The Great Awakening and 18th century America
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The First Great Awakening was a religious movement among members of various Protestant religious sects who were in the American colonies in the 1730s to 1740s.
The Great Awakening resulted from powerful preaching that deeply affected listeners (already church members) with a deep sense of both personal guilt and the possibility for salvation by Christ. Emerging during a time when church practice, especially in new England, had come to be seen as cold and routine, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person. Unlike the Second Great Awakening that began about 1800 and reached out to those who were not church members, the First Great Awakening focused on people who were.
The revival began with Jonathan Edwards, aCongregationalist minister from Northampton, Massachusetts, who still valued the Calvinist tradition, but who wanted to replace the cool logic of Calvinism with an emphasis on the importance of immediate, personal religious experience. Edwards was a powerful speaker, but not a dramatic one, and attracted a large following; "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," is his most famous sermon.
The Methodist preacher George Whitefield, visiting from England, continued the movement, traveling across the colonies and preaching in a dramatic and emotional style, accepting everyone into his audiences. People became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner.
Some Results of the Great Awakening
1. Americans--North and South--shared a common evangelical view of life.
2. Dissent and dissenters enjoyed greater respect than ever before.
3. Greater emphasis came to be placed on education. George Whitefield founded the school that would latter become the University of Pennsylvania.
4. A greater sense of responsibility for Indians and Slaves emerged from the revival. George Whitefield, for instance, was among the first to preach to Blacks. At the first General Conference of Methodism, slave holding was viewed as grounds for immediate expulsion from the society.
5. The Awakening reinterpreted the meaning of the covenant between God and human beings. New emphasis was placed on what humans can do in response to God's great gift of salvation.
6. Ministers could no longer control the direction of religious life. It had been democratized.