The uses of the counterfactual

The readings for this week all, in one way or another, responded to Heimert’s theory, posed in his 1966 book, that it was the Evangelicals (the group responsible for the Great Awakening), not the Liberals, who were most responsible for the Revolution.  In their reviews of the book, Morgan, Mead, and McLoughlin spend a considerable amount of time arguing that Heimert has oversimplified the debate: Morgan and Mead are the harshest, but even McLoughlin acknowledges that Heimert’s too neat division between the Evangelicals and the Liberals might not stand up to the true complexity of the colonists’ religious identities.  However, this sort of debate, while important, also has the tendency to get bogged down in the reification of the labels and terms it establishes for itself.  In that sense, I found Murrin’s article, “No Awakening, No Revolution?” to be incredibly helpful.

Despite my initial skepticism of any counterfactual arguments, I thought Murrin’s article was a useful way of asking and reframing questions about the Great Awakening and its relationship to the Revolution.  If there was no Great Awakening, Murrin asks, would there have been a Revolution?  And would early American society look any different?  Although Murrin deals in hypotheticals, this allowed him to break away from the more narrow debate of Morgan, Mead, and McLoughlin, and ask questions that seemed to cut closer to the heart of the relationship between the Great Awakening and the Revolution.  Murrin concludes that the Revolution would still have happened, but I was most interested in his suggestion that, if it were not for the Great Awakening, the Revolution would have been fought differently.  Murrin asks, “Did evangelicals somehow provide the resiliency and stamina to endure a struggle that the less righteous would have abandoned?” (167).  Though Murrin comes to no clear conclusion on this question, I thought it fit well with some of the questions we have been asking in previous weeks about the role of religion in the Native American conflicts.  To bring back Juster for a moment, does religious zeal enhance the intensity of a conflict?  And could that have ultimately affected the outcome of the Revolution?  Trying to answer such a question would force us to examine the relationship between religious zeal and patriotism more closely. 

On a different note, I thought the weakest part of Murrin’s article was its conclusion.  At the very end, Murrin argues, “Without the Great Awakening and its successors, there would have been a revolution in 1775, but in all probability, no Civil War in 1861” (169).  Here, the careful questioning and probing from the rest of the article falls apart, in just a few sentences, Murrin dismisses a large chunk of early American history, ultimately, perhaps, confirming my initial skepticism of such counterfactual arguments.