The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

by Tim Alberta

Historians and religious scholars had long understood the American story in the context of its “Great Awakenings.” The first broke out in the British American colonies during the 1730s. With echoes of the Protestant Reformation—which had destabilized the aristocratic Roman Catholic Church two centuries earlier—frontier preachers democratized the revival process, calling for a renewed focus on holiness and individual salvation. The second awakening, in the 1790s, offered similar revivals but with far greater breadth, its emphasis on converting the unchurched, spawning myriad new Christian organizations and associations that became central to the young nation’s civic life. The third awakening—generally thought to be the least impactful, at least theologically speaking—stressed missionary work and moral activism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It gave rise to the Prohibition movement and the so-called Social Gospel, which presented Christianity as a cure to poverty and other societal ills.