First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s): Revival in the Colonies

The First Great Awakening was a series of Protestant religious revivals that swept Britain’s North American colonies from the mid-1730s to the mid-1740s. Led by preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and the touring English evangelist George Whitefield, it drew huge crowds, divided churches and encouraged a personal, emotional faith centred on the experience of conversion. It is often seen as the starting point of American evangelical Christianity.

Background

By the early 18th century many colonial ministers worried that religion had grown cold. The Puritan churches of New England, descended from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had become established and comfortable, and many members had joined without any dramatic spiritual experience. In the Middle Colonies, mixed populations of Dutch, German, Scottish and English settlers lacked enough ministers.

Similar movements were stirring elsewhere. German Pietism, the Methodist revival led by John and Charles Wesley in England, and revivals in Wales and Scotland all stressed a “new birth” through faith. Some colonial revivals came earlier, such as those under the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen in New Jersey in the 1720s and Solomon Stoddard in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Jonathan Edwards and Northampton

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Stoddard’s grandson and successor as minister of Northampton, saw a sudden revival in his congregation in 1734–1735. Many townspeople, especially the young, reported intense experiences of sin and grace, and similar awakenings spread to towns along the Connecticut River valley.

Edwards described these events in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, published in London in 1737 and widely read in Britain and America. On 8 July 1741 he preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, then part of Connecticut. Its vivid imagery of human dependence on God’s mercy made it the most famous sermon of the era. Edwards was also the revival’s most important thinker, defending genuine religious emotion while warning against counterfeit enthusiasm. At the Yale commencement of September 1741 he defended the revival in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, arguing that unusual bodily effects neither proved nor disproved a true work of God. In Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742) he answered critics, and in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) he set out how true conversion could be told apart from passing excitement.

George Whitefield’s tours

The revival became a continental movement through George Whitefield (1714–1770), a young Anglican priest linked to the Wesleys’ Methodist movement. After a first visit to Georgia in 1738, he returned in late 1739 and spent more than a year travelling from Georgia to New England, preaching outdoors and in any church that would admit him.

Whitefield was a powerful speaker with a trained, theatrical voice. His farewell sermon on Boston Common in October 1740 was reported to have drawn around 20,000 people or more, though such crowd figures are estimates. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, who did not share his theology, heard him preach, became his friend and printer, and calculated that his voice could reach about 30,000 listeners in the open air. Newspapers and printed sermons spread his fame ahead of him, making him arguably colonial America’s first celebrity.

Whitefield’s methods were new. He preached without notes, often several times a day, and advertised his meetings in advance through the press. Not every churchman welcomed him: in 1740 Alexander Garden, the Bishop of London’s commissary in Charleston, suspended him for irregular conduct, a ruling Whitefield ignored. His willingness to preach to anyone, of any denomination, helped make the revival a shared event across colonies that otherwise had little in common.

Other preachers and radicals

Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey trained at his father William Tennent’s “Log College”, became a leading revivalist in the Middle Colonies. His 1740 sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry attacked clergy he believed had never been truly converted, which deeply offended many ministers.

Some revivalists went much further. James Davenport, an itinerant preacher, denounced local ministers by name and encouraged followers to burn books and luxury goods at New London, Connecticut, in 1743. Such excesses hardened opposition and embarrassed many supporters of the revival.

Division: Old Lights and New Lights

The revivals split congregations and denominations. In New England, supporters became known as New Lights and opponents as Old Lights. The Boston minister Charles Chauncy, the leading critic, argued in Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743) that the movement confused emotional excitement with true faith and undermined order.

Among Presbyterians the split took formal shape in 1741, when the Old Side and New Side parties divided; they reunited in 1758. Many New Light congregations separated from their parish churches, and a large number of these “Separates” eventually became Baptists.

Even Edwards was affected. In 1750 his own congregation dismissed him after a dispute over who could take communion, and he went to work as a missionary to Native Americans at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Consequences and legacy

The Awakening changed colonial religion in lasting ways. Baptist and Presbyterian churches grew rapidly, and Methodism later built on the same foundations. Revivalists founded colleges to train ministers, including the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1746, and later Brown, Rutgers and Dartmouth had roots in the evangelical movement.

The revival also reached enslaved and free Africans and Native Americans more widely than earlier missions. The young missionary David Brainerd worked among the Delaware in the 1740s, and Edwards published an edition of his diary in 1749. Samson Occom, a Mohegan converted during the revival, became a Presbyterian minister and preacher. Many enslaved people in the South were converted in this and later revivals, laying foundations for Black Protestant churches.

Historians debate the wider meaning. Some argue that by encouraging ordinary people to judge their ministers and choose their churches, the Awakening weakened deference to authority and helped prepare the ground for the American Revolution. Others, such as Jon Butler, have questioned whether these scattered revivals amount to a single “Great Awakening” at all. The name itself was popularised in the 19th century.

Whitefield made seven trips to America and died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, on 30 September 1770, where he is buried beneath the pulpit of the Old South Presbyterian Church. He had also founded the Bethesda orphanage near Savannah in the newly founded colony of Georgia.

Timeline

• 1734–1735: A revival begins in Jonathan Edwards’s congregation at Northampton, Massachusetts.
• 1737: Edwards publishes A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God.
• 1739, October: George Whitefield arrives in the colonies to begin his great preaching tour.
• 1740, March: Gilbert Tennent preaches The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.
• 1740, October: Whitefield preaches his farewell sermon on Boston Common.
• 1741, 8 July: Edwards preaches Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield.
• 1741: Presbyterians split into Old Side and New Side.
• 1743: Chauncy publishes Seasonable Thoughts; Davenport’s book burning at New London.
• 1746: The College of New Jersey (Princeton) is founded.
• 1770, 30 September: Whitefield dies at Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Why it matters

The First Great Awakening reshaped religion in colonial America by stressing personal conversion, lay choice and powerful preaching. It created lasting denominations and colleges and set patterns of revival that recurred throughout American history. Whether or not it led to the Revolution, it taught many colonists to question established authority in the name of conscience.