Inventing the "Great Awakening"

Inventing the
Author: Frank Lambert
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691086915

This text presents an account of the evangelical revival known as the Great Awakening. It demonstrates that the 'awakening' was invented by 18th-century evangelicals who were religious promoters. It shows how these people told and retold their account to themselves, their followers and opponents.

Inventing the "Great Awakening"

Inventing the
Author: Frank Lambert
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691223998

This book is a history of an astounding transatlantic phenomenon, a popular evangelical revival known in America as the first Great Awakening (1735-1745). Beginning in the mid-1730s, supporters and opponents of the revival commented on the extraordinary nature of what one observer called the "great ado," with its extemporaneous outdoor preaching, newspaper publicity, and rallies of up to 20,000 participants. Frank Lambert, biographer of Great Awakening leader George Whitefield, offers an overview of this important episode and proposes a new explanation of its origins. The Great Awakening, however dramatic, was nevertheless unnamed until after its occurrence, and its leaders created no doctrine nor organizational structure that would result in a historical record. That lack of documentation has allowed recent scholars to suggest that the movement was "invented" by nineteenth-century historians. Some specialists even think that it was wholly constructed by succeeding generations, who retroactively linked sporadic happenings to fabricate an alleged historic development. Challenging these interpretations, Lambert nevertheless demonstrates that the Great Awakening was invented--not by historians but by eighteenth-century evangelicals who were skillful and enthusiastic religious promoters. Reporting a dramatic meeting in one location in order to encourage gatherings in other places, these men used commercial strategies and newly popular print media to build a revival--one that they also believed to be an "extraordinary work of God." They saw a special meaning in contemporary events, looking for a transatlantic pattern of revival and finding a motive for spiritual rebirth in what they viewed as a moral decline in colonial America and abroad. By examining the texts that these preachers skillfully put together, Lambert shows how they told and retold their revival account to themselves, their followers, and their opponents. His inquiries depict revivals as cultural productions and yield fresh understandings of how believers "spread the word" with whatever technical and social methods seem the most effective.

The Next Great Awakening

The Next Great Awakening
Author: Josiah Strong
Publisher: Wentworth Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780526074709

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The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening
Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1319241735

A detailed examination of the First Great Awakening, this volume presents a valuable study of the spiritual movement that profoundly shaped colonial American cultural and religious life. Thomas Kidd's comprehensive introduction relies on recent scholarship to describe three contemporary views of the revivals: those of radicals in favor of them, moderates supporting them, and antirevivalists attacking them. The views and experiences of these participants and critics emerge through nearly 40 documents organized into topical sections. By expanding coverage of the radicals and the ordinary people, including women, African Americans, and Native Americans, who joined the revival movement, Kidd gives students an opportunity to hear a broader collection of voices from colonial American society. The volume also includes illustrations, headnotes to the documents, a chronology of the Great Awakening, a selected bibliography, questions to consider, and an index.

"Pedlar in Divinity"

Author: Frank Lambert
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691187967

A pioneer in the commercialization of religion, George Whitefield (1714-1770) is seen by many as the most powerful leader of the Great Awakening in America: through his passionate ministry he united local religious revivals into a national movement before there was a nation. An itinerant British preacher who spent much of his adult life in the American colonies, Whitefield was an immensely popular speaker. Crossing national boundaries and ignoring ecclesiastical controls, he preached outdoors or in public houses and guild halls. In London, crowds of more than thirty thousand gathered to hear him, and his audiences exceeded twenty thousand in Philadelphia and Boston. In this fresh interpretation of Whitefield and his age, Frank Lambert focuses not so much on the evangelist's oratorical skills as on the marketing techniques that he borrowed from his contemporaries in the commercial world. What emerges is a fascinating account of the birth of consumer culture in the eighteenth century, especially the new advertising methods available to those selling goods and services--or salvation. Whitefield faced a problem similar to that of the new Atlantic merchants: how to reach an ever-expanding audience of anonymous strangers, most of whom he would never see face-to-face. To contact this mass "congregation," Whitefield exploited popular print, especially newspapers. In addition, he turned to a technique later imitated by other evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham: the deployment of advance publicity teams to advertise his coming presentations. Immersed in commerce themselves, Whitefield's auditors appropriated him as a well-publicized English import. He preached against the excesses and luxuries of the spreading consumer society, but he drew heavily on the new commercialism to explain his mission to himself and to his transatlantic audience.

