the great awakening essay

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Course: US history   >   Unit 2

• Society and religion in the New England colonies
• Politics and native relations in the New England colonies
• Puritan New England: Plymouth
• Puritan New England: Massachusetts Bay
• The Middle colonies
• Lesson summary: New England and Middle colonies
• The Navigation Acts
• The Enlightenment

The Great Awakening

• The consumer revolution
• Developing an American colonial identity
• Colonial North America
• The Great Awakening was an outburst of Protestant Revivalism in the eighteenth century.
• The beliefs of the New Lights of the First Great Awakening competed with the more conservative religion of the first colonists, who were known as Old Lights.
• The religious fervor in Great Britain and her North American colonies bound the eighteenth-century British Atlantic together in a shared, common experience.

The First Great Awakening

Jonathan edwards and george whitefield, what do you think, want to join the conversation.

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Great Awakening

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 20, 2019 | Original: March 7, 2018

The Great Awakening was a religious revival that impacted the English colonies in America during the 1730s and 1740s. The movement came at a time when the idea of secular rationalism was being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale. Christian leaders often traveled from town to town, preaching about the gospel, emphasizing salvation from sins and promoting enthusiasm for Christianity. The result was a renewed dedication toward religion. Many historians believe the Great Awakening had a lasting impact on various Christian denominations and American culture at large.

First Great Awakening

In the 1700s, a European philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment , or the Age of Reason, was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies . Enlightenment thinkers emphasized a scientific and logical view of the world, while downplaying religion.

In many ways, religion was becoming more formal and less personal during this time, which led to lower church attendance. Christians were feeling complacent with their methods of worship, and some were disillusioned with how wealth and rationalism were dominating culture. Many began to crave a return to religious piety.

Around this time, the 13 colonies were religiously divided. Most of New England belonged to congregational churches.

The Middle colonies were made up of Quakers , Anglicans, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, the Dutch Reformed and Congregational followers.

Southern colonies were mostly members of the Anglican Church , but there were also many Baptists, Presbyterians and Quakers.

The stage was set for a renewal of faith, and in the late 1720s, a revival began to take root as preachers altered their messages and reemphasized concepts of Calvinism. (Calvinism is a theology that was introduced by John Calvin in the 16th century that stressed the importance of scripture, faith, predestination and the grace of God.)

Jonathan Edwards

Most historians consider Jonathan Edwards, a Northampton Anglican minister, one of the chief fathers of the Great Awakening.

Edwards’ message centered on the idea that humans were sinners, God was an angry judge and individuals needed to ask for forgiveness. He also preached justification by faith alone.

In 1741, Edwards gave an infamous and emotional sermon, entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” News of the message spread quickly throughout the colonies.

Edwards was known for his passion and energy. He generally preached in his home parish, unlike other revival preachers who traveled throughout the colonies.

Edwards is credited for inspiring hundreds of conversions, which he documented in a book, “Narratives of Surprising Conversions.”

George Whitefield

George Whitefield, a minister from Britain, had a significant impact during the Great Awakening. Whitefield toured the colonies up and down the Atlantic coast, preaching his message. In one year, Whitefield covered 5,000 miles in America and preached more than 350 times.

His style was charismatic, theatrical and expressive. Whitefield would often shout the word of God and tremble during his sermons. People gathered by the thousands to hear him speak.

Whitefield preached to common people, slaves and Native Americans . No one was out of reach. Even Benjamin Franklin , a religious skeptic, was captivated by Whitefield’s sermons, and the two became friends.

Whitefield’s success convinced English colonists to join local churches and reenergized a once-waning Christian faith.

Other Leaders

Several other pastors and Christian leaders led the charge during the Great Awakening, including David Brainard, Samuel Davies, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Gilbert Tennent and others.

Although these leaders’ backgrounds differed, their messages served the same purpose: to awaken the Christian faith and return to a religion that was relevant to the people of the day.

Basic Themes of the Great Awakening

The Great Awakening brought various philosophies, ideas and doctrines to the forefront of Christian faith.

Some of the major themes included:

• All people are born sinners
• Sin without salvation will send a person to hell
• All people can be saved if they confess their sins to God, seek forgiveness and accept God’s grace
• All people can have a direct and emotional connection with God
• Religion shouldn’t be formal and institutionalized, but rather casual and personal

Old Lights vs. New Lights

Not everyone embraced the ideas of the Great Awakening. One of the leading voices of opposition was Charles Chauncy, a minister in Boston. Chauncy was especially critical of Whitefield’s preaching and instead supported a more traditional, formal style of religion.

