Volume 2, Chapter 29, The Great Awakening
Into this relaxing atmosphere came a great reaction, which has become known in rather
loaded terms as the Great Awakening.
Since the Great Awakening was certainly a people's movement, it has been dubbed as necessarily
a progressive force by Marxist and neo-Marxist historians, but it was nothing of the sort.
The Great Awakening was a profoundly reactionary counterblow to the emergence of a liberal
and more rational and cosmopolitan religious atmosphere.
It set itself determinedly against all that was enlightened and constituted an attempt
to return to the pure Calvinism of the previous century.
This is particularly true of the form taken by the Great Awakening in New England, where
the religious revival had its most eminent leader.
The founder of the Great Awakening in New England was the Reverend Jonathan Edwards,
minister of the important inland town of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Born in Connecticut, young Edwards, who came from a long line of Puritan ministers on both
Both his father's side and his mother's was graduated from and taught at Yale, the center
of Puritan orthodoxy. He then took up his post at Northampton in 1727. Edwards was horrified
to find Northampton happily filled with a most unpuritan addiction to mirth and jollity,
including the frequenting of taverns.
Edwards began to thunder at these modern corruptions and moved on to rail at the rising menace
of Arminianism and its pappest view that salvation was a function of a man's free will and his
consequent good works.
What was happening to the good old creed of their fathers, of the depravity of man, of
the predestination of the elect, of reliance on faith and not on reason.
Was the pervasive Calvinist fear of hellfire and damnation to be replaced by the modern
namby-pamby view that God is love?
To the sinners, and who is not a sinner, Edwards warned, the God that holds you over the pit
of Hell, much as anyone holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors
you and is dreadfully provoked, his wrath towards you burns like fire. It is possible
to pinpoint the time when the rapidly growing influence of this oratory reached a crisis
and accelerated and burst into flame. December 1734. Religious concerns swept the people
of Northampton. Other discourse than of the things of religion would scarcely be tolerated
in any company. In an orgy of proclaiming their repentance, over 300 people of Northampton
soon professed conversion to the true faith. Children formed prayer groups to repent the
monstrousness of their sins, and Edward's own uncle committed suicide in remorse. The
intense religious excitement faded in Northampton by the spring, but the precedent had been
set and the revivals of the Great Awakening spread to other towns in the colonies. Apart
Apart from the content of the creed, the mechanism and strategy of the revival movement was profoundly
reactionary.
In contrast to the older Calvinism, it functioned by whipping up the emotions of the masses rather
than by serving or convincing their intellect.
With emotional frenzy and hysteria suspending sober and rational conviction, the leaders
of the Revivals soon reached the point of making this frenzy the acid test of a person's
true Christianity. A man, even a minister of Christ, was still a sinner unless he too
had been born again and experienced conversion by emotional hysteria.
Meanwhile, the Great Awakening had begun independently among Calvinists in New Jersey. It was launched
Published there by the Rev. Theodor J. Frelinghuysen of the Dutch Reformed Church. Frelinghuysen
arrived in New Jersey from Holland in 1720 and immediately began an evangelistic revivalism,
attacking the sobriety and intellectuality of Dutch Reformed orthodoxy. The new revivalism
The Catholicism soon split the Dutch churches into pro and anti-Frelinghuysen factions, which were battling furiously by 1723.
In three more years, Frelinghuysen's converts were increasing and spreading beyond New Jersey.
A particularly important convert was the Reverend Gilbert Tennant, a young English-speaking Presbyterian,
who took up the task of spreading the revival among Presbyterians in New Jersey.
Tennant and his ministerial brothers soon controlled the New Brunswick Presbytery of Central New
Jersey, and emotional revivalism spread throughout rural New Jersey and to Newark and on to Long
Island and Pennsylvania.
The revival encountered bitter opposition among the Presbyterian ministry, angry at
The Various Trends of the Revival Movement were soon fused into a great awakening by
the first of the continental tours of the famous English evangelical preacher, the Reverend
George Whitefield.
Young Whitefield was one of the first members of the small Holy Club at Oxford University,
which stressed evangelical preaching to the masses and constituted the first of the Methodists.
Graduated from Oxford in 1736, Whitefield was ordained an Anglican priest and soon won
fame as by far the most popular and crowd-pleasing evangelist of the day. It was soon to become
It is some evident, however, that Whitefield was not a true Methodist, for while he and
John Wesley used similar evangelical methods, Wesley was at once a liberal believer in free
will and in more rigorous observation of the Anglican rite, while Whitefield cared little
for ritual and a great deal for Calvinist orthodoxy.
