The Great Awakenings
Waves of revival sweep Britain's American colonies and then the young United States, making evangelical Protestantism the dominant faith of the nation.
- The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America — Thomas S. Kidd, Yale University Press (2007)
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
- The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys — Mark A. Noll, InterVarsity Press (2003)
In 1734–35 a revival broke out in Northampton, Massachusetts, under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, America’s greatest Puritan theologian. From 1739 the English evangelist George Whitefield, a friend of the Wesleys, toured the colonies, preaching to vast open-air crowds; even the sceptical Benjamin Franklin admired his voice. Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” became the most famous of the age. The revival split churches between enthusiasts and critics, and stressed that everyone, whatever their rank, needed a new birth.
- The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America — Thomas S. Kidd, Yale University Press (2007)
- The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys — Mark A. Noll, InterVarsity Press (2003)
A Second Great Awakening, from about 1790 to the 1840s, swept the frontier with camp meetings, like the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, and northern cities with the revivals of Charles Finney. Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers made their churches the largest in the country, and the revival fired movements for temperance, missions and the abolition of slavery.
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
- The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America — Thomas S. Kidd, Yale University Press (2007)
Why it matters today
The Awakenings created the American pattern of religion: voluntary, competitive, democratic, emotional and centred on personal conversion. Baptists and Methodists, the big winners, remain huge, revival meetings and altar calls are still part of evangelical life, and enslaved and free Black Americans embraced Christianity in large numbers in this period, laying the foundations of the Black church.