Awakenings: The First Generation of American Evangelical Christianity

FAIN: FT-52462-04

Thomas Saunders Kidd
Baylor University (Waco, TX 76798-7284)

This project will involve research on the "First Great Awakening" and American evangelical Christianity during the eighteenth century. The First Great Awakening was a massive upsurge of religious interest and conversions, centered in the years 1735-1742, that historians have conventionally seen as one of the key moments in American colonial history. Evangelicalism refers to that strain of Protestant Christianity that heavily emphasizes each individual’s experience of being spiritually "born again." Strangely, there is no contemporary book detailing the history of the entire Awakening, or of early North American evangelicalism. This project seeks to fill that significant gap. It will be published as a book with Yale University Press.

Associated Products

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (Book)
Title: The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America
Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/123485245
Primary URL Description: World Cat URL
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0300118872

---