Whitefield and his followers soon broke off to form the Calvinistic Methodists.
Whitefield's important tour of America took place in 1739 and 1740 as he crisscrossed
the colonies, drawing enormous crowds, arousing great enthusiasm, and cementing the whole
revival movement.
Harvard students were roused and converted on mouse, and even the cynical Benjamin Franklin
was greatly impressed. In contrast, the brilliant young liberal Jonathan Mayhew, studying for
the ministry at Harvard, wrote bitterly of Whitefield's largely subliterate following.
As for himself, I heard him, Whitefield, once, and it was as low, confused, puerile, conceited,
Whitefield polarized the religious structure of the colonies by thundering his attacks
against the dominant clergy and their parishioners.
All too many historians have been misled into treating this movement as a great lower-class
protest against the wealthy and the dominant classes.
An attack and a protest it was, but of what kind? Not any sort of egalitarian or Marxist
rallying cry, but a profoundly reactionary and demagogic appeal to the masses against
the liberalism, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism and sobriety of the religion of the day. In
In short, this was a cry of mystical religious fundamentalism against the trappings of civilization
that had begun to emerge in America. Whitefield denounced Christians and their ministers for
not having experienced their Christianity in an emotional frenzy. He deplored colleges
such as Harvard for being seedbeds of liberalism. He vilified the luxuries of the rich. That
Whitefield's triumphal tour introduced him to his admiring allies Tennent and Edwards.
Tennent was moved to level a bitter attack on the unconverted ministry, and to the applause
As of Whitefield and other evangelists joined in trying to weed out of Christianity all
those ministers who did not support the revival movement.
Whitefield's preaching in Northampton brought a dramatic new upsurge of revivalism to New
England.
During early 1741, Edwards and other ministers became itinerant evangelists throughout New
New England, arousing demonstrations of frenzy and huge crowds. Edwards warned of sinners
in the hands of an angry god, and the Reverend James Davenport from Long Island denounced
the bulk of the Massachusetts ministry as unconverted and leading their people blindfold
to hell. These bitter attacks of course provoked a counter movement in the churches. The reaction
as well as the attacks spread through various denominations. As we have seen, Whitefield
paid no attention to the Anglican creed and made his appeal to all Calvinists. The polarization
in Massachusetts and New England especially highlights the nature of the Great Awakening
itself. For the opposition to the Great Awakening consisted of two disparate groups. The conservatives
The Conservatives, like the Reverend Mr. Wigglesworth, aghast at the emotionalism and anti-intellectualism
of the revival, and the Liberals, headed by the Reverend Charles Chauncey of the First
Church of Boston, who opposed virtually anything the awakening stood for.
The criticisms of the two groups unsurprisingly differed.
Wigglesworth centered his attack on the disorderly individuality of the revival movement, whereas
Chauncey, in his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, 1743, concentrated
on its fundamentalist emotionalism. By the very nature of polarization, it was inevitable
that the most thoroughgoing group of critics, the liberals, should take the lead in attacking
in the Great Awakening. Epitomizing the liberal, rationalist attack on the awakening in the
colonies was this statement by Filarities in the South Carolina Gazette. As none but
rational creatures are capable of religion, so there is no true religion but in the use
of reason. If we do not make it our own by understanding the reasons for it, we offer
The Congregational Ministry soon split into the New Lights, who joined in the Awakening,
and the Old Lights, who opposed it.
The majority of the Massachusetts Ministerial Convention condemned the revival for its errors
and disorders, while in Connecticut the General Convocation of the established ministry induced
The Revivalist government used the legislature to prohibit itinerant preaching. Throughout New England, Revivalists were splitting from their congregations and forming separate churches to become known generally as Separatist.
Emotions, particularly frenzied emotions, are notoriously fleeting, and the Old Light counterattack
was soon able to crush the New Light movement, even in Northampton, where not a single new
member joined the Church from 1744 to 1748. Whitefield's second tour of New England in
1744 was hardly triumphal. Although he attracted thousands, he was generally rebuffed and denounced
by ministerial associations and by Yale as well as Harvard. Ironically, Jonathan Edwards
was even ousted from his home parish at Northampton in 1750 when he abandoned the liberal practice
of his predecessors in administering the sacraments to unregenerate members. This was far too
In New Jersey, the battle between the Evangelicals or New Side Party and the Old Side Party came
to a head at the meeting of the Presbyterian Synod of 1741. The Old Siders expelled the
New Side for their itinerant activities, their bitter attacks, and their emotional stress
Press on Hellfire. After vain attempts to win their return, the New Lights set up their
own New York Synod in 1745 at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. The developments after the Presbyterian
split, however, were the opposite of the congregational experience. The New Siders attracted the young
The New Ciders founded the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, in 1746, as the first
The first college of The Awakening, and this college became the main training ground of
Presbyterianism in America. And the College of New Jersey symbolized its new position
as the fortress of Calvinist orthodoxy, taking the honors from an old light Yale, when it
named Edwards its president shortly before his death. The immigrant Ulster Scots, formerly
The conservatives, however, stood no chance there, for they called for remaining under the authority of the Classes of Amsterdam, as well as for services in the Dutch language,
Where as evangelicals wanted independence for the American Church and preaching in English.
