The Evangelical Awakening

David Hempton, one of Ireland’s (and America’s) finest historians of all things evangelical, most notably its Wesleyan/Methodist axis, observes two features of the great evangelical awakening:

First, that it was “largely a generational movement of young people.”

Second, “… most surveys have shown that the majority of the rank-and-file was female. … One does not have to burrow very deeply into the archives of Evangelical awakenings to detect the ubiquitous influence of ‘pious women’ over siblings, husbands, children, parents and friends. Female piety was the lubricant of revival.”

From The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century, 149.

Junia, you have been with us all along!