I recently posted about understanding the social dimension to religious crises and conflicts. Briefly, I suggested that pre-Modern societies were prone to severe dangers from crop failures, sometimes linked to climatic changes, and that these echoed through the whole society in terms of dearth and famine, disease and epidemic. At such times, people were prone to look for scapegoats, and that such episodes could result in religious persecution and paranoia.
In some instances, though, economic crises could contribute to religious revivals, as desperate people sought refuge in faith, often in radical and enthusiastic forms. We see one example of this in the transcontinental phenomenon we call the Great Awakening. In both Europe and North America, revivalism had been stirring from the late 1720s, but it really caught fire from 1739-41 onward. This was the time of George Whitefield’s preaching tours in America, and of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (July 1741). Between 1739 and 1741 also, the revival issue increasingly divided denominations. It was in March 1740 that Gilbert Tennent preached The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, which provoked open schism among Presbyterians the following year. Meanwhile, 1741 marked the beginning of the wild and increasingly bizarre preaching tours of James Davenport. The Awakening spread widely through the following decade.
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