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This chapter focuses on the disruptive religious revivals of the 1740s and 1750s, known as the First Great Awakening. It explores how the impressive mobility and astonishing popularity of itinerant ministers gave new meaning to the right of private judgment. It also documents the rash of revival-inspired church separations, which broadened the range of religious alternatives and undermined traditional religious authority. The travails of a humble minister named Ebenezer Parkman dramatize the sometimes painful consequences of religious diversity, as well as its liberating possibilities.

Widely considered America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, more than any other American, asserted that love dominated and defined heaven—the love among the three members of the Trinity, the love between God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit and individual saints, and the saints' love of one another. His portrait of heaven, like those of George Whitefield and other leaders of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, focused on the saints' praise of God, intimate relationship with Christ, growth (especially in knowledge), and social harmony. Edwards also emphasized heavenly rewards and argued that to avoid the suffering of hell and enjoy the glories of heaven, people must be born again. As Calvinists, First Great Awakening revivalists believed that God predestined people to salvation, but they also exhorted people to pursue holiness.

Prior to the late eighteenth century, only a few maritime memorials featured any form of religious symbolism or inscription. The frequency of memorials with religious themes began to increase around the turn of the 1800s and soared dramatically in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The percentage remained substantial until the end of the Age of Sail. This chapter explores the nature of the nineteenth-century maritime religious boom and places it within its historical context. The boom was part of a larger religious movement that took place in both British and American society. The ideas and motifs found on maritime memorials were directly related to religious trends that took place in both nations beginning in the late eighteenth century. However, rather than mimicking prevalent religious sentiments and forms around them, maritime culture selected which elements of the religious revitalization movement to emphasize in their memorials, thereby exercising cultural agency. The group chose text and emblems that, because they employed maritime symbolism, held deep meaning for the group specifically. Like memorials for the missing, faith was another way by which maritime culture attempted to cope with the deadly nature of seafaring life.

Anxious that God was preparing them for Christ’s second coming, Euro-Americans experienced an unprecedented revival known as the First Great Awakening—an intercolonial phenomenon that infused Protestantism in America with extraordinary heights of millenarianism and apocalypticism. The Awakening was a watershed event in the formation of a distinctive Anglo-American identity. While this identity was not always deeply pious, as economic and political concerns occasionally eclipsed religious matters, there is no doubt that the “vital piety” that had defined radical Protestantism in Europe found new and vibrant expression in America, particularly in its eschatological aspects. These came into sharpest focus when the Seven Years’ War broke out between Britain and France in 1754. Usually considered only in military and geopolitical terms, this war was also a war of religion in which the Anglo-Americans cast themselves in the heroic role of God’s chosen people striving against the forces of the Catholic Antichrist.

This chapter begins with the question posed by a historian to the American Historical Association member forum, “Why do my students think America was founded as a Christian nation?” It explores how these curricula sustain crucial elements of that narrative by denying the influence of the Enlightenment and by making crucial claims about the founding: the Declaration of Independence defined a Christian nation; the American Revolution was either a Christian cause or not a revolution at all; and the Constitution, though silent on religion, nonetheless confirmed the intent of unquestionably Christian founders to establish a Christian nation. The chapter also highlights the nuanced work of historians of religion on these questions to show that such arguments contradict the historical consensus, are unduly simplistic, and are rooted in national origin myths.