Great Awakenings and American Evangelical Identity: Revival, Democracy, and Historical Memory

Abstract

The revivals conventionally called the Great Awakenings have shaped American Christianity more than any other set of events, and they are remembered in ways that frequently serve present purposes rather than describing what occurred. This article examines the historiographical debate over whether the First Great Awakening was a coherent event or a retrospective construction, the theology of Jonathan Edwards and its relation to the revival practice he defended and criticized, the itinerant model established by George Whitefield, and the substantial contemporary opposition that charged the revivals with enthusiasm and disorder. It then examines the Second Great Awakening, the frontier camp meetings, Charles Finney's new measures and the theological shift they embodied, and Nathan Hatch's argument that the period's decisive characteristic was the democratization of religious authority. Particular attention is given to the revivals' relation to slavery, which is genuinely ambiguous: they produced both substantial Black conversion and the independent Black churches, and were used to defend as well as to attack the institution. The article assesses Bebbington's influential definition of evangelicalism, traces the later development through Moody, Pentecostal origins, and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and closes by examining how the Awakenings function in contemporary Christian memory and what that use conceals.

Research Question and Scope

What did the revivals known as the Great Awakenings actually consist of, how did they shape the identity and authority structures of American evangelicalism, and how does the way they are remembered differ from what the historical record supports?

Method and Source Selection

The study works from primary sources of the periods concerned - Edwards' treatises and narratives, Whitefield's journals, Finney's lectures, and contemporary opposition literature - alongside the principal secondary historiography. Where historians disagree substantively, as they do over the coherence of the First Great Awakening, the disagreement is described rather than resolved.

The article treats the revivals as historical events subject to ordinary historical assessment, including examination of their social conditions, their opponents' arguments, and their effects. This methodological choice is not a theological judgment about whether God acted in them; it reflects that historical method cannot adjudicate such a question, and the article marks where it moves between description and theological assessment.

Attention is given throughout to the experience of enslaved and free Black Christians, of women, and of the communities the revivals reached and excluded, on the argument that an account drawn only from the writings of the leading white male figures misrepresents what occurred. No original archival research was conducted.

1. What counts as an awakening

The term Great Awakening is a retrospective label, and the question of whether it names a coherent event has been genuinely contested among historians. Jon Butler's influential argument held that the First Great Awakening is an interpretive fiction constructed in the nineteenth century, that the revivals were regional, episodic, and unconnected, and that their significance has been magnified by later evangelicals seeking a founding narrative.

The counter-arguments are substantial. Thomas Kidd and others have argued that contemporaries did perceive a connected movement, that the correspondence and print networks linking revivals in New England, the middle colonies, and Britain were real, and that Whitefield's colonial tours created an intercolonial religious event without precedent. The evidence of contemporary awareness is stronger than Butler's argument allows.

A moderate position, which most current scholarship approximates, holds that the revivals were real, extensive, and connected by print and itinerancy, while acknowledging that their unity has been overstated, that their geographical reach was uneven, and that the label imposes a coherence on events that were experienced locally as distinct. This is a normal historiographical result rather than a scandal.

The stakes of the debate are not merely academic. If the Awakening was a single divinely initiated movement, it functions as a precedent that later revivalists may invoke and seek to reproduce. If it was a set of regional episodes retrospectively unified, its status as a model is weaker. Contemporary revival movements have frequently invoked the former without engaging the historiography.

A related terminological point deserves mention. Historians increasingly speak of evangelical awakenings in the plural and in transatlantic terms, recognizing that the colonial revivals were part of a movement including the Welsh and English revivals associated with Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, and the Wesleys, and continental Pietism. Treating the phenomenon as American in origin misdescribes it.

2. Edwards and Northampton

Jonathan Edwards, pastor at Northampton in Massachusetts, produced both the most significant theological work associated with the revivals and their most careful analysis. The revival in his own congregation in 1734-35, which he described in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, circulated widely in Britain and the colonies and provided a template for how such events were understood and reported.

Edwards' theology was thoroughly Reformed, and this is frequently obscured in popular memory. He held to divine sovereignty in salvation, original sin, and predestination, and he defended these positions in substantial treatises including Freedom of the Will and Original Sin. The revival he defended was not, in his account, produced by technique but was a sovereign work of God, and this is precisely the point at which later revivalism diverged from him.

