Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
In the early 18th century, religion in the American colonies was often orderly, formal, and deeply tied to established churches.
Then a new generation of preachers began drawing enormous crowds, delivering emotional sermons, challenging traditional authority, and insisting that faith had to be personally experienced.
The movement crossed colonial boundaries, divided congregations, and helped reshape American society long before independence.
Learn more about the Great Awakening on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
To understand the Great Awakening and how it shaped early America, it is necessary to understand the religious history of England and the early American colonies.
After the English Reformation, which established many Catholic traditions while remaining Protestant, many disenchanted English protestants fled England and scattered across Europe. Many of them went to Switzerland and France, where they came under the influence of Calvinism.
Calvinism is a branch of Protestant Christianity based on the teachings of John Calvin. It emphasizes God’s absolute sovereignty, the authority of the Bible, humanity’s sinful nature, and the belief that salvation comes through God’s grace rather than human effort, traditionally including the doctrine of predestination.
Calvinist ideas entered the Church of England during the 16th century. Commitment to Calvinist ideas in England was divided. Some preferred to “purify” the church, while others preferred tradition.
Many of these purifying Calvinists or Puritans migrated to the New England Colonies in the early 17th century, building congregations based on strict social and religious practices.
Members of these early New England Congregations were expected to express their commitment to the church by by sharing their conversion experience before their Congregation, a Calvanist tradition. The conversion experience was deeply personal, marking the moment when the congregant accepted that they had received God’s saving grace.
Congregational rules mandated that, to achieve full church membership, which conferred political and social benefits, as well as the right to have one’s children baptized, a person had to share a conversion experience publicly.
As colonial populations grew, second and third-generation church attendance began to decline, In response, Puritan leaders introduced the Half-Way Covenant in 1662, which no longer required a public conversion experience for partial membership.
The covenant did not solve the problems inherent in the Puritan world. A wide gulf still existed between the various levels of Congregational involvement, and people refused to accept second-class status within their community.
Several decades later, the rise of Enlightenment ideals hastened the transition toward religious rationalism. As enthusiasm for rationalism and innovation grew throughout the Enlightenment era, traditional religious fervor began to decline.
In New England, where civil governance and civil society were linked to the church, this was a crisis.
Over time, many in the community began to question Calvinism and turned to Arminianism, a Protestant alternative theology to Calvinism. Arminianism emphasizes human free will and the belief that grace is offered to all people, not only to a predestined few.
Arminianism grew in popularity because it emphasized human control over one’s destiny, aligning closely with the Enlightenment ideals spreading through the colonies.
By the start of the eighteenth century, institutions like Harvard embraced these ideas, training a new generation of rationalist ministers who appealed to New England’s rising commercial class.
Prosperous urban centers embraced this Arminian theology, increasingly viewing their economic success through the lens of human effort and moral living.
In contrast, less affluent rural communities rejected these elite, rationalist trends, opting instead to reaffirm traditional Calvinist principles through a religious revival known as the Great Awakening.
The Great Awakening emerged as a direct challenge to the growing Arminian perspective during the 1730s.
Western Massachusetts emerged as the movement’s epicenter. In the town of Northampton, Reverend Jonathan Edwards delivered a series of fiery sermons, seeking to restore the region’s commitment and dedication to religion.
In his famous 1741 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards gives a classic fire-and-brimstone performance. He said 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… you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.
Edwards’ sermons resonated with the economically fragile and young congregants, who often moaned and wailed as he used imagery of divine wrath to urge them to confront their own sins.
In Northampton, Edwards reignited a long-dormant religious enthusiasm that was about to sweep over the colonies. Estimates suggest that only 10% of New Englanders were still committed members of a congregation in the early 18th century.
The Great Awakening quickly transcended New England, sweeping through Anglican strongholds across all thirteen colonies, propelled by the tireless itinerant preaching of George Whitefield.
Legend has it that Whitefield’s relentless preaching schedule took him across the Atlantic 13 times and from Georgia to Maine. Whitefield’s own records indicate that during his travels, he gave an estimated 18,000 sermons. Furthermore, it is said that Whitefield’s voice could project to audiences of as many as 20,000.
In a recent study by the Music and Audio Research Laboratory at New York University, researchers have analyzed the ability to hold such an audience without amplification. Their findings, which were based on the assumption that Whitefield spoke at a very loud 90 decibels, much higher than the average of 75 decibels, could have indeed reached an audience of as many as 50,000.
One of Whitefield’s friends and a devout deist was Benjamin Franklin, the epitome of the American Enlightenment. Franklin saw Whitefield at the height of his powers in 1739 as he barnstormed across Pennsylvania.
