The Separation in the Canterbury Congregational Church

THE Great Awakening and the consequent Separate movement have for some decades been topics of important historical inquiry. Not surprisingly, the research has bred changing and sometimes conflicting interpretations as well as expanded knowledge about mid-eighteenth-century revivalism and separatism. Central to much of the investigation and historiographical debate alike have been the questions of was stirred by the revival and of was sufficiently aroused to leave the established churches. These are vital questions. Because learning who is an essential step towards learning more about what and why, identification of and information about the people involved are crucial to understanding the Great Awakening and the Separate movement. The issue of economic class has focused much of the discussion about those caught up in revivalism and separatism. It was long supposed that the Great Awakening cut a swath between rich and poor, stimulating the hostility that already divided them.'l This interpretation identified the revival with the lower class and the backcountry and stressed its social and political implications.2 Subsequent accounts, which found the Awakening and the Separate movement to be essentially religious phenomena, suggested that to the contrary the revival was general, touching all geographical areas and social levels, and that New Lights and Separates were most likely economic cross sections of the populace.3 While this revisionist argument

Political science · Politics · Separation (statistics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · Gender Studies · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies

• Red Yankees

  Open Access•William S Simmons•American Ethnologist•1983

  Add to list