The Great Awakening

The traditional religions of Great Britain’s North American colonies—Puritanism in New England and Anglicanism farther south—had difficulty maintaining their holds over the growing population. The main reason for this was that the frontier kept pushing further west, and the building of churches almost never kept up with this westward movement.

This did not, however, result in a wholesale decline in religiosity among Americans. In fact, the most significant religious development of 18th century America took place along the frontier, in the form of the Great Awakening (often called the “First Great Awakening” to distinguish it from a similar movement that occurred in the first half of the 19th century).

Unorganized and Emotional

The Awakening was not the work of one man or a single organized group. Its various leaders, in fact, created no single set of doctrines or organizational structure. The Awakening was a more general series of religious evangelical revivals led by itinerant preachers who emphasized personal faith rather than conformity to doctrine. Preachers of the Awakening also taught that the essence of religious experience was a “new birth” inspired by the preaching of the Word of God—that is, a personal spiritual conversion in which the individual rejected his or her sinful past and was “born again” into a life devoted to Christianity.

As the video below llustrates (start watching at 8:16), the Great Awakening was also characterized by the emotional enthusiasm of its participants (e.g. weeping, fainting), which stood in contrast to the more staid and formal worship of traditional Anglican and Congregational services.

The evangelical spirit of the mid-eighteenth century that animated the First Great Awakening also swept through parts of Europe. In the Protestant cultures of England, Scotland and Germany, enthusiastic faith rose in response to the rationalism of the time. As explained by historian Christine Leigh Heyrman, “a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.” The First Great Awakening might also be seen as a Christian appropriation of certain aspects of the Enlightenment, such as an emphasis on the individual, reliance on experience instead of authority, and mistrust of tradition.

The First Great Awakening was largely the work of itinerant preachers who addressed huge audiences both in the major cities and in remote frontier villages. In contrast to the older faiths, these preachers preached a doctrine that deemphasized traditional church structure, ceremony, and even clergy. Relying heavily on emotional appeals, which remain a feature of modern-day “tent revivals,” they stressed the importance of a personal relationship with God and of the responsibility to God that came along with it.

Jonathan Edwards

The only son in a family of eleven children, Jonathan Edwards succeeded his maternal grandfather as pastor of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1728. In 1737, he published A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, his account of the extraordinary religious revival that began in his church in Northampton in 1734 and other nearby communities.

That revival is considered to be a harbinger of the Great Awakening, which began in a more widespread manner a few years later. In 1746, Edwards published his first major treatise, Religious Affections, which both defended the Great Awakening and criticized what he considered to be the movement’s excesses. These published accounts are why Edwards is considered to be “the principal intellectual interpreter of, and apologist for, the Awakening.”

After being dismissed from his position as pastor at Northampton in 1750 (by a vote of one, for his discipline of young people for reading “immoral” literature and for his refusal to give communion to unconverted church members), Edwards supervised a boarding school for Indian boys and completed several major theological works. He is generally considered one of America’s most important and most original philosophical theologians. Shortly after being appointed president of Princeton University, Edwards died after volunteering to test a new smallpox vaccine in 1758.

George Whitefield

One of the most popular evangelists of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield was born the son of innkeepers in Gloucester, England in 1714. In 1738 he traveled to Georgia, the first of seven trips to America. In 1739, after a year-long return to London where he was ordained as a minister in the Church of England, Whitefield traveled to Philadelphia.

His popularity when he left the city was so great that his farewell sermon had to be moved to an open field in order to accommodate the enormous crowd. A sermon in Boston reportedly was attended by 30,000 people, which was more than the entire population of the city at the time. Whitefield was known for his lively and dramatic preaching. According to historian Harry S. Stout, “He was not ‘acting’ as he preached so much as he was exhibiting a one-to-one correspondence between his inner passions and the biblical saints he embodied.”

In his sermons, Whitefield spoke out against established churches, encouraging colonists to seek a revived form of Puritanism that did not require institutional churches. He also preached about the spirituality of American slaves, encouraging slave owners to acknowledge their slaves’ spiritual freedom. He traveled throughout the colonies, from Georgia to New England, winning admirers and adherents, including Benjamin Franklin. After delivering over 18,000 sermons in his lifetime, Whitefield died in 1770 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Missions to Native Americans

The Great Awakening led several Protestant denominations to support missionaries who aimed to convert Native Americans to Christianity, especially in New England and the mid-Atlantic region. This marked something of a turn in many colonists’ dispositions toward Native Americans, as evangelizing Native Americans was not a primary concern among seventeenth-century colonial churches in English North America. During that earlier time, many Native Americans were hesitant to embrace what they considered an alien religion. Often from the colonists’ perspective, as historian James H. Merrell puts it, “it proved easier to kill Indians than convert them.”

Nevertheless, while there were some genuine efforts to convert Native Americans to Christianity, established churches showed relatively little interest in doing so as a long-term proposition, and ultimately only a small fraction of Indians abandoned their ancestral religions.

Although the First Great Awakening lasted no more than a generation in New England, it brought with it lasting changes. It left a legacy of theological disputes and divisions between its supporters, “New Lights,” and its opponents, “Old Lights,” who criticized the emotional, non-rational aspects of the Awakening. The Awakening also led to the creation of new colleges—including Princeton, Brown, and Rutgers—to train “New Light” ministers. In the 1760s, supporters carried the spirit of the Great Awakening to the southern colonies, beginning a series of revivals there. The Baptist and Methodist churches were among its most important products.

This movement, thanks in particular to its ministry to those on the frontier, fundamentally changed the religious landscape of English America. Membership in the older, established sects such as Puritan Congregationalism and Anglicanism fell into decline, while the newer evangelical sects—Presbyterians in the North, Baptists and Methodists further south—surged in size and influence. By the time of the American Revolution a majority—perhaps as many as 80 percent of the population—identified with the new faiths.

Learn More?

Read the account of Nathan Cole and his hearing the preaching of George Whitefield at the History Matters Website.