Clericalism and Revival: The Great Awakening in Boston as a Pastoral Phenomenon

Abstract

IN the course of American history, there have been few upheavals of the magnitude of the Great Awakening. It is not surprising, then, that there should be almost as many perspectives on the event as historians examining the record. Some authors have eulogized the Awakening as an assertion of democratic ideals, a prologue to revolution;1 others have written it off as an early manifestation of characteristic American antiintellectualism.2 William McLoughlin has argued that the Awakening represents a shift of paradigms in colonial society, an ideological transformation necessary to the dynamic growth of the nation in adapting to basic social, ecological, psychological, and economic changes,3 while such conservative historians as John Woodbridge, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch, maintaining the legacy of Joseph Tracy, have preferred to describe it as a pietist phenomenon having much in common with nineteenth-century revivalism.4 Other schol-