Content area
Full Text
The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America. By Jerome Dean Mahaffey. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011, Pp. xii, 202. $24.95.)
This reviewer also reviewed Jerome Dean Mahaffey's previous book Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation (2007) in the December 2008 issue of this journal. His new book covers essentially the same ground only re-written for a popular, non-academic, audience. Unfortunately, the weaknesses of the previous book are again present and exacerbated by the fact that Mahaffey does not have the scaffolding of scholarly methodology to keep his exaggerated claims in check. There are few footnotes and these are either from secondary sources or are explanatory. There are no citations for any quotations from Whitefield or his contemporaries, though he refers readers to his previous book or recent editions of Whitefield's works. The book also lacks a bibliography, though...