The Great Awakening in America

Religion in the colonies

By the early 1700s, the American colonies were religiously diverse. There were Congregationalists in New England, Anglicans in Virginia and the South, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Dutch Reformed in New York, Presbyterians among the Scots-Irish, Lutherans and German sects in Pennsylvania, and Catholics in Maryland. But many felt that religion had grown formal and lukewarm. The founders' zeal had cooled. Many colonists, especially on the frontier, had no church at all. New England churches had adopted a "Half-Way Covenant," which allowed children of baptized but unconverted parents to be baptized, a sign of declining conversions.

Sparks of revival

Revival began in scattered places. In New Jersey in the 1720s, a Dutch Reformed pastor influenced by Pietism, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, preached that church membership was not enough. One needed a personal experience of conversion. Among Presbyterians, the Tennent family ran a "Log College" to train fervent preachers. In 1740 Gilbert Tennent preached a sensational sermon, "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry," suggesting that many clergy were themselves unconverted. It caused uproar.

Jonathan Edwards

The towering figure of the Awakening was Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor of the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was perhaps the greatest theologian and philosopher America has produced. He entered Yale at thirteen, read Locke and Newton eagerly, and experienced a profound sense of God's beauty and glory in nature.

In 1734–1735, a revival broke out in Northampton. Young people gave up "frolics." Hundreds professed conversion. Edwards described it in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), which was read widely in Britain and America and inspired revivals elsewhere, including Wesley's.

His most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (Enfield, Connecticut, 1741), pictured sinners dangling over the pit of hell by a thread, like a spider over a fire, held only by God's mercy. Listeners reportedly cried out and clung to the pews. Edwards delivered it in a quiet, steady voice, reading from his notes. But Edwards's preaching and writing were more often about the beauty and sweetness of God than about hell.

Edwards was also the Awakening's most careful critic. In Religious Affections (1746), he argued that true religion consists largely in "holy affections," love for God and delight in his beauty. Emotional outbursts, though, prove nothing either way. The real test is a changed life of humility and love. He also published the diary of David Brainerd, a young missionary to Native Americans who died at 29. It inspired generations of missionaries, including William Carey.

In 1750, after a dispute over who could take Communion, Northampton dismissed Edwards. He became a missionary to Native Americans at Stockbridge, writing major works like Freedom of the Will. In 1758 he became president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but died weeks later after a smallpox inoculation. His wife, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, whose own spiritual experiences he described admiringly, was a respected figure in her own right. Like many colonial ministers, Edwards owned enslaved people, a contradiction later critics have rightly emphasized.

Awakenings and revival movements, 1675–1960

The Grand Itinerant

In 1739–1740 George Whitefield arrived from England (see John Wesley and the Methodists) and toured the colonies from Georgia to Maine. He made seven visits to America in all. His dramatic, emotional preaching drew crowds of up to 20,000, at a time when Boston had only about 17,000 inhabitants. He used newspapers and advance publicity like a modern media campaign. The skeptical Benjamin Franklin calculated that Whitefield's voice could be heard by 30,000 people. He found himself emptying his pockets into the collection plate for Whitefield's orphanage in Georgia, despite having resolved to give nothing. Franklin became Whitefield's friend and printer. Whitefield was perhaps the first person known throughout all thirteen colonies, a shared experience that helped create a sense of American identity.

Old Lights and New Lights

The Awakening divided churches. Supporters, called "New Lights" (or "New Side" among Presbyterians), believed God was doing a mighty work. Critics, "Old Lights," led by Boston minister Charles Chauncy, deplored the "enthusiasm": shrieking, fainting, convulsions, and above all traveling preachers who invaded other ministers' parishes and called them unconverted. Some revivalists, like James Davenport, who led followers in burning "worldly" books and clothes, gave the critics plenty of ammunition.

The revival's results included:

• Growth of new denominations: Many New Lights became Separatist and then Baptist. Baptists grew from a tiny sect into one of America's largest churches, especially in the South under preachers like Shubal Stearns. Presbyterians grew too, and in Virginia Samuel Davies spread New Side Presbyterianism.
• Colleges: Princeton (1746), Brown (Baptist, 1764), Rutgers (Dutch Reformed, 1766) and Dartmouth (1769, originally for Native Americans) were founded largely by revival supporters.
• Evangelicalism: The Awakening established a lasting pattern of American religion. It stressed personal conversion, revival preaching, voluntary denominations, and lay involvement that crossed denominational lines.
• Challenges to authority: By teaching that ordinary people could judge whether their ministers were truly converted, the revival encouraged democratic attitudes, which some historians link to the American Revolution.

Africans and the gospel

Before the Awakening, few enslaved Africans in America had become Christians. Many slaveholders feared that baptism would make enslaved people think they should be free, and some colonies passed laws declaring that it did not. Revival preachers, with their emotional style and their message that all people are equal sinners in need of grace, reached enslaved and free Black people in significant numbers. Whitefield preached to Black audiences, though he also supported introducing slavery into Georgia and owned slaves himself.

African Americans began to shape their own Christianity, blending biblical faith with African traditions of music, movement and call-and-response. They identified deeply with the story of the Exodus: God's people freed from slavery. The first Black Baptist congregations arose in the 1770s, including at Silver Bluff, South Carolina. George Liele, a freed slave and Baptist preacher, founded a church in Savannah and later became the first American missionary overseas, in Jamaica (1783). Richard Allen, born enslaved, became a Methodist preacher and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (see Christianity in America).

Revival and revolution

A generation after the Awakening came the American Revolution (1775–1783). Many clergy, especially Congregationalists and Presbyterians, supported independence. Some preached it as a sacred cause. The Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Anglican clergy, bound by oaths to the king, often remained loyalists, and the Church of England in America collapsed, re-forming as the Episcopal Church in 1789. Quakers and Mennonites mostly stayed neutral as pacifists. Methodists, under suspicion because Wesley opposed the revolution, nonetheless grew rapidly.

The new nation chose not to establish any church nationally. The First Amendment (1791) declared that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Massachusetts kept its established Congregational church until 1833. This "separation of church and state," supported both by Enlightenment Deists like Jefferson and by evangelical Baptists eager to be free from state churches, created a religious "free market." In it, churches competed for members, and revivalism thrived (see Christianity in America).