The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment
Two Movements, One Effect
In the 1730s and 1740s the colonies were swept by two cultural movements that, although very different on the surface, both did the same thing: they taught colonists to think and speak for themselves. The first was the Great Awakening, a wave of emotional Protestant revivalism that pulled crowds of thousands to open-air sermons. The second was the colonial Enlightenment, a quieter movement of newspapers, public libraries, schools and clubs through which European ideas about reason, science and rights reached an American audience. Students often imagine these were opposites — faith versus reason. They were not. Both eroded automatic deference to traditional authority, whether to settled clergy or to the Crown.
The Great Awakening (revivalist religion) and the Enlightenment (reason and education) both undermined automatic deference to authority. Each gave colonists practice in judging ideas for themselves — a habit later used in political dissent.
Whitefield, Edwards and the Open Air
The most famous figure of the Great Awakening was the English revivalist George Whitefield, who made seven voyages to America, the most famous of them beginning in 1739. Refused some pulpits because of his emotional style, he preached in fields and on village greens to crowds reported at 20,000 in Philadelphia and 30,000 in Boston. Travelling far further than any minister of his time, Whitefield bound the colonies into a single religious public for the first time. The American Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards, parish minister at Northampton, Massachusetts, supplied the movement’s great sermon: ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, delivered in 1741. Edwards described listeners shaking, sobbing and crying out for grace. The revival message was personal: a born-again experience, accessible to anyone, did not depend on a learned clergyman’s approval.
The Awakening split many established Protestant churches into ‘Old Lights’, who defended traditional clergy and ordered worship, and ‘New Lights’, who embraced revival. Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Baptists all fractured along this line. New denominations and new colleges — including Princeton, founded in 1746 to train New Light Presbyterian ministers — emerged out of the dispute. Crucially, the conflict taught ordinary believers to choose between competing ministers rather than accept the one their parish allotted. Once colonists had practised judging clergymen, judging governors became thinkable.
Education, Newspapers and Libraries
Alongside the revival ran a steady expansion of public learning. The colonies founded a string of new colleges — Yale (1701), Princeton (1746), King’s College in New York (1754) and others — on top of Harvard’s seventeenth-century base. Literacy rates rose, especially in New England, and primary schooling spread through Pennsylvania and New York. Newspapers grew from a single weekly in 1704 to about two dozen by the mid-1760s, carrying London news, sermons and political argument. Public lending libraries, the most famous founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1731, gave artisans and shopkeepers access to books they could never have afforded individually. The print culture of the 1730s onwards meant that an idea could travel from a Boston pamphlet to a Charleston coffee house within weeks.
Enlightenment ideas spread through new colleges (Yale, Princeton, King’s), a fast-growing newspaper press (about twenty-four titles by the mid-1760s) and subscription libraries (Philadelphia, 1731). Knowledge stopped being the property of the gentry alone.
Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Public Intellectual
No one embodied the colonial Enlightenment more completely than Benjamin Franklin (1706–90). A Boston-born printer who built a fortune in Philadelphia, Franklin published the Pennsylvania Gazette, edited ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’ and wrote for an audience that included craftsmen and farmers, not just college men. He founded the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), the American Philosophical Society (1743) and what became the University of Pennsylvania (1749). His scientific work on electricity — including the celebrated kite experiment of 1752 — brought him European recognition and a Royal Society medal. As a philanthropist he organised volunteer fire companies, hospitals and street lighting. By 1760 Franklin was the most famous American alive, and his career proved that a self-educated tradesman could rise to international standing through learning and useful work. That message, repeated thousands of times in ‘Poor Richard’, dignified ordinary colonists in their own eyes.
A common student error is to set the Great Awakening (faith) against the Enlightenment (reason) as if they were rival camps. They were parallel currents that often overlapped. Jonathan Edwards read John Locke and used Enlightenment philosophy to defend revival theology. Franklin printed Whitefield’s sermons, admired the preacher’s voice and gave him generously, while privately holding deist views. What both movements shared was a rejection of automatic obedience: to the local Anglican rector, to inherited social hierarchy, or, eventually, to a distant British government. Higher-band answers note this convergence; weaker answers force a clean opposition between them.
Why This Matters
The Awakening and the Enlightenment did not directly cause the American Revolution. Their effect was slower and deeper. They built up, over a generation, a colonial public that read its own newspapers, debated its own preachers and voted in its own assemblies. By the time the British government tried to tax that public after 1763, an Atlantic-wide community already existed that could mobilise quickly — through the same pulpits, prints and clubs — against measures it judged unjust. The language of natural rights that Jefferson used in 1776 was not invented in a Philadelphia coffee house that summer. It had been preached in fields and printed in almanacs for forty years.