Exploring the richness of American thought and experience in the mid-eighteenth century, Alan Heimert develops the intellectual and cultural significance of the religious divisions and debates engendered by one of the most critical episodes in American intellectual history, the Great Awakening of the 1740's. The author's concern throughout is to discover what were the essential issues in a dispute that was not so much a controversy between theologians as a vital competition for the ideological allegiance of the American people. This is not a standard history of any one area of ideas. Mr. Heimert's sources include nearly everything published in America from 1735. His study, in its range and conception, is an original contribution to an understanding of the relationship between colonial religious thought and the evolution of American history.

Author - Alan Heimert
Foreword - Andrew Delbanco

Like an iceberg whose bulk is only one-eighth above sea level, Heimert's Religion and the American Mind, for forty years, has languished in historiographical backwaters, only occasionally recognized for its import. Now, scholars armed with more finely tuned navigational equipment recognize it as a true benchmark in American intellectual history.

Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


Forty years ago, American scholars were not ready for Alan Heimert's radical reversal of American cultural priorities from politics to religion. They wanted a secular, enlightened republic where religion was consigned to the dust bins of nostalgia. But two generations of "born again" politics later (to say nothing of brutal wars fought in the name of religion) bear out the relevance of Heimert's work to our deeply conflicted world today, in ways that none of his critical peers could begin to do.

Harry S. Stout, Yale University


It is rare when we can say that a history book was ahead of its time. But that is precisely the case with Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind. Initially vilified and discounted for its method and arguments, it came to mark a touchstone for a new generation of scholars working in colonial American history. Rarely today can historians write about religion in eighteenth-century America without reference to, and often, dependence upon, Heimert's book. No one saw it coming in the 1960s, but Religion and the American Mind is now a classic.

Philip Goff, Purdue University, Indianapolis

Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement by Joseph A. Conforti
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Religion and the American Mind by Alan Heimert
Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context by Norman Fiering
Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards by Roland Delattre
The Young Jonathan Edwards by William S. Morris
Edwards on the Will by Allen C. Guelzo
Jonathan Edwards, Pastor by Patricia Tracy