Revival did not drastically
increase the total number of people
actually joining the church. Notes from Eerdman's Handbook of
Christianity in America.
In a few towns the rapid spread of revival
followed closely upon the heels of serious illness,
especially the "throat distemper" (diphtheria) which carried away
large numbers of New Englanders in the 1730s. In other awakened
localities, economic problems had been a troubling source of
tensions. Some merchants worried about the effects of conflict
following Britain's declaration of war on Spain in 1739. Many others
joined the merchants in concern about the absence of an adequate
currency.
Some historians have speculated
that the shift from rural and
agricultural to urban and commercial styles of life may have engendered guilt in those leaving
"the old ways" behind.
In modern Aztec-like fears that
God is not going to be able to preserve the kingdom and keep the sky
from falling, the "urbans" hold a 52 year and a 52 week event like
the Jubilee. The houses of the rurals are burned down, everyone is
hustled into town, all of the fires are put out, up to 20,000 people
are sacrificed, the sacred fire is relit and taken out to individual,
renewed dwellings to make sure that the "rurals" are up to speed with
the "urbans."
Others have suggested that tensions between
generations over the inheritance of
diminishing amounts of land may have created similar feelings. All of these
observations lead toward the conclusion that environmental factors
prepared the colonial population to embrace a spiritual message
which, even if it could not deal directly with such problems,
brought inner peace and an escape from
guilt.
All ancient
Jubilees were for the purpose of an atonement. The guilt was relieved
by returning individual lands to the tribe.
Debate over the causes of the Great Awakening
should be informed by history, but will probably be resolved
ultimately by belief. Christians should learn from
secularists.
They should recognize that nonspiritual factors came into play; such factors need not explain the whole story,
especially since Christians believe that the gospel is intended
precisely to answer humanity's deepest needs in times of distress.
But secularists also should learn from
Christians. They should recognize that similar environmental
"preconditions" had existed at other times when revival
did not
occur and that no exact correlation can be established between the
outbreak of revival and any set of social conditions. The final
evaluation, as in most such historical questions, will depend less
upon the evidence of history than upon the convictions of historians.
Effects
The number of Americans actually converted
during the Awakening is hard to ascertain. Early estimates ranged
from several thousand to half a million, although the latter figure
is quite high given a total colonial population around one million in
1740. In New England, where again records are best,
the years of revival witnessed
a marked increase in the number of people joining the church (often
the only reliable guide to measure conversions).
The Connecticut churches, for example, admitted
on the average about
eight people each per year in 1739 and 1740,
but then about thirty-three per year in
1741 and 1742.
Similar gains took place in Massachusetts.
The picture changes somewhat, however, if
long-term
trends are analyzed. Very soon after the revival the average number
of admissions dropped
considerably
below where they
had been in the 1730s.
While it is true that these figures do not
fully reflect the formation of new "Separate" and
Baptist churches, they do seem to suggest that revival did not drastically increase the total number of people actually joining the church
with a profession of faith over the entire period, 1730-1750.
It seems rather to have
concentrated church
admissions in the years of its great
impact.
The one imponderable with these figures is the
question whether conversions and admissions to church would have continued at their old rate without a revival. It is possible that the Awakening,
while not increasing the rate of conversion when calculated over the
long run, did keep that rate at its former level when it otherwise
might have fallen.
For the other colonies it is very difficult to
obtain accurate figures for the revival's effect. In the midd e
colonies, the Presbyterians who favored revival did grow much more
rapidly than those who did not.
In 1741 there were
about twenty-five prorevival Presbyterian ministers and an
equal number opposed.
By 1758 the number
of prorevivalists (and churches) had risen to seventy-three, the antirevivalists had fallen to
twenty-three.
And in the South, evangelists by 1760
had made inroads into the backcountry population which had less and
less use for the formalities of the
Church of England, and more and more interest in the informal piety of
the Baptists.
Apart from the individuals actually converted,
a number of other things were also revived during the Great
Awakening.
In the first place, the prominence
of Whitefield and Edwards encouraged a
resurgence of Calvinism.
Whitefield eventually broke with the more
Arminian Wesleys over his belief that God sovereignly called the
elect by his grace alone.
