Reference
- Great AwakeningThe term Great Awakening has been applied to two periods of enthusiastic religious revival: in the American colonies of the 1740s and on the frontier of the United States in the early decades of the 19th century. Both were periods of religious ferment, creativity, and initiative and gave birth to new churches and to changes in existing denominations.
In the 1720s, voices were heard decrying the state of religion in the American colonies. It was difficult for the churches to keep up with the population as it moved westward. Established churches had grown weak, and ministers seemed unable to perpetuate traditional patterns of church participation--the population was fleeing from the churches.
The first effort at revival is usually traced to Theodore Jacob Frelinghausen (1691–1720), who came from Holland to begin work among the Dutch settlers of New Jersey. As revivals broke out under his ministry, he influenced Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent (1703–64), who soon discovered that revivals were spreading to his people as well. In 1737, Massachusetts Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards published an influential account of a revival that broke out in his Northampton ministry in the winter of 1734–35.
All this activity prepared the way for George Whitefield's travels through America, which began in 1735. One of the great orators of the century, he preached from Charleston to Boston; at every stop crowds gathered, people were converted, and revival followed. A wave of religious concern swept the American colonies through the early 1740s and to a lesser extent in the following decades. This first Great Awakening revived the sagging faith of many and converted many others, and it had a marked effect in creating an American national consciousness. Whitefield was the major connecting point between the American revival and similar events in Europe, which together constitute what is generally termed the Evangelical Awakening.
A second wave of religious enthusiasm began as settlers began pushing across the Allegheny Mountains early in the 19th century. New groups, primarily Methodists and Baptists, set about the task of churching the West. They developed two very successful tools: Camp Meetings, where farmers could take a religious vacation when farm work was least demanding, and protracted meetings, where evangelists would keep a revival going in a particular location as long as need and interest persisted.
This second Great Awakening made the Methodists and Baptists the largest religious communities in the country and spawned several new denominations--the Cumberland Presbyterians and the churches of the Restoration Movement--whose founders had left the more slow-moving Denominations behind.
The second Great Awakening received a new boost in the 1830s from Charles G. Finney, who refined the revivals and camp meetings even more. Finney carried the evangelistic activity of the frontier churches through the 1850s and fed the development of the new urban evangelism that would characterize the decades after the Civil War.
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Perspectives
The First Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening, an unprecedented surge in Protestant Christian revivalism in the Eighteenth Century, sparked enormous of controversy at the time and has been a source of scholarly debate ever since. Few historians have sought to write a synthetic history of the First Great Awakening, and in recent decades it has been challenged as having happened at all, being either an exaggeration or an "invention." The First Great Awakening expands the movement's geographical, theological, and sociopolitical scope. Rather than focus exclusively on the clerical elites, as earlier studies have done, it deals with them alongside ordinary people, and includes the experiences of women, African Americans, and Indians as the observers and participants they were. It challenges prevailing scholarly opinion concerning what the revivals were and what they meant to the formation of American religious identity and culture. Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. (c) National Portrait Gallery, London
The Great Awakening
Delving into the spiritual movement that profoundly shaped colonial American cultural and religious life, Great Awakening provides a broad collection of voices from colonial American society, from the radicals, to the moderates, to the antirevivalists.
Inventing the Great Awakening
This book is a history of an astounding transatlantic phenomenon, a popular evangelical revival known in America as the first Great Awakening (1735-1745). Beginning in the mid-1730s, supporters and opponents of the revival commented on the extraordinary nature of what one observer called the "great ado," with its extemporaneous outdoor preaching, newspaper publicity, and rallies of up to 20,000 participants. Frank Lambert, biographer of Great Awakening leader George Whitefield, offers an overview of this important episode and proposes a new explanation of its origins. The Great Awakening, however dramatic, was nevertheless unnamed until after its occurrence, and its leaders created no doctrine nor organizational structure that would result in a historical record. That lack of documentation has allowed recent scholars to suggest that the movement was "invented" by nineteenth-century historians. Some specialists even think that it was wholly constructed by succeeding generations, who retroactively linked sporadic happenings to fabricate an alleged historic development. Challenging these interpretations, Lambert nevertheless demonstrates that the Great Awakening was invented--not by historians but by eighteenth-century evangelicals who were skillful and enthusiastic religious promoters. Reporting a dramatic meeting in one location in order to encourage gatherings in other places, these men used commercial strategies and newly popular print media to build a revival--one that they also believed to be an "extraordinary work of God." They saw a special meaning in contemporary events, looking for a transatlantic pattern of revival and finding a motive for spiritual rebirth in what they viewed as a moral decline in colonial America and abroad. By examining the texts that these preachers skillfully put together, Lambert shows how they told and retold their revival account to themselves, their followers, and their opponents. His inquiries depict revivals as cultural productions and yield fresh understandings of how believers "spread the word" with whatever technical and social methods seem the most effective.
The First Great Awakening
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Meet George Whitefield, an Anglican evangelist who experienced a "new birth" and led a series of religious revivals up and down the East Coast. Here, you will consider the context of religious revivals, examine controversies over evangelism, and reflect on the impact revivals had on American political culture.
The Native Americans in the Great Awakening
- “It Provd but Temporary, & Short Lived”: Pequot Affiliation in the First Great AwakeningNative participation in the First Great Awakening in New England is often assumed but little investigated. This essay provides an in-depth examination of Pequot involvement in the Awakening through a close analysis of local records in Connecticut. Most historians have typically followed the lead of eighteenth-century ministers who proclaimed that previously unevangelized Indians in southeastern New England suddenly joined churches in droves during the revivals of the 1740s. In this view, the “Indian Awakening” was unprecedented, sudden, and complete. By providing a broader context for Indian-colonist relationships prior to the Awakening, and by looking closely at the church records of a few Congregational churches during the revivals, this essay argues that Indians joined churches in the early 1740s in far fewer numbers than previously thought and within a very specific time frame that peaked in 1742 and tapered off dramatically shortly thereafter. Instead of the Awakening serving as a point of seismic religious and cultural disjuncture for natives—the dropping of traditional ways and adoption of Christian practices—it was instead just one of many attempted negotiations with the surrounding colonial world.
The Great Awakening
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThe stresses of Colonial life produced unusual social eruptions that were aimed at regaining some sense of control. The Great Awakening, a revival of radical Protestant religion across New England, helped people recover a sense of spiritual significance and moral direction; it also touched off violent religious controversy.
The Second Great Awakening
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThree factors played a role in creating a Christian America: the resiliency of revival, the absorption of virtue, and the substitution of millennialism.
The Second Great Awakening - Enduring Impacts
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowGrasp how the links between religion and politics that today inspire such powerful positive and negative emotions are nothing new. See how issues born out of the 19th-century's evangelical upheaval - from prison reform to women's suffrage - still engage us today.