Awakening
Religious Tensions

The Great Awakening reveals many of the tensions present in British North America in the mid-eighteenth century. Many upper-class and educated Americans embraced the Enlightenment and deism, which viewed God as a kind of rational “watchmaker” who had set the world in motion but did not directly intervene in its daily workings. Other colonists rejected this intellectual approach in favor of the emotional connections they found in evangelical revivals. The Great Awakening challenged the authority of legally established churches and their ministers, whose congregations began flocking to New Light preachers. These “separatist” groups criticized state-sponsored churches and proposed, instead, that churches be supported through voluntary contributions by church members. Some denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church, split over the controversies engendered by the religious revivals in their midst. The Great Awakening also threw established relations of class and social status into question. Women and men, old and young, upper and lower classes, and even blacks and whites mingled together at revivals, where religious instruction blended with sometimes pointed ­critiques of colonial power structures. (See Document 4.4 for one participant’s description of a revival.)

At first, established clergy, known as the Old Lights, embraced the Awakening as a way to promote church attendance and religious practices. However, as revivalist preachers grew more popular, Old Lights became increasingly uneasy about their messages (Documents 4.9 and 4.10). The powerful preaching of George Whitefield of England initiated a wave of revivals across the colonies (Document 4.6). New Light minister Gilbert Tennent, for example, argued that a minister’s authority rested on his conversion experience, not his education and training (Document 4.7). By 1742 the controversial actions of itinerant preachers such as James Davenport (Document 4.8) led to a backlash from Old Light ministers and their congregations. The following selections reflect the competing religious views of the Old Lights and the New Lights. As you read, consider the issues at stake in the Great Awakening. Why was the conversion experience espoused by New Lights embraced by some but rejected by others? How do these documents reveal the religious, social, and economic tensions that were a part of eighteenth-century colonial society?