The Great Awakening, the most important event in American religion
during the eighteenth century, was a series of emotional religious
revivals that spread across the American colonies in the late 1730s and
1740s. The mid-eighteenth century witnessed a wave of evangelism without
precedent in America, England, Scotland, and Germany. In England, this
wave would culminate in the Methodist revivals led by John Wesley
(1703-1791), while in Germany, the revivals would give rise to a
movement known as Pietism. In colonial America, in contrast to England
and Germany, the revivals tended to cross class lines and to take place
in urban as well as rural areas.
In New England, in particular, the Great Awakening represented a
reaction against the growing formality and the dampening of religious
fervor in the Congregational churches. Elsewhere in the colonies, the
Anglican church, indeed no single church, was able to satisfy the
population's spiritual and emotional needs.
The Great Awakening carried profound consequences for the future. It was
the first experience shared by large numbers of people throughout all
the American colonies, and therefore contributed to the growth of a
common American identity. It also produced a deepened consciousness of
sin within the existing social order and aroused a faith that Americans
stood within reach of Christ's second coming.
Even though the
Great Awakening contributed to a splintering of American Protestantism,
as supporters of the revivalists known as New Lights and their
opponents, known as Old Lights, established separate congregations, it
also sent a powerful spiritual message: that God works directly through
the people, rather than through churches or other public institutions.
Citation: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3591
