Great Awakening
The Great Awakening refers to a series of religious revivals that occurred in the American colonies during the mid-eighteenth century, beginning around the 1730s. This movement is often traced back to influential figures such as Jonathan Edwards, whose sermons, including the famous "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," sparked significant emotional responses among congregations. George Whitefield, a dynamic preacher from England, also played a pivotal role in spreading revivalist fervor across the colonies, attracting massive crowds and fostering a sense of urgency around personal faith and conversion. The Great Awakening led to notable changes in religious practices, including the establishment of new colleges and the emergence of various evangelical denominations, such as Baptists and Methodists.
While some historians argue that the Great Awakening helped unify the colonies, others highlight the divisions it created, particularly between "New Lights" who embraced the revivals and "Old Lights" who opposed them. This period also saw shifts in higher education, as new institutions were founded to reflect the new evangelical ideals. In contemporary discourse, the legacy of the Great Awakening continues to influence American religious life, with conservative evangelicals drawing on its themes for political mobilization. Scholars remain divided on the nature and extent of the Great Awakening, with debates surrounding the number of distinct awakenings and their overall impact on American society and culture.
Great Awakening
The Great Awakening was a series of religious revivals that took place in the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. As early as the 1720s, evangelical preaching was evident in New Jersey, but New England is generally recognized as the region where the revivals began in 1734 under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), pastor of the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts. George Whitefield (1714–70), who was drawing crowds of up to twenty thousand with his powerful preaching in England, began an American tour in 1739 that reached from New England to Georgia. Revivals in the South took place as late as the 1760s. The Great Awakening brought changes in doctrine, led to the establishment of new academies and colleges, and influenced social and political thought.
Brief History
Theodorus Frelinghuysen (1691–1747) began advocating revivalism in 1720, shortly after his arrival in the colonies. He preached passionately to his four Dutch Reformed frontier congregations in New Jersey that true conversion rather than mere religious performance was vital for salvation. As his reputation spread, he was invited to address other congregations, and an outbreak of revivals in the area followed. Irish American pastor Gilbert Tennent (1703–64) was preaching a similar message with similar results among Presbyterians in the middle colonies. The revivals soon spread to Baptists in the area. In 1734, a revival began in Northampton, Massachusetts.
In December 1734, Jonathan Edwards preached on justification by faith, and there were six sudden conversions. By spring there were about thirty conversions each week. Edwards, often described as the finest theological mind in American history, published his observations in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and a book of his sermons called Justification by Faith (1738). Widely read in America and England, Edwards’s writings helped to prepare the ground for George Whitefield’s tour, which began in 1739. Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the sermon for which he is best known, to his Northampton congregation in June 1741. He preached it a second time in Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741, and the congregation responded with an outpouring of emotion.
Edwards did not seek to evoke this level of emotionalism, but George Whitefield, the Anglican priest from England who, along with brothers John Wesley (1703–91) and Charles Wesley (1707–88), led the reform movement that culminated in the founding of Methodism late in the eighteenth century, was a gifted orator accustomed to dramatic performances that moved the record-breaking crowds who attended his meetings to equally dramatic conversion experiences. Whitefield’s sermons, focusing on the innate depravity of human creatures and the mercy of the Creator, offered the Calvinist message preached by countless others, but Whitefield’s oratorical skills and his clever use of advertising, local support, and “press releases” made his appearances into media events long before the term existed. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), although not one of Whitefield’s converts, was so impressed with Whitefield’s command of the crowd when he heard him in Philadelphia that he provided financial support for Whitefield’s efforts. During his forty-five-day tour of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Whitefield preached over 175 sermons to thousands of people. His last sermon on this tour was given at Boston Common before twenty-three thousand people, likely the largest gathering in American history to that point.
Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies (1723–61) spearheaded revivalism in Virginia. His willingness to operate within English laws while serving dissenters (those who disagreed with the Anglican Church) in Anglican Virginia set Davies apart from most itinerant preachers and allowed him to establish eight licensed meetinghouses in the colony. During the 1750s, members of a group known as the Separate Baptists moved from New England to central North Carolina. Through revivals, their influence soon spread in the southern colonies.
Some historians argue that the Great Awakening helped unify the colonies, but at least initially, its effects were divisive. Many clergymen disapproved of the emotionalism that accompanied the revivals. Differences between local clergy and itinerant preachers were exacerbated by the itinerant ministers openly questioning the spiritual health of some local ministers. Schisms developed in churches and within denominations. In some cases, those opposed to what they viewed as the excesses of revivalism shifted their allegiance to Anglican and Quaker groups, while evangelical converts in growing numbers joined Baptist—and, in the 1770s, Methodist—congregations. Congregationalists and Presbyterians continued to make up the largest religious groups in the colonies, but revivalism split them into “New Lights,” who supported the Great Awakening, and “Old Lights,” who opposed it. The Great Awakening eventually led to the disestablishment of Congregationalism in Connecticut and Massachusetts and the Church of England in the southern colonies. Division also changed higher education in New England and the middle colonies. The Old Lights controlled the established colleges such as Harvard and Yale, pushing New Lights to found such schools as Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth.
The Great Awakening Today
For many years after the Great Awakening, historians saw the revivals as creating greater feelings of commonality and cohesion among the colonies to such a degree that they prepared the way for the American Revolution. Since the 1980s, however, historians have challenged that view, arguing that revivalists’ reaction to the American Revolution was mixed, including among Royalists, Patriots, and neutrals, and that one’s point of view was rarely determined by religious beliefs. Some historians have questioned the very existence of the Great Awakening, insisting, in the words of Jon Butler, that the concept was an “interpretive fiction” that exaggerated the extent of the revivals and misrepresented their causes and effects.
Among those who reject the radical view that the Great Awakening was a historical construct rather than a historical fact, there is disagreement about the number of awakenings. Some claim there were three: the first, and most famous, from the 1730s through about 1743; the second occurring late in the eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, producing the abolitionist movement against slavery; and the third beginning in the decade before the Civil War and continuing through the end of the nineteenth century. Another view is that there was a single Great Awakening that began in New England in the 1670s and ended more than a century later. This view includes early evangelicals such as Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729), the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, and Samuel Torrey (1632–1707), whose 1683 sermon “A Plea for the Life of a Dying Religion” established a dominant theme of that time—that the purpose of New England’s settlement had been compromised by backsliding Christians. The argument for a single movement also expands the geographical setting from Canada’s Maritime region to the colonies of the Deep South and includes mission efforts among slaves and American Indians.
Regardless of differences, most scholars of religion in colonial America agree that a series of eighteenth-century revivals in the American colonies led to the establishment of evangelical Protestantism and a style of piety that grew until it became the dominant strain in American religious experience. The political mobilization of conservative evangelicals during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is rooted in what continues to be popularly known as the Great Awakening.
Bibliography
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