A review of God of Liberty

Students of American religious history have long been aware that, at least until re­cently, the field has been riddled with four yawning gaps—eras that cried out for solid synthetic treatments. Those gaps are (in reverse chronological order) religion during the Great Depression, religion and the Civil War, religion during the Revolutionary era and religion during the Great Awakening. Religion in the Great Depression still awaits its historian, while Harry Stout's magisterial 2006 volume, Upon the Altar of the Nation, analyzes the discordant religious voices during the Civil War. A comprehensive understanding of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s had eluded historians—well, forever; Edwin Gaustad tried valiantly a generation ago, but his efforts were confined to New England and neglected the other colonies.

Along comes Thomas S. Kidd, associate professor of history at Baylor University, who now has slain two of these historiographical dragons. His 2007 book, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, demonstrates that the real contest in mid-18th-century America was not between New Lights and Old Lights (proponents and opponents of the revival) but between moderate and radical evangelicals. Now, with the publication of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, Kidd has admirably filled a second major gap in our understanding of American religious history.

That task was not simple. Well over half a century ago, Perry Miller, who had rediscovered the Puritans in the 1930s, suggested that there was a connection between the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening and the Patriot cause of the American Revolution. One of Miller's students, Alan Heimert, took on the challenge of making that link, famously reading "beyond the lines" of evangelical and Patriot rhetoric to produce, in 1966, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. When I was studying colonial history in graduate school in the early 1980s, Religion and the American Mind, which had been savaged in the reviews, was held up as a paradigm of historical overreaching. Heimert, focusing almost entirely on published sources, had forced the connection and taken liberties with his sources in order to argue that there was an almost seamless path from revival to Revolution.