Great Awakening

The Great Awakenings is the name historians give to a series of waves of Protestant revival in American history, from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth. Most scholars count three, and some a fourth. Each was marked by mass revival meetings led by evangelical preachers, intense experiences of sin and conversion, and the birth of new churches and movements, and each left a mark on American politics and society.

The first wave swept the British colonies in the 1730s and 1740s and was closely tied to the Evangelical Revival in Britain. Local revivals had already taken place under Solomon Stoddard and his grandson Jonathan Edwards, whose congregation saw a revival in the mid-1730s. The decisive spark came from the English preacher George Whitefield, who reached Georgia in 1738, toured from Philadelphia to New York in 1739 and visited New England in 1740, drawing huge crowds. The revival divided churches between "Old Lights", who valued established ritual and doctrine, and "New Lights", who stressed emotional, personal faith. It reshaped Congregational and Presbyterian churches, strengthened the Baptists and Methodists, and brought large numbers of African Americans into Christianity for the first time. See the First Great Awakening for a fuller account.

A second, broader wave began in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s and lasted into the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike the first, it reached out to people outside the churches, especially on the frontier, through Methodist circuit riders and outdoor camp meetings such as Cane Ridge in Kentucky in 1801. Western New York became so full of revivals that it was later nicknamed the "burned-over district". The period produced new denominations including the Latter Day Saint movement and the Adventists, and independent Black churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It fed directly into the reform causes of the age, among them the abolition of slavery, women's rights and the temperance movement. See the Second Great Awakening.

The historian William G. McLoughlin proposed a third awakening from the late 1850s into the early twentieth century. It began with urban revivals in 1858 that were interrupted by the American Civil War, though revivals also spread through Confederate armies. Afterwards the evangelist Dwight L. Moody made Chicago his base. This wave was linked to the Social Gospel, which applied Christian teaching to poverty, child labour and factory conditions, to the push for prohibition led by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and to a great expansion of foreign missions. New movements included the Holiness and Pentecostal churches, Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, and the Bible Students who later became the Jehovah's Witnesses. American revival methods were carried to Korea, where a series of revivals took place between 1884 and 1910.

Some scholars describe a fourth awakening after the Second World War, placed variously between the 1950s and the early 1980s; the economist Robert Fogel dated it to the late 1960s and early 1970s. The idea is not generally accepted. Its supporters point to the rapid growth of conservative churches such as the Southern Baptists, a charismatic movement that spread even into the Catholic Church, the rise of megachurches and the Jesus Movement, while mainline Protestant churches lost members and influence.

The term itself comes largely from evangelical Christians, who saw these periods as a waking from spiritual slumber. Historians use it as a convenient label but debate how distinct the waves really were and where each began and ended.

Our 1700 and 1783 maps bracket the First Great Awakening in the colonies that became the United States, and the 1815 and 1880 maps show the country during the second and third waves.