Eventually, in 1772, the split was healed on evangelical terms.
As the New Side became dominant among young Presbyterians and finally conquered the Church,
the new Presbyterian ministers to the Ulster Scott naturally brought the Great Awakening
to the South.
Early in the awakening, a revival movement had begun among lay Presbyterians in Hanover
County in the Virginia Piedmont. Led by Samuel Morris and inspired by Whitefield's sermons,
they persisted as a new-side center, nourished by visiting new-side ministers. When the Reverend
John Roane in 1745 bitterly denounced the established church and its ministers, Governor
Professor William Gooch, with equal bitterness, condemned such false teachers who, without
order or license, lead the innocent and ignorant people into all kinds of delusion, including
railing against our religious establishment. In response, the Virginia grand jury indicted
Rome for vilifying the established religion, as well as to laymen for speaking ill of the
of the Establishment, and for allowing Rome to speak in an unlicensed House of Worship.
The three were eventually convicted and forced to pay small fines in court cost. The empattled
old-siders of the Philadelphia Synod welcomed Gooch's intervention against their enemies.
The new-siders won permission to continue operations from Gooch, but two years later
The governor and council issued a proclamation to prohibit all itinerant preachers.
At this point, the new lights of Virginia were saved by the arrival of the young Reverend
Samuel Davies as the first settled Presbyterian minister in the region.
The relatively moderate Davies was able to win a license to preach from Virginia's governor
and general court.
The Reverend Mr. Davies actually won the hearts of the Virginia authorities with his fervent
warmongering during the French and Indian War.
Davies found it easy to substitute the enemy for the devil in his sermons.
Thus, ye that love your country, enlist, for honor will follow you in life or death in
such a course.
Ye that love your religion, enlist, for your religion is in danger.
Can Protestant Christianity expect quarters from heathen savages and French pappists?
Sure, in such an alliance the powers of hell make a third party. Ye that love your friends
and relations enlist, lest ye see them enslaved and butchered before your eyes.
Shortly after this bit of elegant demagoguery, the Reverend Mr. Davies achieved the pinnacle
The Baptist, however, labored under no such handicaps, and a fateful shift in the Baptist
creed enabled them to fill this gap after mid-century.
The Baptist had begun in the colonies in mid-17th century Rhode Island. There they emerged not
not only as a liberal but as a radically individualist group. Their creed was individualism, not
only in religion but also in political philosophy, to the point of anarchism. The religious individualism
of the Rhode Island Baptists, however, was not frenzied Calvinist orthodoxy but a liberal
and Rationalistic Creed that tended toward Arminianism and Deism.
It is not surprising that, with such a heroically radical creed, the Baptists did not exactly
flourish in the colonies.
They managed to grow moderately, however, and to establish centers in Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, and New York early in the 18th century, in addition to their
The New and Expanding Colony of Religious Liberty, Pennsylvania, The First General Organization of American Baptists, 1707
Within Baptism, The General, that is, those subscribing to the individualist, rationalist
and Armenian creed, and the independently founded Particular Baptist, that is, Orthodox
Calvinist except for their opposition to infant baptism and differences over church polity.
The American Baptist had always been Arminian, but the church had remained small. Under the
impact of the Calvinist outburst of the Great Awakening, the Philadelphia Association, in
a fateful turning point in Baptist history, abandoned the great tradition of the American
Church and swung over to rigid Calvinism in 1742. The Baptist had not yet gone so far
to join the awakening, but this drastic switch to Calvinism paved the way for their eventual
surrender to the New Movement. It soon became clear that the old lights were winning the
struggle for the capture of the Puritan Churches of New England. Many of the separated new
lights, harassed as unrecognized churches, then took the opportunity to declare themselves
The Baptist were now not only Calvinist, but New Light Separatist to boot. By 1764, the
Baptist were strong enough to found Rhode Island College, later Brown University, though
it began on liberal principles, with various Protestant sects sharing in control of the
college. By the early 1760s, the Baptist were ready to meet the Ulster Scots, and the Presbyterians
Southward. To meet the demands of the masses, they allowed virtually anyone, even illiterates,
to dub themselves ministers and to take up evangelical preaching. By 1760, the separate
Baptist, led by the former New Light Connecticut Congregationalist Schubal Stearns, had taken
The San Diego Baptist Church was opened up headquarters at Sandy Creek in Guilford County in western North Carolina.
