Blog VIb: Summary of The Great Awakening: Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (Chapter 12 - Chapter 15)

Chapter 12: The First Great Awakening’s individualist take on religion led to divisions in opinion in how a church should be run. This caused people to want to start their own church where they can worship the way they wanted to. Today that would not be a problem in the U.S. however back in the 1700’s starting a new church was viewed a radical act that would jeopardize the Christian order of society (paraphrased). In some states, laws were made to prevent such divisions however even the government could not contain the passion of the “radical itinerants” as such new churches were formed. Many separatists felt that anyone who felt the calling should become a minister, no matter their social rank, race, gender or education. This was of course regarded as extremely radical behavior by orthodox leaders, and was heavily frowned upon. In the end the radicals got their way and the protestant church was divided into many different branches within the same geographical area. It should be noted that Kidd talks about specifics in his work, however in this summery they will not be covered. Chapter 13: The radical evangelists that fueled the Awakening needed legitimacy inside the colonies and Great Britain, converting Native Americans gave that too them. The Manifest Destiny feeling inside the Christian Religion at the time called for the world to become Christian, it was the Radials progression in this field that gave them their legitimacy. This is best seen in a quote in Eleazar Wheelock: “Nothing can be more Agreable to our Christian Character tha[an to] send the Gopel to the benighted Pagans”. It was the lack of emotional outpouring in traditional Protestantism that caused their attempts at converting the Eastern Seaboard Native Americans to fail. The Radials however were all about a person’s emotional connection to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit Chapter 14: This section mainly dealt with the development of philosophical constructs and their inevitable implications. Ideas such as the equality of all peoples’ souls exemplify such constructs. For instance this particular idea eventually lead to this reasoning: “If all souls are equal then God given rights such as liberty are also equal.” And this reasoning lead to the rights movement and conflict. But before this ideology got to that point in its development it called for the proselytisation of Africa and everywhere else that had not yet heard the word of God and thus were doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation. Inroads into the African culture were difficult for traditional Evangelicals to make however, for the Revivalists this was relatively easy. Thus, the Revivalists capitalized on their ideological advantage and converted as many Africans as they were able both in the Americans and in Africa itself. Much like in Rome this massive intake of new people from different cultures changed the Revivalist movement’s ideals helping to draw the revivalist’s movement’s leaders center stage for the Civil Rights debate. Chapter 15: This chapter deals with the specific events and debates that defined the ideological beliefs in Virginia. The most important deviation in Virginia form the rest of the colonies was that their Awakening movement started late (1740s) other than that their ideological development matched that of the colonies a whole.