The History of Great Awakenings in American Religious History
The Great Awakenings are among the most significant series of events in American religious and cultural history. These waves of intense religious revival swept across the colonial and early national United States, transforming individual lives, reshaping denominations, and catalyzing social reform movements with consequences that extend to the present day. Understanding them is essential for understanding American culture, politics, and religious life.
The First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s)
The First Great Awakening emerged in the context of what many contemporaries perceived as spiritual coldness and formalism in colonial churches. Its central figures included Jonathan Edwards, the brilliant Calvinist theologian whose 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" exemplified the era's emotional preaching; George Whitefield, the itinerant Methodist preacher whose dramatic outdoor revivals attracted crowds of thousands; and Gilbert Tennent, who challenged ministerial complacency in his controversial sermon "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry." The awakening crossed denominational boundaries, creating a sense of shared evangelical identity that contributed to the emergence of an intercolonial American consciousness. Explore our comprehensive coverage in our American religious history library.
The Second Great Awakening (c.1790-1840)
The Second Great Awakening began in New England and spread throughout the expanding American frontier, producing a more democratized, emotionally expressive religious culture. Camp meetings in Kentucky and Tennessee — the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 drew an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people — featured phenomena including speaking in tongues, crying, shaking, and falling that scandalized established ministers and exhilarated participants. The awakening drove explosive growth in Methodist and Baptist denominations, transformed American Protestantism's center of gravity from Calvinist to Arminian theology (emphasizing human free will in salvation), and provided the religious energy and institutional networks that powered the abolitionist, temperance, and women's rights movements.
Charles Finney and the Third Awakening
Charles Grandison Finney, often called the "father of modern revivalism," systematized the revival as a human-organized enterprise rather than a sovereign divine visitation — a theological and practical shift of enormous importance. His "new measures" including the anxious bench, protracted meetings, and permitting women to pray publicly scandalized traditionalists but proved spectacularly effective. Finney's approach inaugurated what historians call the Third Great Awakening in the mid-to-late 19th century, which combined evangelical revivalism with progressive social reform — producing the Social Gospel movement that addressed industrial poverty, labor conditions, and urban squalor through a framework of Christian obligation.
Legacy and Contemporary Relevance
The Great Awakenings established patterns in American religious life that remain visible today: the centrality of personal conversion experience, the expectation that religion produces social transformation, the entrepreneurial organization of religious movements, and the tendency for religious energy to find political expression. The conservative evangelicalism of late 20th-century political life traces direct lineage through these revival movements. The progressive religious left draws on the Social Gospel tradition they also produced. Understanding the Great Awakenings is understanding a crucial dimension of American self-understanding. Contact our research team for more resources.