Politics and Apolitical Religion: The Great Urban Revivals of the Late Nineteenth Century
The treatment of late nineteenth-century revivalism by historians of American Christianity has generally been rather unsystematic, despite the inclusion of the great revivals in survey histories like William G. McLoughun's Modern Revivalism and Bernard Weisberger's They Gathered at the Riv...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
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Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1979
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In: |
Church history
Year: 1979, Volume: 48, Issue: 1, Pages: 81-98 |
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Summary: | The treatment of late nineteenth-century revivalism by historians of American Christianity has generally been rather unsystematic, despite the inclusion of the great revivals in survey histories like William G. McLoughun's Modern Revivalism and Bernard Weisberger's They Gathered at the River. There have been a few good biographies of major evangelists, such as James Findlay's of Dwight L. Moody. Early nineteenth-century revivalism has received a larger share of attention because of its close connections with social reform movements, which seem to be more interesting to liberally- inclined historians than do the later revivalists with specifically conversionist aims. From more “conservative” religious scholars, understandably, the treatment of such material has tended to be more expository and theological than analytical. In all, the revivalist tradition after 1850 has been given rather short shrift as representing only a backwash of American religion, perhaps associated with lower socioeconomic classes or marginal groups. That, unfortunately, has left us with a wide gap between event and explanation when the late sixties and seventies brought a resurgence of conservative and “Spirit-filled” evangelicalism among middle-class Christians, and when 1976 revealed a strong evangelical strain even in the political arena. |
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ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3163925 |