The Great Awakening and Enlightenment Study Pack
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Last updated May 28, 2026
The Great Awakening and Enlightenment Study Guide
Trace the parallel rise of evangelical revival and Enlightenment reason — from Whitefield and Edwards to Locke's natural rights — and see how both movements eroded deference to authority and primed colonists for revolution.
Key Takeaways
- •The Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) was a wave of evangelical Protestant revivals that swept through the American colonies, emphasizing personal conversion, emotional religious experience, and the direct relationship between the individual and God.
- •Enlightenment thought, rooted in the work of thinkers like John Locke and Isaac Newton, promoted reason, empirical observation, and natural law as the foundations of human knowledge and legitimate government.
- •The two movements appear contradictory but shared a common effect: both challenged inherited authority — whether ecclesiastical or monarchical — and encouraged colonists to question established institutions.
- •Itinerant preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards bypassed traditional church hierarchies, creating intercolonial networks of communication and a shared colonial identity that crossed regional boundaries.
- •Enlightenment principles directly shaped colonial political thought, particularly the ideas that governments derive authority from the consent of the governed and that individuals possess natural, inalienable rights.
- •The Great Awakening produced lasting denominational splits — between 'New Light' and 'Old Light' factions — and spurred the founding of new colleges, including Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth.
- •Together, the Great Awakening and Enlightenment cultivated a colonial culture skeptical of unchecked authority, laying intellectual and cultural groundwork that contributed to revolutionary sentiment by the 1760s and 1770s.
Origins and Context of Two Transformative Movements
Both the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment emerged from a broader Atlantic world in the eighteenth century that was grappling with rapid social change, growing literacy, and increasing skepticism toward traditional authority — yet each movement drew on very different sources of truth and human experience.
Colonial Religious Landscape Before the Great Awakening
- •By the early 1700s, the intensity of Puritan religious fervor that had defined seventeenth-century New England had visibly declined, a phenomenon ministers called 'declension.'
- •Established churches — Congregationalist in New England, Anglican in the South — held official status but faced growing competition from Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians spreading through the mid-Atlantic colonies.
- •Many colonists practiced a nominal Christianity disconnected from the emotional intensity their grandparents had brought to worship, creating conditions that revival preachers would later exploit.
European Intellectual Origins of the Enlightenment
- •The Enlightenment drew heavily from the scientific revolution of the previous century; Isaac Newton's demonstration that the universe operates according to discoverable, rational laws inspired thinkers to apply the same logic to human society.
- •John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) argued that political authority is not divinely granted to monarchs but arises from a social contract in which citizens surrender certain freedoms in exchange for the protection of natural rights to life, liberty, and property.
- •Francis Bacon's advocacy for empirical observation — testing ideas against evidence rather than accepting them on tradition or scriptural authority — became a foundational method for Enlightenment inquiry.
The Great Awakening: Mechanics and Key Figures
The Great Awakening was not a single event but a series of interconnected revivals that moved through different colonial regions at different times, unified by a common theology of immediate, personal salvation and a rejection of cold, formalistic religious practice.
Jonathan Edwards and the New England Revivals
- •Jonathan Edwards, a Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, ignited early revivals in the 1730s with sermons that combined rigorous Calvinist theology with vivid, terrifying imagery of divine judgment — most famously 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' (1741).
- •Edwards believed that genuine conversion involved an emotional and sensory transformation, not merely intellectual assent, a position that put him in tension with more rationalist colleagues.
- •His account of the Northampton revival, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), circulated widely in Britain and the colonies and helped inspire further revivals.
George Whitefield and Intercolonial Revival Networks
- •George Whitefield, an Anglican minister from England, conducted multiple preaching tours of the colonies between 1739 and 1770, drawing enormous crowds — sometimes in the tens of thousands — in open-air settings that bypassed church buildings entirely.
- •Whitefield's theatrical preaching style, his willingness to address people of all denominations and social classes, and his strategic use of the colonial press (with printer Benjamin Franklin's assistance in Philadelphia) made him arguably the first true intercolonial celebrity.
- •By traveling from Georgia to New England and back, Whitefield helped create a shared emotional and cultural experience that crossed colonial boundaries, fostering a rudimentary sense of pan-colonial identity.
New Light vs. Old Light Divisions
- •The revivals fractured existing congregations into 'New Light' supporters, who embraced emotional conversion and itinerant preaching, and 'Old Light' opponents, who viewed such enthusiasm as dangerous, socially disruptive, and theologically unsound.
- •New Light Presbyterians and Baptists expanded rapidly in the mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies, often attracting lower-class whites and, notably, some enslaved Africans who found in evangelical Christianity a message of spiritual equality.
- •These denominational splits had lasting institutional consequences: New Light factions founded new colleges — Princeton (1746), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769) — to train a new generation of revival-minded ministers.
Enlightenment Thought in Colonial America
Enlightenment ideas crossed the Atlantic through books, pamphlets, correspondence networks, and institutions like the library company and the learned society, finding fertile ground among educated colonial elites who were simultaneously proud of their British heritage and alert to the limits of British governance.
Transmission and Reception of Enlightenment Ideas
- •Colonial elites accessed Enlightenment texts through transatlantic book trade, subscription libraries (Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731), and learned societies modeled on the Royal Society of London.
- •Franklin himself embodied colonial Enlightenment values: his electrical experiments — demonstrating that lightning is an electrical discharge — earned him international scientific fame and illustrated that an American colonist could contribute to universal human knowledge.
- •Colonial newspapers and almanacs popularized Enlightenment concepts about natural rights and rational governance for audiences well beyond the educated elite.
John Locke's Influence on Colonial Political Thought
- •Locke's argument that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed — and that citizens retain the right to resist or replace governments that violate natural rights — became a cornerstone of colonial political discourse.
- •Colonial assemblies repeatedly invoked the language of natural rights and constitutional limits when resisting Parliamentary taxation in the 1760s and 1770s, showing how abstract philosophical principles became practical political tools.
- •Thomas Jefferson's drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 drew directly on Lockean language, framing the colonial grievances against Britain as violations of self-evident, natural rights rather than merely legal or customary ones.
Deism and Religious Rationalism
- •Some colonial thinkers, including Franklin and Jefferson, embraced deism — the belief that a rational God created the universe according to natural laws but does not intervene in human affairs through miracles or revelation.
- •Deism held that human reason, not scripture, was the most reliable guide to moral truth, placing its adherents in sharp contrast with Great Awakening evangelicals who prioritized direct divine experience.
- •Despite this tension, both deists and evangelicals shared a suspicion of entrenched ecclesiastical hierarchies, creating an unlikely alignment on the question of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
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What phenomenon did colonial ministers use to describe the visible decline in Puritan religious fervor by the early 1700s?
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The Great Awakening
Explain the Great Awakening in your own words. What was it, what sparked it, and why did it spread so quickly across the colonies?
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