How the Great Awakening Affected Society: Education, Missions, Humanitarianism, Women,
& the Gospel
By Rod Dreher
Rawlings School of Divinity
CLED 720: Biblical & Theological Foundations of Education
Genevieve Hamer
July 1, 2022
The “Great Awakening,” the Christian evangelical revival that spread across colonial
America in the mid-1700s, had a number of important effects on American life, society, and
culture. The revival, for example, continued the Puritans’ emphasis on education, propelled
missions and humanitarianism, led to women’s increased participation in the church, and
spread the Christian Gospel to many people.
Revivalists, like the Puritans, encouraged literacy and education in order to promote Bible
reading, prepare ministers and missionaries, and train church laymen. To encourage Bible
study, revivalist ministers often provided basic reading education to their congregations,
especially in rural areas with few schools. The church Sunday School movement, initially a
humanitarian endeavor, also began to grow. Since education was Bible-centered, and Bible
study required reading, colonists equated Bible knowledge with general knowledge. Several
evangelical colleges were founded in the mid-1700s for such Bible-based and missionary
educational purposes including Princeton, Brown, Rutgers/Queens, and Dartmouth
universities. As such, New England in the late 1700s had one of the highest literacy rates in the
world at that time.
The Awakening and Christianity further stimulated missions and humanitarianism which
emerged in colonial America in the early 1800s. Colonists who took up such humane causes
often ministered to and helped the poor, sick, needy, and uneducated. Humanitarian causes,
says H. Richard Niebuhr in his The Kingdom of God in America, “became the rallying point of
ardent souls who had been kindled by the gospel of the kingdom of Christ.”
During and after the revival, as churches and denominations grew, colonial women became
more active in church and religious affairs. Previously, women did not directly influence church
life as men did. They did not conduct formal meetings or hold church offices. Such restrictions
reflected secular life in which women could not vote and lost property rights upon marriage.
However, by the 1700s, women made up the majority of church membership in all
denominations. While men continued to exercise religious authority, women’s increased
religious activities during this period led to greater participation of women in American
churches. Some churches supported greater women’s activism, giving women more direct
church roles, the ability to vote on congregational matters, and management of philanthropic
groups.
Though the Great Awakening did not resolve the issue of slavery, it brought the Christian
Gospel more directly to all classes and groups of people, including the Native Americans and
African-Americans, many of whom were slaves. Some revivalists became missionaries to the
Native Americans or evangelized among slaves. The revival’s emphasis on personal religious
experience resonated with many blacks and even resembled African religions. Faith gave hope
to slaves, some of whom found spiritual liberation even while in slavery. Churches by and for
blacks gradually appeared. The first continuing black church was Silver Bluff Church in Aiken
County, South Carolina, where African-American preacher David George established a
congregation in 1773 or 1774. When revivalist preacher George Whitefield died, Phillis
Wheatley, an emancipated slave and America’s first published black woman poet, wrote her
first published poem as a memorial to Whitefield. It addressed the hope that Whitefield
brought to African-Americans. An excerpt from Wheatley’s 1770 poem, On the Death of… Mr.
George Whitefield, expresses Whitefield’s teaching about Christ: …
