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The Great Awakening was a series of religious revivals in American Christian history. Historians and theologians identify three, or sometimes four, waves of increased religious enthusiasm between the early 18th century and the late 20th century. Each of these "Great Awakenings" was characterized by widespread revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers, a sharp increase of interest in religion, a profound sense of conviction and redemption on the part of those affected, an increase in evangelical church membership, and the formation of new religious movements and denominations.
George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert Tennent were influential during the First Great Awakening. Some of the influential groups during the Great Awakening were the New Lights and the Old Lights. The First Great Awakening in the American colonies is closely related to the Evangelical Revival in the British Isles.
Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion more personal by fostering a sense of spiritual conviction of personal sin and need for redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to personal morality. It incited rancor and division between traditionalists, who insisted on the continuing importance of ritual and doctrine, and revivalists who encouraged emotional involvement and personal commitment. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denomination, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations. It had less impact on Anglicans and Quakers. Unlike the Second Great Awakening, which began about 1800 and reached out to the unchurched, the First Great Awakening focused on those who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness.
Additionally, pastoral styles began to change. In the late colonial period, most pastors read their sermons, which were theologically dense and advanced a particular theological argument or interpretation. Nathan O. Hatch argues that the evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic thought, as well as the belief of the free press and the belief that information should be shared and completely unbiased and uncontrolled. Michał Choiński argues that the First Great Awakening marks the birth of the American "rhetoric of the revival" understood as "a particular mode of preaching in which the speaker employs and it has a really wide array of patterns and communicative strategies to initiate religious conversions and spiritual regeneration among the hearers". All these theological, social, and rhetorical notions ushered in the period of the American Revolution. This contributed to create a demand for religious freedom. The Great Awakening represented the first time African Americans embraced Christianity in large numbers.
In the later part of the 1700s, the Revival came to the English colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island primarily through the efforts of Henry Alline and his New Light movement.
Among these dozens of new denominations were free black churches, run independently of existing congregations that were predominantly of white attendance. During the period between the American revolution and the 1850s, black involvement in largely white churches declined in great numbers, with participation becoming almost non-existent by the 1840s–1850s; some scholars argue that this was largely due to racial discrimination within the church. This discrimination came in the form of segregated seating and the forbiddance of African Americans from voting in church matters or holding leadership positions in many white churches. Reverend Richard Allen, a central founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was quoted describing one such incident of racial discrimination in a predominantly white church in Philadelphia, in which fellow preacher and a former slave from Delaware, Absalom Jones, was grabbed by a white church trustee in the midst of prayer and forcefully told to leave.
Closely related to the Second Great Awakening were other reform movements such as temperance, abolition, and women's rights. The temperance movement encouraged people to abstain from consuming alcoholic drinks in order to preserve family order. The abolition movement fought to abolish slavery in the United States. The women's rights movement grew from female abolitionists who realized that they could fight for their own political rights, too. In addition to these causes, reforms touched nearly every aspect of daily life, such as restricting the use of tobacco and dietary and dress reforms. The abolition movement emerged in the North from the wider Second Great Awakening 1800–1840.
Mainline Protestant denominations weakened sharply in both membership and influence while the most conservative religious denominations (such as the Southern Baptists) grew rapidly in numbers, spread across the United States, had grave internal theological battles and schisms, and became politically powerful.
In the late 2010s and 2020s the term Great Awakening has been used by promoters of the QAnon conspiracy theory to denote awareness of their theory.
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