Religious belief and practice directly influence society in myriad ways. However, the extent and character of its impact is a contested matter. Historians of colonial America have often argued that the First Great Awakening significantly influenced the development of the War for Independence. Paul Johnson, Harry Stout, and Rhys Isaac have each attempted to explain the connection between these historical events.
Unlike revisionist historians such as Jon Butler, they maintain that the Great Awakening was a cohesive movement broader than its individual revival meetings.[1] However, they understand its impact on the founding of the country in different ways. Bringing together their various perspectives offers a richer understanding of how this religious event transformed colonial America.
American Identity
Emotional experiences (referred to as “enthusiasm”), austere pietistic living, broad social participation, volunteer association, and extempore preaching by plainspoken commoners characterized the First Great Awakening. Beginning among immigrant German pietists in 1719, the movement spread throughout the American colonies through the preaching of men like George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert Tennent. By 1740, the revivals had become a distinct movement that had broad appeal in New England and some attraction for southerners.
British historian Paul Johnson rightly points out that defining the Great Awakening, as a popular movement, is very difficult to define, because it did not exist under the jurisdiction of any one institution.[2] Rather, it transcended boundaries—geography, doctrine, skin color, and class. Throughout the colonies, men and women of all skin colors and class structures were drawn into the effects of the Great Awakening in one way or another. Johnson suggests that as many as three in four colonists, known as New Lights, participated in the religious revivals.[3]
Even those who rejected the Awakening were affected. Churches and denominations throughout the land split into New and Old Light factions. Some denominations like the Free Will Baptists in North Carolina were all but destroyed by intruding New Light evangelists.[4] Rationalists moved further away from orthodox religion, eventually becoming Unitarians.
For Johnson, the Awakening’s ubiquitous presence in colonial America was essential for forming a broad intercolonial identity infused with social upheaval. As colonists struggled to find their place in a new religious landscape, they were simultaneously fashioning a common identity that was distinctly American as opposed to British.[5]
When the British began renewing old taxes and levying new ones in the 1760s to recoup imperial losses from the Seven Years War (1756–1763), colonists were ideologically and culturally prepared to band together in rejecting British authority and abuse. The enthusiasm of the revivals also took form in the political passion for independence. Thus, for Johnson, the Great Awakening was essential for preparing the colonists to seek independence from Britain.
The Rhetoric of a Republic
Historian of American religion, Harry Stout, sees the influence of the Great Awakening on the War for Independence as more limited but no less important. In a 1977 article in The William and Mary Quarterly, Stout argues that the aristocratic Founding Fathers adopted the methods of religious enthusiasm and revival meetings to garner the support of lower class colonists. Like the itinerant preachers of evangelicalism, the political leaders of the colonies gathered “extra-institutional mass meetings” where they exhorted the colonists to band together against the British.[6]
Further, these leaders adopted the rhetoric of the Great Awakening in their speeches and pamphlets. Virginia aristocrat, Patrick Henry, was perhaps the most famous orator of the Independence movement. His style was simple and almost careless, a homespun alternative to the classical and literary style of his aristocratic contemporaries like Richard Henry Lee.[7]
According to Stout, some of the most successful pamphlets among common colonists also drew on themes from the Awakening. Baptist minister John Allen filled his pamphlet, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty (1773), with emotional fervor, intending that it be read aloud to groups as well as in private. Further, Allen drew his arguments for independence completely from Scripture without a single reference to classical republican ideas or British Constitutional theory.[8]
Stout provides important insight into the thinking of common colonists whose literacy rates were lower than we often realize.[9] However, as Bernard Bailyn has shown, many literate colonists throughout the country also wrote in newspapers and printed their own pamphlets that did engage classical republican thought.[10] These two distinct social groups had different visions of the political situation in the 1770s, but they found common ground in mass meetings where the enthusiastic rhetoric of men like Henry swayed hearts toward independence.
Social Transformation
Like Stout, Australian historian Rhys Isaac emphasizes that the educated, upper-class colonists were forced to adopt aspects of the Great Awakening to build common cause with free-hold farmers and laborers. However, Isaac makes a more complex and sweeping argument that the Great Awakening fundamentally altered colonial culture, especially in his area of study, Virginia.
Isaac’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Transformation of Virginia: 1740–1790 is a beautifully detailed and intricate cultural history of the changes wrought by evangelical religion in the late eighteenth century. Isaac’s application of Clifford Geertz’s anthropological theories concerning culture make portions of this work less accessible to the average reader than Johnson, Stout, or Bailyn’s work, but there is still much to appreciate.[11]
Isaac contends that the mid-eighteenth-century introduction of evangelical Christianity with its leveled hierarchy, voluntary association, and pietistic lifestyle fundamentally undermined the formalized patriarchal world of colonial Virginia. The new social and moral order offered by the evangelicals served to bolster the patriotic rejection of British rule in the 1770s.
