), pp. 434–35.

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68 Miller, Perry, “Jonathan Edwards and Ihe Great Awakening,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 156–57Google Scholar.

69 Lovelace, Richard F., The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids; Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979)Google Scholar.

70 Mather translated the psalms into blank verse in order to be as faithful as possible to the meaning of the original and objected to Watts's modernizing the psalms to make them more relevant to eighteenth-century Christians.

71 For example, Henderson, Archibald W., The Evangelical Revival and Christian Reunion (London: Epworth Press, 1942), p. 13 Google Scholar; and Wood, Arthur Skevington, The Inextinguishable Blaze: Spiritual Renewal and Advance in the Eighteenth Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdsmans Publishing Co., 1960), esp. pp. 26–27 Google Scholar.

72 The question whether conversion actually helped persons to accept new responsibilities and to lead more autonomous lives, as well as other questions about the consequences of the Revival, lies beyond the scope of this essay.