Colonial America: The Great Awakening | 5-Minute Videos | PragerU
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Before the American Revolution in 1776, there was another revolution decades earlier. This one wasn’t about freedom vs. tyranny, but about something else entirely, and it changed the face of the developing nation almost as profoundly as the War of Independence did. Thomas Kidd, author of American History Volumes 1 and 2, tells the story.
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Transcript:
Colonial America: The Great Awakening
Presented by Thomas Kidd
The first American revolution didn’t happen in 1776. It happened nearly fifty years earlier.
And it wasn’t about politics; it was about religion.
We know it as the Great Awakening, and it changed America almost as profoundly as the War of Independence did.
By the 1730s, the American colonies had achieved a permanency — that is, they were now a fixture on the global landscape. With more and more European settlers arriving every year, the future looked bright. To some, and to one clergyman in particular, the new prosperity came at a steep price.
That clergyman was Jonathan Edwards, the fiery and brilliant pastor of Northampton Congregationalist Church in Massachusetts. Edwards was disturbed by what he saw as his parishioners’ complacency. It wasn’t enough for them to show up in church on Sunday, he asserted.
They needed a personal relationship with God, something that could not be mediated by clergy. God’s grace alone, not religious ritual, would save them from the fires of Hell. “…If we improve our lives to any other purpose, than as a journey toward heaven, all our labour will be lost.”
Edwards’s message struck a chord. Within a year, almost every resident of his frontier town professed to be, as the New Testament puts it, “born
