The origins of evangelicalism, like those of any great historical movement, are much debated. A widely accepted narrative dates its emergence, in the English-speaking North Atlantic world at least, quite precisely to a few years in the mid- to late 1730s. Others, however, would trace its history much further back, at least to the later seventeenth century, or even see it in essential continuity with the Protestantism of the Reformation era.

Two contemporary texts provide a useful, even normative, starting point for this discussion. Jonathan Edwards's Faithful Narrative, first published in 1737 and recounting events in and around Northampton in western Massachusetts in 1734 and 1735, was rapidly accepted as a definitive account of evangelical revival. Edwards (1703–58) had succeeded his grandfather Solomon Stoddard as Congregational minister of the town in 1729, and a few years later experienced a remarkable response to his preaching, which, for a period at least, transformed the whole community. A ‘great and earnest concern about the great things of religion’ spread throughout the town, influencing all classes and age groups. Secular business became a secondary concern, and house meetings for religious purposes proliferated. This was not the first time the people of Northampton had experienced a spiritual awakening: Edwards himself acknowledged that such ‘harvests’ had occurred five times during Stoddard's long ministry over the preceding sixty years. Nor were these occurrences by any means unique to Northampton. Nevertheless, it was clear that both he and his readers felt that there was something qualitatively new about the scale and depth of the revival of 1734–5. For them it was quite literally, as stated in the full title of Edwards's Narrative, ‘a surprising work of God’, the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit in human affairs.