Great Awakening and the Enlightenment

The Great Awakening, was not, as many believe a continuous spiritual awakening or revival in colonial America, instead it was a several revivals in a variety of locations (Matthews). However, The Great Awakening is an appropriate name. The new Americans had found their lives much different from their lives in England. In England the communities were compact, but in America people lived in great expanses of land. Because people had to fend for themselves, any type of authority -- governmental or ecclesiastical -- was met with resistance (Matthews). This and the fact that church was simply not easy to get to caused people to be "spiritually asleep."

The Great Awakening began with Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Initially the movement broke out in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1733 when Edwards preached to the youth of his church about the great sin of bundling. Bundling was a custom where...
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