¶ … Great Awakening and the Enlightenment
The Great Awakening, was not, as many believe a continuous spiritual awakening or revival in colonial America, instead it was a several revivals in a variety of locations (Matthews). However, The Great Awakening is an appropriate name. The new Americans had found their lives much different from their lives in England. In England the communities were compact, but in America people lived in great expanses of land. Because people had to fend for themselves, any type of authority -- governmental or ecclesiastical -- was met with resistance (Matthews). This and the fact that church was simply not easy to get to caused people to be "spiritually asleep."
The Great Awakening began with Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Initially the movement broke out in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1733 when Edwards preached to the youth of his church about the great sin of bundling. Bundling was a custom where young courting people would lie in bed fully clothed. He also called upon the youth not to attend worldly amusements such as dances (Great Men of God) In his view the people were "very insensible of the things of religion" (Edwards qtd by Prescott). By 1734 the revival had intensified and Edwards took his message on a preaching tour, putting the entire Connecticut River Valley into revival mode. In 1737 the revival declined in the area and the congregation fired him, but The Great Awakening had already begun to spread. Edwards' most influential sermon and also considered the most famous sermon in American history was "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in which he expounds God's judgment on sinners and then offers salvation to those who repent (Prescott). Another itinerant preacher/evangelist George Whitefield followed, introducing outdoor preaching and bringing his message to the lower classes -- a class the church typically ignored. His evangelistic tenure included seven evangelistic tours and covered each colony with an estimated attendance of 8,000 per sermon. In his sermons he accused pastors of speaking of an unknown, unfelt Christ. Many ministers opposed the Great Awakening for reasons that ranged from denying the deity of Christ to the belief that human efforts to bring revival was an affront to God (Prescott).
While the Great Awakening was a religious revival, its effects were social and political. The movement splintered established churches by giving people independence from the church. The Puritans used cooptation to accept new members. Cooptation involved the congregation voting in new members or appointing new members with or without their consent. In contrast, The Great Awakening ideals allowed people to join the church because of a personal experience with God and it was the person's own decision -- not a congregation's. The result was to create so many churches that no one church dominated as it had in the past. As the congregational structure lost importance two levels of social life became important -- the individual and the broader community, which for the converts was the nation (Bass). By individual participation in the process of salvation, religion had become democratic (McLoughlin 75). In addition, this new structure caused people to be more tolerant and to widen their view of the community (Bass). Tolerance had the effect of making people who were not a part of the American community to take their place. This included the poor and the slaves. McLoughin states that the Great Awakening drew people from the nonelite and rural culture into a communal bound, a communal identity. The stress on the individual's relationship with God emphasized the importance and value of each human being and paved the way for the American Revolution (Bass).
Another product of The Great Awakening was that people began to reject traditional authority, such as the authority of the British Crown. Scholars also say that the Great Awakening, a movement base on principles, made the American Revolution much different from the French Revolution, which was based on a reign of terror (Prescott).
The Enlightenment
Though the Anglo-American intellectual movement, known as The Enlightenment came to the forefront during the 18th century, the movement began long before this time. The name came about when thinkers and writers in London and Paris, held that they were more "enlightened." Their belief prompted them to "enlighten" others. Thomas Aquinas set the movement in motion when he began to defend every aspect of faith (Christianity) with reason. Humanists followed in the 14th and 15th centuries. These men argued that God not only created humans (the Almighty's crowning glory) in His image, but that humans also shared His creative powers. The movement continued throughout the 16th and 17th centuries with the thinking of philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne and Rene Descartes (Brian). The basic assumption was faith in the power of human reason. If it was possible to discover the God's universe's laws (as Issac Newton discovery of universal gravitation) then humanity could also discover the laws of nature and society (Tackett).
The most important political theory in the American Enlightenment came from John Locke's Two Treatises on Government and the work of a republican group, the commonwealthmen, making American political a mix of many forms of Enlightenment thought. As Locke had argued, the Americans...
Using Tennents' strategy, the clergymen of Presbyterian, Puritan and Baptist churches were conducting revivals in their regions by the 1740s. Preachers such as Jonathan Edwards stirred up flamboyant and terrifying images of the absolute corruption of the human nature in their emotionally charged sermons. These preachers also described the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell in their powerful sermons. Some of the converts from the early revivals in the northern
Works Cited Baumgarten, Linda. (2002). What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bilhartz, Terry D., and Elliott, Alan C. (2007). Currents in American History: A Brief History of the United States, Volume 1. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Crunden, Robert Morse. (1996). A Brief History of American Culture. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Fisher, John Hurt. (2001). "British and American, Continuity and Divergence"
It is Edna who achieves both the awakening of the title, the awareness of how the social traditions imposed on her are stifling her and preventing her from expressing herself as she would wish, and also fails in that she cannot overcome these traditions and so chooses suicide rather than continue under such a repressive system. Chopin implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of
Benjamin Franklin termed himself a pragmatic deist. He believes "there is one Supreme must perfect being," however that this being is distant, and that it is not necessary to build a personal relationship with such a supreme God. He concluded that it was useful and correct to believe that a faith in God should inform our daily actions. However, he did not believe in sectarian dogma, burning spirituality or deep
Enlightenment Upon the Colonies Enlightenment As may be common knowledge by people raised, educated, and living in America for many years will know, during the American Enlightenment period, many people were inspired. There were ideas abound. It was an era of relative tolerance and humanist thinking. Documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were composed and ratified during this period as well. Clearly, the American Enlightenment
Principal intellectual movements Anglo-American colonies eighteenth century: Great Awakening Enlightenment." You sources relevant paper. Use Reich's Colonial America reference research report if draw material source assigned, footnotes book, article, The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment: Wrestling for the souls and the minds of colonial settlers in the Americas The colonial period in the Americas was a time of intense intellectual ferment. Two seemingly contradictory intellectual movements arose: that of the Great Awakening
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