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The impact of the great awakening
The impact of the great awakening
The impact of the great awakening
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When the colonist first came, they were mainly individual colonies with much diversity. The Great Awakening played a major role in the colonies uniting and seeing themselves as the Americans people. The evidence of The Great Awakening was a major cause is that it spread throughout all of the colonies. The awakening didn’t only remained in Massachusetts but “swept through the colonies like a fire through prairie grass” (90). This marked the first time that the colonies were sharing a common idea through one person, a pastor named Jonathan Edwards. From Edward’s concept of righteousness and free will, another person named George Whitefield helped to spread the belief even more effectively through his amazing speech-giving skills (90). Although
The Great Awakening was a superior event in American history. The Great Awakening was a time of revivalism that expanded throughout the colonies of New England in the 1730’s through the 1740’s. It reduced the importance of church doctrine and put a larger significance on the individuals and their spiritual encounters. The core outcome of the Great Awakening was a revolt against controlling religious rule which transferred over into other areas of American life. The Great Awakening changed American life on how they thought about and praised the divine, it changed the way people viewed authority, the society, decision making, and it also the way they expressed themselves. Before the Great Awakening life was very strict and people’s minds were
Although the Great Awakening did have a great influence on the development of a democratic society, that influence does not outweigh the even greater influence the Enlightenment had. The Great Awakening increased religious diversity and led to the Enlightenment. However, it also preached a stricter form of spirituality, which is not what the colonies needed. The logic and reason the Enlightenment emphasized and encouraged throughout the colonies helped them prosper and
All of this is what opened the doors into the Great Awakening. The actual Great Awakening movement itself was set off in the 1730s by Jonathan Edwards and his firm beliefs. He believed strongly in good works being the way to eternal happiness. He also believed that unbaptized children were sent to hell. This belief of his went so far that he claimed that hell was “paved with the skulls of unbaptized children.” Edwards had the sympathies of many people who attended his parish, as well as other people.
The Great Awakening, occurring in 1730s American Colonies, was a religious movement that started a change in the way people in the colonies viewed religion. The movement started with fears of clergymen that western expansion, commercial development, and lack of
Many colonists held a stronger loyalty to their American Colonies than to England by the eve of the Revolution. The battles and trials that they endured gave them an identity and a unity, they had survived through many hardships and any group that does that had some sort of bond. The unique combining of cultures, geography, and the many political ordeals that American colonists had endured provided them with a sense of identity and unity.
The Second Great Awakening was extremely influential in sparking the idea of reform in the minds of people across America. Most people in America just accepted things the way they were until this time. Reforms took place due to the increase of industrial growth, increasing immigration, and new ways of communication throughout the United States. Charles Grandison Finney was one of the main reasons the Second Great Awakening was such a great success. “Much of the impulse towards reform was rooted in the revivals of the broad religious movement that swept the Untied State after 1790” (Danzer, Klor de Alva, Krieger, Wilson, and Woloch 240). Revivals during the Second Great Awakening awakened the faith of people during the 1790s with emotional preaching from Charles Finney and many other influential preachers, which later helped influence the reforms of the mid-1800s throughout America.
People of all groups, social status, and gender realized that they all had voice and they can speak out through their emotional feels of religion. Johnathan Edwards was the first one to initiate this new level of religion tolerance and he states that, “Our people do not so much need to have their heads filled than, as much as have their hearts touched.” Johnathan Edwards first preach led to more individuals to come together and listen. Than after that individual got a sense that you do not need to be a preacher to preach nor you do not need to preach in a church, you can preach wherever you want to. For the first time, you have different people coming together to preach the gospel. You had African American preaching on the roads, Indian preachers preaching and you had women who began to preach. The Great Awakening challenged individuals to find what church meets their needs spiritually and it also let them know about optional choices instead of one. The Great Awakening helped the American colonies come together in growth of a democratic
...ing shattered denominational loyalties and allowed Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists to leap ahead of all other Protestant rivals after 1780. It also destroyed the systems of established churches and recognized hierarchies, and replaced them with Evangelicalism, which mainly consisted of missionary work and reporting conversion experiences to others. The Great Awakening and westward expansion provided the American colonies with a few characteristics that led to the development of an American culture that distinguished it from British culture.
In the early 1700's spiritual revivalism spread rapidly through the colonies. This led to colonists changing their beliefs on religion. The great awakening was the level to which the revivalism spread through the colonists. Even with this, there was still religious revivalism in the colonies. One major reason for the Great Awakening was that it was not too long before the revolution. The great awakening is reason to believe that William G Mcloughlin's opinion and this shows that there was a cause to the American Revolution.
The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival. It influenced the entire country to do good things in society and do what was morally correct. The Second Great Awakening influenced the North more than it did the South and on a whole encouraged democratic ideas and a better standard for the common man and woman. The Second Great Awakening made people want to repent the sins they had made and find who they were. It influenced the end of slavery, abolitionism, and the ban of alcohol, temperance.
The Second Great Awakening began around 1790 and gained momentum in the early nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening was led by established religious leaders who were worried about low church attendance in young America. The crescendo of the
In essence, the Great Awakening was a religious awakening. It started in the South. Tent camps were set up that revolve around high spirited meetings that would last for days. These camp meetings were highly emotional and multitudes of people were filled with the Spirit of God. These meeting, were sponsored mainly by Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterians, and met social needs as well as spiritual needs on the frontier. Since it was hard for the Baptist and Methodist to sustain local churches, they solved the problem by recruiting the non educated to spread the word of God to their neighbors. The camp meetings eventually favored "protracted meetings" in local churches.
Reform movements including religion, temperance, abolition, and women's rights sought to expand democratic ideals in the years 1825 to 1850. However, certain movements, such as nativism and utopias, failed to show the American emphasis on a democratic society. The reform movements were spurred by the Second Great Awakening, which began in New England in the late 1790's, and would eventually spread throughout the country. The Second Great Awakening differed from the First in that people were now believed to be able to choose whether or not to believe in God, as opposed to previous ideals based on Calvinism and predestination.
The First Great Awakening started among the American colonial Protestants during the early 1700s, mainly due to the weakening of the strict Puritan tradition of religious doctrine, and in part, the religious decline caused by negative publicity from the Salem witch trials and the Enlightenment (www.wikipedia.org). The movement to correct these problems began with Jonathan Edwards, a strictly Puritan, orthodox theologian from Massachusetts who dedicated his time to bringing the people back to the strict Calvinist roots, and to reawaken the fear of God' (www.wikipedia.org). He was a powerful speaker, and preached to his large following that it was to simply come to church was not enough to be saved, but they must also acknowledge their grievances in the heart, and feel God's love for them (Danzer, 38). He set off the wave of religious revival, as preachers traveled all across the colonies, attracted thousands of people to revival meetings of spiritual rebirth, gave impassioned sermons, and encouraged people to rededicate themselves to God (Danzer, 38). Although after the First Great Awakening America's religious zeal faded, its influence on religion was the beginning step (www.wikipedia.org).
Why do we need another Great awakening? When I think of an Awakening, even after our class, my mind immediately goes to images of eighteenth century revivalists like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Jereena Lee and a large constellation of other preaching giants of yesteryear. These men and women created a legacy of spiritual fervor which has earned them a place in the annals of American religious history. Their effectiveness as preachers of the word and proclaimers of truth permeated a nation’s consciousness and snatched the nation from spiritual decline.