First Great Awakening

The First Great Awakening was a religious revitalization movement that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. It resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of personal guilt and of their need of salvation by Christ. Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption, along with introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom sees it as part of a "great international Protestant upheaval" that also created Pietism in Germany, the Evangelical Revival and Methodism in England. It brought Christianity to the slaves and was an apocalyptic event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between the old traditionalists who insisted on ritual and doctrine, and the new revivalists. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denomination, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations. It had little impact on Anglicans, and Quakers. Unlike the Second Great Awakening, that began about 1800 and which reached out to the unchurched, the First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self awareness.

Jonathan Edwards

The revival began with Jonathan Edwards, a well-educated theologian and Congregationalist minister from Northampton, Massachusetts, who came from Puritan, Calvinist roots, but emphasized the importance and power of immediate, personal religious experience. Edwards was said to be 'solemn, with a distinct and careful enunciation, and a slow cadence.'[1] Nevertheless, his sermons were powerful 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 more dramatic and emotional style, accepting everyone into his audiences.

Winiarski (2005) examines Edwards's preaching in the Suffield, Massachusetts, meetinghouse on 6 July 1741 and the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" that he preached at Enfield two days later. At Suffield and Enfield, Edwards countenanced the "noise" of the Great Awakening, but his approach to revivalism became more moderate and critical in the years immediately following. The discovery of an anonymous letter composed by one who attended the Suffield service provides evidence for a reassessment of that seminal moment in the Great Awakening.

Impact on individuals

The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. Participants became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights", while the preachers who remained unemotional were referred to as "old lights". People affected by the revival began to study the Bible at home. This effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation.

Impact on American Revolution?

Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) argues that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom. However, Heimert has been criticized for not recognizing the differences between educated and uneducated evangelists, and for not recognizing the significance of Separate-Baptists and Methodists.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Jonathan Edwards, (C. Goen, editor) The Great-Awakening: A Faithful Narrative Collected contemporary comments and letters; 1972, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-01437-6.
• Alan Heimert and Perry Miller ed.; The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences 1967

Secondary sources

• Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People (1972) the standard history
• Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 U of North Carolina Press, 1998 online edition
• Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America Oxford University Press, 1988 online edition
• Bumsted, J. M. "What Must I Do to Be Saved?": The Great Awakening in Colonial America 1976
• Butler, Jon. "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction." Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305-25.
• Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. 1990.
• Conforti, Joseph A. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture University of North Carolina Press. 1995. online edition
• Gaustad, Edwin S. The Great Awakening in New England (1957)
• Gaustad, Edwin S. "The Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Mar., 1954), pp. 681-706. in JSTOR
• Goff, Philip. "Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind." Church History 1998 67(4): 695-721. Issn: 0009-6407 Fulltext: in Jstor and Ebsco
• Goen, C. C. Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (1962) online edition
• Goff, Philip. "Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind." Church History 1998 67(4): 695-721. Issn: 0009-6407 Fulltext: in Jstor and Ebsco
• Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity 1989.
• Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution Harvard University Press, (1966) online in ACL e-books
• Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982), emphasis on Baptists
• Lambert, Frank. Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals; Princeton University Press, 1994
• McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 1978.
• McLaughlin, William G. "Essay Review: the American Revolution as a Religious Revival: 'The Millennium in One Country.'" New England Quarterly 1967 40(1): 99-110. Issn: 0028-4866
• Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (2001)
• Schmotter, James W. "The Irony of Clerical Professionalism: New England's Congregational Ministers and the Great Awakening," American Quarterly, 31 (1979), a statistical study; in JSTOR
• Stout, Harry. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism William B. Eerdmans, 1991
• Tracy, Joseph. The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, 1842; online edition
• Winiarski, Douglas L. "Jonathan Edwards, Enthusiast? Radical Revivalism and the Great Awakening in the Connecticut Valley." Church History 2005 74(4): 683-739. Issn: 0009-6407 Fulltext: Ebsco