Edwards' devotion to the greatness of God's
power and his conclusion that sinners do
not wish to act contrary to their own
sinful natures led him to restate Calvinistic conceptions of
salvation in powerful and influential books.
The Great Awakening also revived
experiential piety. It encouraged people to devote their practical, daily
exertions to loving God and serving their neighbors.
A new desire to
see the churches purified of all but the elect was an ecclesiastical reflection of
this more intense piety.
Led by Edwards, many
Congregational and Presbyterian churches repudiated the Half-Way Covenant.
The fellowship of the faithful on earth, so this reasoning ran,
should reflect the purity
of God's grace as closely as possible.
The Great Awakening also stimulated a concern
for higher education. In 1740, Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale
(founded 1701) were the only colonial colleges. Leaders elsewhere in
the colonies had long expressed an interest in founding colleges, and
the revival added to that interest. The Awakening led more young men
to pursue
the ministry, and it encouraged greater boldness on the part of
laypeople in appropriating the faith for themselves.
A combination of ecclesiastical and other
motives, thus, led to the rapid founding of several more colleges:
the College of New Jersey at Princeton by Presbyterians in 1746,
Rhode Island College (later Brown University) by Baptists in 1764,
Queents College (later Rutgers) by Dutch Reformed in 1766, Dartmouth
by the Con-gregationalist Eleazar Wheelock in 1769 (an institution
which had begun in 1754 as an Indian mission school).
Dissension
The revival of individuals, theology, piety,
and education did not proceed without opposition.
In fact, the Great Awakening did
nearly as much to promote
controversy as it did to stimulate
revival.
In the middle colonies, Presbyterians divided over
the revival and its effects.
Most of the recent ScotchIrish
immigrants, the "Old
Side," favored a tightly organized
church with traditional educational standards for ministers and great
emphasis on the Westminster
Confession.
Presbyterians from New England and the
Tennent
group, the "New Side" did not turn away from these traditional Presbyterian
emphases,
but they did want to promote
revival and vital piety even if it meant relaxing traditional
standards.
A similar set of differences divided the
Dutch Reformed in 1755 between a prorevival "Coetus"
(following the path first established by Theodore Frelinghuysen) and
a traditionalist "Conferentie'' (which sought direction from Amsterdam).
Eventually, Presbyterians (1758) and Dutch Reformed (1771) reunited.
In both groups the prorevival perspective became dominant.
Still, questions raised by the
Great Awakening concerning church order and the nature of popular
religion remained to trouble
Presbyterians and Reformed into the
nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.
In New England, the Great Awakening
sounded
the death knell for the comprehensive Puritan conception of the world.
Its immediate
impact was to divide the Puritan churches into four more or less distinct groups.
Proponents of revival were
known as "New Lights,"
but this broad
designation covered at least two
distinct
groups.
Jonathan Edwards represented
the moderate New
Lights who wished to
remain within estalished Congregationalism, but who did not mute
their evangelistic zeal, their renewed Calvinism, and their belief in
pure churches.
To the left of these Edwardseans was a more radical camp. Many who had been quickened by revival found
the established church sterile
and oppressive. Such people ohen broke away to form
"Separate" churches.
Historian C. C.
Goen has painstakingly identified 321 separations of one kind
or another by these New Lights. Some of
these splits were healed rapidly. Others led to the continuation of
"Separate Congregational', churches.
But most
eventually became
Baptist congregations. Baptists like Isaac Backus ofien appreciated Edwards
and his theology.
But they grew convinced that the
state had no business in the church and that the baptism of adult
believers was the proper way to testify to God's saving
work.
The Baptists were in fact the
greatest
beneficiaries of the Great Awakening. The number of
Baptist churches throughout the colonies rose dramatically in the
generation after the revival (from 96 in 1740 to 457 in 1780, a
number in the latter year which exceeded the total of Anglican
churches). And the renewal of the Baptists in New England eventually
had great impact throughout the land. Baptist emigrants from New
England moved as far south as the Carolinas during the 1750s to begin
what would become a tremendous expansion of Baptist churches in that
region.
Opposed to both the moderate and
radical New Lights stood a group uneasy about the supernaturalism, the
emotionalism, and the radicalism of the revival.
