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Dissertation Information for J. Richard Olivas

NAME:
- J. Richard Olivas

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Gary B. Nash

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Ruth Bloch
- Duane Champagne

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Great awakenings: Time, space, and the varieties of religious revivalism in Massachusetts and northern New England, 1740-1748

Abstract: Although the Great Awakening has received much scholarly attention, historians still have not sufficiently plumbed the 1740s religious revivals in New England. In some sense, revivalism's meaning eludes scholars because its underlying historical facts remain unclear. This study resolves the problem by setting forth the revivals' general facts and properties: the who, what, when, and where. These facts, in turn, help explain why the revivals occurred.

Evidence from journals, diaries, correspondence, sermons, newspapers, and records of nearly 140 churches shows that revivalism in Boston meant one thing; in Portsmouth or York, another. Many awakenings, many meanings. Revival in one northern New England locale assumed a consolatory ambience, while a more condemnatory air prevailed a short distance away. In Boston a tri-church ministerial clique promoted revivalism in order to increase the town's prosperity and piety. Revivalist ministers, by sponsoring the ministry of George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent, spiritually awakened a wide cross-section of Bostonians. Revival's gatekeepers, overwhelmed by large numbers of spiritual seekers responding to public offers of God's free and saving grace, excluded from church membership enslaved blacks, indentured whites, Indians, and other lowly Bostonians in favor of persons with existing ties to revivalist assemblies. Denied the spiritual equality that church membership conferred upon them, Boston's spiritually dispossessed created their own revival in 1742 despite fierce opposition from revivalist ministers and other members of Boston's elite. Rev. James Davenport, leader of the plebeian revival, gathered and encouraged the scattered sheep and then urged them to attend lay-led house churches, a separatist Baptist assembly, and the Presbyterian church. Except for the latter, these churches increasingly defined themselves in terms of ecclesiastical separatism and eventually renounced establishment congregations as irredeemably corrupt. Not until 1748 did a Congregational body rectify the inequity of the 1741 revival, when Boston's Eleventh Church was founded "to be a distinct, but not a separate Church." Pastor Andrew Croswell hoped to create "a new Thing, the like of which" never "was heard of in New-England": an egalitarian Congregationalism that ministered "impartially to all Persons whether High or Low, Rich or Poor, without Fear or Favour."

MPACT Scores for J. Richard Olivas

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TA = 0
calculated 2008-10-14 05:48:30

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Students under J. Richard Olivas

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None