Isaac argues that strong hierarchies of influence and deference placed the gentry at the apex of colonial Virginia society, with freehold farmers beneath them and enslaved blacks at the bottom. The gentry served as patrons for poorer Virginians in the courthouse and in trading tobacco with English merchants. Isaac shows how this hierarchy was communicated nonverbally through church and home architecture, dance, modes of transportation, and public events such as horse races, cockfights, militia service, and local elections.
Isaac argues the rise of enthusiastic religion upset this delicate balance. In colonial Virginia, the Anglican Church was the state-established religion. While dissenting Christians, including English General Baptist migrants, had been in Virginia since the seventeenth century lower class Virginians abandoned the Anglican Church in increasing numbers after 1740.[12] As first New Light Baptists and then Methodists made their way through the Virginia countryside, both poorer white Virginians and enslaved blacks began adopting a much more egalitarian view of society.
The evangelical groups did not rely on highly educated, well-spoken ministers. Instead, local whites and blacks were allowed to preach and speak at church meetings. Further, association with an evangelical church was voluntary as opposed to the geographically-based Anglican parishes. Evangelical congregants referred to one another as brother and sister and adhered to a common identity based on shared emotional experiences. Men and women of both skin colors were also expected to embrace rigidly pious lifestyles. Isaac argues that these varied verbal and nonverbal symbols of cultural meaning communicated a flattened social hierarchy based on volunteer association, austere lifestyles, and widespread participation.
According to Isaac, evangelical cultural forms fundamentally undermined gentry culture in colonial Virginia and laid the foundation for independence. Like Stout, Isaac emphasizes the importance of evangelical rhetoric and mass meetings for the independence movement. However, he goes further, noting that lower class Virginians who voluntarily joined Baptist and Methodist congregations now perceived that they had the power and privilege to join the cause of independence voluntarily and to sign petitions to the British government.
More, the gentry also appealed to the austere pietism and widespread social participation of the Great Awakening by engaging in boycotts against British goods. They called upon Virginian men and women of all skin colors to wear homespun clothes and abandon corrupting imported luxuries like sugar or fine dishware. Without these cultural avenues of mass enthusiasm, volunteerism, and wide spread participation, Isaac argues the gentry could not have garnered enough support to break with Britain.
Conclusion
Since the 1960s, American scholars have questioned the importance of Christianity on America’s founding. While they have numerous philosophical, spiritual, and political reasons for their position, such scholars are ignoring the actual data of the past. Beyond the intellectual and legal foundations that Refomational Christianity provided for the Founders, the Great Awakening was essential for the independence movement.
Though this pietistic campaign upset and destroyed many churches and denominations (as it did among North Carolina Free Will Baptists), it also helped transform American culture in important ways. Common colonists began to realize that they had the power to engage in public conversation and overthrow broken social institutions. They saw themselves as a common people in opposition to the legal abuses of the crown of England. This common identity was reinforced by the mass participation in boycotts and petition signing. This new American culture shaped the War for Independence, the fashioning of our government, and in some ways remains with us today.
[1]See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[2]Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 109.
[3]Ibid., 115.
[4]See Jesse F. Owens, “When General Baptists became Particular Baptists,” Helwys Society Forum, Aug. 3, 2015; http://www.helwyssocietyforum.com/when-general-baptists-became-particular-baptists/; accessed December 4, 2020; Internet.
[5]Johnson, 116.
[6]Harry Stout, “Religion, Communications, and Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 4 (Oct., 1977): 534.
[7]Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia: 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 267.
[8]Stout, 537.
[9]Isaac, 122. Literacy rates in New England were unusually high due to their Puritan heritage. By contrast, in the oldest American colony, Virginia, literacy rates among white men hovered around sixty percent for most of the eighteenth century.
[10]See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1967).
[11]Clifford Geertz argued that cultures are alien to one another and that understanding another culture is ultimately impossible. As a result, cultural outsiders must study the myriad nonverbal interactions of culture to garner even small glimpses of understanding that other outsiders can be interpret. This anthropological understanding of culture rightly emphasizes the importance of unspoken communication, but it also fails to account fully for the universal nature of humanity and multifarious and shifting facets of a culture situated in time. In addition, Geertz fails to explain adequately why cultures are inscrutable to all outsiders except enlightened anthropologists and scholars such as himself. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic, 1973).
[12]For information on English General Baptist migrants in seventeenth-century Virginia, see William F. Davidson, The Free Will Baptists in History 2nd ed. (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2001) and Michael R. Pelt, A History of Original Free Will Baptists (Mount Olive, NC: Mount Olive College Press, 1996).
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