Revival and Revolution | RealClearReligion
Did the First Great Awakening have anything to do with the Revolution? Evangelicals are not the first to think so. The thesis comes from Alan Heimert’s 1966 book Religion and the American Mind. Heimert, a Harvard English professor at the time, suggested, by way of a literary reading of eighteenth-century sermons, that Evangelical Calvinists triggered the American Revolution by preaching an egalitarian “New Birth” that taught colonists to rebel against the established authority of local clergy. First Great Awakening sermons laid the intellectual groundwork and prepared the American “soil,” to use Laurie’s word, for a radical and democratic revolution. According to Heimert, eighteenth-century liberal Christians, the opponents of the Great Awakening, were too conservative in the way they fused their political ideas with Protestant Christianity to ever invoke a revolution. He described them as the “most reluctant of rebels.”
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