The sermon for which he is chiefly remembered, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield in 1741, has distorted his reputation. It is unrepresentative of his preaching, which was predominantly concerned with the beauty and excellency of God, and its delivery was reportedly quiet rather than declamatory. Reducing Edwards to that sermon is comparable to reducing a body of literature to its most anthologized page.

A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, published in 1746, is his most important contribution to the assessment of revival and remains the standard treatment. Its argument is that true religion consists largely in holy affections, that intense emotion is neither evidence for nor against genuine conversion, and that the reliable sign is a changed life over time. He lists twelve signs that are not evidence and twelve that are.

Edwards' own pastorate ended in dismissal in 1750, after a dispute over admission to communion in which he reversed his grandfather's practice of open admission and required a credible profession of faith. That the period's leading revival theologian was removed by his own congregation is a detail that revival narratives generally omit and that complicates simple accounts of the Awakening's effects.

3. Whitefield and the itinerant model

George Whitefield's colonial tours, beginning in 1739, created a religious phenomenon without precedent in the colonies. He preached outdoors to very large crowds, travelled continuously across colonial boundaries, and used newspaper advertising and printed accounts to publicize his arrival in advance. Historians including Harry Stout have argued that he pioneered techniques of publicity and performance that anticipate modern mass communication.

The itinerant model had structural consequences that outlasted him. A preacher unattached to a settled congregation, drawing hearers from many parishes, and answerable to no local authority represented a direct challenge to the established parish system and to the authority of settled ministers. The opposition Whitefield attracted was substantially about this rather than about doctrine.

The crowds are difficult to assess. Contemporary estimates are unreliable and were inflated by supporters and dismissed by opponents, and Whitefield's own journals are promotional documents. What is not in doubt is that the gatherings were large by the standards of colonial society, that they drew across denominational lines, and that they were reported throughout the colonies.

Whitefield's relationship with slavery is a matter of record and is not creditable. He campaigned successfully for the legalization of slavery in Georgia, arguing that the colony's economy required it, and he himself owned enslaved people who worked at his orphanage. He also preached to enslaved people and argued that they should be evangelized and catechized, which some slaveholders opposed.

This combination - evangelistic concern for enslaved people alongside active support for their enslavement - is characteristic of the period and is the point at which honest historical treatment is most often avoided. It cannot be resolved by noting that he was a man of his time, since abolitionist arguments existed and were being made by Quakers during his lifetime, and it should not be omitted from accounts that treat him as a model.

4. The opposition and its arguments

Substantial opposition to the revivals came from within the churches and made arguments that deserve engagement rather than dismissal. Charles Chauncy of Boston published Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England in 1743 as a direct response to Edwards, arguing that the revivals produced disorder, that emotional intensity was mistaken for grace, and that itinerants undermined settled ministry.

The specific charges were concrete. Itinerants entered parishes without invitation and preached against the settled minister. Lay exhorters, some barely literate, took on preaching roles. Converts judged the spiritual state of others, including their ministers, and separated from congregations they judged unconverted. James Davenport, the most extreme itinerant, led a public burning of books and clothing at New London in 1743 and was declared mentally disturbed by a Connecticut court.

Edwards himself made many of the same criticisms. Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival and the Religious Affections both address the excesses at length, and he was explicit that judging others' spiritual states, relying on impressions, and treating physical manifestations as evidence were errors. The distinction between Edwards and the opposition was not that he approved of the excesses but that he held the movement to be genuine despite them.

The revivals produced lasting division. The Presbyterian church split into New Side and Old Side in 1741 and reunited in 1758; Congregational churches divided into New Lights and Old Lights, with separatist congregations forming; and many of these separatist congregations subsequently became Baptist. The denominational landscape of American Christianity was substantially reshaped by these divisions.

The historiographical lesson is that revival and division have been closely associated throughout the movement's history, and that accounts presenting revival as producing unity are not supported by the record. This is not an argument against revival; it is an observation that its effects have consistently included fracture, and any contemporary movement that expects otherwise is working from a sanitized history.

5. Black Christianity and the revivals

The revivals were the period in which substantial numbers of enslaved Africans and their descendants became Christian, and this is among their most consequential effects. Prior to the Awakenings, Christianization of enslaved people had been limited and frequently opposed by slaveholders who feared that baptism implied manumission or that literacy for Bible reading was dangerous.