From there the Sandy Creek Association spread the separate Baptist gospel into Virginia and South Carolina.
They soon far overivided the sober and educated older or regular Baptist churches in these provinces.
Moreover, with their enthusiasm and uneducated ministry, the separate Baptists were able
after 1760 to grow far more rapidly in the South than were the Presbyterians. Indeed,
they grew extremely rapidly, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. In the years
1768 to 1770, the period of the Great Persecution, the angered Virginia government arrested and
I imprisoned over 30 separate Baptist ministers as disturbers of the peace, but the persecutions
only serve to multiply rather than restrict the number of Baptist adherents.
Despite Whitefield's original connection with the Church of England, the Anglican Church
remained a stronghold of opposition to the Great Awakivid.
Indeed, many old-siders, when defeated in their own communions, turned to the Anglican
Methodism began as an evangelical tendency within the Church of England. As such, it
first took root in the colonies in 1763 in Dinwiddie County in southern Virginia, with
the New Light preaching of the Reverend Devereux Jarrett. Cooperating with Methodist lay preachers
emerging in New York and Maryland, Methodism grew rapidly in the vicinity of Jarrett's
Of all the major church groups, the Quakers were the least affected by the Great Awakening.
The Quakers were already fiatistic and individualistic and thus were not affected by this major attraction
of the Awakening.
Two, the Quaker creed was highly optimistic and liberal and at the opposite pole from
the rigid, predestinarian, Calvinist theology.
The consequences of dynamic new movements are not always the same as their original objectives.
For one thing, although the Great Awakening was by no means an economic class struggle
in intent, its permanent consequence was to bring about a sharp religious split throughout
the colonies along income and educational class lines.
The upper classes would remain sober and rationalistic, whether as Quakers, Deists, Liberal Congregationalists,
Conservative Congregationalists or Anglicans.
The lower classes would adopt emotional and evangelistic creeds as New Side Presbyterians,
Methodists or Baptists.
Previously in America, there had been few, if any, religious splits along class lines.
The Great Awakening, while reactionary in nature, also had progressive and libertarian
consequences.
The Awakening split had fragmented the Protestant churches.
In doing so, the New Lights found themselves at war with the established church in the
the various colonies, with the Puritans in New England and the Anglicans in the South.
At war with the establishment, the New Lides were willy-nilly pushed by the logic of their
situation into libertarian positions, and they contributed greatly to the weakening
of the establishment in New England and the South. Liberalism in Massachusetts and indifference
in the South had already weakened these establishments internally, and the fissures opened by The
Awakening greatly furthered this task.
Moreover, the ensuing multiplication of sects made it far more difficult for any one sect
to establish itself in place of the old creed.
In short, The Awakening permanently made matters far more difficult for any sect to become
or Remain and Established Religion. The most severe struggle against establishment
came in Connecticut, where control by the established quasi-presbyterian church was
far more rigorous than in the more liberal and more truly congregationalist Massachusetts.
The Connecticut old lights, in control of the established church, were far more willing
In 1742, the Connecticut Assembly outlawed itinerant as well as unlicensed preaching and
took away tax support from new light ministers. Unlicensed or itinerant ministers were to
be fined or expelled from the colony. The following year, toleration of dissent as established
in the Act of 1708 was repealed and religious dissidents were required to obtain special
permission from the assembly. When the New Lights tried to set up their own training school,
the Connecticut Legislature passed a law prohibiting any school, college or seminary from being
created without the license of the assembly. For unlicensed preaching at Milford and New
New Haven, the New Light Presbyterian Reverend Samuel Finley, afterwards President of the
College of New Jersey, was arrested and expelled from the colony. Furthermore, suspected New
Lights were ejected from public office, and elected representatives from New Light towns
such as Canterbury, Plainfield, and Lyme in eastern Connecticut were refused their seats
in the Assembly.
The old-siders were by no means alone in persecuting the Great Awakening.
This was particularly true among the liberals.
In 1743, Governor Jonathan Law of Connecticut wrote the powerful, dissenting deputies of
Great Britain, defending the persecutions in view of the troublesomeness of the Great
Awakening movement.
