The Great Awakening and Enlightenment Study Pack

Kibin's free study pack on The Great Awakening and Enlightenment includes a 3-section study guide, 8 quiz questions, 10 flashcards, and 1 open-ended Explain review question. Sign up free to track your progress toward mastery, plus upload your own notes and recordings to create personalized study packs organized by course.

Last updated May 22, 2026

Topic mastery0%
Save progress →

The Great Awakening and Enlightenment Study Guide

Trace the twin intellectual currents that reshaped colonial America — the Enlightenment's embrace of reason and natural law alongside the Great Awakening's wave of evangelical revivalism. This pack covers key figures like George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, examining how both movements undermined deference to authority and planted the seeds of democratic thought and the American Revolution.

Key Takeaways

  • •The Enlightenment was an 18th-century intellectual movement that elevated reason, empirical observation, and natural law as the primary tools for understanding the world, challenging the authority of tradition and revealed religion.
  • •The Great Awakening (roughly 1730s–1740s) was a wave of evangelical Protestant revivalism that swept the American colonies, emphasizing personal conversion, emotional experience, and a direct relationship with God over institutional church authority.
  • •Itinerant preachers such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards were central figures of the Great Awakening, drawing massive crowds and spreading revivalist theology across denominational and colonial boundaries.
  • •Both movements, though philosophically opposed in many respects, eroded deference to established authorities — religious, intellectual, and political — and encouraged individuals to question inherited institutions.
  • •Enlightenment ideas shaped the political thought of colonial elites like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, directly influencing the rhetoric of natural rights and self-governance that underpinned the American Revolution.
  • •The Great Awakening accelerated religious pluralism in the colonies by fracturing established churches into 'Old Light' and 'New Light' factions and empowering dissenting denominations such as Baptists and Methodists.
  • •Together, the two movements cultivated a culture of individual judgment and popular participation that laid intellectual and social groundwork for American democratic thought.

The Enlightenment: Reason as the Foundation of Knowledge

The Enlightenment was a transatlantic intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that repositioned human reason — rather than scripture or inherited tradition — as the primary means of understanding nature, society, and governance.

Core Philosophical Principles of the Enlightenment

  • •Enlightenment thinkers argued that the natural world operates according to discoverable, rational laws — a view shaped by the scientific revolution and figures like Isaac Newton, whose laws of motion demonstrated that the universe follows predictable principles.
  • •John Locke's theory of natural rights held that individuals possess inherent rights to life, liberty, and property that exist prior to and independent of any government, making government authority legitimate only when it protects those rights.
  • •The concept of the social contract — the idea that governments derive just power from the consent of the governed — became a foundational principle that colonial intellectuals would later deploy against British imperial policy.

Enlightenment Thought in the American Colonies

  • •Benjamin Franklin embodied the colonial Enlightenment: his experiments with electricity, founding of learned institutions like the American Philosophical Society, and practical civic projects all reflected the Enlightenment conviction that reason could improve human life.
  • •Thomas Jefferson drew directly on Lockean philosophy when drafting the Declaration of Independence, translating abstract theories of natural rights into the political argument that British rule had forfeited its legitimacy.
  • •Colonial Enlightenment culture was largely confined to educated elites — merchants, lawyers, planters, and clergy — who read European philosophical works and corresponded through transatlantic networks of learned societies and print.

Origins and Spread of the Great Awakening

The Great Awakening emerged in the 1730s as a reaction against what many colonists perceived as cold, formalistic religious practice, igniting a continent-wide revival that prioritized heartfelt conversion over doctrinal conformity.

Conditions That Enabled the Revival

  • •By the early 18th century, many colonial congregations — particularly Congregationalist churches in New England and Presbyterian churches in the Middle Colonies — had become institutionally settled and spiritually complacent, prompting calls for renewal.
  • •The expansion of colonial print culture, including newspapers and printed sermons, allowed revival messages to circulate rapidly across regions where preachers had not yet traveled in person.
  • •Colonial society's geographic dispersal meant that many settlers lived far from established churches, making them receptive to itinerant preachers who brought religion directly into fields, town squares, and private homes.

Key Figures and Their Distinctive Approaches

  • •George Whitefield, an Anglican minister from England, conducted multiple preaching tours of the colonies between 1739 and the 1760s, drawing crowds of thousands with his theatrical oratory and open-air sermons — he was one of the first genuinely intercolonial celebrity figures.
  • •Jonathan Edwards, a Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, combined rigorous Calvinist theology with vivid, emotionally charged preaching; his 1741 sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' became one of the most famous texts of the revival.
  • •Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, aggressively challenged unconverted clergy in his 1740 sermon 'The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,' pushing congregations to abandon ministers they deemed spiritually deficient.

About this Study Pack

Created by Kibin to help students review key concepts, prepare for exams, and study more effectively. This Study Pack was checked for accuracy and curriculum alignment using authoritative educational sources. See sources below.

Sources

More in US History

See all topics →

Browse other courses

See all courses →