First Great Awakening

The First Great Awakening (or The Great Awakening) was a religious revitalization movement that swept the Atlantic world, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. It resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of personal guilt and of their need of salvation by Christ. Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, and the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by fostering a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. It brought Christianity to African-American slaves and was an apocalyptic event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between old traditionalists who insisted on the continuing importance of ritual and doctrine, and the new revivalists, who encouraged emotional involvement and personal commitment. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denomination, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations. It had little impact on Anglicans and Quakers. Unlike the Second Great Awakening, that began about 1800 and which reached out to the unchurched, the First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self awareness.

To the evangelical imperatives of Reformation Protestantism, eighteenth- century American Christians added emphases on divine outpourings of the Holy Spirit and conversions that implanted within new believers an intense love for God. Revivals encapsulated those hallmarks and forwarded the newly created evangelicalism into the early republic.

International dimension

The evangelical revival was international in scope, affecting the North Atlantic region. The emotional response of churchgoers in Bristol and London in 1737, and of the Kingswood colliers with white gutters on their cheeks caused by tears in 1739 under the preaching of George Whitefield, marked the start of the English awakening. Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom sees it as part of a "great international Protestant upheaval" that also created Pietism in Germany, the Evangelical Revival and Methodism in England.

American colonies

Although the idea of a "great awakening" has been contested by Butler (1982) as vague and exaggerated, it is clear that the period was a time of increased religious activity, particularly in New England. The First Great Awakening led to changes in Americans' understanding of God, themselves, and the world around them. In the Middle and Southern colonies, especially in the "back country" regions, the Awakening was influential among Presbyterians. In the southern Tidewater and Low Country, northern Baptist and Methodist preachers converted both whites and blacks, enslaved and free. The Baptists especially welcomed blacks into active roles in congregations, including as preachers. Before the American Revolution, the first black Baptist churches were founded in the South in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia; in Petersburg, Virginia, two black Baptist churches were founded.

Jonathan Edwards

The revival began with Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the leading American theologian of the colonial era and a Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards came from Puritan, Calvinist roots, but emphasized the importance and power of immediate, personal religious experience. Edwards was said to be 'solemn, with a distinct and careful enunciation, and a slow cadence.' Nevertheless, his sermons were powerful and attracted a large following. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," is his most famous sermon. The Methodist preacher George Whitefield, visiting from England, continued the movement, traveling across the colonies and preaching in a more dramatic and emotional style, accepting everyone into his audiences.

Winiarski (2005) examines Edwards's preaching in 1741, especially his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." At this point, Edwards countenanced the "noise" of the Great Awakening, but his approach to revivalism became more moderate and critical in the years immediately following.

George Whitefield

The arrival of the young Anglican preacher George Whitefield probably sparked the religious conflagration. Whitefield, whose reputation as a great pulpit and open-air orator had preceded his visit, traveled through the colonies in 1739 and 1740. Everywhere he attracted large and emotional crowds, eliciting countless conversions as well as considerable controversy. Critics condemned his "enthusiasm", his censoriousness, and his extemporaneous and itinerant preaching. A famous literary example of the new style of preaching can be found in Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". His techniques were copied by numerous imitators both lay and clerical. They became itinerant preachers themselves, spreading the Great Awakening from New England to Georgia, among rich and poor, educated and illiterate, and in the back-country as well as in seaboard towns and cities. The first new Congregational church worship building in Massachusetts in the Great Awakening period of 1730–1760, was at the newly incorporated town of Uxbridge. It was pastored by the newly called Pastor Rev. Nathan Webb, a native of Braintree, who remained in the ministry here for the next 41 years. His student, Samuel Spring, started the Andover Seminary and the Massachusetts Missionary Society.

Benjamin Franklin became an enthusiastic supporter of Whitefield Franklin, a nonbeliever, did not subscribe to Whitefield’s theology, but he admired Whitefield for exhorting people to worship God through good works. Franklin printed Whitefield’s sermons on the front page of his Gazette, devoting 45 issues to Whitefield's activities. Franklin used the power of his press to spread Whitefield's fame by publishing all of Whitefield’s sermons and journals. Half of Franklin’s publications in 1739-1741 were of Whitefield, and helped promote the evangelical movement in America. Franklin was a lifelong friend and supporter of Whitefield, until his death in 1770.

Impact on individuals

The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. Participants became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights", while the preachers who remained unemotional were referred to as "old lights". People affected by the revival began to study the Bible at home. This effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation. The Awakening played a major role in the lives of women, especially, though rarely were they allowed to preach or take public roles.

