I sometimes refer to the Great Awakening as a time when my students really need to wake up. The honeymoon of days 1 and 2 is over and the class has started in earnest–we now have tests and papers to think about!
Once you say that, Jonathan Edwards becomes more interesting. This is especially true if you have them read Marsden’s A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards, a concise but sweeping book that pairs Edwards against Ben Franklin, showing the variety of changes going on in 18th-century colonial America, and the variety of responses available to the colonists.
While my students are mulling over the question of “Were we founded as a Protestant nation?” (write!), I’m mulling over the Great Awakening’s influence on the Revolution. This has a long and distinguished historiography I know, but it also gets to the question of religion and, more broadly, culture as a moving force in history. For instance, it seems impossible to suggest that the “long train of abuses”–political and economic–that lead to the Revolution were unimportant. On the other hand, it’s striking in today’s political climate for students to think that religion and religious identities don’t have ramifications regarding who belongs and who doesn’t in any sort of political constituency. My students see religion as a marker of which side you’re on in today’s political culture. Why would it be different at other times? Thus the Great Awakening seems to be an obvious location of social cohesion, perhaps an extremely vital one.
While there are answers to this latter question about things mattering more at one time and not at another, I still think it’s interesting how historiography is really a reflection of today’s questions as much as anything else, and how things come back into vogue depending on the state of current debates. I’m also struck by the obvious if fascinating connections between economics, politics, and culture/religion in the colonial era, and I use Jonathan Edwards to make this seem interesting. Let’s hope it works!
Otherwise, I’ll be dangling like a spider from a pencil thin web over the flames of eternal hell…never mind.
