Doug Winiarski

And there, she's cultivating the most radical evangelical new lights of the First Great Awakening and their children and grandchildren.

So the places that Anne Lee visits are

are places where evangelical dissent in New England had been strongest.

It's among those people sort of more charismatic, more interested in gifts of the Holy Spirit and continuous and ongoing revelation type people that had come out of the Great Awakening revivals of the 1740s are most open to her message.

But those same communities are communities where in New England, the congregational churches have broken apart as a result of the Great Awakening.

So there's kind of these longstanding things

I think what we're really talking about here is the emergence of a new way of being religious, the way that we today talk about born-again Christians, evangelicalism.

This is the moment, at least in New England, and it's a transatlantic phenomenon, the Protestant evangelical awakening of which the

So-called First Great Awakening in New England is just one small piece.

But what early evangelicalism is about is about creating distance between your new religious experience, being born again, taking Jesus as your personal savior, what George Whitefield, the great British field preacher, would have called the new birth.

That's not a way that those New England Puritans had experienced religion previously.

The idea that one could have a transformative single moment in which you could point to that at a particular time or a particular day and say, you were born again, is a radically new idea.

And it creates all sorts of new kinds of religious communities among people that claim to have had that experience.

So, well, in New England, the place where Ann Lee will make her first converts, and American Shakerism really is a New England phenomenon.

Those original Puritan churches were almost always the only game in town in the 17th century.

Everyone in town was required by law to attend meeting and attend their congregational church and pay taxes to that congregational minister.

Along comes George Whitefield in the 1740s and tells people they need to have a new birth experience.

Once they do, they might want to turn around and say, why am I worshiping with these people who have not had a new birth experience?

Why am I going to meeting with a minister who can't testify to having had that experience?

Perhaps I belong over here with these people, sometimes even in a different town.