By about 1742, debate over the Great Awakening had split the New England clergy and many colonists into two groups.

Preachers and followers who adopted the new ideas brought forth by the Great Awakening became known as “new lights.” Those who embraced the old-fashioned, traditional church ways were called “old lights.”

Second Great Awakening

The Great Awakening came to an end sometime during the 1740s.

In the 1790s, another religious revival, which became known as the Second Great Awakening, began in New England. This movement is typically regarded as less emotionally charged than the First Great Awakening. It led to the founding of several colleges, seminaries and mission societies.

A Third Great Awakening was said to span from the late 1850s to the early 20th century. Some scholars, however, disagree that this movement was ever a significant event.

Effects of the Great Awakening

The Great Awakening notably altered the religious climate in the American colonies. Ordinary people were encouraged to make a personal connection with God, instead of relying on a minister.

Newer denominations, such as Methodists and Baptists, grew quickly. While the movement unified the colonies and boosted church growth, experts say it also caused division among those who supported it and those who rejected it.

Many historians claim that the Great Awakening influenced the Revolutionary War by encouraging the notions of nationalism and individual rights.

The revival also led to the establishment of several renowned educational institutions, including Princeton, Rutgers, Brown and Dartmouth universities.

The Great Awakening unquestionably had a significant impact on Christianity . It reinvigorated religion in America at a time when it was steadily declining and introduced ideas that would penetrate into American culture for many years to come.

The Great Awakening, UShistory.org . The First Great Awakening, National Humanities Center . The Great Awakening Timeline, Christianity.com . The Great Awakening, Khan Academy .

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The Great Awakening

Written by: Thomas Kidd, Baylor University

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how and why the different goals and interests of European leaders and colonists affected how they viewed themselves and their relationship with Britain

Suggested Sequencing

Before reading this Narrative, students should be familiar with the role of religion and challenges to religious authority in the New England colonies ( Anne Hutchinson and Religious Dissent and The Salem Witch Trials Narratives). This Narrative should be followed by the What Was the Great Awakening? Point-Counterpoint.

During a cool October 1740 morning in Kensington, Connecticut, Nathan Cole was hard at work in his field, as he had been since sunrise. Suddenly his labor was interrupted by a passing messenger’s shouts: at 10 o’clock the evangelist George Whitefield was going to preach in nearby Middletown. Nathan immediately dropped his tools in the field, ran to fetch his wife, and saddled his horse. He and his wife joined a throng of others hurrying along the roads to Middletown, afraid they would arrive too late to hear the famous preacher.

After receiving his degree from Oxford University, Whitefield had begun a life of itinerant preaching and evangelism. Rather than expounding on the intricacies of Christian doctrine, he appealed to the emotions of his listeners at home in England, and now, still only twenty-five years old, he had brought his new style to the American colonies. For weeks, Nathan Cole had heard reports that Whitefield’s preaching tour of the colonies was drawing huge crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Many people in the audience experienced the “new birth” of evangelical conversion. Watching the celebrated preacher begin, Cole began to tremble. “My hearing him preach,” he wrote in his diary, “gave me a heart wound.”

Compare the two images of George Whitefield: (a) a 1774 portrait by engraver Elisha Gallaudet and (b) a 1763 British political cartoon entitled “Dr. Squintum’s Exaltation or the Reformation.” Dr. Squintum was a nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed. What details can you find each in image that indicate the artists’ respective views of the preacher?

Whitefield’s message was simple: It was not enough to be baptized or go to church. Each individual must be converted by the Holy Spirit of God through a personal, wrenching examination of his or her own corruption and sinfulness. The youthful, twenty-five-year-old English minister held the crowd at Middletown spellbound with his masterful, emotional pleas that each person receive God’s gift of salvation and be “born again.” Countless listeners, including Nathan Cole, were converted.

Whitefield was not America’s first revival preacher. Just a few years earlier, Jonathan Edwards, a minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, had led a series of awakenings too. Possibly the greatest theologian the colonies had ever produced, Edwards was a master of rhetoric who preached on human sinfulness and the need for divine grace. Most famously, he delivered a 1741 sermon titled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God . Under Edwards’ preaching, a town-wide revival broke out in Northampton from 1734 to 1735. In London, Edwards published a compelling account of this revival, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God . As George Whitefield, England’s John Wesley, and other evangelical ministers read Edwards’ narrative, they realized they were part of a series of religious revivals that began in the colonies and spanned the Atlantic. They were in the middle of what historians came to call “The Great Awakening.”

