AP® United States History · Unit 2 · Topic 2.7
The Great Awakening and the Enlightenment
The Great Awakening was a wave of emotional religious revivals that told colonists they could reach God directly, while the Enlightenment taught that reason could uncover natural laws governing the world and government. Both habits of thinking for yourself outlasted their original subject.
Starting in the 1730s, traveling preachers called itinerants crossed the colonies holding outdoor revivals. George Whitefield was the biggest draw: he could preach to thousands in a field, moving from New England down to Georgia on a tour that felt like one continuous event rather than separate local sermons. His message was simple and radical. You did not need an ordained minister or a particular denomination to reach God. A personal, emotional conversion was enough. That message spread fast because newspapers, pamphlets, and improving post roads carried reports of his sermons from town to town, letting colonists hundreds of miles apart feel like they were part of the same event.
That religious claim had a political shadow. If an ordinary farmer could judge spiritual truth for himself without deferring to a minister's authority, the same farmer could start judging other authorities too, including royal governors and Parliament. The Great Awakening also split congregations into Old Lights, who favored traditional, learned sermons, and New Lights, who favored emotional revival preaching, which multiplied the number of churches and habits of dissent.
The Enlightenment supplied a second, cooler version of the same lesson. Thinkers like John Locke argued that reason, not inherited authority, should determine how government is organized, and that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed. Educated colonists like Benjamin Franklin absorbed this. Between them, revival preaching and Enlightenment reasoning normalized questioning authority and communicating across colonies, both habits the Revolution would need thirty years later.
Key terms
- Itinerant preacher
- A minister who traveled from town to town holding revivals instead of serving one fixed congregation.
- New Lights
- Colonists who supported the emotional, personal-conversion style of the Great Awakening's revival preaching.
- Old Lights
- Colonists who preferred traditional, formally educated clergy and rational sermons over revival emotionalism.
- Enlightenment
- A movement holding that reason and natural law, not tradition or inherited authority, should guide government and society.
- Consent of the governed
- Locke's idea that government is only legitimate when the people being ruled agree to its authority.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does George Whitefield's preaching tour move town by town down the whole seaboard?
- How it worksWalk me through newspapers, pamphlets and post roads stitching thirteen separate colonies together.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the Great Awakening purely a religious event with no political aftershocks?
- Ties togetherHow does its habit of questioning authority turn up again in the Revolution thirty years later?
Check yourself
End of topic.