The revival preaching's emphasis on direct experience, its use of vernacular language, its indifference to formal education as a qualification, and its egalitarian implication that all stood equally before God made it accessible in ways that catechetical instruction in established churches had not been. Camp meetings and revival gatherings were among the few settings where Black and white worshippers were present together.

Black preachers emerged during and after this period, and their significance is substantial. Figures including Harry Hosier, George Liele, and Andrew Bryan preached to both Black and white audiences; Liele established a Baptist congregation in Georgia and later founded churches in Jamaica after emigrating. The independent Black church tradition dates substantially from this period.

Independent Black denominations followed. Richard Allen, after being pulled from prayer at a segregated Philadelphia church, led a withdrawal that resulted in the founding of Bethel Church and eventually of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church followed a comparable path. These institutions became central to Black community life, education, and later to the civil rights movement.

The theological reading enslaved Christians developed differed sharply from that of their enslavers and is documented in spirituals, narratives, and later testimony. The exodus was read as a promise of deliverance; Egypt and Babylon named the slaveholding society; and the Christianity preached by masters, which emphasized obedience and used Ephesians 6:5 as its text, was distinguished from what they understood the gospel to be. Frederick Douglass' distinction between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of this land states it as sharply as it has been stated.

6. The Second Great Awakening and the frontier

The revivals conventionally dated from the 1790s into the 1830s differed substantially from the first in setting, method, and theology. Their most distinctive form was the camp meeting, a multi-day outdoor gathering with continuous preaching, and the Cane Ridge meeting in Kentucky in 1801 became its emblematic instance, drawing crowds contemporaries estimated in the thousands to tens of thousands.

Physical manifestations were prominent at these meetings and were widely reported: falling, jerking, barking, laughing, and dancing. Assessments differed sharply at the time and have since, with explanations ranging from divine action to crowd dynamics to the conditions of the meetings themselves. Contemporary revival leaders were themselves divided about whether such phenomena should be encouraged, tolerated, or suppressed.

The Second Awakening's denominational effects were substantial and enduring. Methodists and Baptists grew enormously in this period and became the largest Protestant bodies in the United States, displacing the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans who had dominated the colonial religious establishment. The circuit-riding system and the licensing of relatively uneducated preachers enabled Methodist expansion at a pace settled ministry could not match.

New religious movements originated in the same environment. The Restorationist movement associated with Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell, the Millerite movement whose disappointed expectation of Christ's return in 1844 gave rise to Adventism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founded by Joseph Smith all emerged in the region of intense revival activity in upstate New York that came to be called the burned-over district.

The regional concentration is itself informative. The burned-over district's combination of rapid settlement, economic transformation through the Erie Canal, weak established institutions, and repeated revival activity produced conditions in which new religious claims found audiences. Historians have generally read this as evidence that revival flourishes where established institutional authority is weak, which has implications for how contemporary movements are assessed.

7. Finney and the new measures

Charles Grandison Finney, a lawyer turned evangelist, transformed revival practice and its underlying theology, and the change he represents is more significant than is usually recognized. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion, published in 1835, states the position bluntly: a revival is not a miracle but the right use of the constituted means, and it is a purely philosophical result of the right use of means.

This is a direct reversal of Edwards. Where Edwards understood revival as a surprising work of God that could be prayed for and not produced, Finney understood it as the predictable outcome of correct method. The theological shift is from Reformed sovereignty toward a position emphasizing human ability, and Finney's own theology moved substantially away from the Calvinism in which he was ordained.

The new measures were the practical expression: protracted meetings held for consecutive nights, the anxious bench where those under conviction sat before the congregation, direct address to individuals by name, women praying publicly in mixed assemblies, and preaching aimed at producing immediate decision. Each was controversial and each became standard evangelistic practice.

Opposition came from Reformed quarters and made arguments that remain relevant. Critics including Asahel Nettleton and later John Williamson Nevin argued that the measures produced emotional response rather than conversion, that the anxious bench substituted a physical act for repentance, that immediate decision bypassed instruction, and that the resulting converts frequently did not persist. Nevin's The Anxious Bench remains the most substantial critique.

The long-term significance of Finney's shift is difficult to overstate. Modern evangelistic practice - the appeal, the response, the counting of decisions, the assumption that method produces result - descends from him rather than from Edwards, and evangelical movements that claim Edwards as a forebear while using Finney's methods are combining positions that their originators understood to be incompatible.

8. Democratization and the authority of the common person

Nathan Hatch's argument that the decisive characteristic of the period was the democratization of American Christianity has been among the most influential interpretations. His claim is that the early republic saw a transfer of religious authority from educated clergy to ordinary people, and that this was the fundamental change of which revival was one expression.

The evidence he assembles is substantial. Preachers without formal education gained followings; vernacular preaching displaced learned exposition; hymnody in popular idioms spread through cheap print; and the claim that any believer could read Scripture for themselves without clerical mediation was pressed further than the Reformers had pressed it. Movements defined themselves explicitly against established clergy and educational requirements.

The change corresponded to the political culture of the early republic, and Hatch argues the correspondence was not coincidental. A society rejecting inherited authority in politics produced religious movements rejecting it in the church, and the vocabulary of liberty, of rejecting tyranny, and of the sovereignty of the people transferred directly into religious discourse.

The consequences were double-edged and Hatch is clear about both. Democratization made Christianity accessible to people the established churches had not reached, empowered Black and women preachers in movements that would not have licensed them, and produced enormous growth. It also removed the checks that education and institutional accountability provided, enabled charismatic figures to gather followings without oversight, and produced a fissiparity that has characterized American Protestantism since.

This analysis bears directly on contemporary evangelicalism. The suspicion of theological education, the authority accorded to compelling communicators regardless of accountability, the multiplication of independent congregations and movements, and the recurrent pattern of leaders whose authority is unchecked until scandal are all traceable to this inheritance rather than being recent developments.

9. Revival and reform

The Second Great Awakening produced substantial social reform activity, and the connection was explicit in the theology of its leaders. Finney held that converted people should reform society and that a revival which produced no such fruit was suspect, and his followers were prominent in a range of causes. The period's reform movements were substantially staffed and funded by revival converts.

Abolitionism drew heavily on this constituency. Theodore Dwight Weld, converted under Finney, became a leading organizer; the Tappan brothers funded abolitionist work; and the Lane Seminary debates of 1834, in which students committed themselves to abolition and subsequently left for Oberlin, illustrate the connection. Oberlin College, where Finney later taught and served as president, admitted Black students and women.

Other causes followed the same pattern: temperance, prison reform, Sabbath observance, education, care for the mentally ill, and missions both foreign and domestic. The voluntary society became the characteristic instrument, and the resulting network of organizations has been described as a benevolent empire funded and staffed largely by evangelical converts.

Women's participation and leadership expanded substantially through these movements, and the connection to later feminism is direct. Women organized, spoke publicly, and administered societies in ways their churches did not otherwise permit, and several early advocates of women's rights, including the Grimké sisters, came to that position through abolitionist work grounded in revival religion.

The counter-record must be stated with equal clarity. Revival religion was also used to defend slavery, and the biblical defence of the institution was made by ministers of the same traditions and with the same claims to scriptural authority. The Baptist and Methodist denominations split over slavery in 1844-45, and the southern bodies were not less revivalist than the northern. Revival did not determine the moral outcome in either direction.

10. Defining evangelicalism

The revivals produced the movement subsequently called evangelicalism, and its definition has been contested. David Bebbington's characterization, proposed in 1989, identifies four priorities: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

The quadrilateral has been widely adopted because it is descriptive rather than doctrinal, applies across denominational lines, and identifies emphases rather than a confession. Its critics have argued that it is insufficiently precise, that the four items describe much of Protestantism generally, and that it omits the social and institutional dimensions that actually constitute the movement's identity.

An alternative approach defines evangelicalism sociologically, by networks, institutions, and shared markers rather than by beliefs. On this account evangelicals are identified by which conferences they attend, which publishers they read, which institutions they support, and which figures they recognize as authoritative. This describes something real and it explains why the boundaries of the movement do not track doctrinal agreement.

The problem has become acute in contemporary American usage, where the term functions substantially as a political and cultural identity marker in survey research and public discourse. Substantial numbers of people who identify as evangelical in surveys do not attend church, and the correlation between the label and political alignment has become stronger than its correlation with the theological commitments Bebbington identified.

The global dimension complicates matters further and is frequently ignored in American discussion. Most of the world's evangelicals are not American, are not white, and do not share the political alignments that dominate American usage of the term. Discussions of evangelical identity conducted entirely in American terms are describing a minority of the movement, and the majority would not recognize themselves in the description.

11. From Moody to the modern crusade

Revival practice continued to develop after Finney, and the line to contemporary practice runs through identifiable figures. Dwight L. Moody, a former shoe salesman, conducted urban campaigns in Britain and the United States from the 1870s, organizing them with businesslike efficiency, employing the musician Ira Sankey, and establishing institutions including a Bible institute that carried the model into the next century.

Moody's approach reflected the urban and industrial setting. Campaigns were organized in advance by committees of local churches, held in large purpose-built or rented halls, publicized through the press, and financed by businessmen. The professionalization of revival as an organized enterprise dates substantially from this period, as does the association between evangelistic ministry and business methods.

Pentecostalism emerged from the holiness movement, which itself descended from Wesleyan revival theology, and the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles beginning in 1906 is conventionally treated as its founding event. Led by William J. Seymour, a Black preacher, it was notably interracial in its early phase, and the movement it launched has become the fastest-growing form of Christianity globally.

Billy Graham's crusades from the late 1940s represented the model's fullest development. Organized through local church committees, conducted in stadiums, broadcast on radio and television, and following a consistent format culminating in an invitation, they reached audiences of unprecedented size across many countries. Graham's insistence on financial accountability and on desegregated seating from the 1950s distinguished his organization from several contemporaries.

Assessment of the crusade model has been mixed and the evidence is genuinely limited. Follow-up studies have generally found that a substantial proportion of those responding to appeals had existing church connections and that persistence rates among those without prior connection were lower than the response figures suggest. Graham's organization itself acknowledged the difficulty and invested in referral to local congregations, which was a serious response to a real problem.

12. Fundamentalism, modernism, and the reshaping of identity

The early twentieth century saw evangelical identity substantially reshaped by controversy rather than by revival. The publication of The Fundamentals between 1910 and 1915, the rise of biblical criticism and evolutionary biology as public issues, and the resulting conflict within the northern Protestant denominations produced the fundamentalist movement and a set of boundary markers that revival religion had not previously required.

George Marsden's analysis has shaped understanding of this period. He describes fundamentalism as militant opposition to modernism within evangelical Protestantism, and traces how the controversy converted a movement characterized by evangelistic priority into one characterized by doctrinal boundary-keeping. The Scopes trial of 1925 and its public reception accelerated a withdrawal from mainstream institutions.

The institutional consequences were substantial. Fundamentalists who lost control of denominational structures built parallel institutions - Bible colleges, mission agencies, radio ministries, and publishing houses - which sustained the movement through decades of cultural marginality and became the infrastructure from which it re-emerged after the Second World War. The parallel institutional world these bodies constructed is among the most consequential developments in twentieth-century American religion.

The neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and after, associated with Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Billy Graham, represented a deliberate attempt to retain fundamentalist doctrine while recovering intellectual engagement and social concern. Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published in 1947, argued that the movement had abandoned social responsibility and needed to recover it.

The subsequent political mobilization of American evangelicalism from the late 1970s represents a further reshaping whose relation to the revival tradition is genuinely contested. Some historians read it as continuous with the reform activism of the Second Great Awakening; others read it as a substantially new development driven by cultural and racial politics, noting that the mobilization's early organizing issues included the tax status of segregated religious schools.

13. How the Awakenings are remembered

The Awakenings function in contemporary Christian memory as a resource rather than as history, and the uses are identifiable. They serve as precedent for expecting large-scale spiritual change, as a model to be reproduced, as evidence of a nation's Christian founding, and as a standard against which the present is measured and found wanting. Each use selects from the record.

The most common distortion is the removal of division, opposition, and excess. Revival narratives as commonly told describe conversions, transformed communities, and social reform, and omit the church splits, the lay exhorters denouncing settled ministers, the book burnings, the emotional manifestations that participants themselves disagreed about, and the substantial critique offered by serious contemporaries including Edwards.

The second is the removal of slavery. An account of the Awakenings that describes Whitefield's preaching without his advocacy for legalizing slavery in Georgia, or the Second Awakening's reform activism without the parallel revivalist defence of slavery and the denominational splits of the 1840s, has produced a usable past by omission.

The third is the merging of incompatible figures. Edwards and Finney are frequently invoked together as revival authorities, though Finney's central methodological claim - that revival is the philosophical result of the right use of means - directly contradicts Edwards' understanding. A movement claiming both has not reconciled them; it has stopped reading them.

The fourth is national. The Awakenings are invoked in arguments about American religious identity in ways that abstract from their transatlantic character, from the fact that most participants were British subjects, and from the substantial Welsh, English, and continental European movements of which they formed part. This is a use of history rather than an account of it.

14. What revivals accomplished and what they did not

An assessment requires distinguishing claims that the evidence supports from those it does not. The revivals demonstrably produced large numbers of conversions and church memberships, substantially altered the denominational composition of American Protestantism, brought Christianity to populations the established churches had not reached including enslaved Africans, and generated institutions and reform movements of lasting significance.

They did not produce lasting societal transformation of the kind sometimes claimed. The moral effects reported by contemporaries were frequently temporary and locally variable, and the periods following revivals show declines that revival narratives generally omit. Historians examining specific communities have found the changes real but more limited and shorter-lived than the accounts of participants suggest.

They did not resolve the central moral question of their society. Revival flourished in both slaveholding and free regions, produced abolitionists and defenders of slavery from the same theology and methods, and the denominational institutions split along the same line as the nation. Whatever revival accomplishes, it does not by itself determine moral outcomes on the questions that most matter.

They did not produce unity, and consistently produced division. Every major revival examined here generated separations, and the pattern is sufficiently reliable to be treated as characteristic rather than incidental. This follows from the movement's structure: a claim that some are genuinely converted and others are not, made within existing congregations, necessarily divides them.

The theological assessment is a distinct question that history cannot settle. Whether God acted in these events is not answerable by historical method, and historians who assert or deny it have exceeded their competence. What historical method can establish is what occurred, what was claimed, what followed, and what the participants and their opponents said, and Christians reflecting theologically on revival should work from that record rather than from the sanitized version.

15. Hymnody, print, and the culture of revival

Revival movements have consistently been carried by song and by cheap print, and these deserve more attention than accounts organized around preachers usually give them. Isaac Watts had already transformed English hymnody before the Awakenings by composing freely rather than versifying psalms, and Charles Wesley's output, running to several thousand hymns, supplied the Methodist movement with a body of sung theology that its members knew by heart and that carried doctrine more effectively than sermons did. A movement whose adherents could sing extended theological statements from memory had a form of catechesis that required no schools and no clergy.

The theological content of this material was substantial rather than merely devotional. Wesley's hymns state the doctrines of the incarnation, the atonement, assurance, and sanctification in compressed and memorable form, and the movement's characteristic emphases can be traced through them as readily as through its published theology. The later American revival tradition produced its own bodies of song, from the camp-meeting spirituals with their repeated refrains suited to crowds who could not read, through the gospel songs associated with Moody's musician Ira Sankey, to the twentieth-century revival choruses.

Print was the second carrier and was integral to the movements' spread rather than incidental. Edwards' Faithful Narrative circulated internationally and supplied the template by which subsequent revivals were recognized and described; Whitefield's journals functioned as promotional material and were published serially; and the periodicals produced by revival movements created an imagined community of readers across colonies and continents who understood themselves to be participating in a single work.

The relationship between print and revival was reciprocal and is worth stating precisely. Print reported revivals and, in reporting them, produced expectations that shaped subsequent events, since communities that read accounts of what had occurred elsewhere knew what to look for and what to do. Historians have argued that the intercolonial awareness which makes the First Great Awakening describable as a connected event was substantially created by this print network rather than existing independently of it.

The contemporary parallel is direct and should be drawn carefully. Recorded music, broadcast media, and digital distribution now perform the functions that hymnody and cheap print performed, and they raise the same questions: what theology is being carried by the material that people actually consume repeatedly, who selects it, and whether anyone has examined its content. A movement whose members sing what they have not examined is being formed by it regardless, which was as true in the eighteenth century as it is now.

16. Women in revival movements

Women constituted the majority of converts and members in most of the revivals under discussion, and their participation was substantially greater than the accounts organized around male preachers convey. Historians working on New England church records have documented the predominance of women in membership through the colonial period, and the same pattern holds across the later revivals, which makes the standard narrative of male leadership a poor description of who the movements actually consisted of.

Revival settings also created openings for women's public activity that established churches did not provide. Praying aloud in mixed assemblies, one of Finney's controversial new measures, gave women a public voice within worship. Camp meetings and holiness gatherings featured women exhorting and testifying. The Methodist tradition licensed some women as preachers in its early phase, and figures including Phoebe Palmer in the holiness movement, Catherine Booth in the Salvation Army, and Aimee Semple McPherson in early Pentecostalism led substantial movements.

Black women's leadership in these settings has been the least documented and is increasingly recovered. Jarena Lee, who sought and eventually received permission to preach within the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published a narrative of her ministry; Zilpha Elaw and Julia Foote left comparable accounts. Their preaching crossed racial and denominational lines under conditions that made every element of it contested.

The pattern of these openings and their subsequent closure is consistent enough to be significant. Movements in their early and least institutional phase frequently permitted women's leadership, and as they consolidated, acquired buildings and salaried clergy, and sought respectability, they restricted it. Pentecostalism's early years and its later development illustrate this clearly, and the same trajectory can be traced in Methodism and in the holiness bodies.

The theological arguments deployed on each side of this question have been examined at length elsewhere and are not resolved here. What the historical record establishes is that the revival tradition's actual practice has been considerably more varied than the settled positions of its later institutions suggest, and that movements which now cite tradition against women's leadership are frequently citing a tradition their own founders did not observe.

17. Where the movement now lives

Any assessment of evangelicalism that concludes with American developments has described a minority of the movement, and the imbalance has become more pronounced with each decade. The majority of the world's evangelicals now live in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, which descends from the holiness movement examined above, is the fastest-growing religious movement in the world by most measures.

The transmission was through missionary activity that the revival tradition itself generated. The modern Protestant missionary movement emerged directly from the evangelical awakenings, with William Carey's departure for India in 1793 conventionally treated as its beginning and the student volunteer movements of the nineteenth century supplying its personnel. What was exported was revival Christianity, and the churches that resulted have developed it in directions the senders did not anticipate.

The resulting Christianity differs from its Western parent in ways that Western evangelicals frequently misread. It generally holds a stronger expectation of divine action in healing and deliverance; it addresses spiritual powers directly in a manner that Western theology had largely set aside; it is more likely to be led by people without formal theological education; and it operates in settings of poverty, religious plurality, and sometimes persecution that shape its questions.

The flow of influence has begun to reverse and is likely to continue doing so. Migrant congregations in Western cities, theological literature produced in the majority world, and mission personnel sent from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to Europe and North America all represent a shift whose significance the Western churches have generally been slow to recognize. The relationship has considerable potential and is complicated by the racism that migrant Christians in Western churches consistently report.

For the study of revival specifically, this global shift supplies evidence that the Western debates cannot. Movements exhibiting the characteristics examined in this article - mass conversion, emotional intensity, itinerant leadership, division, rapid institutional growth, and the recurring problem of unaccountable charismatic authority - are occurring now, at scale, and can be studied directly rather than reconstructed from eighteenth-century sources. Scholarship on revival that confines itself to the historical Western cases is neglecting its most substantial available evidence.

18. Contemporary implications

Several practical implications follow for movements that invoke this history. The first is that revival and division have been consistently associated, and any movement expecting renewal without fracture is working from a history that has been edited. Anticipating the division, and planning how it will be handled charitably, is more realistic than being surprised by it.

The second concerns method and expectation. Edwards' position, that revival is a sovereign work that may be prayed for and cannot be produced, and Finney's position, that it is the philosophical result of the right use of means, are genuinely incompatible, and a movement should know which it holds. Holding Finney's method while claiming Edwards' theology produces the disappointment and the manipulation that both would have criticized.

The third is Edwards' own test, which remains the most useful available. Religious Affections argues that intensity of emotion, physical manifestation, fluency in religious speech, and confidence of assurance are all compatible with genuine and with counterfeit conversion, and that the reliable evidence is a changed life over time. A movement willing to be assessed by that criterion, and to wait long enough for it to apply, is engaging its own tradition's most serious thinking.

The fourth concerns accountability. The democratization Hatch describes removed checks that education and institutional structure had provided, and the recurring pattern of unaccountable charismatic leadership in evangelical movements is a direct inheritance. Movements that value this inheritance should recognize what it costs and should construct the accountability that their tradition's structure does not supply automatically.

The fifth concerns the whole record. A tradition that tells its history honestly - including the divisions, the excesses its own leaders criticized, the defence of slavery alongside abolition, and the converts who did not persist - has a more credible account of itself than one that does not, and it is better equipped to avoid repeating what it has never admitted. This is the ordinary requirement of truthfulness applied to a community's memory of itself.