This image shows the frontispiece of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8, 1741 ,by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was an evangelical preacher who led a Protestant revival in New England. This was his most famous sermon, the text of which was reprinted often and distributed widely.

Over the course of his seven preaching tours of the colonies, Whitefield reached 75 to 80 percent of the population, sometimes addressing crowds that approached thirty thousand listeners. His revivals were controversial. Local ministers resented Whitefield and other traveling preachers coming to their towns uninvited. When revivalists drew massive crowds and preached in public, local ministers and churches worried the preachers were undermining their spiritual authority. Worse, some evangelical preachers, such as New Jersey’s Gilbert Tennent, dared to suggest that many of the established church’s pastors were not converted. Tennent charged that some pastors were Christians only in name, because they had not yet experienced the “new birth.” He called true believers to leave the lukewarm established congregations and join new, “pure” churches.

In addition to challenging religious authorities, the revivals could also challenge social conventions. Following their conviction that all believers were equal before God, some evangelicals allowed women to “exhort,” or preach informally, during meetings. In Ipswich, Massachusetts, a gathering of evangelicals in 1742 was amazed when a “spirit of prophecy” filled a female convert named Lucy Smith. Smith preached the Gospel to this assembly for over two hours. White evangelicals even ordained converted African Americans and American Indians to preach or be missionaries, although typically only to their own communities. Some evangelicals began to argue that, in light of the Gospel’s implications, slave owning was sinful. These egalitarian impulses were unprecedented in colonial society and challenged racial and social hierarchies, especially in the South.

Evangelical teaching also challenged barriers based on social class. Uneducated, poor whites with no theological training often felt a strong calling to preach. Their sermons were frequently highly charged, even frenzied, displays of emotion and, according to some critics, resulted in indecent and immoral behavior. However, the messages of these radical preachers resonated with those lower on the social ladder. Common people and American Indians loved the emotional, radical preaching of James Davenport, a college-educated preacher in New England. In 1743, in New London, Connecticut, Davenport and his followers built a bonfire and instructed the audience to throw their religious books into it. Davenport then turned his eye to their fancy clothing (“cambric caps, red-heeled sho[e]s, fans, necklaces, gloves”), all of which deserved to be burned. Davenport led by example, pulling off his own pants and throwing them on the fire. But this action went too far for some audience members. A woman snatched his clothes off the flames and threw them in his face, and his audience rebuked him.

Many critics thought the emotional appeal of the “New Light” evangelical ministers was foolish and led to social chaos. The New Light ministers rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment and appealed to the passions of the audience members rather than their reason, which resulted in emotional reaction and immediate conversion. The main source of opposition was conservative pastors of the established churches, particularly Anglicans and Congregationalists. These “Old Light” ministers insisted upon sober and rational sermons and religious practices and rejected the passionate New Light theology and style of the evangelical preachers. The Old Light ministers successfully banned the New Light ministers from preaching in several churches and towns.

By the late 1740s, the New England revivals had cooled, but the Great Awakening’s effects were widespread and long-lasting as the fervor continued to spread to the southern colonies in the ensuing decades. The revivals had weakened the hold of the established churches in colonial America, and large numbers of Christians joined new evangelical churches like those of the Baptists or Methodists.

The Great Awakening also contributed to colonial religious liberty by changing the balance of religious power. During the American Revolution and the struggle for individual liberty, Baptists used their new numbers and influence to challenge religious establishments, first in Virginia and then throughout the new nation. Many evangelicals called for an end to government-supported denominations, which received tax money and lands called “glebes” to support ministers and churches. After the Revolution, opposition to established churches helped inspire the First Amendment’s prohibition of the “establishment of religion” and its guarantee of “free exercise” of religion. The founders believed that freedom of conscience was an inalienable right of all individuals. The religious landscape of the new nation was never the same.

The Great Awakening helped prepare the colonies for the American Revolution. Its ethos strengthened the appeal of the ideals of liberty, and its ministers and the members of the new evangelical faiths strongly supported the Revolution. The drive for religious liberty against a tyrannical religious authority fed into the movement for civil liberty against the unjust political authority of the British in the 1770s. Likewise, the evangelical teaching that each individual believer was equal before God made it easier for people to accept the radical implications of democracy and to question authority. Thus, the same movement that sent Nathan Cole sprinting out of his field that October morning helped set the stage for American independence. The Great Awakening was the most significant religious and cultural upheaval in colonial American history, and helped forge U.S. civil and religious liberties emerging in the mid-eighteenth century.

