Against the tumult of the American Revolution, the first white settlers in the Ohio Valley imported their religious worldviews and experiences from a colonial past to their unfamiliar new surroundings. Within a generation, they witnessed the Great Revival (circa 1797-1805), a dramatic mass revelation of religion, converting thousands of worshipers to spiritual rebirth while transforming the region’s cultural identity.
This study focuses on the lives and careers of three prominent Kentucky settlers: Christian revivalists James McGready and Barton Warren Stone, and pioneering newspaper editor John Bradford. All three men occupy points on a religious spectrum, ranging from the secular public faith of civil religion, to the apocalyptic sectarianism of the Great Revival, yet they also overlap in unexpected ways. This study explores how the evangelicalism characteristic of McGready and Stone fatally eroded the public sphere envisaged by the deistic Bradford. It also examines the Presbyterian Church’s reaction against the alleged enthusiasm within its own clergy, embracing a more socially conformist mode of religion. It looks at how Stone’s faith led him to denounce the direction of Presbyterian Church. Even as McGready submitted himself to the discipline imposed by his denominational colleagues, Stone withdrew instead into a primitive Christianity marked by political quietism and civil disengagement. This study follows the consequences of such diverging paths, as McGready rehabilitated himself into the Presbyterian fold and Stone struggled to maintain his prophetic voice while charting an independent course. An epilogue charts the political persecution of the Shakers, whose emergence in the Ohio Valley marked the apex of evangelical enthusiasm. The impact of the Great Revival is finally considered against the cultural parameters of religious expression that emerged in its wake, both regionally and throughout the United States.