Charles Chauncy of Boston's First Church was the spokesman for this
group. It had a higher view of human capabilities than the strict
Calvinists, it feared for social chaos if "enthusiasm" should
prevail, and it emphasized the natural evidences of God's power over
the supernatural. These "Old Lights" were, in modern terms, more
theologically liberal and more socially conservative than the New
Lights. [See our Colonial Index for
Chauncy]
Members of a final group, the "Old Calvinists," were
caught in the middle.
With Old Lights they shared an
uneasiness about the socially disruptive
effects of the Awakening;
with the New
Lights they held to a generally
evangelical theology.
Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), who eventually became
president of Yale College in 1778, was representative of this point
of view.
He was a broad-minded and tolerant
man by the standards of his day who did not like the dogmatism of New
Light theology, the disorder of unruly revivalism, or the division of
the churches.
Yet Stiles also did not appreciate
the Old Light drift to rationalism and
Unitarianism. These Old Calvinists found themselves faced with hard
choices as the century wore on.
Some chose to tolerate revivalism in
order to retain a more traditional theology, others chose to modify
that theology in order to support social and ecclesiastical
stability.
In the face of this
ecclesiastical fragmentation, the older Puritanism had no chance. The New Lights, Edwardseans and Separates, urged individuals to turn in repentance to Christ.
- They urged those who heeded
their message
- to purge the churches of all who were
not converted.
Old Lights, on the other hand, feared for the
safety of
society. They wanted the churches, through the Half-Way Covenant,
to remain open to most citizens, and in so doing to exert a stabilizing effect on
society.
The parts of the Puritan synthesis were going
different directions. New Lights stressed the individual covenant of
grace, Old Lights the social covenant.
Arguments over the church covenant
divided
the two main groups
and rent also Baptists from New Light
Congregationalists.
However great an impact elements of
Puritanism would retain in American life, the Puritan synthesis
was no more.
The fragmentation
of Puritanism in New England and the
growth of dissent in the South provided more elbow
room for other Christian bodies. While the Church of England suffered
in the South from the first onslaughts of Baptists and Presbyterians,
it grew in the North as a haven for colonials upset with the emotions
of revival.
Only after the Great Awakening did the
Anglicans become in the North the church
of the elite that it had always been in
the South. Other denominations also were able to take indirect
advantage of the revival. The subjective elements of the Awakening,
for example, paralleled and strengthened emphases of the Pietists. In
all, the Awakening made the American ecclesiastical situation
much more fluid than it had been before.
The Great Awakening also had a profound impact
on American society. Some of the hierarchism and
authoritarianism common to all Western societies of the period gave way
before the revival's theology and its practice.
The renewed Calvinistic emphasis on
divine predestination, free grace, and the inability of position to insure salvation had social
implications.
Gilbert Tennent, who in 1741 preached a famous sermon on "The Danger of
an Unconverted Ministry," showed how corrosive such a theology could
be.
If conversion was the only
condition for standing in the church,
then ecclesiastical office and social prominence must not be as
important as once thought.
And what was true in church might also be true
in society. Charles Chauncy was worried about the theology of the
Awakening, but he was appalled by its
effects on traditional social order.
He once complained that the lay
"exhorters" which the Awakening spawned were "babes in age as well as
understanding.
They are chiefly, indeed, young persons,
sometimes lads, or rather boys; nay, women and girls, yea, Negroes,
have taken upon them to do the
business of preachers."
Revivalists were not primarily concerned about
the rights of laypeople, women, blacks, and youth. It is nonetheless
the case that their concern to promote the glory of God also promoted
the democratization of America.
The Great Awakening, then, retains great
fascination for the historical imagination. It offers dramatic action
and a complex web of causation. It presents dynamic and brilliant
leaders. It left a direct and powerful impact on American religion,
and a subtle but no less telling impact on America itself.
Of the Second Great American Awakening in
Kentucky the following chart proves the point of no lasting
effects.
Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting
Revivalism by Ellen Eslinger shows that the pattern of growth is not based upon
human performance which ignores the narrator's teaching role in the church. After the fact it was recognized
that this radicalism hindered the growth of the Restoration
Movement.
See the Divisive Effects of Cane Ridge and other
Revivals.
Awakening
Index
Colonial
Index
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