The Great Awakening and the American Identity One of the primary questions for historians of Colonial American History is the desire to pinpoint an event, or series of events, that contributed to the formation of an American national identity.  For the uninitiated, a quick response to this question would be the Stamp Act Crisis or the Boston Tea Party.  Others might look to the publishing of Thomas Paine?s Common Sense, and still others might name the Declaration of Independence as their identifying marker.  Another clever guess might be the Seven Years War, otherwise known as the French and Indian War in North America.  All of these events are very important variables in the creation of the American Republic.  However, there remains one event that comes closer to an answer.  The Great Revival of Religion, more famously known as The Great Awakening, lasting from roughly 1735-1745, is cited by many historians such as Alan Heimert, Perry Miller, and Martin Marty as the genesis of the American identity.      Before delving into the Great Awakening, one disclaimer should be mentioned.  Establishing an American identity via historical events is more than a daunting task, it is completely speculative, and open to all kinds of refutations and counterfactual ?what if?s.?  The point is not to definitively establish a boundary where the British Empire gave way to American nationalism, but to show culturally that something indeed occurred which brought about a momentous change.  For example, the anger that precipitated from the passage of the Stamp Act was already evidenced in the sermons of ministers long before the stamp duties were levied.  There was already a language in place being used by the New England ministers advocating resistance and liberty?albeit for spiritual arguments not necessarily political ones.  Historians often find themselves researching the cultural elements residing beneath the visible surface rather than focusing in on the flashpoints of history where those underlying currents finally come into full view.      The Great Awakening is a prime example of an event which sowed the seeds for later social change.  The revivals of the 1730?s and 1740?s impregnated the Atlantic colonies with a new language whose vocabulary became ensconced with concepts devoted to liberty, freedom of the will, emotional fervor, and  rugged individualism.  Jonathan Edwards, the famous Northampton, Massachusetts minister whose revival in 1735 touched off the Great Awakening, introduced a spiritual earthquake that resonated long after his heyday into the Revolutionary period itself.  Edwards argued emphatically and intellectually that man in fact had a voice in his spiritual conversion that ran counter to the Standing Order Congregationalist and Anglican churches.  Edwards, without completely rejecting the old Calvinistic dogma of predestination, modified it to where man could influence the particulars of his destiny without interfering in God?s providential will.  The liberalizing effect Edwards had on religious expression opened the door for a new religious language devoted to choice and the freedom to make those choices.      Edwards, however, would never had been the influential factor he was had it not been for the exploits of another more charismatic minister fresh from England named George Whitefield.  Whitefield came to North America in 1738 with a powerful and emotionally charged message known as the New Birth.  If religion ever had a rock star, Whitefield fit that description perfectly.  He brought with him a booming eloquence never before heard.  He met out in open fields to amassed gatherings in the thousands including such notables as a young Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams.  The throngs who gathered to hear Whitefield often broke out into frenzies of spiritual enthusiasm where violent shaking, crying, and shouting ensued.  Traditional ministers like Alexander Garden the Rector of Charlestown, South Carolina, and Reverend Charles Chauncy of Boston, openly rejected the ministerial rock star and his disorderly revival meetings.  Chauncy said the workings of ?Whitefieldism? disturbed the imagination.  Garden had Whitefield thrown out of Charlestown for challenging his authority as the chief representative of the Anglican Church in the colony of South Carolina.  Yet despite the best efforts of the naysayers, Whitefield and Edwards along with many other rebellious ?New Light? ministers forged a movement that created the rise in denominationalism still with us today.  Torn by the new religious language of the time, ministers began to revolt from the Standing Order Churches to build churches of their own.  Many of these new preachers were laymen who had no formal training.  The result was that New Light Churches and New Side Presbyterian Churches became dominated by unlearned clergy.  Thus the common man found for himself a religion in which he could gain a greater voice than could ever be heard in the old churches.  In time, however, the New Lights found schools who would accept them such as William Tennent?s famous Log College in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania (founded in 1726).  Several graduates of the Log College became influential presidents and professors at the College of New Jersey?otherwise known today as Princeton University.  Among them were Samuel Blair, Samuel Davies, William Tennent Jr., and Gilbert Tennent.  Indeed the Great Awakening spread throughout the colonies into the mid 1740?s until it began to burn itself out.  It was the first inter-colonial event and one that shifted the cultural landscape tremendously.  Born from the Awakening was a new religious language supporting the New Birth with its visible conversion evidenced by the displays of enthusiasm during worship services.  Arguments for religious toleration soon absorbed the new vocabulary.  Ministers like Isaac Backus, a Baptist stalwart, lobbied tirelessly for the abolishment of paying tithes to the Standing Order Churches when he and his fellow Baptists did not attend those houses of worship.  Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would later put those pleas into laws in the Virginia House of Burgesses.  The Great Awakening not only changed the way the colonists viewed religion, but it also changed the way they saw themselves.  They began to understand that they could think independently about their day to day lives apart from the customs of their motherland.  They began to see that they had a say in the particulars of their salvation and so that logic transferred over into their politics where they began to assert themselves more boldly.  Important British religious figures such as the hymnist Isaac Watts marveled at what was transpiring in America.  Watts was so impressed he initiated an overseas correspondence with Jonathan Edwards chronicling the events in Northampton as they occurred.  It was the first time that the colonies made headlines and had folks on the other side of the Atlantic buzzing.  The spirit of the Awakening was getting back to the pristine state of religion.  It was a movement to counter the corruption and complacency of Anglican dogma.  It was also a movement that conjured up millenarian ideas of the New Jerusalem beginning its thousand year reign on the shores of North America.  Those same millenarian themes would rise again as they fused into the patriotic rhetoric of the War for Independence.  In the words of historian Nathan Hatch, liberty became a sacred cause.  It became the duty of the Christian to bring about a just and noble government both free for religion and secular pursuits.  Just like the Great Awakening sought to bring religion back to its former glory, so too did the Revolution seek to bring back the golden age of the British Commonwealth.  The colonists believed that the Empire had somehow lost its way, and betrayed the spirit of its founding.  The same corruption and complacency that had ruined the Anglican Church now had gone so far as to infest the very institutions of the British governmental system?once the most free the world had ever known.  So many colonists reasoned anyway.  Just as New Lights practiced an emotional religion, Patriots and Sons of Liberty practiced an emotional politics.  No doubt the fiery sermons of Whitefield had planted a fertile seed in a young Samuel Adams?s heart later to germinate into his passion for liberty.  The leader of the Sons of Liberty would never forget the lessons he learned from the great itinerant.  He learned that to be reborn, others must see the conversion, and he put it to practice with every act of defiance he could muster against the British.    Of all things most notable about the Great Awakening, the rise of denominationalism stands out the most.  Christianity became ?Americanized? into new sects or denominations.  The reshaping of the American religious landscape is described by historians such as Mark Noll as evangelicalization.  The term evangelicalization can be derived from the New Light practice of itinerancy?the practice of traveling ministries.  Whitefield was the chief practitioner of itinerancy and many New Light ministers copied him hoping to gain similar fame and success.  While the Standing Order Churches remained stagnant, content to remain in their traditional strongholds, New Lights followed the currents of economic expansion and mobilized their ministries throughout the colonies.  The result was Anglicanism and Congregationalism soon became demographically overwhelmed by the time of the Revolution.  Gone was the Anglican Church?s influence and so the Church of England became the first British institution to collapse.  Shortly thereafter Parliament and the Crown followed suit?victims of a process begun in 1735 when American colonials dared to disturb their imaginations.  Permission is granted to copy this essay to your blog, forum, or website by the author so long as you give me credit somewhere on your site.