The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution

The evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic concepts in the period of the American Revolution. The Enlightenment period taught an ideal based on ancient Rome of republican government based on hierarchical social orders of king, aristocracy and commoners. It was widely believed by secular Enlightenment writers that English liberties relied on the balance of power divided between king, elite and commoners, and that social stability required hierarchical deference to the privileged class. "Puritanism … and the epidemic of evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification” by preaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved. Franklin, who grew up a Puritan and became an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical movement, rejected the salvation dogma, but embraced the radical notion of egalitarian democracy. The evangelical revivalists, especially Whitefield, were the greatest advocates of religious freedom, “claiming liberty of conscience to be an ‘inalienable right of every rational creature.’” They were tolerant as well; Whitefield’s supporters in Philadelphia erected a large, new hall, that could be used as a pulpit by anyone of any belief.

In Virginia, the existence of Baptist preachers challenged the established Anglican Church. Young Baptist preachers were arrested and tried in Fredericksburg before the Revolution. The issue of religious freedom was incorporated into the new constitution by James Madison, who as a young lawyer had defended some early Baptist preachers.

Impact on American Revolution?

Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) argues that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom. However, Heimert has been criticized for not recognizing the differences between educated and uneducated evangelists, and for not recognizing the significance of Separate-Baptists and Methodists.

Some historians, in particular, Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible (1986), have seen the First Great Awakening as a means by which humbler colonial Americans were able to challenge their 'social betters'. Harry Stout (1986) has even suggested that the first Great Awakening radically democratized mass communication in the colonies, setting the stage for new popular politics later in the revolutionary decades that followed.

Christine Leigh Heyrman (1984) and Christopher Jedrey (1979) and others have been highly critical of Heimart's interpretation, arguing instead that The First Great Awakening was an essentially conservative movement a continuation of other, earlier religious traditions.

See also

• American philosophy
• Second Great Awakening
• Christian revival

Further reading

Scholarly studies

• Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People (1972) (ISBN 0-385-11164-9)
• Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America Oxford University Press, 1988
• Bumsted, J. M. "What Must I Do to Be Saved?": The Great Awakening in Colonial America 1976, Thomson Publishing, ISBN 0-03-086651-0.
• Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. 1990.
• Conforti, Joseph A. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture University of North Carolina Press. 1995.
• Gaustad, Edwin S. The Great Awakening in New England (1957)
• Gaustad, Edwin S. "The Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Mar., 1954), pp. 681–706. in JSTOR
• Goen, C. C. Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening 1987, Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0-8195-6133-9.
• Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity 1989.
• Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966)
• Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 1982, emphasis on Baptists
• Kelleter, Frank. Amerikanische Aufklärung: Sprachen der Rationalität im Zeitalter der Revolution (2002)
• Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (2009) ISBN 0300158467.
• Lambert, Frank. Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals; (1994)
• Lambert, Frank. "The First Great Awakening: Whose interpretive fiction?" The New England Quarterly, vol.68, no.4, pp.650, 1995
• Lambert, Frank. Inventing the "Great Awakening" (1999).
• McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (1978).
• Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (2001)
• Schmotter, James W. "The Irony of Clerical Professionalism: New England's Congregational Ministers and the Great Awakening", American Quarterly, 31 (1979), a statistical study
• Stout, Harry. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991)

Historiography

• Butler, Jon. "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction." Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305-25. in JSTOR
• Goff, Philip. "Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind." Church History 1998 67(4): 695-721. Issn: 0009-6407 full text online
• McLaughlin, William G. "Essay Review: the American Revolution as a Religious Revival: 'The Millennium in One Country.'" New England Quarterly 1967 40(1): 99-110. Jstor

Primary sources

• Jonathan Edwards, (C. Goen, editor) The Great-Awakening: A Faithful Narrative Collected contemporary comments and letters; 1972, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-01437-6.
• Alan Heimert and Perry Miller ed.; The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences 1967
• Davies, Samuel. Sermons on Important Subjects. Edited by Albert Barnes. 3 vols. 1845. reprint 1967
• Gillies, John. Memoirs of Rev. George Whitefield. New Haven, CN: Whitmore and Buckingham, and H. Mansfield, 1834.
• Jarratt, Devereux. The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt. Religion in America, ed. Edwin S. Gaustad. New York, Arno, 1969.
• Whitefield, George. George Whitefield's Journals. Edited by Iain Murray. London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960.
• Whitefield, George. Letters of George Whitefield. Edited by S. M. Houghton. Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976.

External links

• Lesson plan on First Great Awakening
• The Great Awakening Comes to Weathersfield, Connecticut: Nathan Cole's Spiritual Travels
• http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5788 "I Believe It Is Because I Am a Poor Indian": Samsom Occom's Life as an Indian Minister]
• "The Joseph Bellamy House: The Great Awakening in Puritan New England", a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan
• Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" text