Great Awakening, The

A detailed Summary of Great Awakening, The

The Great Awakening was the first real event in America that did not include any other country. The Great Awakening was a revivalism of religion and the purpose of going to church. Many ministers in congregations of different religions caused the people of their churches to fall to their knees to obey God in fear of hell. These events led to the realization of the need to go to church in many of the colonists in the 1730s and 1740s.

The Great Awakening began among Dutch settlers around New Brunswick in Northern New Jersey, in the 1720s. The growth of towns, the increase of commerce, and the expansion of overseas trading caused new distractions from church.

It spread in the 1730s to the Congregationalists under Jonathan Edwards in the Connecticut valley, and to Presbyterian revivalists (who had come directly from Northern Ireland to eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New York). These Scottish-Irish carried the movement with them, wherever they settled, mostly along the frontier from Maine to Georgia (Garraty 95).

In America, the Awakening signaled the coming of an encircling evangelicalism, which is the belief that the core of religious occurrence was the "new birth," inspired by the preaching of the Word. It invigorated

One of the earliest of the revivalists to make a stir was Theodorus J. Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey preacher of the Dutch Reformed Church. He preached up and down the Raritan valley and other areas in that region. He preached a doctrine of hellfire and damnation. He worked his congregations into a fever of excitement. More conventional preachers of the Reformed Church objected to Frelinghuysen's methods and by 1726 he had already brought about a split in the Reformed Church. (Wright 91-92).

Therefore let everyone that is out of Christ now awake and fly from the wrath to come!..."(Garraty 96-97).

The Great Awakening raged on for a few years, but by 1744 willingness for revival preaching had faded. Ministers who had doubted the good of such religious excesses now openly opposed a renewal of evangelistic activity. Harvard College, which had welcomed Whitefield in 1740, passed a verdict four years later in opposition to him and his conduct. Jonathan Edwards found himself under attack and in such disfavor at his alma mater, Yale, that he then attended commencement at Princeton. Churches broke apart. Tennent's group in the Presbyterian Church, known as New Lights, broke away from the group known as the Old side, which opposed revivalism. The Congregationalists in New England suffered losses. Many conventional people, disgusted with the unrestrained excesses of the evangelists, went over to the Anglican Communion where respectable people might worship with decency, untroubled by a noisy preacher shouting that they were damned. The Great Awakening, like other Protestant upheavals, was a disrupting influence. Not only did the Great Awakening bring about religious confusion, but it had subtle repercussions on politics in the next decades (Wright 94-95).

Jonathan Edwards was the other person of great influence on the Great Awakening. Edwards preached a return to the religion of his fathers. He opposed the new latitudinarianism and emphasized afresh the sovereignty of God, the depravity of man, and the necessity of experiencing a sense of election if one would be sure of his salvation. In short, Edwards set out to rehabilitate Calvinism and to deny the validity of Arminianism, which had been making inroads in more than one New England congregation. Jonathan also knew how to magnify the terrors of hell. Although his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of a

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Category: History