I included this in today’s roundup, but I wanted to call attention to it again. Yesterday Missouri senator Josh Hawley spoke at MAGA worship leader Sean Feucht’s Washington D.C. rally. Here is part of what he said: It’s a privilege […]
First Great Awakening
“REVIVAL OR BUST”
Earlier this week, Commonweal published my piece on the way the Christian Right uses the supposed links between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution to advance its political agenda. And then this comes across my X feed today: […]
The disputed thesis that underpins MAGA evangelicalism
I have a piece today at Commonweal. Read it here. A taste: On April 5, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would be streaming the Palm Sunday service at Harvest Christian […]
Boston Seminar Day 5
Friday was the last day of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History/Wilderness Education Project seminar with K-12 teachers from the Roanoke, Virginia area. We took colonial and revolutionary Boston by storm! 🙂 See our updates on the previous days of […]
Josh Hawley’s conservative populism was on full display at Road to Majority 2023
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley made a visit on Friday to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority 2023” conference. Watch: If you watched the speech you can see that Hawley wasted no time identifying with the crowd: I’m proud […]
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: An annotation
Over at JSTOR Daily, Ed Simons offers an annotation of the famous 1741 sermon. A taste: Often remembered as the prototypical “fire and brimstone” sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” reflects the complicated religious background of eighteenth-century […]
Every revival has its Old Lights and skeptics
If you’ve been following my ongoing curation of the Asbury University revival going on right now, you will see that there are a lot of skeptics. Anyone who knows something about the history of revivalism in the United States is […]
Is evangelical Christianity a religious movement, or is it something else?
I first read historian Paul E. Johnson’s 1978 book A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 in 1989 while I was studying church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Johnson argued that evangelical religion in Rochester, […]
The First Great Awakening and a New England cold spell
Two years before Jonathan Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” he suffered through what historian Philip Jenkins calls a “horrific period of extreme weather and glacial cold.” Here is Jenkins at History News Network: Scholars of […]