But this interpretation has been sharply criticized by other scholars like Christine Leigh Heyrman (Commerce and Culture) and Christopher Jedrey (The World of John Cleaveland) who view the first Great Awakening, at least in the North, as an essentially conservative movement, a continuation of earlier religious traditions. Revised: January 2008 [78], Regeneration was always accompanied by saving faith, repentance and love for God—all aspects of the conversion experience, which typically lasted several days or weeks under the guidance of a trained pastor. Another key figure to the first Great Awakening is George Whitefield. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in American Studies and is currently Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. With a little luck, those remarks will return the class to thinking about the SPECIFIC HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES that might have enhanced the appeal of evangelical Christianity, with its formidable array of emotional consolations and moral certitudes, to large numbers of people in the eighteenth century. Many Africans were finally provided with some sort of education. Continue Reading. Wesley made contact with members of the Moravian Church led by August Gottlieb Spangenberg. His rants and attacks against "unconverted" ministers inspired much opposition, and he was arrested in Connecticut for violating a law against itinerant preaching. Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg told of a German woman who heard Whitefield preach and, though she spoke no English, later said she had never before been so edified. [80], True conversion meant that a person was among the elect, but even a person with saving faith might doubt his election and salvation. While it occurred in all parts of the United States, it was especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest. [68], The major figures of the Great Awakening, such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Dickinson and Samuel Davies, were moderate evangelicals who preached a pietistic form of Calvinism heavily influenced by the Puritan tradition, which held that religion was not only an intellectual exercise but also had to be felt and experienced in the heart. He was known to attract thousands of people just to hear him speak. Through their efforts, New England experienced a "great and general Awakening" between 1740 and 1743 characterized by a greater interest in religious experience, widespread emotional preaching, and intense emotional reactions accompanying conversion, including fainting and weeping. [42] In the fall of 1734, Edwards preached a sermon series on justification by faith alone, and the community's response was extraordinary. [71] When under conviction, nonbelievers realized they were guilty of sin and under divine condemnation and subsequently faced feelings of sorrow and anguish. His first stop was in Philadelphia where he initially preached at Christ Church, Philadelphia's Anglican church, and then preached to a large outdoor crowd from the courthouse steps. "[20] Wesley understood his Aldersgate experience to be an evangelical conversion, and it provided him with the assurance he had been seeking. Significantly, the pietists placed less emphasis on traditional doctrinal divisions between Protestant churches, focusing rather on religious experience and affections. The Moravians came to Herrnhut as refugees, but under Zinzendorf's guidance, the group enjoyed a religious revival. But Whitefield—and many American preachers who eagerly imitated his style—presented that message in novel ways. Old Lights saw the religious enthusiasm and itinerant preaching unleashed by the Awakening as disruptive to church order, preferring formal worship and a settled, university-educated ministry. [23] In response, Whitefield began open-air field preaching in the mining community of Kingswood, near Bristol. [72] When revivalists preached, they emphasized God's moral law to highlight the holiness of God and to spark conviction in the unconverted. [67] Revival theology focused on the way of salvation, the stages by which a person receives Christian faith and then expresses that faith in the way they live. In some cases, entire Separatist congregations accepted Baptist beliefs. Finally, for a magisterial survey of the sweep of spiritual awakenings throughout America’s past, you should take a look at William McLoughlin’s American Revivalism. [89], The First Great Awakening led to changes in Americans' understanding of God, themselves, the world around them, and religion. I never saw the Christian spirit in Love to Enemies so exemplified, in all my Life as I have seen it within this half-year. The first is represented by those historians who argue that the revivals became a means by which humbler colonials challenged the prerogatives of their social “betters”—both by criticizing their materialistic values and undermining their claims to deference and respect. [40] While pastoring a church in New Jersey, Gilbert Tennent became acquainted with Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen. Besides Boston, Tennent preached in towns throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Chances are that most students will simply look confused at this inquiry—although some Christians among them might suggest that divine providence inspired large numbers of people to embrace “true Christianity.” If that happens, you have a prime opportunity to point out that while such an explanation might well be persuasive from the standpoint of faith (that is, the perspective of a believer), historians (no matter what their personal religious convictions might be) strive to explain the IMMEDIATE causes of why things happened without reference to acts of God. [17], John Wesley left for Georgia in October 1735 to become a missionary for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. "[22] In February 1739, rectors in Bath and Bristol refused to let him preach in their churches on the grounds that he was a religious enthusiast. The strongest case for this interpretation in the North has been advanced by Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible, a wide-ranging study of major seaports in the eighteenth century; a similar view of the Awakening in the upper South appears in Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. [96] Davies wrote a letter in 1757 in which he refers to the religious zeal of an enslaved man whom he had encountered during his journey. Many pulpits were closed to him, and he had to struggle against Anglicans who opposed the Methodists and the "doctrine of the New Birth". Native American Religion in Early America, Religious Pluralism in the Middle Colonies, Church and State in British North America, The Separation of Church and State from the American Revolution to the Early Republic. Sources. These revivals would also spread to Ulster and featured "marathon extemporaneous preaching and excessive popular enthusiasm. The Great Awakening offered religious reform and increased religious fervor, but Scougal wrote that many people mistakenly understood Christianity to be "Orthodox Notions and Opinions" or "external Duties" or "rapturous Heats and extatic Devotion". Soon after, he arrived in Boston and resumed his fanatical preaching only to once again be declared insane and expelled. In the United States, the term Great Awakening is most often used, while in the United Kingdom the movement is referred to as the Evangelical Revival. This society was modeled on the collegia pietatis (cell groups) used by pietists for Bible study, prayer and accountability. The Enlightenment was a period of time where old ideas were being … Wesley and his assistant preachers organised the new converts into Methodist societies. , NHC Home  |  TeacherServe  |  Divining America  |  Nature Transformed  |  Freedom’s Story Evangelical preachers "sought to include every person in conversion, regardless of gender, race, and status". In 1812, Princeton Theological Seminary was founded to take on the task of training ministers. The Great Awakening also affected the colonies by creating rifts among members of religious denominations. [49], In 1740, Whitefield began touring New England. