The First Great Awakening

The event

Beginning with a localized revival under the preaching of pastor Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734-35 (which Edwards documented in his widely circulated Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God), a broader wave of religious revival spread across Britain's American colonies over the following decade, intensified dramatically by the arrival of the itinerant English evangelist George Whitefield, whose preaching tours drew enormous crowds across the colonies from 1739 onward.

The revival was characterized by intense emotional experiences of conviction and conversion, often accompanied by physical manifestations such as weeping, fainting, or outcry during preaching, and by an emphasis on individual, experiential conversion (the "New Birth") over inherited or merely formal religious affiliation — features that proved both spiritually compelling to many participants and deeply controversial to more traditionalist clergy and laypeople, producing lasting divisions within several colonial denominations between pro-revival "New Light" and more cautious "Old Light" factions.

Edwards's own theologically sophisticated preaching, including his famous 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," combined vivid, unsettling imagery of divine judgment with careful philosophical argument, while Whitefield's extraordinary, widely reported vocal power and cross-colonial itinerant preaching helped weld what had begun as scattered, localized revivals into something contemporaries and later historians increasingly understood as a shared, trans-colonial religious phenomenon.

The Awakening's emphasis on individual religious experience over inherited denominational or social hierarchy contributed to significant longer-term effects on American religious and civic culture, including the proliferation of new and dissenting religious denominations, increased skepticism toward established, state-supported churches, and, according to many historians, a broader cultural emphasis on individual choice and voluntary religious commitment that some scholars connect to the revolutionary political culture that emerged in the following decades.

Other witnesses

• Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God
• George Whitefield, Journals

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 8: Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening — free full issue
• Christian History Magazine 38: George Whitefield — free full issue