GREAT AWAKENING

GREAT AWAKENING. 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.

Charles L.Cohen

See alsoEvangelicalism and Revivalism .

Great Awakening Series of 18th-century religious revivals in the American colonies. It was inspired in the 1730s by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Baptist revivals occurred in 1760, and Methodism evolved in the pre-Revolutionary period. The movement led to Christian missionary work among the Native American tribes.

Great Awakening. A series of conversionary revivals of Christian religion in N. America, 1720–50. They were particularly associated with George Whitefield, and proved divisive.