The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening, America’s first major religious revival, was the most important religious event of the colonial period. Rocking the Atlantic seaboard in the middle decades of the 18th century, it established revivalism and emotional conversion as central features of American religious life, lowered denominational boundaries, challenged traditional social patterns, and generated perceptions and conflicts that would inform the American Revolution.

The Awakening resulted from the colonial importation of Pietism, a German movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that emphasized intense, personal, “experiential” contact with God. Pietism strongly influenced British and Dutch religious cultures and crossed the Atlantic between the 1680s and 1730s with German, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish migration. It powerfully influenced a changing provincial social geography in which the dominant and mutually supporting churches and elites of established coastal areas faced a growing challenge from the proliferation of new and more egalitarian frontier communities.

The first manifestations of the Awakening appeared among Pietists in the middle colonies in the 1720s. In the Delaware Valley, Irish Presbyterian immigrant William Tennent Sr. spread a fervent experiential piety and trained like-minded ministers—most notably his son, Gilbert—at his “log college” in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania. Conrad Beissel (1692–1768) arrived in Germantown in 1712 and, beginning in 1722, inspired revivals among recently arrived German Dunkers. In New Jersey’s Raritan Valley, Dutch Reformed minister Theodore Frelinghuysen (1691—1748) presided over several revivals in his congregations. The aggressive preaching of Congregationalist Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) in Northampton, in the Massachusetts backcountry, produced a series of small revivals among his congregation in the early eighteenth century.

These local episodes were transformed into a major intercolonial event by the sensational tour of Anglican evangelist George Whitefield (1714–1770). He arrived in October 1739, his growing fame, his integrity, and his combination of Anglicanism, Pietism, and Calvinism enhancing his appeal and earning him the respect if not always enthusiastic support of settled ministers. He preached over the following fifteen months from Savannah, Georgia to York, Maine, in churches and outdoors, sometimes in defiance of local clergy, and often to crowds of unprecedented size—sometimes more than 20,000 people. His greatest successes came in New England—where he spent the fall of 1740—but by the time he left for England in January 1741, his renown, charismatic and controversial preaching, and itinerancy had generated religious excitement and fueled revivalism throughout the colonies.

Other evangelists, some less temperate, followed as the Awakening peaked in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Firebrand Gilbert Tennent left New Jersey in 1741 to retrace Whitefield’s steps in New England; in that same year, the even more rabid Long Island preacher James Davenport (1716–1757) brought the enthusiasm to fever pitch in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In Pennsylvania, German Moravian leader Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) arrived in 1741 for a visit of several months, bringing revival energy to its height and promoting ecumenical evangelicalism among the region’s German Pietists.

The Awakening was initially most effective in the middle and Northern colonies, where the fires of revival began to cool by the mid-1740s.

Activities in all regions suggested that the new piety produced new religious alignments that generated conflict, even schism, within Protestant denominations while fostering interdenominational cooperation among evangelicals. Controversy over revivalism produced a seventeen-year schism among Presbyterians, sharp conflict within Congregationalism that eventually drove whole congregations from the fold, and rival parties within Anglicanism. At the same time, the evangelical impulse united Anglican George Whitefield with Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, with whom he traveled for a time during his 1739–41 tour, and Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards, whom he visited while in New England. In 1758, Edwards became president of the College of New Jersey, a Presbyterian institution.

George Whitefield. His electrifying tour of the colonies in 1739–41 fueled the Great Awakening and established revivalism in American religious life.

The Awakening also challenged existing structures of religious and social authority.

Critics of the Awakening, concentrated in the cosmopolitan coastal towns, decried what they considered the revivalists’ unbridled “enthusiasm,” heedless endangerment of tradition, and threat to social order. Perhaps the most outspoken was Congregational minister Charles Chauncy of Boston’s First Church, who saw in revivalism an unhealthy elevation of emotion over reason. In 1744 the faculty of Harvard College issued a denunciation of George Whitefield, who had just returned for a second tour. Jonathan Edwards, meanwhile, defended the religious “affections” and produced in the 1740s and 1750s a series of treatises developing a new and influential evangelical Calvinist theology. His alma mater, Yale, became and remained for several decades a focus for the further development of Edwards’s “new divinity.”

Historians have offered different dates for the end of the Awakening: the late 1740s, by which time its peak of visibility had passed; the late 1750s, when Edwards died (1758), the Presbyterians reunited (1758), and the French and Indian war stifled frontier revivalism; and the 1770s, when looming political revolution overshadowed spiritual matters.