The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795-1842

Abstract

The Second Great Awakening has been the focus of some of the most important recent work i American religious history. No longer viewed by most historians as a clergy-inspired campaign of social control, the revival has been variously explained as an institution-building process, a cultural revitalization movement, a women's awakening and a shopkeeper's millennium, to identify some influential lines of interpreta tion. Most recendy, Nathan Hatch has argued that the awakening is best understood as a democratizing process within evangelical Protestantism that was set in motion by the American revolution. Among other things, Hatch has observed, this democratizing movement promoted a Jeffersonian disdain tradition and for the past as a repository of wisdom (Hatch 7) In the course of the new awakening, however, leaders and participants came to possess an acute historical consciousness, not simply a forward looking millennial expectation. Historians have not examined how the Second Great Awakening provoked a significant and sometimes acrimoni ous debate over the American revivalistic tradition?a debate that consti tuted a major cultural response to the kind of democratic change that Hatch has so effectively described.1 Leaders of and participants in the Second Great Awakening ransacked the annals of colonial revivalism, with important consequences successive historical understanding of the First Great Awakening. In fact, Second Great Awakeners reified the colonial awakening into a great, general, and formative event, a line of interpre tation that has proved so troubling in modern historiography of the eighteenth century. Concurrent with the historical reification of the colonial awakening, Jonathan Edwards emerged belatedly and the first time as a central religious authority in American evangelical culture?an intellectual rebirth that was initiated by a growing and influential group of New Divinity ministers with direct ties to the mid-eighteenth-century revivals. At the outset of the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity men