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More than a year and a half ago, I read Timothy Beal's 2008 book Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction. It was actually a decent book. However, I was surprised and skeptical when I read in the book that in July 1800, the first camp meeting of the Second Great Awakening took place at the site of the Creedence Clearwater Church near the Gasper River.[1] Could it be that the famous band was named after or shared the name of a church associated with the Second Great Awakening? It seemed unlikely but I wanted to find out. One problem was that Beal didn't cite a source for the claim.
So, I rummaged around the internet and my local library and found two more books that made the same basic claim: Andrew Himes' The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family and, an otherwise good book, James Boyce's Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western Mind.[2][3] Himes' book gives the name as the "Creedence Clearwater Revival Church". The problem was these two didn't cite any source for the claim, either.
Thus, I turned to two academic studies of the actual subject matter in question: Donald G. Mathews' Religion in the Old South and John B. Boles' The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Neither of these books provided any evidence to support the existence of the church in question.[4][5]
What a mystery. Where did this claim come from? As it turns out, the apparent source is none other than Wikipedia. In 2006, User 68.171.28.139 decided to vandalize the Second Great Awakening article. One of the edits s/he made was to change "The first camp meeting took place in July 1800 at Gasper River Church in southwestern Kentucky." to read "The first camp meeting took place in July 1800 at Creedance [sic] Clearwater Church in southwestern Kentucky."
The text stayed that way for more than three years presumably taking in the likes of Beal, who changed the spelling to "Creedence". Boyce and Himes probably got it from Beal and were seemingly untroubled by the name or Beal's lack of a source. This all just goes to show that Wikipedia is not a reliable source (hence, the disclaimer) and neither are writers and editors who give its contents too much credence.
Coincidentally, though, the Clear Fork Creek is a tributary of the Gasper River, near where the Rev. James McCready did have a church. --Mox La Push (talk) 09:19, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
