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Great Awakening
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The Great Awakenings were several periods of rapid and dramatic religious revival in Anglo-American religious history, generally recognized as beginning in the 1730s. They have also been described as periodic revolutions in U.S. religious thought. The term is also used in some respects to refer to American religious revivalism that the Protestant Reformation inspired during and after the 1500s, as well as to identify general religious trends within distinctly U.S.
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Encyclopedia
The Great Awakenings were several periods of rapid and dramatic religious revival in Anglo-American religious history, generally recognized as beginning in the 1730s. They have also been described as periodic revolutions in U.S. religious thought. The term is also used in some respects to refer to American religious revivalism that the Protestant Reformation inspired during and after the 1500s, as well as to identify general religious trends within distinctly U.S. religious culture.
There are four such periods in U.S. history, although the most recent is too recent for proper historical perspective yet.
Influence on political life
Since religion has often been used to support political platforms, the Great Awakenings have exerted significant influence on the politics of America. Joseph Tracy, the minister and historian who gave this religious phenomenon its name in his influential (and still, to many, definitive) 1842 book The Great Awakening, saw the First Great Awakening as a precursor to the War of Independence. For another example, the abolition movement, part of the wider Second Great Awakening, eventually contributed to the crisis over slavery, which led to the American Civil War.
The Third Great Awakening was a major influence in guiding the USA through the Great Depression and World War II. The New Deal originated in that same era. The idea of an "awakening" implies a slumber or passivity during secular or less religious times. Thus, awakening is a term which originates and is embraced often and primarily by evangelical Christians. In recent times, the idea of "awakenings" in US history has been put forth by conservative US evangelicals.
See also
Further reading
- Jim Wallis; "The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America"; 2008 HarperOne, ISBN 9780060558291
- Alan Heimert; Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966
- Robert William Fogel; The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism; 2000, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226256626
- Alan Heimert and Perry Miller ed.; The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967
- Frank Lambert; Inventing the Great Awakening Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
- Frank Lambert; Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994
- William G. McLoughlin; Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (1978)
- Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, 1997, Banner of Truth, ISBN 0851517129. This is a reprint of the original work published in 1842.
- Harry Stout; The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism;Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans, 1991
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