Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World

by Timothy D. Hall

The First Great Awakening in eighteenth-century America challenged the institutional structures and raised the consciousness of colonial Americans. These revivals gave rise to the practice of itinerancy in which ministers and laypeople left their own communities to preach across the countryside. In Contested Boundaries , Timothy D. Hall argues that the Awakening was largely defined by the ensuing debate over itinerancy. Drawing on recent scholarship in cultural and social anthropology, cultural studies, and eighteenth-century religion, he reveals at the center of this debate the itinerant preacher as a catalyst for dramatic change in the religious practice and social order of the New World.
This book expands our understanding of evangelical itinerancy in the 1740s by viewing it within the context of Britain’s expanding commercial empire. As pro- and anti-revivalists tried to shape a burgeoning transatlantic consumer society, the itinerancy of the Great Awakening appears here as a forceful challenge to contemporary assumptions about the place of individuals within their social world and the role of educated leaders as regulators of communication, order, and change. The most celebrated of these itinerants was George Whitefield, an English minister who made unprecedented tours through the colonies. According to Hall, the activities of the itinerants, including Whitefield, encouraged in the colonists an openness beyond local boundaries to an expanding array of choices for belief and behavior in an increasingly mobile and pluralistic society. In the process, it forged a new model of the church and its social world.
As a response to and a source of dynamic social change, itinerancy in Hall’s powerful account provides a prism for viewing anew the worldly and otherworldly transformations of colonial society. Contested Boundaries will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial American history, religious studies, and cultural and social anthropology.

Genres: History

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 1994

About the author

Timothy Hall is Professor of History and Dean of the Howard College of Arts and Sciences at Samford University.

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good account of the printed controversies over itinerant preachers during the Great Awakening.

[Wesley Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book through which I'm still working. It deals with the confrontations between itinerants and "settle" clergy in the late colonial period (beginning in the 1740's). Some of the arguments are still being waged today, only regional "mega-churches" have taken on the role of the itinerants. Actually this conflict never really ended, it's tended to be transposed into new media. Itinerants gave way to Radio, gave way to TV, gave way to Mega-churches.

[Matthew Boehm]

Hall takes as his subject matter the religious debate surrounding itinerant preaching in colnial America, positioning the "Great Awakening" of the 1740s not so much as a revolutionary religious movement but as a new social paradigm expressed in religious terms but best accessed through the metaphoric registers of itinerancy. Itinerancy as both method and metaphor.