America’s First Great Awakening
Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Ephesians 5:14
In 1620 the Pilgrims came to Cape Cod, Massachusetts seeking religious freedom and the “advancement of the Christian faith.” Ten years later the Puritans, led by Jonathan Winthrop, arrived in much larger numbers. Echoing Matthew 5:14, Winthrop wrote “The Lord make it like that of New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.”
But over time the vision of their posterity waned. Hard work and righteous living brought prosperity, but with prosperity came pride and complacency. Posterity began to attend church more of habit than conviction. Their children dropped out altogether.
“Religion beget prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother,” was how the later Puritan preacher Cotton Mather (1663-1728) put it.
As water eventually reaches a bottom, so too must complacency, which begets boredom. Boredom begets enslaving habits such as alcohol, gambling, pornography, crime, divorce, occultism, and malice. Such was the condition in the early eighteenth century within the original thirteen colonies.
In 1720 a minister from Germany named Theodore Frelinghuysen (1691-1747) came to New Jersey to take over the pastorate of a Dutch Reformed church. Shocked at the deadness of his church and of the surrounding community, he immediately began to preach repentance and salvation through Jesus Christ. A wall of opposition ensued, but he persevered and began to see results. Seizing on that momentum, William Tennent and his four sons spread the revival flames to Pennsylvania.
Then in December, 1734 a larger stirring began in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) pastored a church, having succeeded his maternal grandfather Solomon Stoddard (1643-1729. Aware of the revivals to the south and in response to the apathy in Northampton, Edwards prepared two sermons on the subject of “Justification by Faith Alone.” Edwards was no flamboyant, fiery preacher. He delivered his carefully constructed sermons in a dry monotone. Yet something struck a chord with his parishioners.
“There were, very suddenly, one after another, five or six persons who were, to all appearance, savingly converted….Particularly, I was surprised with the relation of a young woman, who had been one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town….By the conversation I then had with her, it appeared to me that what she gave an account of was a glorious work of God’s infinite power and sovereign grace, and that God had given her a new heart, truly broken and sanctified….The news of it seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning upon the hearts of young people all over the town, and upon many others….
“Presently upon this, a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion and the eternal world became universal in all parts of the town….The noise of the dry bones waxed louder and louder….and the work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner….souls did…come by flocks to Jesus Christ.
“There were many instances of persons that came from abroad, on visits or on business…who partook of that shower of divine blessing that God rained down here and went home rejoicing. Till at length the same work began to appear and prevail in several other towns in the country.”
Far to the south in the colony of Georgia there came another stirring in 1736 with the arrival of George Whitefield from England. Whitefield traveled by horseback throughout Georgia, preaching to ever increasing crowds of people who turned to Christ. As he journeyed northward the other revivalists welcomed him.
He befriended Benjamin Franklin, an avowed agnostic, who nevertheless observed the change that went on in his city of Philadelphia. “From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”
Whitefield’s resonate, booming voice could be heard from great distances. Franklin calculated that he could be heard by as many as 30,000 people at a time.
In Northampton Jonathan Edwards offered Whitefield his pulpit. Of his preaching Edward’s wife Sarah wrote, “He speaks from a heart aglow with love, and pours out a torrent of eloquence which is almost irresistible. Many, very many persons in Northampton date the beginning of new thoughts, new desires, new purposes, and a new life, from the day on which they heard him preach of Christ and this salvation.”
The Great Awakening brought about a social conscience that resulted in charities for the poor. Whitefield himself founded an orphanage in Georgia. Educational institutions such as Princeton, Rutgers, Brown, and Dartmouth were created to train ministers of the gospel. The various major denominations, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Dutch Reformed found a unity over the shared experience of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
From that unity came the sense of a national identity, which spawned the American revolution a generation later. The idea that God spoke to individuals, who then formed their own government, replaced the idea of the divine right of kings, who spoke for God to the people. “No king but Jesus,” became the motto of the revolution.
Today America is engaged in a titanic struggle between those of us who believe in “No king but Jesus” and those who posit that “No deity will save us. We must save ourselves.” Such wrote Paul Kurtz in 1973 in the Humanist Manifesto II. We in the former camp fervently pray for another Great Awakening in America, without which our freedoms and the original “city upon a hill” vision will be lost.
