It appears the seeds of the
Great Awakening had been sown as far back as the Reformation and its aftermath
in Europe. The Reformation had shaken up traditional Christendom that had
reigned in the Catholic Church for centuries. In a search for the true faith the
Church scattered many disjointed Protestant denominations in Europe (Shelley 342). In the face of a dithering Catholic Church
and a disorganized infant Protestant movement came strong national leaders/princes
that tried to maintain alliances of church/state in their realms for the
supposed good of their subjects.
These alliances supported by state
law, fluctuated between tyranny and moderation. This eventually led to things
like the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In the milieu of constant war and an
inability to reconcile a standard orthodoxy/doctrine, nation-state religious
alliances attempted to fix the problem through policies of inclusiveness. Doctrinally
sound denominations in an attempt at ecumenicalism ended up watering down their
doctrine and this movement found many opponents and created further division.
In this disunity and unorthodoxy, church-state organizations often suppressed
or ignored true faith (Noll-America's God 9-10, Shelley 342-343).
In addition, other reasons
such as a weariness of war, religious persecution and political oppression forced
people into pilgrimages to the New World. Although many left their socio-economic
problems behind them in Europe, almost all brought their beliefs with them and
the disunity that had been in Europe due to religious beliefs and arrived on
American shores. So in essence, American theology started as European theology
(Noll-America's God 19). To be able to maintain the freedom of one’s
religion in this new land, religious groups finally understood that they needed
to grant the same autonomy to all other beliefs. What arose was a nascent form
of “freedom of religion”. Churches would now be on their own to evangelize the
masses with no state sponsorship. Churches were forced into a situation where
they would need to “win” converts, there was no longer a state sanctioned
religion forced down the collective throats of the people as in Europe. Instead
of the new freedom being a positive driving force for religious belief in
general, it seems to have created complacency and spiritual ambivalence among
believers. Religion became something of a banal ritual in which people would
“go through the motions”. Because of past abuses and a new concept of American individuality,
some Christians began to detach from “normal” approaches to worship. It is in
this spiritual and cultural milieu that the Great Awakening surfaces.
As it is now, so it was
then…the Word and the preacher reigned supreme in this environment for propagating
the Gospel in a setting of voluntaryism.
Voluntaryism being nothing more than the idea that the churches would now need
to take on responsibility for evangelizing the unconverted and nurturing the
believers with no state support (Shelley 343).
The Great Awakening seems to have been a genuine act of God initiated in
multiple places simultaneously at this point. It resulted in the conversion of
many that subsequently lived godly lives. In short it was a series of
spontaneous and what appears to be unorganized awakenings led by a sovereign God
(Noll-America’s God 19, Noll-Christianity in America 113, Shelly 365).
Some of the more obvious secular factors were declining morality that had been
allowed by the influence of the American frontier, a mobile population and a
series of brutal wars or skirmishes with Natives Americans. This combined with
a shift to urban setting may have produced a sort of religious nostalgia due to
the abandoning of the “old ways” (Cairns 367, Noll-Christianity in America 114). These same factors drove the revival
in Europe also, so it is not surprising to see preachers like Wesley and
Whitefield in both locations (minus Native Americans).
[continued in Part II]
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