Review Questions

1. Many historians believe the Great Awakening helped set the stage for the American Revolution. Which of these ideas best supports that argument?

• Evangelical teaching during the Great Awakening proposed that each individual believer was equal before God, which made it easier to accept the radical implications of democracy.
• Many Great Awakening preachers were political radicals.
• Churches under the Great Awakening were much more democratic than earlier churches had been.
• Great Awakening theology argued that only those who were among God’s “elect” would go to Heaven when they died.

2. How did local ministers feel about George Whitefield and other traveling preachers coming to their towns uninvited?

• They welcomed these popular preachers, who brought more people into their church.
• They worried that revivalists undermined their spiritual authority.
• They appreciated the chance to study the techniques of the traveling preachers.
• They were indifferent to the Great Awakening preachers.

3. Which of these was not a way in which the ministry of the Great Awakening challenged social conventions?

• Following their conviction that all believers were equal before God, some evangelicals allowed women to “exhort,” or preach informally during meetings.
• White evangelicals ordained converted African Americans and American Indians to preach or be missionaries
• Some evangelicals began to argue that, in light of the Gospel’s implications, enslaving people was sinful.
• Sometimes children were allowed to preach from the pulpit.

4. Who were the “Old Lights”?

• People who read books from the Enlightenment and did not attend church or meeting on Sundays
• Jewish residents of Newport, Rhode Island
• Elderly people admired for their knowledge of the Bible and scripture
• Ministers and their parishioners who insisted upon sober and rational religious practices and rejected the style of the evangelical preachers

5. Who were the “New Lights”?

• Critics who thought the emotional appeal of the evangelical ministers was foolish and led to social chaos
• Followers of Great Awakening evangelical preachers whose sermons were notable for their emotion and dramatic appeal
• People interested in Enlightenment interpretations of the Bible
• Enlightenment preachers who wanted to introduce their parishioners to concepts such as deism

6. It has been argued that the Great Awakening contributed to a decline in the importance of established religion during the second part of the eighteenth century, because

• people were alienated by the anti-intellectual quality of the sermons they had to listen to
• many ministers simply quit the profession and denounced any form of Christianity
• the revivals had weakened the hold of established churches in colonial America
• many Americans converted to Judaism or Islam

7. George Whitefield was immensely popular as a preacher in the colonies because

• he explained the intricacies of Christian doctrine with great precision and erudition
• he preached to small groups so he could get to know his audience
• he appealed to the emotions of his listeners, many of whom experienced the “new birth” of evangelical conversion
• he made his listeners feel good about themselves and reassured them that they would be admitted to Heaven

8. How did the Great Awakening affect laws in those states that supported an official religion through taxation?

• Members of the “new” religions resented being assessed for a church they did not attend, so they called for an end to the practice.
• The Great Awakening had little effect because members of these new religions took little interest in money, which they regarded as the invention of the Devil
• Members of new churches began demanding that they also be supported in proportion to their population in the colony.
• Baptists were able to get support, but Presbyterians were regarded as too radical and out of the mainstream.

Free Response Questions

• Explain how the Evangelical teaching of the Great Awakening challenged barriers based on social class.
• Explain how the Great Awakening laid some of the groundwork for the American Revolution.
• Explain the connections between the Great Awakening and the first clause of the First Amendment.

AP Practice Questions

“When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the Scaffold he looked almost angelical, a young, slim slender youth before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance, and my hearing how God was with him every where as he came along it solumnized my mind, and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach; for he looked as if he was Cloathed with authority from the Great God, and a sweet solemn solemnity sat upon his brow. And my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound; by Gods blessing my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me; then I was convinced of the doctrine of Election and went right to quarrelling with God about it, because all that I could do would not save me; and he had decreed from Eternity who should be saved and who not.”

Nathan Cole in Connecticut, 1740

1. Which conclusion would a historian not draw from the excerpt provided?

• That Nathan Cole took only a slight interest in hearing George Whitefield
• That Nathan Cole took a tremendous interest in hearing George Whitfield
• That Nathan Cole was a farmer
• That Nathan Cole likely identified as an “New Light”

2. Based on the excerpt provided, how could a historian describe Whitfield’s appeal to his audience?

• Whitefield could not project his voice unaided to thousands of people.
• Whitefield looked a bit sloppy, but his audience overlooked that.
• Whitefield’s effect was almost overpowering.
• Whitefield was not a Calvinist preacher.

