The First Great Awakening

Overview: A Transatlantic Revival

The First Great Awakening was a transatlantic evangelical revival movement that swept through the British American colonies during the 1730s and 1740s. It represented a fundamental break with the formal, rationalistic religion that had come to dominate colonial Protestantism and introduced an intense, emotionally charged spirituality that would permanently reshape American religious life.

Unlike later revivals, the First Great Awakening occurred in a colonial world where most settlers still understood themselves as British subjects — yet the revival inadvertently helped create an "American" identity by providing the colonies' first genuine intercolonial cultural event. When the English revivalist George Whitefield preached up and down the Eastern Seaboard in 1739–1740, he became arguably the first truly transcolonial public figure in American history.

The revival challenged established religious authority, democratized access to spiritual experience, and prepared the philosophical and cultural ground from which American revolutionary thought would later grow. Historians such as Alan Heimert famously argued that the Awakening was the direct spiritual precursor of the American Revolution — a claim that remains influential and debated.

Origins and Early Stirrings (1720s–1730s)

The First Great Awakening did not spring into existence fully formed. Its roots lay in decades of gradual spiritual concern among Reformed and Presbyterian ministers who worried that colonial Protestantism had become too formal, too hereditary, and too disconnected from genuine conversion experience.

The Dutch Reformed minister Theodore Frelinghuysen is often credited with sparking the earliest revival fires. Beginning around 1726, he preached with unusual urgency in the Raritan Valley of New Jersey, emphasizing the necessity of a personal, experiential conversion — not merely intellectual assent to doctrine. His methods scandalized older ministers but attracted fervent followers, especially among younger congregants.

Among the Presbyterians, the Tennent family — particularly William Tennent Sr. and his son Gilbert Tennent — established what critics mockingly called the "Log College" in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, training a new generation of ministers committed to revivalist, experiential preaching. Gilbert Tennent's 1740 sermon "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry" created a firestorm by accusing settled ministers who lacked genuine conversion of being spiritual frauds — a provocative charge that accelerated the revival's spread and deepened existing conflicts within colonial Presbyterianism.

In New England, the stage was set by Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts. Beginning in 1734, Edwards reported an extraordinary religious awakening in his congregation. His written account, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic and helped convince English revivalists like George Whitefield that America was fertile ground for evangelical renewal.

George Whitefield and the Awakening's Peak (1739–1741)

The First Great Awakening truly became a mass movement with the arrival of George Whitefield in America in 1739. The 24-year-old English Methodist preacher had already generated controversy and enthusiasm in Britain with his open-air preaching and theatrical delivery. In America, his impact was extraordinary.

Whitefield made seven tours of the American colonies between 1738 and his death in 1770. His first extended tour (1739–1740) was the most consequential. He preached to crowds in Georgia, South Carolina, the mid-Atlantic colonies, and New England, drawing gatherings that contemporary accounts placed in the tens of thousands. In Philadelphia alone, Benjamin Franklin — a skeptic who nonetheless respected Whitefield — estimated 30,000 attended one outdoor sermon, though modern historians consider this an exaggeration. What is undeniable is the scale: Whitefield drew the largest public gatherings seen in the colonies to that point.

Whitefield's preaching style was unlike anything most colonists had encountered. He had trained with the actor David Garrick (or was compared to him by contemporaries) and used dramatic pauses, mimicry, voice modulation, and direct emotional appeals. He memorized his sermons rather than reading them from a text, which itself was revolutionary. He preached outdoors, welcoming crowds that crossed denominational lines. He preached to enslaved people and free Black colonists. He attacked ministerial formalism and spiritual complacency with blistering directness.

The revival he catalyzed was not merely about religion — it was about authority. In challenging settled clergy and established church structures, Whitefield and other New Light revivalists implicitly empowered ordinary believers to judge for themselves whether their minister was truly converted, whether their church was truly alive spiritually. This democratizing impulse had profound political implications that would become apparent three decades later.

Jonathan Edwards and the Theology of Revival

While Whitefield provided the spectacle and scale of the Awakening, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) provided its most sophisticated theological articulation. Edwards was the grandson of the Puritan minister Solomon Stoddard and had inherited a deep Calvinist tradition that emphasized the absolute sovereignty of God and the radical dependence of humanity on divine grace.

Edwards's 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", delivered in Enfield, Connecticut, is the most famous text of the First Great Awakening and one of the most famous sermons in American history. Its vivid imagery of sinners dangling like spiders over the pit of hell, held only by the slender thread of God's patience, reportedly caused congregants to cry out and grip the pews in spiritual terror — a reaction Edwards himself found somewhat alarming but interpreted as genuine evidence of the Spirit's work.

But Edwards was not merely a hell-fire preacher. He was a rigorous philosopher who grappled seriously with questions of religious psychology: How do you distinguish genuine religious experience from mere enthusiasm or self-deception? In works like A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), he developed a sophisticated analysis of what genuine spiritual transformation looks like — arguing that true religion involves not merely emotional excitement but lasting transformation of the will, of love, of moral behavior.

This question — the authenticity of revival experiences — would dog American revivalism ever after. Edwards essentially invented the discipline of evangelical psychology, asking how the Spirit works and how we know it when we see it.

Old Lights vs. New Lights: The Great Controversy

The First Great Awakening was not universally welcomed. It split colonial Protestantism into two broad camps: the New Lights, who embraced the revivals as genuine works of God, and the Old Lights, who viewed the emotional excesses and challenge to established clergy as dangerous enthusiasm at best and fraud at worst.

Among the most articulate critics was Charles Chauncy, pastor of First Church Boston, whose 1743 work Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England attacked the revivals methodically. Chauncy catalogued the physical and emotional excesses of revival meetings — the crying, fainting, screaming, trances — and argued these were not evidence of divine work but of manipulated human passions. He defended the existing order of settled, educated clergy and argued that religion should engage the rational mind, not merely the emotions.

These conflicts had lasting consequences. The Presbyterian Church split in 1741 into Old Side and New Side factions that would not reunite until 1758. Congregationalist churches divided into "New Light" and "Old Light" congregations. Separatist movements emerged — groups who felt existing churches were too spiritually dead and formed new congregations outside establishment structures. These separatists often became Baptists, contributing to a massive growth in Baptist membership in the colonies.

Legacy and Historical Significance

The First Great Awakening's legacy is difficult to overstate. Its immediate effects included a dramatic increase in church membership across denominations, the founding of new colleges (Princeton was founded in 1746 partly to train New Side Presbyterian ministers; Dartmouth was founded partly to train ministers to preach to Native Americans), and a new emphasis on missions to enslaved people and indigenous communities.

Its long-term effects were more profound. The revival challenged colonial deference to established authority — whether the authority of settled clergy or, by extension, of established government. It created an intercolonial identity by giving colonists from Georgia to New Hampshire a shared spiritual experience. It established the principle that individual religious experience — the believer's direct encounter with God — mattered more than ecclesiastical hierarchy or inherited denominational identity.

These are also, not coincidentally, the building blocks of American revolutionary thought: the primacy of individual conscience, the legitimacy of challenging corrupt authority, the idea of an intercolonial American community. Historians debate how direct the causal link is, but few deny that the spiritual culture shaped by the First Great Awakening helped make American independence imaginable.

The First Great Awakening also established patterns of American religious life that persist today: the revival meeting, the emotionally direct style of evangelical preaching, the emphasis on personal conversion, the willingness of ordinary believers to judge and challenge religious authorities, and the expectation that religion should be felt as well as believed.