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Alright, so I'm interested in knowing others' opinions on the First Great Awakening. How important of an event was it in American history? Should more people know about it? It's kind of a forgotten episode in the United States.
I'm going to say very important but (mostly) not for the reason of religion; religion was the means to an end though.Folks were challenging their church leadership both domestic and across the pond... it was a real grass roots movement with folks all more or less on the same page... allows for the beginnings of committees of corespondence (though not called that). I(f)
fhtesthese folks would challenge the church they weren't gonna be timid about standing up to government.How about the flip side? I agree that the Great Awakening helped create feelings that enabled the colonists to rebel against Britain. I'm guessing this is generally considered to be a “positive” effect (because hey – we're Americans!). But were there negative ramifications of the Great Awakening as well?
Anytime there is growth / change within an institution there will be negatives… lots of offshoot churches formed and much hostility between folks over same but not of a magnitude that made it negative (overall) compared to how much it helped the revolutionary fervor to grow.
The splintering of denominations added to an impetus to encode religious freedoms into the Constitution. It meant that Deists and Christians of various denominations would agree that the establishment of a state religion was a not good thing. Although the Puritans were losing strength in the North even before the Great Awakening got into full swing, evangelistic itinerant congregations were only getting established in the South by the 1740's–and were opposed by the Anglicans and powerful political leaders who were aligned with them. So I'd say that the Great Awakening helped significantly to change the mindset by creating a parallel questioning of the dominance of the Anglican church on religious grounds, alongside an increasing resistance to the political authority of the Crown with which the Anglicans were aligned.
I thnk what Wally said is very accurate. But also, what I think the first GA did was break racial and social barriers. There was at least one Indian preacher (Occam), some black ones, and many poor or uneducated (non-college educated) ones who preached. Blacks and whites attended church at the same time…unheard of just 30 years earlier. And even though people of different classes attended the same service, weren't they seated according to social hierarchy? These revivals seemed to remove these walls and placed everyone on the same footing: submission to God rather than submission to a political leader.
.... And even though people of different classes attended the same service, weren't they seated according to social hierarchy?
Likely but being together at the meeting hearing the same sermon was the big deal.
These revivals seemed to remove these walls and placed everyone on the same footing: submission to God rather than submission to a political leader.
Or religious leader... worth and equality were issues with the government and the church.
.... And even though people of different classes attended the same service, weren't they seated according to social hierarchy?
Likely but being together at the meeting hearing the same sermon was the big deal.
Good point, but wasn't it always like that (same race/different class) in the same church? It's just the poor people were delegated to the back rows. I'm only imagining that at the revivals there was nothing like that going on.
Or religious leader... worth and equality were issues with the government and the church.
Very true (I just assumed most of us here already knew the political and religious were very intertwined back then)
The Great Awakening is important as a historical event, but it is even more important as a tool, plot device, and or delimiter for historians who wish to mark the beginnings of an inter-colonial identity that made the Revolution a possibility as the origins of many of the dissenting ideas that the Founders would later use against England.
