The Great Awakening was the only event before the American Revolution that swept all 13 colonies simultaneously. This episode covers the revival preaching of George Whitefield, the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and the democratic spirit the movement unleashed. Students will understand how a religious awakening helped create the cultural unity and sense of individual conscience that fed the revolutionary generation.

Key Takeaways

• George Whitefield preached in all 13 colonies in 1740, and it's estimated that one in four Americans heard him speak at some point.

• Benjamin Franklin calculated that Whitefield's outdoor voice could carry to more than 30,000 listeners, and Franklin became a friend despite being a skeptic himself.

• The Great Awakening was the only shared colonial experience before the Revolution, creating a sense of common identity across otherwise very different colonies.

• Whitefield's message carried an implicit equality: any person, regardless of race or background, could be saved. Black Americans listened to his preaching and found in it a God who showed no partiality to race.

• Whitefield owned slaves and advocated for slavery's legalization in Georgia, a contradiction that his own message of spiritual equality would eventually be used against the institution he supported.

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FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What was the Great Awakening and when did it happen?

The Great Awakening was a wave of Protestant religious revival that swept through the American colonies roughly between the 1730s and 1770s. It was characterized by emotional preaching, large outdoor gatherings, personal conversion experiences, and a democratic approach to faith that stressed individual relationship with God over church hierarchy. It's considered the first shared cultural experience across all 13 colonies.

Q2: Who was George Whitefield and why was he so significant?

George Whitefield was a British evangelical preacher who made seven trips to the American colonies and preached to enormous crowds throughout all 13 of them. A former acting student, he used theatrical delivery and common language to reach audiences of thousands without notes or amplification. He's estimated to have preached to more people than any individual in the 18th century. His message that anyone could be saved regardless of background had a democratizing effect on colonial religious and eventually political culture.

Q3: How did the Great Awakening influence the American Revolution?

The revival encouraged individual conscience over institutional authority, whether in churches or in politics. A generation raised on Whitefield's preaching, which stressed personal judgment and challenged established hierarchies, proved receptive to revolutionary arguments about political self-determination. Historians often point to the Great Awakening as a cultural precondition for the Revolution, creating a colonial population that had already practiced the habit of questioning authority on the most important questions they knew.

Q4: What was Jonathan Edwards' role in the Great Awakening?

Jonathan Edwards was the leading theologian of the American Great Awakening. A Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, he combined rigorous Calvinist theology with vivid, emotional preaching. His 1741 sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' became the most famous text of the revival. Unlike Whitefield, who traveled constantly, Edwards worked primarily in New England, but his writings circulated throughout the colonies and influenced the theological direction of the movement.

Q5: Why did the Great Awakening lead to church splits and new denominations?

The revival's emphasis on personal conversion experience created divisions between those who had been 'born again' and those who hadn't, cutting across existing denominational boundaries. Congregations split between 'New Side' members who embraced the revival and 'Old Side' members who were skeptical of its emotional intensity and theological claims. These splits produced new denominations and increased religious competition, which paradoxically strengthened religion's overall presence in colonial life by creating more options.

The One Thing That Crossed All 13 Colonies

Before the American Revolution, there was only one event that spanned all 13 American colonies. It was not a war, nor a political movement. No great discovery or invention was involved. Between the 1730s and 1770s, what swept colonial America was a spiritual revival. The Puritans who had built a city upon a hill had planted the seeds of this movement decades earlier.

What came to be known as the Great Awakening. In America, the Great Awakening's most outstanding theologian was the Christian apologist and preacher Jonathan Edwards. His eloquent writing captured the splendor of God and humankind's profound need for a savior. In his reflection on humility, he wrote: "A truly humble man is sensible of his natural distance from God, of his dependence on him, of the insufficiency of his own power and wisdom, and that it is by God's power that he is upheld and provided for, and that he needs God's wisdom to lead and guide him, and his might to enable him to do what he ought to do for him." The colonies the Awakening swept across had been settled across more than a century, beginning with the story we tell in our episode on Jamestown and the birth of English America.

George Whitefield: The Most Famous Man in Colonial America

The greatest preacher of the Great Awakening was George Whitefield, along with John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists. Whitefield was part of the Great Awakening back in England. He arrived in America in 1738 and began preaching revival. In 1740, he preached in all 13 colonies. It is estimated that one out of every four Americans listened to his sermons. Until George Washington emerged as general and president, the preacher George Whitefield was the most celebrated man in colonial America. A once-aspiring actor, Whitefield had a powerful voice. His sermons reportedly could reach many thousands of outdoor listeners. Benjamin Franklin once remarked on the preacher's capacity for speaking outdoors: "I computed that he might well be heard by more than 30,000. This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to 25,000 people in the fields, and to the ancient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted."

Whitefield delivered his sermons with no formal notes and in common speech that everyone could comprehend. No matter one's background, any listener could experience the conversion Whitefield preached. The appeal was democratic, the impact electric. Churches up and down the 13 colonies swelled in membership. George Whitefield died in Newburyport, Massachusetts on September 30th, 1770. He had preached twice that day, the second time just shortly before he passed. He is buried there beneath the First Presbyterian Church. Religious liberty had already been tested in colonies like Pennsylvania under William Penn.

The Awakening's Long Reach into American Life

The Great Awakening set the stage for the character of Protestantism in America, and its spirit of dissent would eventually fuel the road to revolution. Black Americans like Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, were widely evangelized through the revival. The Great Awakening gave birth to American evangelicalism, whose members believe that salvation is not so much mediated by an institutional church, but chiefly through the Bible and preaching on it.

In the decades following the Great Awakening, Baptists dramatically grew in number. Since the early 19th century, Baptists have constituted the largest of all Protestant groups in the United States. Abraham Lincoln, who led America through her greatest crisis, was raised by a Baptist father. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the civil rights movement, was a Baptist. So was Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and the Moral Majority, a national alliance of American evangelicals that helped expand the conservative movement in the late 1970s and early '80s.

A Second Wave and the Revivalists Who Followed

Since the time of Whitefield and Edwards, revivals have been a regular part of the American landscape. A second Great Awakening took place between 1790 and 1840. Charles Finney was the most acclaimed preacher of the second wave of revival. Among his greatest achievements was his ability to reach audiences on the frontier and in America's major cities. Finney was first and foremost an evangelist, but he was also an effective advocate for abolition, care for the handicapped, and universal co-education. Dwight Moody was America's most prevalent preacher of the second half of the 19th century. In 1886, he founded the Moody Bible Institute, a leading evangelical Bible college.

Among the 20th century's more colorful preachers was Billy Sunday, who had been a professional baseball player known for his athleticism and exceptional speed. As a revivalist, Sunday moved energetically across the stage, sometimes sliding on his knees as if stealing a base. The most famous and influential of the 20th century's revivalists was Billy Graham. He was a friend and personal pastor to celebrities like Louis Zamperini and Johnny Cash. Graham counseled presidents from Truman through Obama. In 2005, Gallup took a poll. According to its findings, one out of every six American adults had heard Billy Graham preach. It was a remarkable continuation of the precedent set by George Whitefield two and a half centuries earlier. Watch all episodes of HISTORY250 to follow the full American story. The democratic spirit the revival unleashed would feed directly into the revolutionary generation, as we trace in our episode on the Stamp Act crisis.