First Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening (sometimes Great Awakening) or the Evangelical Revival was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement permanently affected Protestantism as adherents strove to renew individual piety and religious devotion. The Great Awakening marked the emergence of Anglo-American evangelicalism as a trans-denominational movement within the Protestant churches. 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.[1]
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. Revivalists added to the doctrinal imperatives of Reformation Protestantism an emphasis on providential outpourings of the Holy Spirit. Extemporaneous preaching gave listeners a sense of deep personal conviction about their need for salvation by Jesus Christ and fostered introspection and commitment to a new standard of personal morality. Revival theology stressed that religious conversion was not only intellectual assent to correct Christian doctrine but had to be a "new birth" experienced in the heart. Revivalists also taught that receiving assurance of salvation was a normal expectation in the Christian life.
While the Evangelical Revival united evangelicals across various denominations around shared beliefs, it also led to division in existing churches between those who supported the revivals and those who did not. Opponents accused the revivals of fostering disorder and fanaticism within the churches by enabling uneducated, itinerant preachers and encouraging religious enthusiasm. In England, evangelical Anglicans would grow into an important constituency within the Church of England, and Methodism would develop out of the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley. In the American colonies, the Awakening caused the Congregational and Presbyterian churches to split, while strengthening both the Methodist and Baptist denominations. It had little immediate impact on most Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Protestants,[2] but later gave rise to a schism among Quakers that persists to this day.
Evangelical preachers "sought to include every person in conversion, regardless of gender, race, and status".[3] Throughout the North American colonies, especially in the South, the revival movement increased the number of African slaves and free blacks who were exposed to (and subsequently converted to) Christianity.[4] It also inspired the founding of new missionary societies, such as the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792.[5]
Continental Europe[edit]
Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom sees the Great Awakening as part of a "great international Protestant upheaval" that also created Pietism in the Lutheran and Reformed churches of continental Europe.[6] Pietism emphasized heartfelt religious faith in reaction to an overly intellectual Protestant scholasticism perceived as spiritually dry. Significantly, the Pietists placed less emphasis on traditional doctrinal divisions between Protestant churches, focusing rather on religious experience and affections.[7]
Pietism prepared Europe for revival, and it usually occurred in areas where pietism was strong. The most important leader of the Awakening in central Europe was Nicolaus Zinzendorf, a Saxon noble who studied under Pietist leader August Hermann Francke at Halle University.[8] In 1722, Zinzendorf invited members of the Moravian Church to live and worship on his estates, establishing a community at Herrnhut. The Moravians came to Herrnhut as refugees, but under Zinzendorf's guidance, the group enjoyed a religious revival. Soon, the community became a refuge for other Protestants as well, including German Lutherans, Reformed Christians, and Anabaptists. The church began to grow, and Moravian societies would be established in England, where they would help foster the Evangelical Revival as well.[9]
Social effects[edit]
Women[edit]
The Awakening played a major role in the lives of women, though they were rarely allowed to preach or take leadership roles.[86] A deep sense of religious enthusiasm encouraged women, especially to analyze their feelings, share them with other women, and write about them. They became more independent in their decisions, as in the choice of a husband.[87] This introspection led many women to keep diaries or write memoirs. The autobiography of Hannah Heaton (1721–1794), a farm wife of North Haven, Connecticut, tells of her experiences in the Great Awakening, her encounters with Satan, her intellectual and spiritual development, and daily life on the farm.[88]
Phillis Wheatley was the first published black female poet, and she was converted to Christianity as a child after she was brought to America. Her beliefs were overt in her works; she describes the journey of being taken from a Pagan land to be exposed to Christianity in the colonies in a poem entitled "On Being Brought from Africa to America."[89] Wheatley became so influenced by the revivals and especially George Whitefield that she dedicated a poem to him after his death in which she referred to him as an "Impartial Saviour".[90] Sarah Osborn adds another layer to the role of women during the Awakening. She was a Rhode Island schoolteacher, and her writings offer a glimpse into the spiritual and cultural upheaval of the time period, including a 1743 memoir, various diaries and letters, and her anonymously published The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity (1753).[91]
African Americans[edit]
The First Great Awakening led to changes in Americans' understanding of God, themselves, the world around them, and religion. In the southern Tidewater and Low Country, northern Baptist and Methodist preachers converted both white and black people. Some were enslaved at their time of conversion, while others were free. Caucasians began to welcome dark-skinned individuals into their churches, taking their religious experiences seriously while also admitting them to active roles in congregations as exhorters, deacons, and even preachers, although the last was a rarity.[92]
The message of spiritual equality appealed to many enslaved people, and, as African religious traditions continued to decline in North America, black people accepted Christianity in large numbers for the first time.[93]
Evangelical leaders in the southern colonies had to deal with the issue of slavery more frequently than those in the North. Still, many leaders of the revivals proclaimed that slaveholders should educate enslaved people so that they could become literate and be able to read and study the Bible. Many Africans were finally provided with some sort of education.[94]
George Whitefield's sermons reiterated an egalitarian message but only translated into spiritual equality for Africans in the colonies, who mostly remained enslaved. Whitefield was known to criticize slaveholders who treated enslaved people cruelly and those who did not educate them, but he had no intention to abolish slavery. He lobbied to have slavery reinstated in Georgia and proceeded to become a slaveholder himself.[95] Whitefield shared a common belief held among evangelicals that, after conversion, slaves would be granted true equality in heaven. Despite his stance on slavery, Whitefield became influential among many Africans.[96]
Samuel Davies was a Presbyterian minister who later became the fourth president of Princeton University.[97] He was noted for preaching to African enslaved people who converted to Christianity in unusually large numbers, and he is credited with the first sustained proselytization of enslaved people in Virginia.[98] 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. "I am a poor slave, brought into a strange country, where I never expect to enjoy my liberty. While I lived in my own country, I knew nothing of that Jesus I have heard you speak so much about. I lived quite careless what will become of me when I die; but I now see such a life will never do, and I come to you, Sir, that you may tell me some good things, concerning Jesus Christ, and my Duty to GOD, for I am resolved not to live any more as I have done."[99]
Davies became accustomed to hearing such excitement from many black people who were exposed to the revivals. He believed that black people could attain knowledge equal to that of white people if given an adequate education, and he promoted the importance of allowing slaveholders to permit enslaved people to become literate so that they could become more familiar with the instructions of the Bible.[100]
The emotional worship of the revivals appealed to many Africans, and African leaders started to emerge from the revivals in substantial numbers soon after they converted. These figures paved the way for the establishment of the first black congregations and churches in the American colonies.[101] Before the American Revolution, the first black Baptist churches were founded in the South in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia; two black Baptist churches were founded in Petersburg, Virginia.[102]
Scholarly interpretation[edit]
The idea of a "great awakening" has been contested by historian Jon Butler as vague and exaggerated. He suggested that historians abandon the term Great Awakening because the 18th-century revivals were only regional events that occurred in only half of the American colonies, and their effects on American religion and society were minimal.[103] Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Alan Heimert sees a major impact, but most historians think it had only a minor impact.[104]