Great Awakening

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Its proponents claim it to be the most important revival in American history. They say it was a cross-denominational movement of God that changed the course of religion in America for the better, that it led to a new way of preaching, new forms of ministry, and a better understanding of God's purpose in the founding of America.

Its detractors call it a social phenomenon that split churches, ruined lives, demeaned the Reformation, and all but destroyed America's chance of ever being a real Christian nation.

It is called the Great Awakening and, for better or worse, America was changed after a Calvinist preacher named Jonathan Edwards preached a series of five sermons on the topic of "justification by faith alone." The scene was Northampton, Massachusetts, and the date was 1734. Edwards had been concerned by what he considered to be the complacent acceptance of Arminianism (See Calvin, John, and Jacobus Arminius) by the people in the Congregational church he served. He also noticed that the youth of Northampton were:

very much addicted to night walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices.… It was their manner very frequently to get together in conventions of both sexes for mirth and jollity, which they called frolics, and they would often spend the greater part of the night in them.

The result of his sermons surprised everyone, especially Edwards. In his humble opinion they proved to be "a word spoken in season" and sparked "a very remarkable blessing of heaven to the souls of the people in town."

That was, to say the least, an understatement. A spiritual snowball started rolling down the cold hill of New England's religious life, enveloping folks who have been called by more than one writer "God's frozen people."

A young woman, said to have "questionable morals," became convinced of the evil of her ways. That inspired young people to follow her example of repentance. Conversions multiplied. According to Edwards, during the spring and summer of 1735, "the town seemed to be full of the presence of God. It was never so full of love, nor so full of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then."

By 1738 Edwards's book, bearing the descriptive title Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundreds of Souls in Northampton, was the talk of London, England. It was reprinted in staid, conservative Boston. John Wesley read it during a walk from London to Oxford. George Whitefield read it during a trip to Georgia. By 1740, what was now being called a "Great Awakening," or religious revival, had spread from Georgia to Nova Scotia and out to what was then called the frontier. So great was the religious fervor and conviction of itinerant circuit preachers that it became common to declare, "The weather is so bad today that there's nothing moving except crows and Methodist ministers!"

Jonathan Edwards was not what we would today call a typical evangelist. He was a student who preached tightly knit expositions of scripture. For example, reading his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," in which he keeps sinners suspended like spiders on webs over the fires of hell for all eternity, leads people to expect to hear the voice of a real fire-breathing, pulpit-pounding, brimstone-preaching evangelist. But Edwards read it word for word in a monotone, and he seemed almost embarrassed when people started to swoon in the aisles, swept up in their conviction of sin and despair. He was a theologian, not a natural speaker. (The preacher Edwards really admired was George Whitefield. It was said of Whitefield, after he was invited to fill the pulpit in Northampton, that by merely saying the word "Mesopotamia" he could move a congregation to tears.)

Whenever religious revivals begin, you can be sure detractors will follow. To some, the fervor of the Great Awakening was simply the "emotional babble" of lower-class, uneducated, simple folk who knew no better. Ministers who allowed such activity were not doing their duty. The detractors were called "Old Lights," and they were the essence of respectable, upper-class pillars of the community. Religion to them was to be expressed in contained, unemotional, intellectual, and academic terms. It was certainly nothing to get excited about.

The strange thing was that this was exactly the kind of man Jonathan Edwards was. He had graduated from Yale College. He believed in predestination. But people kept "choosing" to be saved when he preached. He was counted as one of the "New Lights," those who favored revival and reveled in the excesses the "Old Lights" so deplored.

The clergy and their churches were so split they completely rearranged the religious landscape. From the courthouse balcony in Philadelphia, Whitefield cried out:

Father Abraham, whom have you in heaven? Any Episcopalians? No! Any Presbyterians? No! Any Independents or Methodists? No, no, no! Whom have you there?

We don't know those names here. All who are here are Christians …

Oh, is this the case? Then God help us to forget party names and to become Christians in deed and truth.

As time went on, it became a matter of more importance to side with the "Old Lights" or the "New Lights" than to belong to a particular church. Although the term "denomination" had been defined a century earlier, it now became widely used as a way to express the idea that people were Christians first, and members of a particular "brand" of the church second. Ever since then, denominationalisim has been a distinctly American tradition, even when transported to other countries.

We have to remember that the Great Awakening was called "Great" because it was general and universal. It changed the way many people thought about God in America and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Its social ramifications alone changed the way America thought about itself. It unified American society and made people of differing religious traditions feel like one. Edwards and Whitefield were unifying names and rallying points a full thirty years before Washington and Jefferson were.

No one knows how many people started going to church, but the numbers were huge. Missions, especially to the American Indians, grew as never before. Education received a shot in the arm when the need for ministers schooled in the classics was seen. Universities-many of which, such as Princeton and Brown, still survive as respected secular institutions of learning-trace their beginnings to this time of religious fervent. The role of the laity in positions of leadership was enhanced. Ministerial authority was lessened, due to the fact that "New Light" ministers were pitted against their "Old Light" colleagues. Paradoxically, the profession was also enhanced due to the fame of "New Light" revivalists.

But all things come to an end. Gradually people returned to normal. Bickering and disillusionment increased. Jonathan Edwards was fired from his church when disagreements arose. A second Great Awakening arose during the first years of the nineteenth century, followed by religious high-water marks such as the 1950s church-building craze and the charismatic movement of the early 1970s, but a religious movement as significant as the Great Awakening has not been seen since.

Sources: Hudson, Winthrop S. Religion in America. New York: Charles Scribner, 1965.

