Great Awakening. Those Who Practiced

¶ … Great Awakening. Those who practiced the established religions tended to be of a different class and outlook of those who heeded the call of the Great Awakening preachers. The established plutocrats found the new religious movements threatening, and thereby controversial. This paper seeks to address the Great Awakening as a controversy between the existing, moneyed classes and the "local traders, artisans and the laboring poor (McCormick 2007).

The colonists were spread out, rural, and had little contact with the religion of the larger towns, such as Boston and Philadelphia. Nearly all professed some form of religion, and nearly all needed religious and moral support for the perils they were facing: death, childbirth, Indian raids, and the terrifying images of hell. The established, Puritan religion of the Massachusetts Colony preached that not attending church every day would lead to eternal damnation. Many who lived in rural areas were unable to attend church. These were the farmers, the hunters, the small tradesmen, who were God-fearing but bereft of formal Church support.

The obvious solution was the itinerant preacher, who brought God to the settlements and villages in the far-flung hinterlands. The need was great throughout the Colonies, and many preachers arose to take on the task. In backwoods Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, Jonathan Edwards preached to his congregation that they "hung by a slender thread," telling them that they needed the Church and Faith in order to save their souls.

They preached a different kind of religious observance, at once free of the requirement for daily attendance at a village meeting-house, but filled with a passion which inflamed their hearts.

In colonial Virginia, a series of religious revivals took place in mid-Century which helped to increase the influence and reach of the Baptist Church. The itinerant Baptist preachers appealed to particular classes, and worried the upper classes, who were generally in the cities and towns. Part of the reason for patrician worry was that the attendance at revival meetings was not just religious fervor, but a dissatisfaction with their place in society. In the previous, Calvinist and Puritan-dominated ethos in Virginia, religious rectitude was demonstrated by honor, display and wealth. Since the lower classes could not compete with these parishioners, they reached for a different kind of expression of piety and religious belief, which included loud professions of faith, rapture, and devoted following of effective religious teacher (Spangler 2001).

One of the most threatening elements in the Baptist religion to the reigning landowners was that Baptists accepted slaves and freed blacks into their fold. As a result, Baptism also questioned the ethical reasoning behind slavery, which was threatening to the core of Virginian society (Scruple 1810).

The rise of evangelical preachers began in New England. Up to that time, a Congregational minister was a kind of public employee. His responsibility was to be the town's spiritual leader, "He guided his parishioners as a shepherd tended his flock, functioning as a symbol and focus of religious purpose within his community (Kirsch 1980)."

Viewing the Great Awakening as a Democratic Counter-Movement

Even in those areas where slave-holding was not common, the new preachers and religions posed a threat to the local establishment. Many of the ideas later embraced by the Founding Fathers originated from the democratizing effects of the earlier Awakening. Those who heeded the call of the new ministers felt that the existing religious-statist social structure did little to explain or order their lives. They objected to the idea that the only true spokesmen of God emerged from Yale or Harvard with divinity degrees. Many of the preachers were not ordained; rather, they proclaimed their faith as self-realized, without the official sanction of an established church.

The itinerant preacher was a showman and a religious man at the same time. Those who were more successful were those who could raise the most adherents and the most contributions were, by definition, the most successful. These preachers heavily stressed that an individual's salvation experience was of greater value than official church sanction. These preachers claimed that all people of faith were equal in God's eyes, a direct refutation of the Congregationalist idea that God bestowed favor upon man in life as well as in Heaven (Kidd 2007).

The most famous of these preachers were the most vilified by the established Church. Ben Franklin wrote of George Whitefield:

He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches; but the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refus'd him their pulpits, and he was oblig'd to preach in the fields. The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers (Brannan 1998).

Franklin, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and a true Democrat, saw both Whitefield's democratic tendencies and the threat that he posed to the Established Church. He noted that "some of Mr. Whitefield's enemies affected to suppose that he would apply those collections (of money) to his own private emolument...," but Franklin would have none of it.

The established Puritan churches in Massachusetts had assumed the role of the official churches of Europe, asserting that they represented God in the matters of government. Like modern-day theology-based governments, they believed that God's laws, interpreted through the Puritan church, were also the laws for the community. In 1635, the Reverend John Cotton proposed a set of laws and a General Court based on Moses' laws, with capital punishment as indicated in Leviticus.

Jonathan Edwards, another Great Awakening star, wrote that this religious influence on the governance of the community led to a cynicism and a distancing from God. He was concerned that Many of our young people (are) indecent in their carriage at meeting, which doubtless would not had prevailed to such a degree, had it not been that my grandfather...was not able to observe them. There had also prevailed in the town a spirit of contention between two parties, into which they had for many years been divided, by which was maintained a jealousy one of the other (Thompson 1861).

Thus Edwards found not only that the Congregation was drifting and cynical about God, but the community had failed to use godly principles in countering petty disputes. In Edwards' mind, the church-state combination failed both in its secular and its religious mission. Edwards, who had been the Congregational minister in Northhampton, Massachusetts, had seen that the church membership was declining. His religious beliefs would not let him accept that his parishioners were falling away from the faith. Finally, in 1734, he changed his message, telling the parishioners that they must make a personal covenant with God, or risk losing their immortal souls. Edwards' change of message resonated with the community, and helped to create the religious revival movement in New England.