David Horn - Great Awakenings: Historical Perspectives for Today

The book that you hold in your hands is about great awakenings, the kind that are produced by the wonderful, free, and sovereign grace of God, to use the words of Jonathan Edwards. When a great awakening arrives, it turns cold, formal religion and careless, performance-based Christianity into a lively and heartfelt exercise of the love of God that was the central teaching of Jesus Christ. It is manifest in repentance for sin and the conversion of life and practice. It eventuates in the praise of God, renewed worship, overcoming of old feuds, and care for neighbors.

As a subject of historical scholarship, the matter of great awakenings has produced a number of accounts that seek to explain the increased religious enthusiasm and fervor that has periodically evidenced itself in the cultural life of America. On the macro level, the work of William McLoughlin identifies a number of great awakenings that have played their role in shaping American culture. He sets out the following five awakenings:

The Puritan Awakening, 161040;

The First Great Awakening, 173060;

The Second Great Awakening, 18001830;

The Third Great Awakening, 18901920;

and The Fourth Great Awakening, 196090(?).

This periodization of the awakenings is approximate and McLoughlins is not the only possible model to consider. When one is working on the macro level, nuance gained by individual studies on a particular awakening cannot be given full prominence.

What McLoughlin and other researchers would have us see is that awakenings are certainly religious in nature, but should also be seen as coinciding with and contributing to the revitalization of culture. This approach highlights the complex social and intellectual causes as well as the religious causes of awakening. A sophisticated society is under constant pressure to adjust its central institutions in light of changing technologies, changing social opinion, and moral/religious justifications that set the relation between institutions and the web of culture. A revival or great awakening begins when accumulated pressures for change produce such personal and corporate stress that a shift is required for culture to proceed. At that moment the hard crust of custom must be broken through to sweep away blockages that would obstruct social structures that make for a new equilibrium.

When studying great awakenings from this vantage point, we can see that there is no separating the religious elements from the social elements. This is something that comes out as McLoughlin differentiates between two similar terms, that of Revivalism and Great Awakenings.

Revivalism is the Protestant ritual (at first spontaneous, but, since 1830, routinized) in which charismatic evangelists convey the Word of God to large masses of people who, under this influence, experience what Protestants call conversion, salvation, regeneration, or spiritual rebirth. Awakeningsthe most vital and yet most mysterious of all folk artsare periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a period of a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture.

The great advantage of this definition is that it points out the difference between a simple instance of religious fervor and the effects of a great awakening. While the first can be understood purely in religious termsthe effect of the word of God in the soula great awakening is a more complex reality with social as well as religious components.

The idea that a great awakening includes social components might be new to some, but it is standard thinking in the literature exploring the great awakenings. For example, in his work From Puritan to Yankee, Richard L. Bushman traces the deterioration of Puritan social institutions, especially from 1690 onwards. The internal stresses, including economic and social, pressed hard on the established patterns of authority. This atmosphere became the precursor for which the Great Awakening was the answer. When the awakening swept through Connecticut, it helped to seal a restructuring of the social contract. The Puritan compact was over, and a new (Yankee) structure for relating to authority (and the legitimization of the moral warrants for that structure) was set in place. In addition, the new structure made greater degrees of individualism, volunteerism, and democracy acceptable practices. All of these qualities helped prepare the colonies for the rigors of the Revolution. In fact, McLoughlin would argue that the First Great Awakening aided in the creation of the American republic.

Jonathan Edwards gives an eyewitness account of the beginnings of the First Great Awakening in his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work ofGod. When Edwards had taken up his post at the Northampton church as its third pastor, he noted that it was a time of extraordinary dullness in religion. People were more interested in their own pursuits and the cares of daily life than in thinking about eternal matters. The young people were given to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices. This led to the corruption of morals and a general disregard for the authority structures in their families. Further, there was a significant division in the parish. As Edwards describes it, There had also long 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, and they were prepared to oppose one another in all public affairs.