The American Revolution Issue 50 | 1996 Purchase this issue

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The following books will be especially rewarding to the diligent reader.

Arguing for an explicit relationship between the Great Awakening and the Revolution are:

• Alan E. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Harvard, 1966);
• Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford, 1986); and
• Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford, 1986).

Penetrating essays linking religious thought to the Revolution are found in:

• Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (Harper and Row, 1963) and
• Jerald C. Brauer, ed., Religion and the American Revolution (Fortress, 1976).
• Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Eerdmans, 1977) surveys the varied Christian responses to the Revolution.
• Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (Harper & Row, 1987) surveys these men’s religious beliefs in general, and in particular in Thomas Jefferson: A Religious Biography (Eerdmans, 1996).

For the interaction between republicanism and religious thought, see:

• Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (Yale, 1977) and
• Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, 1985).
• Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (Harper & Row, 1974) feature essays that consider how the revolutionary experience shaped America’s civil religion.

• Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Women and Religion in America, vol. 2, The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods (Harper & Row, 1983); see especially Keller’s chapter.