![]() "Even before the advent of the American Revolution," the author writes, "the stage had been set for the cooperation of evangelicals and more liberal Christians, not only in the Patriot cause but also in the struggle to disestablish the state churches." Kidd expertly reviews the relations between church and state in the various colonies and charts the progress toward disestablishment. Roiling beneath the surface during these years was growing evangelical discontent about religious establishments, which came to be seen as another species of coercion and an affront to liberty. Kidd does point out the "morally problematic" nature of American providentialism, as demonstrated by the clergy's endorsement of the destruction of Iroquois towns during the war. The British surrender at Yorktown was greeted as evidence of divine favor. Americans had been scandalized by the vulgarity of British soldiers, and they came to believe that "success in the war depended on their individual moral character and that of their new nation." Chaplains monitored the behavior of soldiers, fearing that moral lapses would throw the Patriot cause off course. Military chaplains were viewed as crucial to the success of the Continental Army. Three hundred members of his congregation signed up for the army that day. After preaching on Ecclesiastes 3 ("To every thing there is a season") in January 1776, Peter Muhlenberg of Woodstock, Virginia, stepped down from his pulpit and removed his vestments to reveal a military uniform, announcing that he had accepted a commission with a Virginia regiment. The Stamp Act of 1765 implicated the British crown in that web of arbitrary and malevolent power and set the stage for the American Revolution.ĭuring the Revolution itself, evangelicals generally lined up with the Patriots. Kidd demonstrates that the revivalism of the Great Awakening became politicized during the Seven Years' War, which "forged a visceral bond among Protestantism, anti-Catholicism, and liberty." Apocalyptic imagery abounded, with Catholicism identified with both the Antichrist and monarchy. (Certainly the irony cannot have been lost on Kidd that his editor for God of Liberty, the incomparable Lara Heimert, is Alan Heimert's daughter.) With impressive command of the primary sources and deft historical analysis, Kidd has produced an indispensable survey of religious life during the Revolutionary era. God of Liberty suffers from no such overreaching. Heimert, focusing almost entirely on published sources, had forced the connection and taken liberties with his sources in order to argue that there was an almost seamless path from revival to Revolution. When I was studying colonial history in graduate school in the early 1980s, Religion and the American Mind, which had been savaged in the reviews, was held up as a paradigm of historical overreaching. ![]() One of Miller's students, Alan Heimert, took on the challenge of making that link, famously reading "beyond the lines" of evangelical and Patriot rhetoric to produce, in 1966, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Well over half a century ago, Perry Miller, who had rediscovered the Puritans in the 1930s, suggested that there was a connection between the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening and the Patriot cause of the American Revolution. ![]() ![]() Read our latest issue or browse back issues. Now, with the publication of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, Kidd has admirably filled a second major gap in our understanding of American religious history. His 2007 book, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, demonstrates that the real contest in mid-18th-century America was not between New Lights and Old Lights (proponents and opponents of the revival) but between moderate and radical evangelicals. Kidd, associate professor of history at Baylor University, who now has slain two of these historiographical dragons. A comprehensive understanding of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s had eluded historians-well, forever Edwin Gaustad tried valiantly a generation ago, but his efforts were confined to New England and neglected the other colonies.Īlong comes Thomas S. Religion in the Great Depression still awaits its historian, while Harry Stout's magisterial 2006 volume, Upon the Altar of the Nation, analyzes the discordant religious voices during the Civil War. Those gaps are (in reverse chronological order) religion during the Great Depression, religion and the Civil War, religion during the Revolutionary era and religion during the Great Awakening. ![]() Students of American religious history have long been aware that, at least until recently, the field has been riddled with four yawning gaps-eras that cried out for solid synthetic treatments. ![]()
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