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 new members were admitted to New England's Congregational churches even as expectations for members increased. Some of your students will be aware of those trends—and therefore will have greater confidence when it comes to speculating about the social sources of contemporary evangelicalism’s popular appeal—the transient lives of many Americans as population shifts to the South and West, the high incidence of family fragmentation in the face of staggering divorce rates, the uncertainty over gender roles fueled by feminism, the threats that recent scientific discoveries and “secular humanism” are perceived by many to pose to “traditional values,” and so forth. [58], Historian John Howard Smith noted that the Great Awakening made sectarianism an essential characteristic of American Christianity. The revival movement permanently affected Protestantism as adherents strove to renew individual piety and religious devotion. [33] At the same time, church membership was low from having failed to keep up with population growth, and the influence of Enlightenment rationalism was leading many people to turn to atheism, Deism, Unitarianism and Universalism. Numerically small before the outbreak of revival, Baptist churches experienced growth during the last half of the 18th century. By the eve of the American Revolution, their evangelical converts accounted for about ten percent of all southern churchgoers. Building on the foundations of older traditions—Puritanism, Pietism and Presbyterianism—major leaders of the revival such as George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards articulated a theology of revival and salvation that transcended denominational boundaries and helped forge a common evangelical identity. and reverberated throughout the Protestant countries of Europe as well. As many commentators, both scholarly and popular, have noted, recent decades have witnessed an evangelical revival—what some regard as yet another “Great Awakening.” Since the 1960s, membership in conservative evangelical Protestant churches has grown dramatically, while the membership of national organizations like the Promise Keepers and local bible study groups have also expanded at an astonishing rate. The treatise Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards was written to help converts examine themselves for the presence of genuine "religious affections" or spiritual desires, such as selfless love of God, certitude in the divine inspiration of the gospel, and other Christian virtues. [13] From that point on, Whitefield sought the new birth. He established a seminary called the Log College where he trained nearly 20 Presbyterian revivalists for the ministry, including his three sons and Samuel Blair. The beliefs of the New Lights of the First Great Awakening competed with the more conservative religion of the first colonists, who were known as Old Lights. He landed in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 14, 1740, and preached several times in the Anglican church. [39], In the 1720s and 1730s, an evangelical party took shape in the Presbyterian churches of the Middle Colonies led by William Tennent, Sr. These figures paved the way for the establishment of the first Black congregations and churches in the American colonies. [74], Revivalists counseled those under conviction to apply the means of grace to their lives. The First Great Awakening (c. 1735-1743) was the development of a religious revival which was heavily influenced by Calvinist ideals. [92][page needed], George Whitefield's sermons reiterated an egalitarian message, but only translated into a spiritual equality for Africans in the colonies who mostly remained enslaved. [91], Evangelical leaders in the southern colonies had to deal with the issue of slavery much more frequently than those in the North. Dr. Heyrman is the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial New England, 1690–1740 [1984], Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt [1997], which won the Bancroft Prize in 1998, and Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the Republic, with James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff [3rd ed., 1997]. The revivalists use of "indiscriminate" evangelism—the "practice of extending the gospel promises to everyone in their audiences, without stressing that God redeems only those elected for salvation"—was contrary to these notions. So this is the moment for you to steer them back into the eighteenth century by noting that this, too, was an era of extraordinary upheaval and crisis for ordinary people. For the first time, the narrator mentions women’s rights as such. Decline in religious activity. [81] Converts were encouraged to seek assurance through self-examination of their own spiritual progress. The first stage was conviction of sin, which was spiritual preparation for faith by God's law and the means of grace. Objecting to the Halfway Covenant, Strict Congregationalists required evidence of conversion for church membership and also objected to the semi–presbyterian Saybrook Platform, which they felt infringed on congregational autonomy. [14][15] In 1736, he began preaching in Bristol and London. [7] In 1722, Zinzendorf invited members of the Moravian Church to live and worship on his estates, establishing a community at Herrnhut. Evangelicals considered the new birth to be "a bond of fellowship that transcended disagreements on fine points of doctrine and polity", allowing Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and others to cooperate across denominational lines. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. He preached twice in the parish church while Edwards was so moved that he wept. Protestant Christian preachers taught that good behavior and individual faith were more important than book learning and Bible reading. Now let’s cut to the classroom. [8], While known as the Great Awakening in the United States, the movement is referred to as the Evangelical Revival in Britain. In the early days of the First Great Awakening, Whitefield preached in an oak grove in Chester County, PA. It was centered around the American Revolution which was primary focused around the thirteen colonies in which an evangelical Protestant revivalist wave took the colonies by hold. It had little immediate impact on most Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Protestants,[1] but later gave rise to a schism among Quakers (see Quaker History) which persists to this day. The revivals he led in the Raritan Valley were "forerunners" of the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. [6], Pietism prepared Europe for revival, and it usually occurred in areas where pietism was strong.
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