Great Awakening, First and Second, evangelical religious movements in British colonial North America and the early United States characterized by revival meetings and emotional conversion experiences.The term “Great Awakening” usually refers to the revivals in
New England and the Middle Colonies associated with the first American preaching tour of George Whitefield, 1739–1742; at other times it refers to the more general evangelical movement within
Protestantism, from about 1720 until 1750, sometimes including the spread of evangelicalism into the
South from the 1750s through the 1770s.
Whitefield (1714–1770), an itinerant English Calvinist Methodist, preached soul‐searching sermons on conversion. He adapted commercial techniques, such as newspaper advertising, inexpensive publications, and the deliberate provocation of controversy, to stimulate interest. A consummate actor who spoke with charismatic spontaneity, he found in America a receptive audience for his message and preachers ready to imitate his style.
Whitefield's tour through the Middle Colonies in 1739 exacerbated divisions within the Presbyterian and the Dutch Reformed churches. Conservatives maintained orthodox doctrine and the prescribed liturgy; evangelicals sought experiential piety and spontaneous preaching. Theodorus Freylinghuysen (1691–c. 1748) introduced conversionist ministry to the Dutch Reformed in America in the 1720s and influenced the ministry of the Scottish Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764). The Philadelphia synod, to which Tennent belonged, was already divided over itinerant preaching and ordination qualifications when Whitefield arrived. Allying with the evangelical party, Whitefield attracted vast crowds to his outdoor assemblies and set off a series of local revivals. Whitefield's first New England tour, September and October 1740, initiated a year of local revivals that built upon an indigenous revival tradition already developed under Jonathan
Edwards.
The Great Awakening agitated several divisive issues, including itinerant preaching, church membership qualifications, and the role of emotion. Revivalists preached the terrors of hell to awaken sinners to their need of conversion, and people turned from their own ministers if they found more awakening preaching elsewhere. Many converts separated from established churches to form churches with stricter membership requirements. The antirevivalist
Boston minister Charles Chauncy (1705–1787) exploited these innovations as well as the faintings and visions of converts to discredit the awakening, while Edwards defended the revivals by separating such disorders from their spiritual essence. Colonial governments passed laws to keep ecclesiastical order, fueling sentiment for separation of
church and state.
Three waves of evangelicalism swept the South in the late eighteenth century. The Presbyterian denomination expanded into Virginia, under the Reverend Samuel Davies (1723–1761), beginning in the 1740s. Starting in the 1750s,
Baptists such as Shubal Stearns won converts among the unchurched of Virginia and the Carolina backcountry. And in the 1770s, circuit riders such as the Reverend Devereux Jarrett organized thousands into Methodist societies, mostly in Maryland and Virginia.
The Second Great Awakening began in the 1790s in the Northeast as followers of Edwards, such as Timothy Dwight (1752–1817) and Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), led a counteroffensive against
Deism. In the West, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists employed revival meetings to evangelize unchurched frontier families. Camp meetings organized by preachers like James McGready, culminating in a massive interdenominational meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, brought dispersed settlers together to confirm their commitment to Christianity. Itinerant preachers spread the movement through the South among both whites and blacks.
Many new denominations emerged from the Second Great Awakening, while at the same time theological differences between denominations blurred. Like the First Great Awakening, the movement promoted belief in the imminence of the millennium, but it differed from the earlier movement in its trust in universal salvation and the perfectibility of society. This optimism led to the founding of missionary, education, tract, and Bible societies as well as moral‐reform groups promoting temperance and chastity and opposing gambling and other vices. Some evangelicals sought to Christianize the republic by ending the delivery of mail and the operation of stage lines on Sundays. Participation in moral‐reform movements enhanced women's moral and social authority. American Protestantism became more populist as older denominations, such as the Congregational and Episcopal bodies, lost ground to the more actively evangelistic, particularly Baptist and Methodist, which did not require a college‐educated ministry.
The Second Great Awakening faded by the 1830s, as revivals lost their spontaneity. As a set of standardized practices promoted by Charles G.
Finney proved their effectiveness in the so‐called Burned‐Over District of upstate New York, revivals became practically an institutionalized element of American evangelical Christianity.
Because of the two Great Awakenings, evangelicalism supplanted rationalism in post‐Revolutionary America. While strengthening denominationalism, the awakenings furnished a common evangelical tradition of emotional
religion. They implanted evangelical Protestant Christianity at the heart of African‐American culture and reinvigorated missionary work among Native Americans. Some rationalists repelled by evangelical emotionalism embraced Unitarianism.
See also
African American Religion;
Colonial Era;
Early Republic, Era of the;
Methodism;
Millennialism and Apocalypticism;
Missionary Movement;
Revivalism;
Temperance and Prohibition;
Unitarianism and Universalism.
Bibliography
Whitney Cross , The Burned‐Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850, 1950.
Richard L. Bushman , From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765, 1967.
Donald G. Mathews , Religion in the Old South, 1977.
William G. McLoughlin , Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977, 1978.
Patricia U. Bonomi , Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, 1986.
Nathan O. Hatch , The Democratization of American Christianity, 1989.
Michael J. Crawford