Primary Sources

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: http://greatawakeningdocumentary.com/items/show/35

Suggested Resources

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 . Chapel Hill: University Press of North Carolina, 1999.

Kidd, Thomas S. George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents . Boston: Bedford, 2007.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Marsden, George M. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards . Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

These early revivals in the northern colonies inspired some converts to become missionaries to the American South. In the late 1740s, Presbyterian preachers from New York and New Jersey began proselytizing in the Virginia Piedmont; and by the 1750s, some members of a group known as the Separate Baptists moved from New England to central North Carolina and quickly extended their influence to surrounding colonies. By the eve of the American Revolution, their evangelical converts accounted for about ten percent of all southern churchgoers.

The First Great Awakening also gained impetus from the wideranging American travels of an English preacher, George Whitefield. Although Whitefield had been ordained as a minister in the Church of England, he later allied with other Anglican clergymen who shared his evangelical bent, most notably John and Charles Wesley. Together they led a movement to reform the Church of England (much as the Puritans had attempted earlier to reform that church) which resulted in the founding of the Methodist Church late in the eighteenth century. During his several trips across the Atlantic after 1739, Whitefield preached everywhere in the American colonies, often drawing audiences so large that he was obliged to preach outdoors. What Whitefield preached was nothing more than what other Calvinists had been proclaiming for centuries—that sinful men and women were totally dependent for salvation on the mercy of a pure, all-powerful God. But Whitefield—and many American preachers who eagerly imitated his style—presented that message in novel ways. Gesturing dramatically, sometimes weeping openly or thundering out threats of hellfire-and-brimstone, they turned the sermon into a gripping theatrical performance.

But not all looked on with approval. Throughout the colonies, conservative and moderate clergymen questioned the emotionalism of evangelicals and charged that disorder and discord attended the revivals. They took great exception to “itinerants,” ministers who, like Whitefield, traveled from one community to another, preaching and all too often criticizing the local clergy. And they took still greater exception when some white women and African Americans shed their subordinate social status long enough to exhort religious gatherings. Evangelical preachers and converts rejoined by lambasting their opponents as cold, uninspiring, and lacking in piety and grace. Battles raged within congregations and whole denominations over this challenge to clerical authority as well as the evangelical approach to conversion from “the heart” rather than “the head.”

So the first Great Awakening left colonials sharply polarized along religious lines. Anglicans and Quakers gained new members among those who disapproved of the revival’s excesses, while the Baptists (and, in the 1770s, the Methodists) made even more handsome gains from the ranks of radical evangelical converts. The largest single group of churchgoing Americans remained within the Congregationalist and Presbyterian denominations, but they divided internally between advocates and opponents of the Awakening, known respectively as “New Lights” and “Old Lights.” Inevitably, civil governments were drawn into the fray. In colonies where one denomination received state support, other churches lobbied legislatures for disestablishment, an end to the favored status of Congregationalism in Connecticut and Massachusetts and of Anglicanism in the southern colonies.

Guiding Student Discussion

Now let’s cut to the classroom. You’ve sketched out the story of the first Great Awakening—its beginnings in the mid-Atlantic, its transit to New England, and its culmination in the South, its legacy of debate and division. And you’ve emphasized that it was only the colonial manifestation of a religious revival of much broader geographic scope—it spread the length of British North America (where, indeed, the only public figure whose name was known to virtually all colonials was George Whitefield!) and reverberated throughout the Protestant countries of Europe as well.

So your next move might be to pose the question: What could account for the tremendous appeal of evangelical Christianity to men and women living on both sides of the Atlantic during the latter half of the eighteenth century?

Chances are that most students will simply look confused at this inquiry—although some Christians among them might suggest that divine providence inspired large numbers of people to embrace “true Christianity.” If that happens, you have a prime opportunity to point out that while such an explanation might well be persuasive from the standpoint of faith (that is, the perspective of a believer), historians (no matter what their personal religious convictions might be) strive to explain the IMMEDIATE causes of why things happened without reference to acts of God. (Otherwise they’d all be out of business, since the ULTIMATE cause of every historical event, from the standpoint of faith, is the will of God.)

With a little luck, those remarks will return the class to thinking about the SPECIFIC HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES that might have enhanced the appeal of evangelical Christianity, with its formidable array of emotional consolations and moral certitudes, to large numbers of people in the eighteenth century.