A sixth implication concerns what the tradition should be asked to bear. The revivals are frequently invoked as a solution to contemporary decline, with the implication that another awakening would restore what has been lost, and this expectation does not survive examination of what the earlier ones accomplished. They produced substantial conversion and did not secure lasting societal change; they generated institutions and also divisions; they reached populations the churches had neglected and left the central moral question of their society unresolved. A community praying for revival may reasonably do so, and should do so with an accurate account of what revival has previously involved rather than with an expectation that the historical record does not support. The alternative to that accuracy is the disappointment that has followed every revival movement whose participants were promised more than the tradition has ever delivered.

The most useful posture may be the one Edwards himself adopted after the Northampton revival subsided and after his own congregation dismissed him. He continued to hold that God had genuinely worked, continued to write about how such work should be assessed, corrected what he judged to have gone wrong, and went to a frontier mission station in Stockbridge where he produced some of his most substantial theological work. That is neither the triumphalism nor the disillusionment that revival movements typically produce, and it is available to communities that want the tradition without the mythology. What Edwards did not do, and what his successors have generally done instead, was to conclude either that the whole thing had been an illusion or that the failure lay entirely with those who opposed him. He assessed the movement he had defended by the criteria he had himself proposed, and he did not exempt it from them, which is the discipline any tradition serious about its own history has to accept.

The historiographical work of the past several decades has made that discipline considerably easier to exercise. The scholarship on the Awakenings is now extensive, is largely produced by historians sympathetic to the traditions they study, and has documented the divisions, the opposition, the record on slavery, and the theological shifts that revival narratives had smoothed away. A community that wants an accurate account of its own origins can obtain one without difficulty, which means that continuing to circulate the sanitized version is now a choice rather than a limitation. Making that choice differently is among the more achievable acts of institutional honesty available to any tradition, and it costs nothing that the tradition should wish to keep.

Limitations

• Whether the First Great Awakening constituted a coherent event remains genuinely contested among historians, and this article describes the debate rather than resolving it. Readers should consult the primary historiography, since the assessment materially affects how the revivals function as precedent.
• Contemporary estimates of crowd sizes, conversion numbers, and the persistence of converts are unreliable, having been produced by partisans on both sides and without consistent method. Quantitative claims about the revivals should be treated with corresponding caution, and this article avoids them.
• The scope is principally British colonial and United States history, with limited attention to the parallel British, Welsh, and continental European movements of which the colonial revivals formed part, and to the subsequent global spread of evangelicalism. An account weighted this way inevitably overstates the American dimension.
• The article treats the question of whether God acted in these events as outside historical method, and readers seeking a theological verdict will not find one. Its assessment of what revivals accomplished concerns observable historical effects and is not a judgment about their spiritual authenticity.
• Coverage of Black Christian experience relies on the secondary literature and on published narratives, and the documentary record for enslaved Christians is fragmentary and mediated. The account here should be supplemented from the substantial specialist scholarship in African American religious history.

Conclusion

The revivals were real, extensive, and connected by print and itinerancy, and the label Great Awakening imposes more coherence than the events possessed. They reshaped American Protestantism decisively, brought Christianity to populations the established churches had not reached, and generated the movement subsequently called evangelicalism, its institutions, and much of its reform activism.

They also produced division consistently, and the pattern is characteristic rather than incidental. Every major revival examined here generated separations; the Presbyterian and Congregational churches split; and the denominational bodies later divided over slavery along the same lines as the nation, with the southern bodies no less revivalist than the northern. Revival did not determine moral outcomes in either direction.

Finney's reversal of Edwards is the most consequential theological development and the least often noticed. Edwards held revival to be a sovereign work that may be prayed for and not produced; Finney held it to be the philosophical result of the right use of means. Modern evangelistic practice descends from Finney, and movements claiming Edwards while using Finney's methods have combined positions their originators knew to be incompatible.

The way the Awakenings are remembered differs from the record at identifiable points: the divisions are removed, the excesses that Edwards himself criticized are removed, slavery is removed, incompatible figures are merged, and a transatlantic movement is nationalized. A tradition that tells its own history honestly is more credible and is better equipped to avoid repeating what it has never admitted, which is an ordinary requirement of truthfulness applied to communal memory.

References

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4. Finney, C. G. (1835). Lectures on Revivals of Religion.
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