The First Great Awakening

Revivalists sought to awaken what they saw as spiritually complacent congregations. They taught that sinners were totally dependent on God’s grace for salvation and that true religion was felt in the heart, not merely reasoned in the head — a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Preachers delivered emotionally charged, often extemporaneous sermons. The Tennents founded a seminary, the “Log College,” to train ministers in this style; its successor institution became Princeton University. George Whitefield, an ordained Anglican, made several trips across the Atlantic after 1739 and preached in every colony, often outdoors to crowds too large for any church — so famous that he was perhaps the only public figure whose name nearly all colonists knew. Itinerant preachers carried the revival from the Middle Colonies to New England and, by the 1740s and 1750s, to the South.

Conservative and moderate clergy criticized the revivals’ emotionalism and the disorder that followed them. They especially objected to itinerants who criticized local ministers, and to white women and African Americans who stepped beyond their subordinate status to exhort religious gatherings. Congregations and whole denominations split.

Baptists and, later, Methodists grew rapidly; by the eve of the Revolution, evangelical converts made up about a tenth of Southern churchgoers. The revivals encouraged ordinary people to judge religious authority for themselves, and dissenting churches lobbied to end the official, tax-supported status of the Congregational church in New England and the Anglican church in the South.

Historians debate how far the Awakening prepared the ground for the Revolution. Its challenge to established authority and its intercolonial reach suggest connections, but the links are indirect. Its most lasting legacy may be the evangelical style — revivals, conversion, voluntary churches — that became central to American religion.