The Great
Awakening
Jonathan Edwards
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Click here
to read Edwards's sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
George Whitefield
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Read about The Great Awakening in the context of the Puritans' original
mission
at The
Faith
& Freedom web site
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Nowhere did the
line between social and
economic change on the one hand
and religion on the other crumble as swiftly than in the experiential
and ideological upheaval called the Great Awakening. The Great
Awakening was more than a religious movement -- it was a period of
sustained religious enthusiasm that must be observed the in the context
of a profound cultural crisis that had been building for several
generations.
At its core, observed on historian, the Great
Awakening was a search
for new sources of authority, new principles of action, new foundations
of hope among people who had come to believe that the colonial churches
no
longer met the spiritual needs of the people. The Awakeners
preached that the old sources of authority were inadequate in solving
the problems of the day, too encrusted with tradition, hypocrisy, and
intellectualism to
bring hope and faith to a generation that was witnessing the rapid
transformation of the world of their fathers. A new wellspring of
authority was needed, and that source, the evangelists preached, was
the individual himself. Like the "inner light" of the Quakers,
which dwelled in every man and woman, the "new light" within the
awakened would enable them to achieve grace through the conversion
experience. When enough people were "born again,"
as the evangelists phrased it, a new sense of community would be
forged,
a new brotherhood of man achieved, and the city on the hill
restored. The Awakening, in its way, was a "revitalization
movement," similar to those that would occur periodically in Indian
societies, as attempts were made
to reject corrosive new ways and return to the traditions of the past.
The Awakening had its first stirring in the
colonies in the 1720s in
New Jersey and Pennsylvania and then in the 1730s in Jonathan Edwards's
church in Northampton, Mass. But it was not until 1739 with the
arrival of George
Whitefield
from England that it struck with full force. Whitefield was a
master
of open-air preaching and had trekked across the English countryside
for
several years preaching. He began a barnstorming trip along the
coast
of North America in 1739 that evoked a mass response of a sort never
witnessed
before in the colonies. Thousands turned out to see him, and with
each
success his fame grew. Particularly in the cities, which were the
crucibles
of social change, his effect was extraordinary.
Some of Whitefield's appeal can be attributed
to his genius for
dramatic performances and his perfection of the art of advanced
publicity. He was able to simplify theological doctrine and focus
the attention of masses
of people on one facet of religious life -- the conversion
experience. He also directly assaulted traditional sources of
authority and called upon people to become the instruments of their own
salvation, which attacked the upper-class notion that the simple folk
had no minds of their own. [Contrast this with Anne Hutchinson's
experiences in the 17th century.]
When Whitefield began his American tour in
1739, the social dynamite
buried deep in his message was not yet clearly perceived by the
elite. They only saw and welcomed the thousands of conversions
that followed his preaching and the subsequent flocking of the
converted to churches, which had been languishing for a
generation. Whitefield magnified the importance of religion in
almost everyone who heard him, but his popularity soon waned among the
gentry because he was followed by a series of itinerant Awakeners whose
social radicalism was far less muted than Whitefield's. Roaming
preachers like Gilbert
Tennant infused their preaching with a radical
egalitarianism that left many of the gentry supporters of Whitefield
aghast. Tennant attacked the established clergy an unregenerate
and encouraged people to forsake their own ministers. James
Davenport, another itinerant preacher, told huge crowds that
they
should drink rat poison rather than listen to corrupt clergy.
Even more dangerous, Davenport exhorted ordinary people to resist those
among the rich and powerful who exploited and deceived them. Only
when this happened, he said, would the Lamb of God return to earth.
Following sermons such as these, respectable
people were convinced
that revivalism had gotten out of hand and that social control of the
lowest layers of society was crumbling. Revivalism had started
out as a return to religion among backsliding Christians but now was
turning into a social experience that profoundly threatened the
established culture, which stressed order, discipline, and
submissiveness from laboring people. Their fears
were heightened by examples of preachers encouraging followers to burn
items
from genteel culture such as books, fans, red-heeled shoes, gloves, and
other luxurious apparel.
By 1742, New England and the middle colonies
was being criss-crossed by
a procession of itinerant gospelers and harranguers, all of them
labeled social incendiaries by the established clergy. Of all the
signs of social leveling that conservatives saw springing from
evangelicalism, the one they feared the most was the practice of public
lay exhorting. Within the established churches there was no place
for lay persons to compete with the qualified ministry in preaching,
nor was there any room for self-initiated associations of people
meeting outside the bounds of regularly-constituted religious or
political meetings. To do so would be to relocate authority
collectively in the mass of common people. Lay exhorting
shattered the monopoly of the established clergy on religious
discourse, putting all people on the same plane in the area of
religion, and gave new importance to the oral culture of the common
people, whose spontaneous outpourings contrasted sharply with the
literary culture of the gentry. It established among them the
notion that their destinies and their souls were in their own
hands instead of the hands of the elite clergy, thus turning the world
upside
down for those who had traditionally been consigned to the bottom of
society
and allowed them to assume roles customarily reserved for educated,
adult
men. In lay exhorting, class lines were crossed and sexual and
racial
roles were defied, as ordinary men, women, and even children, servants,
and
slaves rose to testify before the crowd about their own conversion and
exhort
others to a state of religious ecstasy by preaching the Lord's truth.
The Great Awakening thus represented far more
than a religious
earthquake. Through it ordinary people haltingly enunciated a
distinctive popular ideology that challenged inherited cultural
norms. To some extent, as many
historians have noted, the
Awakening represented a groundswell of individualism, a kind of
postdemocratic spirit that anticipated the Revolution.
This was
true, especially among the middling people of colonial society for whom
the revival years involved an expansion of political consciousness and
a new feeling of self-importance, as they partook of spontaneous
meetings, assumed new power in ecclesiastical affairs, and were
encouraged by the evangelists
to adopt a skeptical attitude toward dogma and authority. But
among
the lowest members of society, including impoverished city dwellers,
servants,
slaves, and those struggling to gain a foothold on economic security,
the
Awakening experience implied not a movement forward toward democratic
bourgeois
revolution but backwards to an earlier age when it was conceive that
individuals
acted not for themselves, always striving to get ahead at the expense
of
their neighbors, but pulled together in a community. Hence the
dispossessed
harkened to the anti-entrepreneurial, communalistic tone permeating the
exhortations of the radical evangelicals.
The radical evangelicals were not preaching
class revolt or the end to
wealth-producing commerce. What they urged was a "thorough
reconsideration of the Christian ethic as it had come to be understood
in the America of the 1730s." Nor were those who harkened to the
Awakeners inspired
to foment social revolution. The seeds of overt political
radicalism
were still too small to bear mature fruit. But the multitudes who
were
moved by the revivalists in the North of the 1740s and in the South
during
the 1750s began to believe that it was justifiable in some
circumstances
to take matters into their own hands. That is why Jonathan
Edwards
was seen by the commercial elite and their clerical allies as "the
grand
leveler of Christian history," even though sedition and leveling were
not
what he had in mind.
The Great Awakening produced the greatest flow
of religious energy
since the Puritan movement of a century before, but the outpouring was
immediately connected with the tensions in colonial society that had
grown from generations of social and economic change.
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