First Great Awakening Peaks

In 1739, the English preacher George Whitefield began a tour of the American colonies that turned a scattered set of local religious revivals into something close to a shared continental experience. Drawing crowds far larger than any meetinghouse could hold, he helped make the First Great Awakening a defining moment in colonial life. The movement reshaped American Protestantism, encouraged new ideas about religious authority, and gave the colonies an early taste of a common public culture.

The revival had roots on both sides of the Atlantic. European Pietism and English Methodism stressed personal conversion and heartfelt faith over formal ritual. In the colonies, several ministers had already seen waves of spiritual intensity. Theodore Frelinghuysen preached revival among Dutch Reformed congregations in New Jersey, the Presbyterian Tennent family promoted similar ideas in the Middle Colonies, and Jonathan Edwards saw a remarkable surge of conversions in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the mid-1730s. Many colonists, meanwhile, felt that established churches had grown comfortable and distant.

Whitefield, a young Anglican clergyman and gifted orator, arrived in 1739 and traveled widely, preaching outdoors in fields and town squares from Georgia to New England. Contemporary accounts describe audiences in the thousands, though crowd estimates from the period are uncertain and probably generous. He spoke without relying on notes, in a dramatic style that moved listeners to tears and sometimes to open emotional outbursts. Newspapers publicized his movements, which helped build anticipation and spread his fame. Benjamin Franklin, who printed his sermons and admired his voice, was impressed though not converted.

The Awakening also provoked fierce disagreement. Supporters, often called "New Lights," valued emotional conversion and welcomed itinerant preachers. Critics, or "Old Lights," worried about disorder, emotional excess, and ministers who crossed into other parishes without invitation. Charles Chauncy of Boston was a prominent skeptic. Congregations and denominations, especially Presbyterians and Congregationalists, split over the question, and new churches formed as a result.

The consequences were lasting, though historians debate how far to call the Awakening a single unified movement, and some have argued that the term overstates its coherence. Evangelical denominations such as Baptists and Methodists gained strength in the following decades. The emphasis on individual religious experience challenged the authority of established clergy and encouraged ordinary people to judge religious questions for themselves. Some scholars see this as feeding the questioning of authority that later marked the Revolutionary era, while others consider the link modest. The revival also spurred the founding of colleges, including Princeton and Dartmouth, and involved some enslaved and Native people, though its effect on slavery was limited and mixed. Whitefield's tours remain a landmark in the history of evangelicalism.