The Great Awakening was a pivotal religious moment in American history. The Great Awakening was a religious event where preachers started using emotion to influence their parishioners to convert instead of reason and education. The Great Awakening occured in the 1730s and 1740s. It had its beginning in Northampton Massachusetts in the fiery sermon of Jonathan Edwards and spread through the other 12 colonies like the plague. The Great Awakening came about because of a rise of apathy in the Christian churches of the New World. Due to a lack of churchgoers, Puritan preachers were forced to use measures such as the Half-Way Covenant, which didn't require spiritual conversion to attend church, which sapped spiritual vitality.
Due to the aforementioned apathy, a deeply spiritual Jonathan Edwards decided to try a different tactic in convincing people to join the church with his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Later George Whitefield took Jonathan's product in a different direction by preaching the positives of God, while including the necessity of faith and God's omnipotence. As a result of Jonathan Edward's woeful sermon over the horrors of hell and the limitedness of God's patience, and George Whitefield's sermons on the love of God and his omnipotence, hundreds of people experienced "conversion" to God's will. The Great Awakening also sparked a new wave of religious conversion among the Native Americans and the African slaves.
Another, little considered effect of the Great Awakening was its contribution to the separation of church and state. I believe that the Great Awakening contributed to this, later central, American phenomenon due to the very reason it spread: emotion.
I believe that the founding fathers, when they drafted the Constitution they realized that if the now emotionally and religiously charged people brought their religious matters into politics than religiously divided politcal parties may emerge. And these religiously political parties would be remeniscent of the children of King Henry VIII with a Anglican son, and a fiercely Catholic daughter who persecuted against their "enemy" religions. Such religious parties would divide the flegeling nation into various, warring factions, vunreble to an English counterattack, so the signers of the Constitution, to avoid this problem separated religion and politics, according to my theory. The preceding theory is my belief of how the Great Awakening contributed to the separation of church and state.
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Interesting discussion of how Great Awakening contributed to evolving separation of church and state.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to what made the preaching of the Great Awakening new, it's probably not quite fair to say emotion replaced education and reason. Even Edwards scary sermon walked his listeners throught a logical progression of propositions, showing them how they added up to each of them being in real danger of hell fire! And then think of the many new centers of learning that arose during this era -- all those new light colleges. While it's definitely true to think of emotion and passion as very much a part of the Awakening, think of that emotion as supplementing logic and education rather than replacing them all together.