Reluctantly, Franklin agreed to go and see what the big deal was with this English preacher. Franklin was determined not to fall under Whitefield’s spell, but according to Franklin it did not go well. He wrote: I happened soon after to attend one of his Sermons, in the Course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a Collection, and I silently resolved he should have nothing;
I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the Silver; and he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my Pocket wholly into the Collector’s Dish, Gold and all.
Whitefield’s popularity exacerbated a growing split in Colonial Christianity. On one side, the advocates of the traditional values, who were skeptical of the revivals sweeping the country, were known as the “Old Lights”. The “Old Lights” were angered by the power of the open-air revivals to pull their parishioners away from their home church.
The Old Lights advocated a return to traditional messages and parish boundaries to maintain consistent congregational size. More common in urban areas, the Old Lights found a spiritual leader of their own in Boston Minister Charles Chauncy. Chauncy believed that the revivalists were using emotional manipulation to thin their flock.
The fears of the Old Lights weren’t entirely unfounded. Radical revivalists like James Davenport claimed he could spot the damned at a glance. Davenport even organized massive public bonfires to burn orthodox books, fine clothing, and other symbols of the Old Light.
Boston was an Old Light stronghold because of its deep tradition, but also because splintering congregations threatened the financial tax base and civic influence of their state-supported meetinghouses. Boston’s Harvard University became the center of the Old Light movement.
The revivalists led by Whitefield, Edwards, and William and Gilbert Tennent in Pennsylvania became known as the “New Lights”. By replacing formal lectures with emotionally charged conversion experiences, open-air field preaching, and river baptisms, the New Lights revolutionised American Christianity.
Open conflict emerged between the Old Lights and the New Lights, with each side accusing the other of heresy. An unintended consequence of the rift between the Old Lights and New Lights was the establishment of some of America’s most famous colleges and universities which became the basis of the Ivy League.
Collegiate School was founded in 1701 in Saybrook, Connecticut, by Puritan Congregationalists to preserve Old Light teachings and to educate ministers. In 1718, the college changed its name to Yale after a large donation from Elihu Yale, a British East India Company official.
New Light leaders of several denominations realized that they needed to train the next generation of ministers and teachers. They unleashed a wave of college foundings across the Northeast.
in 1746 New Light Minister Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr Sr. established the College of New Jersey to spread New Light Presbyterianism. That college went on to become Princeton.
To counter the foundation of this New Light institution so close to New York, Anglican Old Light leaders in the city founded King’s College in 1754. King’s College later changed its name to Columbia University.
The College of Rhode Island, which later became Brown University, was founded in 1764 by New Light Baptists to emphasize academic rigor and the power of religious conversion.
In New Hampshire, a minister who converted during the Awakening, became an ordained Presbyterian pastor and traveled to England, raising the core funds that founded Dartmouth College, with the intent to educate native people and train missionaries.
Of the eight Ivies, six owe their origins directly to colonial religious battles and the Great Awakening.
Whether in classrooms or log-camp churches, the Great Awakening produced fierce rivalries across the colonies. New Light congregations routinely refused to acknowledge taxes that went to established churches and even refused to recognize local leaders who disagreed with their positions.
New Light believers demanded emotionally charged, heartfelt sermons. When traditional ministers failed to deliver, angry parishioners voted out their pastors, in some cases even physically barring them from the pulpit or forcibly dragging them from the meetinghouse.
The Great Awakening also helped spread newer denominations. Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the Great Awakening were the Baptists, whose opposition to infant baptism found a wide audience, particularly in the Colonial South.
The Baptist message extended far beyond New England. It exploded in popularity among enslaved African Americans across the South, offering a rare common thread with whites.
But by the antebellum period, deep divisions over slavery shattered the church along regional and racial lines. Black Baptist leaders such as Andrew Bryan and George Liele, both former slaves, founded the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, one of the oldest Black churches in America.
By the late 1740s, the most intense phase of the Great Awakening had begun to fade. Some of the emotional enthusiasm waned, and some revivalist leaders lost credibility due to their extreme behaviour.
The most important legacy of the Great Awakening was the transformation of religion from something often inherited through community and tradition into something increasingly based on personal choice.
Before the Great Awakening, colonial religion was dominated by relatively established regional churches. Afterward, the religious landscape became more competitive.
Denominations increasingly had to attract members rather than simply inherit them. This encouraged a distinctive American religious culture based on voluntary participation.
Moreover, the creation of new churches and people’s ability to join them based on their personal beliefs indirectly laid the foundation decades later for the First Amendment and the freedom of religion clause.
The Great Awakening was more than a burst of religious enthusiasm. It reshaped colonial society by challenging established churches, encouraging personal religious choice, and spreading new denominations across regional boundaries.
Although the Great Awakening did not cause the American Revolution, it helped prepare the cultural ground by making religious liberty, voluntary association, and resistance to established authority increasingly familiar ideas in American life.