What Christianity?

This chapter teases out many strands of Christian thought that inform the “Christian perspective” these curricula bring to bear in narrating history. It contends that they are unequivocally but narrowly Protestant. They reflect fundamental tenets of Martin Luther and John Calvin but incorporate facets of evangelicalism’s history from the eighteenth-century First Great Awakening to the present. Although the publishers do not acknowledge it, their understanding of “Christian” reflects every important evolution of evangelicalism and the battles fought both within that tradition and with external foes. The chapter highlights the broad variety of religious ideas contributing to these curricula’s undifferentiated “Christianity,” including providentialism, millennialism, and fundamentalism as well as narrower, minority religious views, notably dispensationalism, dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism. These minority views were influential in shaping the contemporary alliance of the religious and political right.

“The Glorious Day is Coming On”

Anxious that God was preparing them for Christ’s second coming, Euro-Americans experienced an unprecedented revival known as the First Great Awakening—an intercolonial phenomenon that infused Protestantism in America with extraordinary heights of millenarianism and apocalypticism. The Awakening was a watershed event in the formation of a distinctive Anglo-American identity. While this identity was not always deeply pious, as economic and political concerns occasionally eclipsed religious matters, there is no doubt that the “vital piety” that had defined radical Protestantism in Europe found new and vibrant expression in America, particularly in its eschatological aspects. These came into sharpest focus when the Seven Years’ War broke out between Britain and France in 1754. Usually considered only in military and geopolitical terms, this war was also a war of religion in which the Anglo-Americans cast themselves in the heroic role of God’s chosen people striving against the forces of the Catholic Antichrist.

Latin America

This chapter gives an overview of the reception of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America, particularly Brazil. In Brazil, Evangelicals and Pentecostals have especially appropriated Edwards. At first, Edwards was received as a revivalist. Protestant Christians in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century were enamoured with church growth, pietistic spirituality, and revivalism. Biographies of Edwards and his writings on these subjects (especially as they related to the First Great Awakening) were translated into Portuguese and Spanish, serving to introduce Christians to Edwards’s life and thought. More recently, Protestant Christians have begun to appreciate Edwards’s Reformed theology. A growing interest in theological education, evangelical history, and the Reformed faith has led many to Edwards. While these two movements do not account for all of the reception history of Jonathan Edwards in Latin America, they do reveal broad trends about both Latin American Protestantism and the appropriation of Edwards in Latin American contexts.

The Emergence of Academies

Academies arrived in colonial America during the First Great Awakening. They were built at first by Presbyterians with the goal of training clergy. Other denominations quickly followed suit. Before long, it became clear that academies also offered a secular education that appealed to middling and elite colonists across denominational lines. Denominational academies seemed to help solve the larger problem of elite formation in colonial America.

The Theological Polemics of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield: Differences in Their Understanding of the "Great Awakening" of the 1740s in New England

The first "Great Awakening" took hold of all British colonies in North America in the 1730s-1750s and developed contemporaneously with the Enlightenment movement, which had a significant impact on all aspects of life in the colonies, influencing religion, politics and ideology. The inhabitants of the colonies, professing different religious views, for the first time experienced a general spiritual upsurge. The colonies had never seen anything like the Great Awakening in scale and degree of influence on society. This was the first movement in American history that was truly intercolonial in nature, contributing to the formation of a single religious and partially ideological space in British America. The beginning of the Great Awakening in British America was instigated by both the colonial traditions of religious renewal (the so-called "revivals") and new ideas coming from Europe, hence this religious movement cannot be understood without considering its European roots nor not taking into account its transatlantic nature. The development of pietism in Holland and Germany and the unfolding of Methodism on the British Isles greatly influenced Protestant theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the differences in understanding the nature of the Great Awakening by its two leaders - J. Edwards and J. Whitefield.