This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline

theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in

Louisville, Kentucky.

It is no accident that so much of our intellectual activity is invested in thinking about history.

It's also no accident that we have so many conversations with historians because they are often

those who in the academy are dealing with the most interesting ideas, not only in retrospect, but in terms

of the contemporary meaning of these things.

I'm looking forward to this conversation with Thomas Kidd.

Thomas S Kidd is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, where he also serves

a senior fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion.

He is the author of several very well reviewed and respected academic works in American history starting with the

Protestant interest New England after Puritanism published in 2004 by Yale University Press and

his most recent work Patrick Henry first among, published just in recent days by basic books.

Professor Kidd, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Thank you for having me on.

You know, I have to begin with one of the biggest questions in terms of American religious history or perhaps even American history.

Are we right when we talk about what we often call the Great Awakening?

Are we actually talking about something real or is this something that historians have invented?

Well that's a controversy that really emerged in the 1980s until that point I think most

historians have just assumed that the Great Awakening was a critical event, at least in American religious history, if not American history generally, but then a Yale historian named John Butler said that the Great Awakening had been invented by a later Christian historians and

that Great Awakening really wasn't all that great. In fact he said it basically didn't

...