Colonial America: The Great Awakening | 5-Minute Videos | PragerU

Before the American Revolution in 1776, there was another revolution decades earlier. This one wasn’t about freedom vs. tyranny, but about something else entirely, and it changed the face of the developing nation almost as profoundly as the War of Independence did. Thomas Kidd, author of American History Volumes 1 and 2, tells the story.

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Transcript:

Colonial America: The Great Awakening

Presented by Thomas Kidd

The first American revolution didn’t happen in 1776. It happened nearly fifty years earlier.

And it wasn’t about politics; it was about religion.

We know it as the Great Awakening, and it changed America almost as profoundly as the War of Independence did.

By the 1730s, the American colonies had achieved a permanency — that is, they were now a fixture on the global landscape. With more and more European settlers arriving every year, the future looked bright. To some, and to one clergyman in particular, the new prosperity came at a steep price.

That clergyman was Jonathan Edwards, the fiery and brilliant pastor of Northampton Congregationalist Church in Massachusetts. Edwards was disturbed by what he saw as his parishioners’ complacency. It wasn’t enough for them to show up in church on Sunday, he asserted.

They needed a personal relationship with God, something that could not be mediated by clergy. God’s grace alone, not religious ritual, would save them from the fires of Hell. “…If we improve our lives to any other purpose, than as a journey toward heaven, all our labour will be lost.”

Edwards’s message struck a chord. Within a year, almost every resident of his frontier town professed to be, as the New Testament puts it, “born again.”

It was the beginning of evangelical Christianity in America.

If Edwards kindled a new religious fervor, it was George Whitefield who fanned it into a bonfire. Whitefield was born in England in 1714. Although he studied philosophy and theology at Oxford University, he never took a permanent pulpit. Instead, he traveled from town to town as a preacher, first in England and then in the colonies.

A naturally gifted orator and an incredibly hard worker, Whitefield attracted mind-boggling crowds — 20,000 in Boston (at a time when it had a population of 17,000) and 25,000 in Philadelphia, to cite just two examples. People would travel long distances, often walking or riding for days to hear him speak.

All this attention made him America’s first true celebrity.

It also connected Whitefield to an ambitious printer and future celebrity himself, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin saw an opportunity for a major windfall in publishing Whitefield’s works, while Whitefield saw an opportunity to get his message out to even more Americans.

Both were right. Franklin made a fortune, and Whitefield made more converts. The Great Awakening was fundamentally a spiritual event. But it also had profound political consequences. The quintessentially American idea of religious liberty took shape during this period. Before the Great Awakening, American religious practices were tightly regulated by the government. Pastors generally did not have the freedom to start new churches or preach wherever they wished. But the Awakening’s popularity and its focus on the individual’s relationship with God overwhelmed these restrictions.

It also stirred the first inklings of revolution. If you could rebel against the established church, you could rebel against the Crown.

But the Great Awakening did even more than that. It shaped America’s pre-Revolutionary culture. Not only did it increase biblical literacy throughout the colonies, it also rooted America in a Judeo-Christian worldview. For example, Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the two least doctrinaire of the Founders, wanted the seal of the United States to feature Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt under the motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

When noted patriot Patrick Henry exhorted his Virginia colleagues to embrace the cause of revolution in his 1775 “Liberty or Death” oration, he used Biblical language to do it. He declared that “An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us.” His audience, reared during the Great Awakening, understood that kind of talk.

So did Jefferson, who used religious language to capture the sacred spirit of liberty in the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal… [and are] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

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