Edwards’s report of his Northampton revival in the mid-1730s; no one individual like George Whitefield can be identified as the driving force for Christian developments. Instead, from the 1790s to the time of the Civil War, the United States experienced an unprecedented expansion of Protestant churches, a striking growth in Protestant public influence, and a general reorientation of public discourse around Protestant-inspired themes. To add to the complexity of the era, Protestants who were not evangelical,