To keep the discussion on that track—and to make such connections more accessible to students—you might try tossing out the observation that religious culture in America today bears many resemblances to that of the eighteenth century. As many commentators, both scholarly and popular, have noted, recent decades have witnessed an evangelical revival—what some regard as yet another “Great Awakening.” Since the 1960s, membership in conservative evangelical Protestant churches has grown dramatically, while the membership of national organizations like the Promise Keepers and local bible study groups have also expanded at an astonishing rate. Some of your students will be aware of those trends—and therefore will have greater confidence when it comes to speculating about the social sources of contemporary evangelicalism’s popular appeal—the transient lives of many Americans as population shifts to the South and West, the high incidence of family fragmentation in the face of staggering divorce rates, the uncertainty over gender roles fueled by feminism, the threats that recent scientific discoveries and “secular humanism” are perceived by many to pose to “traditional values,” and so forth.

Okay, here’s the payoff lurking at the end of this seeming digression into the religious culture of the late twentieth century: by now at least some students will see the connection between popular religious inclinations and broader social trends. So this is the moment for you to steer them back into the eighteenth century by noting that this, too, was an era of extraordinary upheaval and crisis for ordinary people. Remind them that England was entering the Industrial Revolution and that evangelicals like the Methodists attracted large numbers of converts among miners and factory workers. Remind them that northern Ireland and Germany, other hotbeds of evangelical enthusiasm, were wracked by warfare, famine, or both—harsh conditions that prompted hundreds of thousands to migrate to British North America. And, finally, remind them that in the American colonies, the same epoch witnessed a massive internal shift of population to the embattled frontiers of the South and West, where ordinary families endured hardscrabble, rootless lives and the ever-present threat of attack from dispossessed Indian tribes. Such circumstances also thrust women into newly responsible roles for the survival of migrating households as families were fragmented by movement and death.

Why would Jonathan Edwards refer to the Great Awakening as the “Surprising Work of God” in his 1737 narrative? It follows that men and women faced with such stark challenges might have sought opportunities for fellowship, solace, and emotional release—and that is exactly what evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic offered. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists touted their churches as havens from all the evils afflicting ordinary people—as islands of disciplined stability and Christian charity in a churning sea of social chaos and cultural confusion.

If you’d like more information about the First Great Awakening, the first book to consult is Patricia Bonomi’s Under the Cope of Heaven . This is probably the best overview of religious history in the American colonies, and it offers a superb discussion of both the First Great Awakening and how it bore upon the American Revolution. Another key source is J. M. Bumsted and John E. Van de Wetering, What Must I Do to Be Saved? For a vivid evocation of how revivalism flourished on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, you could not choose a better book than Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Holy Fairs . Finally, for a magisterial survey of the sweep of spiritual awakenings throughout America’s past, you should take a look at William McLoughlin’s American Revivalism .

Historians Debate

There are two notable trends in recent scholarship on this subject. The first is represented by those historians who argue that the revivals became a means by which humbler colonials challenged the prerogatives of their social “betters”—both by criticizing their materialistic values and undermining their claims to deference and respect. The strongest case for this interpretation in the North has been advanced by Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible , a wide-ranging study of major seaports in the eighteenth century; a similar view of the Awakening in the upper South appears in Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 . Indeed, some scholars like Harry Stout (The New England Soul) have argued that the first Great Awakening radically transformed and democratized modes of mass communication, thereby setting the stage for the emergence a new popular politics in the revolutionary decades that followed.

But this interpretation has been sharply criticized by other scholars like Christine Leigh Heyrman ( Commerce and Culture ) and Christopher Jedrey ( The World of John Cleaveland ) who view the first Great Awakening, at least in the North, as an essentially conservative movement, a continuation of earlier religious traditions. As for the South, even those scholars who credit the potentially radical implications of early evangelical teachings in that region argue that challenges to slavery and class privilege faded quickly in the wake of the revolution; see, for example, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross and Rachel Klein, The Unification of a Slave State .

That skepticism about the social and political effects of colonial revivalism is shared by another scholar who has offered the most sweeping rejection of the long-held view that the first Great Awakening marked a watershed in early American history: Jon Butler, in his essay, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History , 69 (1982–83), 305–25.

Many students of the first Great Awakening have been drawn to considering its possible bearing on the American Revolution. If you’d like to find out more about their conclusions, continue reading under Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries : Religion and the American Revolution .