The dissenting deputies replied in a friendly but firm reminder of libertarian principles.
They too deplored the delusions and disruptions of the Great Awakening. But great and manifest
as those mischiefs are, we cannot be of the opinion that the magistrate has anything to
do in this matter, but to see that the public peace is preserved, that there are no riots
or tumults, and that his subjects are not allowed to assault, hurt, maim, wound, plunder, or
kill one another in these religious contests. Laws against differing religious opinions,
on the other hand, are unfortunate, as Connecticut should well have known from the experience
of the establishment in England. The deputies proceeded to criticize sharply the Connecticut
Law of 1742 and its severe penalties for dissent from Connecticut's own establishment.
The deputies concluded eloquently, In short, whether we consider this matter in a religious
or political light, it seems every way most advisable to let these men alone, how wildly
erroneous soever both you and we may take their sentiments to be.
So great was the prestige of the dissenting deputies in New England that, before long,
Connecticut had adopted the bulk of their advice.
The campaign of persecution did not stamp out the New Lights, rather it led to a libertarian
opposition among the New Light Ministry.
The New Light Association of Ministers of Western Fairfield County denounced the use
and the use of the civil power to impose ecclesiastical discipline. They also called for more genuine
congregationalism in the Connecticut Church. The separatist Newlights only came to adopt
a libertarian anti-establishment posture by the logic of their political position as a
dissenting minority, after they had been clearly defeated in their attempt to control the congregational
Only after several years did the logic of the situation push more and more separatists
into opposing an establishment.
The first clear-cut separatist opposition to the principle of establishment in Connecticut
came in 1747 in the town of Canterbury in eastern Connecticut, the site of the colony's
most violent struggle between the two congregational factions.
And from Yale, all of the rebellious New Life students were expelled, and the senior class's
attempt to reprint John Locke's letter on toleration was suppressed by the college.
Finally, the students won their academic religious freedom by threatening to appeal the situation
to the Crown.
At last, the reaction against the persecutions in Connecticut triumphed, and in 1750, the
persecutory laws were repealed.
The Puritan establishment continued on, however, along with taxation of the separatist for
salaries for their tax-supported enemies.
Separate Congregationalists and Baptists continued to be jailed for refusal to pay taxes to
the establishment.
Controls continued between local Congregationalist and the quasi-Presbyterian Church authorities.
And this uncongregational type of control was weakened further in such cases as Wallingford.
There older lights separated from the majority new lights of the local church and were freed
from the obligation to pay taxes for support of a new light minister. This breakdown of
of Central Control helped to weaken the establishment still further. The separate Baptist in particular
inherited a Baptist tradition of religious liberty and separation of church and state
that helped propel them to anti-establishment positions. However, coming from a different
theological wing of their church, they were more influenced by the logic of their struggle
and Their Minority Position. The separate Baptist showed no sign of favoring wider separation
of church and state than equality for their own sect, for example, of advocating repeal
of compulsory church attendance laws, prohibition on work or travel on Sunday, outlawing of
blasphemy or banning of Catholics or deists from public office.
In more liberal Massachusetts, the major fight for religious liberty among new lights was
conducted by the separate Baptist. In contrast to the far more tyrannical Connecticut, there
were no laws against the freedom of the separate Baptist as such. But by the law of 1753, separate
Baptists were in effect deprived of the exemption from taxes for the establishment, an exemption
This flagrant discrimination against the hated new-lights roused the latter to enlarge the libertarian situation into which they had been placed.
Freedom and Independence with all other religious groups in Massachusetts.
A movement grew in Massachusetts to imprison the rash signers of this petition, but wiser
heads prevailed.
It was not until 1770 that the worst features of this discrimination against the separate
Baptist were repealed.
The law served to liberalize the separate Baptist politically.
One of their main leaders in Massachusetts, the Reverend Isaac Backus of Middleboro in
Plymouth County, drew heavily on John Locke's letter on toleration in working out a theory
of religious freedom.
Here and there in the colonies, New Light ministers, repelled by struggles against persecution,
began to adopt a broader libertarian outlook, at least in rhetoric. Thus, the Reverend Mr. Davies referred in 1751 to men's natural right to follow their judgment, including the questioning and even rejection of authority. Davies, however, confined the application of this radical principle to religious matters. On the other hand, the Reverend Aaron Burr
President of Princeton during the 1750s went on to widen the principle, becoming known as a
great friend to liberty, both civil and religious, burr, abhorred tyranny in the state, as well as in the church.