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.

What Reason Wrought

This chapter recognizes scholarly debates about the Enlightenment; some indict the movement for failing to live up to its ideals. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers were traditionally understood to have been shaped by Enlightenment values. These curricula reject that understanding. They repudiate Enlightenment values, including secularism, tolerance, the social sciences, social reform, internationalism, and those values’ possible influence on the new nation. The curricula instead indict the Enlightenment as godless and reject its appreciation of reason and science as threats to the authority of the Bible. The genuine eighteenth-century Enlightenment is, for these curricula, the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. These textbooks also assert that France’s commitment to humanism warranted divine punishment in the French Revolution, and that its reprehensible politics differentiate it from American virtues. This chapter concludes with some implications of what rejecting the Enlightenment entails for modern America culture.

Louisa Mariah Woosely

Chapter 5 describes the life and evangelist work of Louisa Woosley. Following an exploration of The Great Awakening, Evangelical Protestantism, and religious institutionalism, this chapter places Woosley within the context of the female preaching debate and the question of whether women should have the authority to preach. Although ordained by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Woosely continued to face institutional resistance throughout her life. This chapter argues that her use of the authority of scripture and biblical interpretation aided her in constructing her call narrative and claiming her call to preach. Finally, this chapter analyzes her prophetic rhetoric as recorded in Shall Women Preach? Or, The Question Answered as evidence of the definitive affirmation she utilized in presenting a compelling case for the ordination of women.

Who Can Stand Before His Cold?

The years from 1739 to 1742 were marked by extreme cold across the Atlantic world. State mechanisms were better developed than in earlier centuries, while forms of media and communication were much more sophisticated. This new world allowed the circulation of ideas and beliefs on an international and intercontinental scale. Popular fears were channeled into radical new forms of enthusiastic revivalist religion. New denominations and sects emerged within particular faiths, and many become globally significant in their own right. The result was the Great Awakening.

“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.

From “Captain Kidd” to Gospel Music

The roots of the “Sweet Thing” scheme reach back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England. One of the main branches of this lineage crosses the Atlantic as a penitent broadside ballad castigating Captain William Kidd, a pirate sent to the gallows in London in 1701. Chapter 1 concerns the history of this branch: the long journey of a stanzaic structure from ancient Scottish popular song through English broadside balladry, from the transatlantic broadside “Captain Kidd” through the fervent folk hymnody of the Great Awakening, and from nineteenth-century popular song and urban revivalism to twentieth-century gospel music. Throughout this span, the distinctive rhythmic and textual attributes of the form are apparent in all of the genres that it crosses. In both broadsides and folk hymns we can observe or reconstruct certain melodic characteristics that accompany the form, and in the folk hymns we can also see some general harmonic attributes.