The First Great Awakening

In the 1730s and 1740s a series of revivals ran through the British colonies in America and through parts of Britain, and they had a common emphasis: that a person must undergo a conscious experience of conversion, a new birth, and that formal membership, correct belief and respectable conduct were not substitutes for it.

Jonathan Edwards, a Congregational minister at Northampton in Massachusetts, provided the movement's most careful theology and its most influential narrative account of a local awakening. George Whitefield, an Anglican preacher of extraordinary carrying power, provided its reach, touring the colonies repeatedly and preaching in fields to crowds that no meeting house could hold. In Britain the same impulse produced the Methodist movement under the Wesleys, within the established church at first.

The revivals divided the churches they touched. Those who welcomed them, the New Lights, valued the evident work of grace; those who opposed them, the Old Lights, objected to the emotional displays, to itinerants preaching in other ministers' parishes without invitation, and to the practice of judging a settled minister unconverted. Congregations split, new ones were founded, and a college was established to train ministers the existing colleges would not.

The Great Awakening is one of the fixed points of American religious history, and historians have spent forty years arguing about whether it existed as a single event. The sceptical case, put most sharply in the 1980s, is that the phrase names a set of scattered and locally distinct revivals, some of them decades apart, that were assembled into one movement afterwards by nineteenth-century writers who needed a founding moment for American evangelicalism.

The evidence for the sceptical position is real. Revivals occurred at different times in different colonies, some communities were untouched, contemporaries did not use the term, and the sense of a general awakening is much stronger in retrospective writing than in the sources of the 1740s. The defenders answer that Whitefield's tours, the printed accounts that circulated between colonies, and the shared vocabulary of the new birth constituted a genuine intercolonial phenomenon that participants recognised.

The dispute matters beyond the label. A great deal has been built on the Awakening, including the claim that it prepared Americans for revolution by teaching them to challenge established authority. If the event is partly a later construction, those inferences need re-examining.

What is not disputed is that a style of religion organised around personal conversion and itinerant preaching established itself in this period and has been a permanent feature of American religious life since.