THE GREAT AWAKENING
APUSH - Spiconardi
THE GREAT AWAKENING
A religious revival movement that spread throughout the colonies
from the 1720s-1740s
ORIGINS
• Enlightenment rationalism
• Enlightenment corrupted the Anglican Church
• But Enlightenment did affect emphasis on the individual
• Lack of individual engagement in church services
• Rationalization of predestination
• “Unchurched” colonists living in the frontiers
• Pioneers had lapsed into sinful lives due to influence of “heathen” Indians
• Growing focus on commercialism as opposed to religion
JONATHAN EDWARDS
• Massachusetts
Congregationalist minister
• Pioneered an intensely
emotional style of
preaching
• Noted for his famous
sermon, “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God.”
• Scared people by
describing the
torments that awaited
sinners in the afterlife
Our people do
not so much
need to have
their heads
stored [with
new knowledge]
as to have their
hearts touched.
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN
ANGRY GOD
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards
with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you
would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless
gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best
contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to
uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a
falling rock…
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, and is dreadfully provoked;
his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing
else, but to be cast into the fire…
GEORGE WHITEFIELD
• English minister who came to America after
not receiving a pulpit in England
• His style and sermons made him a celebrity,
albeit a controversial one
• REFER TO DOCUMENTS
What does
this print by
John Collet
inform you
about the
Great
Awakening?
IMPACT
• Growth of new Christian churches
• Presbyterian, Baptists, and
Methodists
• Encourages breakdown in respect
for authority
• United the colonists through a
common experience
• Rejection of intellectual approach to
faith
• Comes to define American
Protestantism
CONCLUSION
The Great Awakening subsided by 1750…The Awakening, like its counterpart the
Enlightenment , influenced the American Revolution and set in motion powerful currents that
still flow in American life. It implanted in American culture the evangelical crusade and the
emotional appeal of revivalism. The movement weakened the status of the old-fashioned
clergy and state-supported churches, encouraged believers to exercise their own judgment, and
thereby weakened habits of deference generally…the Awakening and the Enlightenment,
between the urgings of the spirit and logic of reason, led by different roads to similar ends.
Both movements emphasized the power and right of individual decision making, and both
aroused millennial hopes that America would become the promised land in which people
might attain the perfection of piety or reason, if not both.
-- From America: A Narrative History by George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi
Analyze the events of the early 18th century and
explain to what extent this statement was accurate