00:00:00.120Welcome to Bitchy History, the American History podcast that would like to begin this episode with a content warning.0.66
00:00:05.660If you have a history of religious trauma related to evangelical Christianity, you may want to take a Valium before this episode or something.0.63
00:00:17.960Here we are at episode 13. Today's episode will be a shorter one than planned for one massive reason.
00:00:23.640Last Tuesday, I woke up with a sore throat and a headache, and by Tuesday night, I had confirmed that I had COVID.
00:00:29.340Again, I don't know what it is about me, but I seem to be a magnet for COVID-19.
00:00:34.060I had it in February of 2020, before anyone even really knew what COVID was in Western Europe.
00:00:39.160I caught it again in June of 2022, after working as a guest speaker on a river cruise, and now again in June of 2023.
00:00:47.060So anyway, I have been wiped out this week.
00:00:49.740This episode was meant to cover two very different philosophical and religious movements that impacted the early 18th century in the colonies,
00:00:56.360but I managed to write the script for only one of them before a deadline, so this is what you're
00:01:00.940gonna get. And for those of you saying, hey, you promised us a podcast about what life was like in
00:01:05.920the early 18th century, not a podcast about religion. Yeah, well, unfortunately, life in
00:01:10.880the first half of the 1700s in the colonies can be described using exactly one word. Boring.
00:01:17.480Absolutely mind-numbing. Watching paint dry would be more interesting. Once I realized that, I said,
00:01:23.660Okay, let's just start on some of the little factors during the first half of the century that will eventually get the American Revolution going in the second half.
00:01:31.980Because there is literally only so much time I can spend talking about 18th century agrarian farming communities before I lose my mind, and quite frankly, I don't think any of you want to hear that episode.
00:01:43.680I know that most of us have wished, especially in the past few years, that we could stop living in interesting times and stop experiencing historic events firsthand.
00:01:52.780hand. But living through the utterly mind-numbing calm of the early 1700s in the American colonies
00:01:58.420would probably have been worse. Well, maybe. They did have smallpox, after all, which is a little
00:02:04.240worse than COVID in the grand scheme of things. And that reminds me, I need to do an episode on
00:02:08.700the history of vaccines in America soon, because if you're an anti-vaxxer, George Washington would
00:02:13.280be ashamed of you. But despite the relative boredom of this period of American colonial history,
00:02:18.120this part of the century does lay the groundwork for some very important things to happen, which
00:02:22.660will lead to a much more interesting latter half of the century. Religious, philosophical, political,
00:02:28.000and financial events all begin to set the stage for a conflict between the British and the American
00:02:32.480colonists. The first of these that we're going to discuss is the Great Awakening. The First Great
00:02:37.240Awakening, anyway. The First Great Awakening is a series of religious revivals that take place
00:02:41.960between 1730 and 1755 that begins in England before making its way to the colonies where it
00:02:47.700spreads like wildfire, and it then begins reshaping the American Protestant religious
00:02:52.640practice into something closer to the evangelical Christianity of today.
00:02:57.240Don't worry, I am not going to be getting into the specific religious doctrines here
00:05:37.920He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire
00:05:43.200He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight0.55
00:05:49.260You are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes0.86
00:05:54.000As the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours0.95
00:05:57.300You have offended him by your continual rejection of his son
00:06:02.780infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince and yet is nothing but his hand that
00:06:09.180holds you from falling into the fire at every moment is to be ascribed to nothing else that
00:06:15.140you did not go down to hell the last night that you was suffered and allowed to awake again in
00:06:19.880this world after you closed your eyes to sleep and there is no other reason to be given why you
00:06:24.860have not dropped into hell since you arose this morning but that god's hand has held you up there
00:06:30.060is no other reason to be given why you have not gone down to hell since you have sat here in the0.61
00:06:34.060house of god provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn0.65
00:06:39.440and joyous worship yay there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you don't
00:06:43.960this very moment drop down into hell yeah i know john edwards really sounds like he was fun at
00:06:50.120parties this type of fire and brimstone preaching would end up becoming a hallmark of evangelicalism
00:06:55.880especially in America, where the fear of damnation is used as the primary way to encourage
00:07:00.660salvation even to this day. Of course, not everyone was on board with the new religious
00:07:05.540awakening happening. Opponents accused the revivals of fostering disorder and fanaticism
00:07:10.480within the churches by enabling uneducated, itinerant preachers and encouraging ecstatic
00:07:15.440expressions of religious enthusiasm. The kind of emotional preaching and religious fervor that,
00:07:20.300again, anyone raised in evangelical churches would recognize. Emotional outbursts in the
00:07:25.480aisles, sharing of personal testimonies, the kind of behavior we see at big tent revivals and summer
00:07:30.420church camp salvation nights in the modern era. And look, I'm not putting the blame for modern
00:07:35.520evangelicalism only on the Great Awakening, but there is a certain truth to the fact that the
00:07:40.080emphasis on the personal relationship with God that the Great Awakening emphasized has influenced
00:07:45.220the kind of anti-intellectual version of evangelical Christianity that we see today. People who say
00:07:50.580things like, I don't have a PhD, but I do have the BIBLE and that's all I need, and dismiss all
00:07:56.560historical and linguistic study of biblical texts as unnecessary to understanding the word of God.
00:08:02.240Sorry, maybe I'm a little bit bitter about this. It's the religious trauma talking. Let's get back
00:08:06.780to the history, I guess. So how does this religious awakening impact the American Revolution?
00:08:11.800The most major contribution was how the Great Awakening encouraged challenges to authority.
00:08:16.060The conflict between the old-style churches and the new evangelicals led to a lot of challenges of traditional religious authority.
00:08:22.940Local ministers resented the evangelical itinerant preachers who came to their towns uninvited.
00:08:27.980When revivalists drew massive crowds and preached in public, local ministers and churches viewed it as undermining their spiritual authority.
00:08:34.820Some evangelical preachers, such as New Jersey's Gilbert Tennant, took it even further.
00:08:39.040Tennant dared to suggest that many of the established church's pastors were not truly converted.