The First Great Awakening

I will sometimes be organizing my own ideas of various important events in American history, with information gathered from my notes and teacher and compiling a useful read below.

The First Great Awakening - Causes and Effects

CAUSES

1. Failure of organized religion to reach the masses, particularly in the interior and frontier areas.
   
   
2. Declining church membership led to changes in approaches to lure more convert (this included the Half-Way Covenant, which came in about 1662 in Puritan churches due to sharp decline in membership. The covenant conferred partial church membership [did not require an emotional conversion experience, allows children of non-members to join], where strict religious piety was sacrificed for wider religious participation, and church membership became more democratic as the exclusive power of the "elect" and "visible saints"
   declined.
   
   
3. An awareness on the part of religious leaders of a breakdown in moral standards. Increase Mather: "Many of the rising generation are profane drunkards [and] swearers..."
   
   
4. Traumas of the revoking of the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1684 and its conversion into a royal colony under the despised Restoration monarch Charles II (who hated Puritans who had committed regicide) and the Salem Witch Trials (1692) which shook the foundations of Massachusetts. Increasingly, people began to question their church and civil leaders.
   
   
5. A reaction against the rationality of the Enlightenment Period.
   
   
6. An increase in number of non-Puritans settling in New England and more people living on the frontier who don't have access to churches, the influence of ministers and a tight-knit community.
   

RESULTS

1. A large increase in church membership throughout colonies
   
   
2. A large growth in revivalist Baptist Church and the birth of the Methodist Church (John Wesley)
   
   
3. A lessening of the power of the Anglican Church and with it, lessened royal authority.
   
   
4. New centers of higher learning: Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth...
   
   
5. A new missionary zeal to bring the dispossessed (Blacks and Native American included) into the fold.
   
   
6. An increased emphasis on religion being an individual experience encourages democracy.
   
   
7. American religious experience becomes more "from the heart" (emotional) rather than in "the head"
   
   
8. The Presbyterian and Congregationalists split into "new lights" who embraced the new emotionalism and the traditional "old lights" who rejected it
   
   
9. Increased involvement of women in the church.
   
   
10. The rise of the Baptist and Methodist churches brings a decrease in the power of the Anglican Church which results in a decrease in royal authority since the Anglican Church was one of the pillars of royal support.
    
    
11. Begins a cycle of evangelicalism that is seen in American society today (Born again movement, "Culture Wars" over abortion and gay civil rights)