First Great Awakening - The First Great Awakening and The American Revolution

The First Great Awakening and The American Revolution

The evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic concepts in the period of the American Revolution. The Enlightenment period taught an ideal based on ancient Rome of republican government based on hierarchical social orders of king, aristocracy and commoners. It was widely believed by secular Enlightenment writers that English liberties relied on the balance of power divided between king, elite and commoners, and that social stability required hierarchical deference to the privileged class. "Puritanism … and the epidemic of evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification” by preaching that the Bible taught that all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved. Franklin, who grew up a Puritan and became an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical movement, rejected the salvation dogma, but embraced the radical notion of egalitarian democracy. The evangelical revivalists, especially Whitefield, were the greatest advocates of religious freedom, “claiming liberty of conscience to be an ‘inalienable right of every rational creature.’” Whitefield’s supporters in Philadelphia erected a large, new hall, that could be used as a pulpit by anyone of any belief.

In Virginia, the existence of Baptist preachers challenged the established Anglican Church. Young Baptist preachers were arrested and tried in Fredericksburg before the Revolution. The issue of religious freedom was incorporated into the new constitution by James Madison, who as a young lawyer had defended some early Baptist preachers.

Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) argues that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom. However, Heimert has been criticized for not recognizing the differences between educated and uneducated evangelists, and for not recognizing the significance of Separate-Baptists and Methodists.

Some historians, in particular, Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible (1986), have seen the First Great Awakening as a means by which humbler colonial Americans were able to challenge their 'social betters'. Harry Stout (1986) has even suggested that the first Great Awakening radically democratized mass communication in the colonies, setting the stage for new popular politics later in the revolutionary decades that followed.

Christine Leigh Heyrman (1984) and Christopher Jedrey (1979) and others have been highly critical of Heimart's interpretation, arguing instead that The First Great Awakening was an essentially conservative movement and a continuation of other, earlier religious traditions.

Bernard Bailyn argues that the evangelism of the era challenged traditional notions of natural hierarchy by teaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, so that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class. Kidd argues that religious disestablishment, belief in a God as the guarantor of human rights, and shared convictions about sin, virtue, and divine providence worked together to unite rationalists and evangelicals and thus encouraged American defiance of the Empire. Emphasizing intense opposition to sending an Anglican bishop to the colonies, and anger at the pro-Catholic Quebec Act of 1774, Kidd argues that they reflected the long term impact of the Great Awakening, in terms of apocalyptic warnings religious egalitarianism, and anti‐Catholicism. The result he says was that by 1773, when battles over taxation without representation escalated, Patriots were prepared to defy British administrators.