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Article: Inventing the "Great Awakening".(Review)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- August 30, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Inventing the "Great Awakening."
By Frank Lambert. Princeton University Press, 300 pp., $35.00.
A LOT OF PARTIES have put a lot of stake in the Great Awakening, the wave of religious enthusiasm which swept up and down the colonial seaboard in the early 1740s. To evangelicals, it shows how well revivals can work and entrenches them at the nation's foundation. To liberal Protestants during the cold war and to neo-conservatives since, it has endowed American nationhood with moral ballast. To all these and more, it marks the onset of democracy and autonomy in the American religious narrative.
That's why the proposal made some years ago by Yale ...