![]() ![]() But you are suggesting that there really ought to be at least a three-fold understanding as I understand your presentation of the Great Awakening of this period between new lights and old lights and then perhaps on the far left some rather radical evangelicals. In terms of the inherited understanding of the Great Awakening and of especially Christianity in the colonies during this period, it’s often said that the Great Awakening came out of, well a basic understanding of those churches as belonging to either new lights or old lights with the new lights being basically those who led the Great Awakening and encouraged and supported the Great Awakening. Mohler: Well, let’s get technical for just a moment. And that’s what helped to awaken America. There was something else to Christianity, in fact the center of the Christian faith which was the conversion experience. And I think it brought a kind of fervor and simplicity to the preaching of the gospel that brought people out of this sort of complacency that they just attended church and tried to live virtuous lives and this sort of thing. And I think that especially when the revivalist George Whitfield arrived beginning in 1739, to America, he brought a new passion and intensity to the preaching of the gospel with laser focus on the message that people needed to be born again. Now you’re getting into say the third and fourth generations and the level of religious commitment was mixed. ![]() That is a historical kind of term, but what I think was new and unprecedented and what was awakened was the kind of, I think especially in New England, the original faith of the puritan colonists had probably become a little more distracted or limited in its intensity of those founding pioneers who had come here to preserve their faith, to be able to practice their faith in freedom. I think that we can understand that they didn’t immediately realize, oh this is the Great Awakening. Kidd: Well, you know that is a phrase that they would use at the time, but they would say that there is a great awakening happening in Boston or something like that. Why do we talk about it in terms of an awakening? What was awakened? And we’re talking here especially about those events that took place between the years of 17. I think you also point right to the issue and that is that the people even at the time felt that something was happening. Mohler: Well, I think it’s very helpful that you point out that it was a trans-national if not international kind of experience. And I think that that was helpful about the discussion about what do we really mean by the Great Awakening? But I also think that it was greatly exaggerated by him because even at the time in the 1740’s people knew that something incredible and unprecedented was happening in terms of revivals all over the American colonies and also in Britain, Scotland, Wales and the continent. In fact, he said that is basically didn’t exist. Until that point, I think most historians had just assumed that the Great Awakening was a critical event at least in American religious history if not American history generally, but then a Yale historian named John Butler said that the Great Awakening had been invented by later Christian historians and that the Great Awakening really wasn’t all that great. Kidd: Well, that’s a controversy that really emerged in the 1980’s. Are we right when we talk about what we often call, The Great Awakening? Are we actually talking about something real or is this something that historians have invented? ![]() Mohler: You know, I have to begin with one of the biggest questions in terms of American religious history, but perhaps even American history. Professor Kidd, welcome to Thinking in Public. He is the author of several very well received and respected academic works in American History, starting with The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism published in 2004 by Yale University Press, and his most recent work, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, published in just recent days by Basic Books. Kidd is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University where he also serves as senior fellow of The Institute for Studies of Religion. I’m looking forward to this conversation with Thomas Kidd. It’s also no accident that we have so many conversations with historians because they are often those who in the academy are dealing with the most interesting ideas, not only in retrospect, but in terms of the contemporary meaning of these things. Mohler: It is no accident that so much about intellectual activity is invested in thinking about history. Host, and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. This is “Thinking in Public”, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about front line ![]()
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