THE GREAT AWAKENING APUSH Spiconardi THE GREAT AWAKENING

THE GREAT AWAKENING APUSH - Spiconardi

THE GREAT AWAKENING A religious revival movement that spread throughout the colonies from the 1720 s-1740 s

ORIGINS • Enlightenment rationalism • Enlightenment corrupted the Anglican Church • But Enlightenment did affect emphasis on the individual • Lack of individual engagement in church services • Rationalization of predestination • “Unchurched” colonists living in the frontiers • Pioneers had lapsed into sinful lives due to influence of “heathen” Indians • Growing focus on commercialism as opposed to religion

JONATHAN EDWARDS • Massachusetts Congregationalist minister • Pioneered an intensely emotional style of preaching • Noted for his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. ” • Scared people by describing the torments that awaited sinners in the afterlife Our people do not so much need to have their heads stored [with new knowledge] as to have their hearts touched.

SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock… The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire…

GEORGE WHITEFIELD • English minister who came to America after not receiving a pulpit in England • His style and sermons made him a celebrity, albeit a controversial one • REFER TO DOCUMENTS

What does this print by John Collet inform you about the Great Awakening?

IMPACT • Growth of new Christian churches • Presbyterian, Baptists, and Methodists • Encourages breakdown in respect for authority • United the colonists through a common experience • Rejection of intellectual approach to faith • Comes to define American Protestantism

CONCLUSION The Great Awakening subsided by 1750…The Awakening, like its counterpart the Enlightenment , influenced the American Revolution and set in motion powerful currents that still flow in American life. It implanted in American culture the evangelical crusade and the emotional appeal of revivalism. The movement weakened the status of the old-fashioned clergy and state-supported churches, encouraged believers to exercise their own judgment, and thereby weakened habits of deference generally…the Awakening and the Enlightenment, between the urgings of the spirit and logic of reason, led by different roads to similar ends. Both movements emphasized the power and right of individual decision making, and both aroused millennial hopes that America would become the promised land in which people might attain the perfection of piety or reason, if not both. -- From America: A Narrative History by George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi Analyze the events of the early 18 th century and explain to what extent this statement was accurate