Some historians denominate essentially all revivalistic activity in Britain's North American colonies between 1740 and 1790 as the "Great Awakening," but the term more properly refers only to those revivals associated with the itinerant Anglican preacher George Whitefield that occurred between 1739 and 1745. Evangelicals in Britain as well as America attended to Whitefield's perambulations on both sides of the Atlantic, giving the Awakening an international dimension; indeed, American events made up just one portion of a trans-European movement among eighteenth-century Protestants to exalt spiritual experience as faith's hallmark as opposed to adherence to systematized creeds and catechisms.

The Awakening elaborated upon strains of revivalism that had been developing piecemeal within Reformed Protestant traditions. As far back as the 1680s, Solomon Stoddard had hosted "refreshings" within the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, elevating parishioners' religious and moral commitment by heightening their fear of hell while emphasizing that salvation could be obtained only through conversion (the New Birth)—the Holy Spirit's infusion of grace into the soul. His grandson, Jonathan Edwards, anatomized the process, detailing how, with God's help, a minister heading a settled congregation—the New England norm—might inspire multiple conversions relatively quickly. During the 1720s, Theodorus Frelinghuysen initiated a similar interest in "heart-religion" among New Jersey's Dutch Reformed churches. His example animated Gilbert Tennent, a Pennsylvania Presbyterian whose father, William, similarly advocated the importance of conversion at his Neshaminy seminary. The Tennents' preaching warmed Presbyterian settlers from Scotland and Ulster who were accustomed to holding Sacramental Seasons—four-day devotions climaxed by highly affective celebrations of the Lord's Supper. Reformed churches had thus independently discovered various means of inducing collective conversions through heightened religious excitement before Whitefield commenced his second American tour in 1739. Whitefield's unique contribution was to foment religious excitement in all of these traditions simultaneously, make them each fully cognizant of the others, exaggerate the behavioral manifestations of the New Birth, and demonstrate the degree to which highly effusive appeals to large audiences could stimulate conversion and recruit the unchurched.

Whitefield appropriated secular culture in order to challenge it. Condemning the stage for diverting play-goers from God, he dramatized both the Word and himself theatrically. Critical of the "Consumption Revolution" brought about by both middle-class arrogations of aristocratic taste and burgeoning industrial production because it lured people into luxuriousness, he took advantage of the emerging transatlantic press, itself a market phenomenon, to advertise the Gospel while commodifying himself. An apostle for spontaneously seizing grace, he calculated his evangelical campaigns carefully, pioneering the use of advance men to announce his movements and the printed word—his own journals and others' press reports—to trumpet his progress. In less than two years, he visited every province from Georgia to New Hampshire, attracting the largest crowds anyone in those colonies had ever witnessed. His ordination notwithstanding, Whitefield preferred Reformed Protestant predestinarianism to the Church of England's Arminianism, but in the pulpit he downplayed dogma and minimized the importance of denominational affiliation to stress the necessity of being born again. He wanted "just Christians," he said, and anyone willing to take Christ by faith would qualify. Capable, remarked contemporary actor David Garrick, of moving audiences to paroxysms simply by pronouncing "Mesopotamia," Whitefield excited thousands to manifest their conversion by shrieking, groaning, laughing, or singing. Preaching often to people who, un-like New Englanders, belonged either to churches that did not emphasize conversion or to no church at all, he characterized the New Birth as a decision for Christ that any believer could make in defiance or in the absence of clerical authority, an act manifested by a brief, highly charged (even convulsive) experience that conferred salvation but did not, as for Puritans, also energize the believer to reform society morally. This shift toward a normative understanding of conversion as occurring outside a settled ecclesiastical order identifies an emergent "evangelical" conception of the New Birth as essentially an individualized experience.

Whitefield did not fare well in the South, where he angered Anglicans by chastising them for ignoring conversion and slaveowners for keeping Christ from their slaves (though he never condemned slavery itself). He enjoyed greater influence among northern Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and German Reformed, all churches with conversionist traditions. Anglicans, Quakers, and German sectarians, all non-Reformed Protestants, paid him little heed, as of course did the smattering of Roman Catholics. Increasingly, however, White-field in particular and revivalism in general came under fire for promoting discord rather than godliness. In his wake, churches were disrupted by itinerant preachers inveighing against unconverted ministers and by "New Lights" censoring congregants deemed unregenerate. Under such strains the Presbyterians schismed from 1741 to 1758, and the Congregational Standing Order lost one-third of its churches, many of which ultimately became Baptist. Whitefield suffered a tepid reception when he returned to America in 1744, and by the next year, the colonists had turned their attention to saving their skins from the French rather than their souls from the Devil.

The Great Awakening created a new definition of a "revival of religion" as a specific event manifesting God's gracious dispensation toward a church, town, or people. It elevated the rate of conversion, but a drop in succeeding years suggests that it accelerated the pace of church membership only temporarily, by lowering the age at which people already likely to convert claimed Christ rather than by attracting a substantial number of outsiders to the churches. Discovery that church-formation continued briskly before and after the 1740s intimates that the Awakening did not have such a prominent impact on Christianizing the American people as had been supposed. The Awakening did mark an important attempt to proselytize Amerindians and Africans, though the numbers baptized were quite small, but it had no discernible effect on the American Revolution, none of whose ideology, politics, or organization of protest can be traced directly to revivalism. Most important, the Awakening did demonstrate the revival's power to recruit large numbers of church members during a short period of time. The Whitefieldian model—more effective for spurring conversion and cohering churches among the trans-Appalachian West's dispersed, unorganized populations than its Edwardsean counterpart—would become the engine driving the evangelization of nineteenth-century America.

Bibliography

Crawford, Michael J. Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the "Great Awakening." Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Ward, W. R. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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