Definition
The Great Awakening was a series of Protestant revivals that spread through the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Preachers told listeners they were sinners who needed a personal conversion, a new birth they would feel in their own hearts. George Whitefield, an English minister, toured from Georgia to New England and drew crowds of thousands, while Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, Massachusetts, preached the terror of hell in sermons such as Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in 1741. Itinerant preachers such as Gilbert Tennent warned that many ministers had never been converted themselves, and the revival split congregations between New Lights, who supported it, and Old Lights, who opposed it.
Why it matters on the AP exam
The Great Awakening taught ordinary colonists to challenge authority, since believers learned to judge their ministers and to choose their own churches. It weakened established churches, helped Baptist and other dissenting congregations grow, and gave colonists a shared experience across colony lines through traveling preachers and printed sermons. Questions ask students to compare it with the Enlightenment, which appealed to reason instead of emotion but also taught colonists to question authority, and with the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, and to explain its effects on religion and politics. Thomas Paine later used the Bible against kings in Common Sense, and historians often link the habit of questioning authority to colonial resistance.
In the sources
“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”
Connections
- Benjamin Franklin: he printed Whitefield's sermons and journals and sold them across the colonies
- Common Sense: Paine used the Bible against kings, building on the habit of questioning authority
- John Locke: his Enlightenment ideas, like the revival, taught colonists to question authority