In-depth explorations of the Great Awakenings, revivalist movements, and their lasting legacy in American culture, politics, and society
How George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards transformed colonial religious life in the 1730s–1740s, created the first intercolonial cultural event in American history, and helped plant the seeds of independence. From Jonathan Edwards's Northampton awakening to Whitefield's massive open-air campaigns, we trace the movement that changed America forever.
The explosive growth of revivalist religion on America's frontier — from the extraordinary Cane Ridge Revival (1801) that drew 20,000 to a Kentucky field, to Charles Finney's professional urban revivals in Rochester and New York. How the Second Awakening gave birth to the abolitionist movement, temperance campaigns, and early women's rights activism.
How Dwight Moody's professional urban revivalism and Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel theology shaped Progressive Era reform and defined American Protestantism into the 20th century. The Third Awakening built lasting institutions — the YMCA, Salvation Army, Moody Bible Institute, settlement houses — and planted the seeds of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.
Detailed biographical profiles of the most influential figures across all three Great Awakenings — from Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the colonial era, to Charles Finney and Barton Stone on the frontier, to Dwight Moody, Walter Rauschenbusch, Frances Willard, and Billy Sunday in the Gilded Age. Who were these extraordinary individuals, and what drove them?
Understanding the Great Awakenings is essential to understanding 21st-century American religious and political life. Why does religion remain more publicly prominent in America than in comparable Western democracies? Why do social reform movements so often carry religious overtones in the United States? The answers lie in the revival movements of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
In August 1801, an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people gathered in a Kentucky field for a camp meeting that lasted nearly a week. The Cane Ridge Revival produced scenes of mass religious ecstasy — falling, jerking, barking, laughing uncontrollably — that shocked observers and transformed American religious culture. What actually happened at Cane Ridge, and why does it matter?
Jonathan Edwards's 1741 sermon is arguably the most famous in American history — and one of the most misunderstood. Often remembered only for its fire-and-brimstone imagery (dangling sinners, the "spider over the fire"), the sermon is actually a sophisticated theological argument about grace, free will, and spiritual complacency. What was Edwards really saying, and why did it have such a dramatic effect on his audience?
When Walter Rauschenbusch published Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, he expected to be fired and perhaps exiled from respectable theological circles. Instead, the book became an immediate bestseller. Rauschenbusch's argument — that sin is social as well as individual, and that Christian ethics demands systemic reform — proved electrifying in Progressive Era America. We examine his argument, his context, and his enduring relevance.