In the conversion experience, these rebellious sons and daughters were released from their fears.  They found that God forgave them for their rebellion against their fathers’ ways, and by accepting God’s forgiveness, discovered themselves reinstated in paternal grace. “Soon, out of the awakening emerged new churches and new sects… Individual freedom and fraternal union went hand in hand.” (Finke, Stark 1992 p59)  The old hierarchy of fatherhood morphed into a new structure of fraternalism.  When George Whitefield preached to Americans that “sinners could repent and be saved if they really wanted to” he implied a power of agency that belied his supposed Calvinist dogma of predestination.  This meant that, instead of salvation being pre-destined, people could save themselves by their own actions.  If they could be saved by their own actions, it only remained to discover how.  Suddenly, people could be in control of their own lives, not predestined to Heaven or Hell by birth or by the divine roll of the Elect. 

Although Whitefield represented himself as a Calvinist while effectively breaking with Calvinist predestination, the Wesley brothers formally broke with Calvin and his key doctrine, preaching that Christ died for all men and not just for the predestined Elect.  Above all, men had the power to work out their own salvation.  This approach won many converts in England, as Methodist itinerants preached to the poorer members of the community, forming small groups of converts as pietistic cells within each Anglican parish.

What causes a great religious outburst like the Great Awakening?  And why should it have occurred in the mid-eighteenth century?  Why should two related outbursts occur at the same time, one in England and one in England’s colonies?  William McLoughlin addresses the question directly in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform.  Opposing the modern interpretation of history regards religion as a sideshow to the real business of politics and economics he proposes, on the contrary, that it is religion that drives politics.  He finds that the Great Awakening drove the American Revolution, the Second Great Awakening in 1800-1810 drove American politics into abolitionism and the Civil War, and that a Third Great Awakening of Social Gospelers drove the welfare state politics of the twentieth century.  In his reading of history, it is preposterous to suggest otherwise.  Was not Marx’s system a religious movement that within a generation spawned a gigantic political movement inspiring revolutionaries across the world to gigantic deeds in his name?  And was not fascism a fundamentalist response to socialism, advancing the instinctive values of blood and land against the rootless community of the socialist brotherhood?

For McLouglin, the religious outburst is the social equivalent of the canary in the coal mine.  It is a signal that something is wrong deep down in society, that the meaning delivered by the reigning belief system no longer provides an adequate account of the meaning of life, how it should be lived, and how it should be experienced.

Great awakenings are periods when the cultural system has had to be revitalized in order to overcome jarring disjunctions between norms and experience, old beliefs and new realities, dying patterns and emerging patterns of behavior. (McLoughlin 1978 p10)

What exactly were the jarring disjunctions that drove the people of New England into a process of revitalization?  As we have seen above, McLoughlin attributes the profound change from a collectivist, hierarchical, paternal order to an individualist social order in which individual effort was the foundation for a meaningful life.  This factor operated at a number of levels.  First of all, there was the economic.  Men found that there was prosperity and wealth for those that seized the opportunity.  This discovery was an experience directly in opposition to the presumption of Calvinism that everything was preordained.  Instead, it seemed that the material conditions of life could be changed by hard work and a good eye for opportunity.  Second, the experience of life on the frontier broke down the idea that men needed to depend on church and town fathers to guarantee social peace.  Out west, away from established political and religious institutions, men were forced to institute law and justice on their own, to defend property and person without benefit of established courts and political power.  And they found they could do it.  Men were emerging from a life of dependence into a world of freedom, and they needed help.  They found it in the enthusiastic Protestantism of the Great Awakening, an authentic and popular movement that gave them the structure and the courage to live away from the authority of the father and to live in freedom.  When, in the ensuing years, the American colonists came into conflict with their royal father in London, they found that they had already acquired the beliefs and the culture they needed to sustain a rebellion against him and to create a whole nation in ordered freedom that reflected the experience of freedom in their personal lives.

Media mogul Ted Turner famously tagged Christianity in the late twentieth century as a religion for losers.  Implied in his attitude is that religion is not a transforming social force, but a place to go and hide.  But religion is nothing if not a search for meaning, a community of people joined to explain the mystery of human life, and to imagine its purpose.  When Marx developed his dialectic of the oppressor, the oppressed, and their precipitation into communism through the catalysis of revolution, he was developing a secular religion that seemed to explain the frightening social upheaval in Europe in the nineteenth century with breathtaking power.  His religion inflamed the hearts of millions in the nineteenth century no more and no less than the preachers of the Great Awakening inflamed the hearts of the North American colonists in the eighteenth century.  The modern age, like any age is alive with the pulse of religion, secular and transcendental.  And every religion turns soon enough from private contemplation and ecstasy to the mundane work of extending its saving truth into the society at large.  But the initial outburst is a signal.  It means that something is changing; something has called for a new interpretation of the mystery of meaning. 

The Great Awakening culminated in the American Revolution.  But the outburst that preceded the Great Awakening called forth even greater turmoil.  This outburst was the Reformation that erupted into Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill