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Willy Ben Chen
1.pptxThe Great Awakening
During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the ranks of several Protestant denominations: Congregationalists (Puritans), Anglicans (Church of England) and Presbyterians.
They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a vigorous emotional religiosity.
The Great Awakening
The first revivals began in New England in the 1730’s and then spread through the 1740’s and 1750’s to all over the other Thirteen Colonies.
Preachers became key figures in encouraging individuals to find a personal relationship with God.
The Great Awakening
These preachers caused a split between those who followed the evangelical message—the New Lights—and those who rejected it—the Old Lights.
The elite ministers in British America were firmly Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos.
The Great Awakening
They abandoned traditional sermons in favor of outside meetings where they could whip up the congregation into an emotional frenzy that might reveal evidence of saving grace.
Many religious leaders were suspicious of the enthusiasm and message of these revivals, but colonists flocked to the spectacle.
The Great Awakening
In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led explosion of evangelical fervor.
Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, used powerful imagery to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding damnation by personal conversion.
The Great Awakening
The most famous preacher was George Whitefield, who preached that the only type of faith that pleased God was heartfelt.
Whitefield had been an actor with a dramatic style of preaching and a simple message. Thundering against sin and for Jesus Christ, Whitefield invited everyone to be born again.
Image: By Hay, David; - Wesleyan Conference Office; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:George_Whitefield_likeness.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3144910
The Great Awakening
Leaders like Edwards and Whitefield encouraged individuals to question the world around them.
This idea reformed religion in America and created a language of individualism that promised to change everything else.
The Great Awakening provided a language of individualism, reinforced in print culture, which reappeared in the call for independence.
Works Cited
“Colonial Society,” American Yawp
http://www.americanyawp.com/text/04-colonial-society/
“The Great Awakening,” Khan Academy
