Great Awakening

Sources

A Key Event. The Great Awakening was the pivotal event in the eighteenth-century religious scene. It was an offshoot of a transatlantic revival of piety that arrived on American shores with George Whitefield, an evangelical itinerant preacher from England who sparked his own revivals, legitimized those of others, and publicized them all as one great awakening. It took on various emphases within the different denominations and regions, exposed existing fissures and caused others, precipitated realignments both within and among religious groups, and settled the religious landscape onto new ground. Although it affected all denominations, the Great Awakening had its greatest initial impact on the Presbyterians in the middle colonies and the Congregationalists in New England. In the northern colonies it only lasted for about three years, but its ripples continued to affect all regions throughout the century.

SINNERS BEWARE!

The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten Times so abominable in his Eyes, as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince; and yet ‘tis nothing but His Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every moment.

O Sinner! Consider the fearful Danger you are in: ‘Tis a great Furnace of Wrath, a wide and bottomless Pit, full of the Fire of Wrath, that you are held over in the Hand of that God, whose Wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as many of the Damned in Hell. You hang by a slender Thread, the Flames of divine Wrath flashing about it, and ready in a Moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.

Source: Jonathan Edwards , Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God... (Boston: Printed & sold by S. Kneeland & T. Green, 1741).

Middle Colonies. Revivalistic preachers in several denominations already were engaged in attempts to awaken religious fervor among their own flocks and the unchurched when Whitefield arrived in 1739 on a preaching tour to raise funds for his orphanage in Georgia. The Presbyterian revivalists in particular had already heard of him and rushed to enlist his support. Their leader, Gilbert

Tennent, led Whitefield in a tour of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, observing closely his rousing preaching style and simple message: repent, seek Christ, and be saved by the Holy Spirit in so sensible a manner that you will have immediate and definite assurance of your salvation and that of everyone else, including your minister. This ecumenical message, which dismissed theology, denominational distinctions, and the authority of the clergy, drew crowds. Tennent and his followers accompanied Whitefield to conduct revivals around the countryside and then to Philadelphia, where he filled Independence Square. His booming voice reached them all, even Benjamin Franklin, who had come as a spectator determined to give nothing to the collection for the orphanage and ended up emptying his pockets. This tour reenergized the revivalists, especially those among the Presbyterians, who became insistent on lowering the educational requirement for ministers so that more of their followers could be ordained, take over the synod,

and silence any opposition to them. Tennent sounded the call to battle in a 1740 sermon titled “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,” in which he labeled all of his learned opponents as damned men who were leading their flocks to hell. Within a year the synod had split over this issue of the necessity of a highly educated clergy.

New England. From the middle colonies Whitefield set off for New England, making it a point to preach in the church of Jonathan Edwards, the intellectual cornerstone of the revivalists whose writings had received transatlantic acclaim. Local ministers at first welcomed the evangelist, applauding his ability to arouse the laity from their apathy and mimicking his style within their own flocks. Then he began to attack them as “dead men.” Itinerant preachers such as Tennent and James Davenport who followed in his wake concentrated on this theme to the extent that the Great Awakening increasingly focused more on castigating settled clergy than on inciting conversion and personal piety. Such men raised the pitch of radicalism and encouraged laymen to take the stage and preach on the horrors of damnation on every available street corner. Davenport reached new heights when, after he had already been judged as “disturbed in the rational faculties of his mind” and expelled from Connecticut, he returned to New London and built bonfires which consumed classical works, sermons by Puritan divines, and even the clothes shed by his followers. The resultant animosities split churches so that most communities had a regular and a Separatist congregation by 1743. Many of these Separatists later entered the Baptists’ fold, while some of the more formalistic joined the Anglicans. Among mainstream Congregationalists there arose a deeper concern with the spiritual life and pious conduct that revitalized that large denomination.

Opposition Arises. As the Great Awakening became more extreme, moderates in all denominations publicly dissociated themselves from these New Light revivalists and fought back. Old Light Congregationalist Charles Chauncy and Anglican Timothy Cutler in New England were joined by two Old Side Presbyterians, Francis Alison and John Thompson, and an Old Light Baptist, Ebenezer Kinnersley in Pennsylvania, in denouncing the misguided theology and un-Christian behavior of the revivalists. Many of their arguments were based on those Calvinist foundations that Enlightenment thought reinforced: man can never have absolute knowledge of anything, much less the gracious states of others that are only known to God; God had revealed his will only through the Holy Scriptures and not through impromptu rantings by humans; and humans must glorify God by developing virtuous Christian habits that are best formed in the harmonious and settled environment similar to the one in the original creation. The governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the Congregational Church was established, tried to force seceding congregations to continue to pay the legal tithes to their old churches. The Connecticut General Assembly even passed laws requiring ministers to have degrees from Yale or Harvard, prohibiting itinerancy and banning lay preachers from administering the sacraments.

Fading Movement. The emotionalism that underlay the spate of revivals had already begun to die by 1743 as people experienced the single emotional event defined as conversion, felt a release, and settled down to pious lives. In New England they continued their revivalistic emphasis within Baptist congregations. In the middle colonies some revivalistic leaders such as Tennent were shocked by the consequences of their actions and recanted, settling down to minister quietly to their own flocks. The people they had aroused often gravitated to the Moravians. Others, such as John Cross, were discredited, in his case for fathering an illegitimate child. Even Whitefield, in his subsequent tours, apologized and tried to heal the wounds caused by his zeal.

Legacy. The Great Awakening left different footprints on all of the colonial denominations and sects. Its general legacy was a renewed concern with individual salvation and piety, defining religious beliefs for oneself rather than accepting them from clerical authorities, selecting a minister for his charisma and preaching style rather than for his theology and counseling, and accepting those who shared a similar style and concerns no matter what the denomination. Women became more influential in many congregations which believed that, if females were converted, they would lead their children and menfolk to salvation. Itinerancy and clerical responsibility for multiple congregations became more common among the smaller congregations that resulted from the divisions in churches. Both the Old and New persuasions formed intercolonial and interdenominational networks that helped to break down provincialism and isolation and prepared Americans for accepting the denominational pluralism that was on the horizon. Baptists and Presbyterians spread into New England and the South, which had been strongholds of established churches. Evangelicals reached out to Native Americans and Africans and encouraged others to Christianize these peoples. Smarting from charges that they were ignorant and unlettered, revivalists founded colleges for their ministers, which coincided with the general movement for widespread education that the Enlightenment and increasing commercialization were effecting. Given the centrality of the Great Awakening to the development of an American culture, some historians have gone so far as to label the Great Awakening as the key to the society that later mounted the American Revolution.

Sources

John B. Franz, “The Awakening of Religion Among German Settlers in the Middle Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976): 266–288;

Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper, 1957);

C.C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962);

Martin E. Lodge, “The Crisis of the Churches in the Middle Colonies,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 95 (1971): 195–220;

Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987).