The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening
Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300148259

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.

The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening
Author: Albert Adams Merrill
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781334476648

Excerpt from The Great Awakening: The Story of the Twenty-Second Century Had I been carried to some other house, to some hospital? Was I still sick? I did not suffer; on the contrary I felt in the best of health; and then, as the dismal thoughts of the weeks of suffering I had undergone came back to me, I concluded I must be dreaming. Well, thought I, if by dreaming I can still the pain which tortured me, let me but dream forever! I lay quietly on my back, and began to look around the room. At my left was a large window looking out upon a park filled with beautiful large maples, their branches moving softly with the gentle breeze across the room a large fireplace met my gaze, with a mantel surmounting, on which there was a clock and some vases, and I distinctly heard the clock ticking. A most marvellous dream, thought I. As my eyes wandered about, now stopping to admire some pictures, now examining curi ously some article of furniture wholly new to me, a little door above the dial of the clock opened, a miniature head was pushed out, and a soft, delightful voice said pleasantly, It is now ten o'clock. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America

The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America
Author: Frank Lambert
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2010-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400825539

How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency. Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of building a "City upon a Hill," and the Founding Fathers, who determined the constitutional arrangement of religion in the new republic. While the former proselytized the "one true faith," the latter emphasized religious freedom over religious purity. Lambert locates this shift in the mid-eighteenth century. In the wake of evangelical revival, immigration by new dissenters, and population expansion, there emerged a marketplace of religion characterized by sectarian competition, pluralism, and widened choice. During the American Revolution, dissenters found sympathetic lawmakers who favored separating church and state, and the free marketplace of religion gained legal status as the Founders began the daunting task of uniting thirteen disparate colonies. To avoid discord in an increasingly pluralistic and contentious society, the Founders left the religious arena free of government intervention save for the guarantee of free exercise for all. Religious people and groups were also free to seek political influence, ensuring that religion's place in America would always be a contested one, but never a state-regulated one. An engaging and highly readable account of early American history, this book shows how religious freedom came to be recognized not merely as toleration of dissent but as a natural right to be enjoyed by all Americans.

The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening
Author: Richard L. Bushman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469600110

Most twentieth-century Americans fail to appreciate the power of Christian conversion that characterized the eighteenth-century revivals, especially the Great Awakening of the 1740s. The common disdain in this secular age for impassioned religious emotion and language is merely symptomatic of the shift in values that has shunted revivals to the sidelines. The very magnitude of the previous revivals is one indication of their importance. Between 1740 and 1745 literally thousands were converted. From New England to the southern colonies, people of all ages and all ranks of society underwent the New Birth. Virtually every New England congregation was touched. It is safe to say that most of the colonists in the 1740s, if not converted themselves, knew someone who was, or at least heard revival preaching. The Awakening was a critical event in the intellectual and ecclesiastical life of the colonies. The colonists' view of the world placed much importance on conversion. Particularly, Calvinist theology viewed the bestowal of divine grace as the most crucial occurrence in human life. Besides assuring admission to God's presence in the hereafter, divine grace prepared a person for a fullness of life on earth. In the 1740s the colonists, in overwhelming numbers, laid claim to the divine power which their theology offered them. Many experienced the moral transformatoin as promised. In the Awakening the clergy's pleas of half a century came to dramatic fulfillment. Not everyone agreed that God was working in the Awakening. Many believed preachers to be demagogues, stirring up animal spirits. The revival was looked on as an emotional orgy that needlessly disturbed the churches and frustrated the true work of God. But from 1740 to 1745 no other subject received more attention in books and pamphlets. Through the stirring rhetoric of the sermons, theological treatises, and correspondence presented in this collection, readers can vicariously participate in the ecstasy as well as in the rage generated by America's first national revival.

Toward the Great Awakening

Toward the Great Awakening
Author: Sidney W. Powell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2013-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781258966096

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.