The Enlightenment brought logic and reason into the way colonists thought about the natural world. However, religion remained a critical aspect of each colonist’s daily life. The biggest issue the church faced at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the fact that many settlers lived outside the reach of organized churches.
Isolated from their seaboard peers, the pioneers were often too far away to attend churches and religious gatherings. They, too, were caught up in the pursuit of wealth, defending their land holdings, and exploiting labor. It was a common opinion in the eastern settlements that the westerners had become as "savage" as their Native American neighbors. Churches still used traditional means of gaining new members, including building new churches and teaching children the articles and liturgies, but ministers were inching toward the discovery of a new mechanism—the revival—that would recruit not just an individual or a family but hundreds of people at once. The stage was set for a series of religious revivals, which would collectively become known as The Great Awakening.
As American thinking grew more scientific and settlers grew more prosperous, the colonists began to desire a more relaxed way of life. As a result, the dependency on strict religious tenets eased. Harsh Calvinist beliefs began to fall by the wayside as preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield began taking over the pulpits.
Jonathan Edwards, besides being a superb preacher in his own right, became his generation’s greatest theorist of revivalism. His most famous speech, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield, Connecticut in 1741, is arguably the most famous American sermon of all time. But the model Edwards perfected—the traditional New England revival in which a pastor awakens a spiritual outpouring in his own congregation—did not become the American standard.
That honor fell to George Whitefield’s technique of “field preaching” that gathered hundreds, even thousands of people into a public space and subjected them to highly emotional, dramatic sermons. When performed by someone with Whitefield’s charisma and theatrical flair, dozens of people at a time were excited to experience conversion. Even logic-ruled Benjamin Franklin could not resist emptying his pockets into the offering plates at a Whitefield sermon.
Whitefield’s practice fit even better with conditions south of New England, where religious pluralism was greater, ecclesiastical organizations often weaker, and a greater percentage of the population were not church members. Reaching all thirteen colonies in 1739-41 and returning to many of them a few years later, Whitefield captivated audiences, who followed his movements through newspaper articles and journals that he wittingly published in order to advertise his journeys and their accomplishments. This was the first time a religious leader had done such a thing.
In the short run, the Great Awakening accelerated church membership, dropping the age of conversion and temporarily increasing the percentage of converts who were male. It also increased competitiveness among American churches for the new converts brought in by preachers like Edwards and Whitefield. In the long run, it had the effect of recruiting people who would likely have joined churches anyway, though more gradually. It also represented the first concerted effort to convert African Americans and native peoples living within the boundaries of colonial settlement, which brought about a new emphasis on missionary work by these people. Revivalists’ appeal for all to take Christ crossed ecclesiastical lines and reinforced the evangelical position that salvation could not be obtained without conversion.
The Awakening also spurred enormous controversy. Many ministers were influenced by the Enlightenment to distrust spiritual claims based solely on personal revelation. Thus, they doubted the authenticity of conversions, shuddered at traveling preachers luring people out of their own congregations, and disliked the self-righteousness displayed by converts who claimed to be able to determine whether their ministers and other church members enjoyed grace or not. As a result, many Congregationalists and Presbyterians split off from their churches and joined the Baptists, Methodists, and other moderate sects. The need for ministers of these new and emergent sects spurred the growth of colleges and universities throughout the colonies.
Some traditionalists rejected the teachings of Whitefield, Edwards, and other preachers of the Great Awakening as too radical, which divided their churches into two distinct groups. The traditionalists became known as “Old Lights” in the Congregational Churches and “Old Sides” in the Presbyterian Churches. Their counterparts who were accepting of the new doctrines became known as “New Lights” and “New Sides.” Both sides agreed on the need for living a life that glorified God, but the New Lights and New Sides took the view that salvation was man’s responsibility, rather than God’s. The New Light influence during this time brought about the foundation of several colleges, including Dartmouth, Brown, Rutgers, and Princeton.
The Great Awakening was the first true “American” event. Even as those with differing beliefs developed new religious organizations, the shared experiences of the revivals encouraged settlers to begin identifying themselves as Americans. The Awakening established revivalism as a major recruitment tool for many American Protestants.
The Awakening and the Enlightenment interacted in complex ways. The Enlightenment had its greatest impact among colonial elites, who in years to come would write a national constitution that balanced power among agencies of the government, protected religious liberty, and prevented the establishment of a national church. Most colonists, however, continued to subscribe to Protestant views of grace and salvation.
Both the Enlightenment and the Awakening fostered religious liberty, albeit in different ways. The Enlightenment underlined an individual’s natural rights to choose one’s faith. The Awakening contributed by setting dissenting churches against establishments and trumpeting the right of dissenters to worship as they pleased without state interference. During the Great Awakening, a coalition of enlightened liberals and evangelicals would write religious liberty into the law of the land.