Christine Leigh Heyrman was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1986–87. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in American Studies and is currently Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Dr. Heyrman is the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial New England , 1690–1740 [1984], Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt [1997], which won the Bancroft Prize in 1998, and Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the Republic , with James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff [3rd ed., 1997].

Address comments or questions to Professor Heyrman through TeacherServe “Comments and Questions.”

Links to online resources

To cite this essay: Heyrman, Christine Leigh. “The First Great Awakening.” Divining America, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. <https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/grawaken.htm>

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4.4 Great Awakening and Enlightenment

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the significance of the Great Awakening
• Describe the genesis, central ideas, and effects of the Enlightenment in British North America

Two major cultural movements further strengthened Anglo-American colonists’ connection to Great Britain: the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. Both movements began in Europe, but they advocated very different ideas: the Great Awakening promoted a fervent, emotional religiosity, while the Enlightenment encouraged the pursuit of reason in all things. On both sides of the Atlantic, British subjects grappled with these new ideas.

THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING

During the eighteenth century, the British Atlantic experienced an outburst of Protestant revivalism known as the First Great Awakening . (A Second Great Awakening would take place in the 1800s.) During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the ranks of several Protestant denominations: Congregationalists, Anglicans (members of the Church of England), and Presbyterians. They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a vigorous emotional religiosity. Whereas Martin Luther and John Calvin had preached a doctrine of predestination and close reading of scripture, new evangelical ministers spread a message of personal and experiential faith that rose above mere book learning. Individuals could bring about their own salvation by accepting Christ, an especially welcome message for those who had felt excluded by traditional Protestantism: women, the young, and people at the lower end of the social spectrum.

The Great Awakening caused a split between those who followed the evangelical message (the “New Lights”) and those who rejected it (the “Old Lights”). The elite ministers in British America were firmly Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos. Indeed, the revivals did sometimes lead to excess. In one notorious incident in 1743, an influential New Light minister named James Davenport urged his listeners to burn books. The next day, he told them to burn their clothes as a sign of their casting off the sinful trappings of the world. He then took off his own pants and threw them into the fire, but a woman saved them and tossed them back to Davenport, telling him he had gone too far.

Another outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey, led by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen. Frelinghuysen’s example inspired other ministers, including Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. Tennant helped to spark a Presbyterian revival in the Middle Colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), in part by founding a seminary to train other evangelical clergyman. New Lights also founded colleges in Rhode Island and New Hampshire that would later become Brown University and Dartmouth College.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still another explosion of evangelical fervor. Edwards had grown frustrated with lack of religious emotion among practicing Christians within his community. He wanted to enliven religious practice. An important component of his approach involved using vivid depictions of the terrors of hell ( Figure 4.13 ). Edward's best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” perfectly exemplifies this terrifying approach. One passage reads: “The wrath of God burns against them [sinners], their damnation don’t slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth under them.” Edwards’s revival spread along the Connecticut River Valley, and news of the event spread rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his famous sermon.

The foremost evangelical of the Great Awakening was an Anglican minister named George Whitefield. Like many evangelical ministers, Whitefield was itinerant, traveling the countryside instead of having his own church and congregation. Between 1739 and 1740, he electrified colonial listeners with his brilliant oratory.

Two Opposing Views of George Whitefield

Not everyone embraced George Whitefield and other New Lights. Many established Old Lights decried the way the new evangelical religions appealed to people’s passions, rather than to traditional religious values. The two illustrations below present two very different visions of George Whitefield ( Figure 4.14 ).

Compare the two images above. On the left is an illustration for Whitefield’s memoirs, while on the right is a cartoon satirizing the circus-like atmosphere that his preaching seemed to attract (Dr. Squintum was a nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed). How do these two artists portray the same man? What emotions are the illustration for his memoirs intended to evoke? What details can you find in the cartoon that indicate the artist’s distaste for the preacher?

The Great Awakening saw the rise of several Protestant denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists (who emphasized adult baptism of converted Christians rather than infant baptism). These new churches gained converts and competed with older Protestant groups like Anglicans (members of the Church of England), Congregationalists (the heirs of Puritanism in America), and Quakers. The influence of these older Protestant groups, such as the New England Congregationalists, declined because of the Great Awakening. Nonetheless, the Great Awakening touched the lives of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and provided a shared experience in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment , or the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas. Many consider the Enlightenment a major turning point in Western civilization, an age of light replacing an age of darkness.

Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including rationalism, empiricism, progressivism, and cosmopolitanism. Rationalism is the idea that humans are capable of using their faculty of reason to gain knowledge. This was a sharp turn away from the prevailing idea that people needed to rely on scripture or church authorities for knowledge. Empiricism promotes the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation of the world. Progressivism is the belief that through their powers of reason and observation, humans could make unlimited, linear progress over time; this belief was especially important as a response to the carnage and upheaval of the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century. Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers’ view of themselves as citizens of the world and actively engaged in it, as opposed to being provincial and close-minded. In all, Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.

The Freemasons were a fraternal society that advocated Enlightenment principles of inquiry and tolerance. Freemasonry originated in London coffeehouses in the early eighteenth century, and Masonic lodges (local units) soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies. One prominent Freemason, Benjamin Franklin, stands as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in British America ( Figure 4.15 ). Born in Boston in 1706 to a large Puritan family, Franklin loved to read, although he found little beyond religious publications in his father’s house. In 1718 he was apprenticed to his brother to work in a print shop, where he learned how to be a good writer by copying the style he found in the Spectator , which his brother printed. At the age of seventeen, the independent-minded Franklin ran away, eventually ending up in Quaker Philadelphia. There he began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette in the late 1720s, and in 1732 he started his annual publication Poor Richard: An Almanack , in which he gave readers much practical advice, such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Franklin subscribed to deism , an Enlightenment-era belief in a God who created, but has no continuing involvement in, the world and the events within it. Deists also advanced the belief that personal morality—an individual’s moral compass, leading to good works and actions—is more important than strict church doctrines. Franklin’s deism guided his many philanthropic projects. In 1731, he established a reading library that became the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society to encourage the spirit of inquiry. In 1749, he provided the foundation for the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1751, he helped found Pennsylvania Hospital.

His career as a printer made Franklin wealthy and well-respected. When he retired in 1748, he devoted himself to politics and scientific experiments. His most famous work, on electricity, exemplified Enlightenment principles. Franklin observed that lightning strikes tended to hit metal objects and reasoned that he could therefore direct lightning through the placement of metal objects during an electrical storm. He used this knowledge to advocate the use of lightning rods: metal poles connected to wires directing lightning’s electrical charge into the ground and saving wooden homes in cities like Philadelphia from catastrophic fires. He published his findings in 1751, in Experiments and Observations on Electricity .

Franklin also wrote of his “rags to riches” tale, his Memoir , in the 1770s and 1780s. This story laid the foundation for the American Dream of upward social mobility.

Click and Explore

Visit the media gallery for PBS’s Ken Burns Franklin documentary to watch excerpts covering some of Franklin's many achievements.

THE FOUNDING OF GEORGIA

The reach of Enlightenment thought was both broad and deep. In the 1730s, it even prompted the founding of a new colony. Having witnessed the terrible conditions of debtors’ prison, as well as the results of releasing penniless debtors onto the streets of London, James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament and advocate of social reform, petitioned King George II for a charter to start a new colony. George II, understanding the strategic advantage of a British colony standing as a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, granted the charter to Oglethorpe and twenty like-minded proprietors in 1732. Oglethorpe led the settlement of the colony, which was called Georgia in honor of the king. In 1733, he and 113 immigrants arrived on the ship Anne . Over the next decade, Parliament funded the migration of twenty-five hundred settlers, making Georgia the only government-funded colonial project.

Oglethorpe’s vision for Georgia followed the ideals of the Age of Reason , seeing it as a place for England’s “worthy poor” to start anew. To encourage industry, he gave each male immigrant fifty acres of land, tools, and a year’s worth of supplies. In Savannah, the Oglethorpe Plan provided for a utopia: “an agrarian model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values holding all men as equal.”

Oglethorpe’s vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded these prohibitions. Despite its proprietors’ early vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of slavery, by the 1750s, Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by the enslaved.

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Great Awakening(s) by Zachary Hutchins LAST REVIEWED: 29 August 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0013

In the 19th century, religious historians coined the term great awakening to describe a series of widespread evangelical revivals concentrated in the British colonies between the years 1740 and 1743. During this period, now known as the First Great Awakening, thousands of individuals claimed to have experienced the new birth, a datable and often dramatically emotional conversion experience. Subsequent eras of revival noted for their longevity and fervor have since been dubbed the Second, Third, and Fourth Great Awakenings. This bibliography primarily catalogues texts associated with the First Great Awakening. During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, individual preachers and congregations enjoyed isolated surges of religious fervor that led to the incorporation of new church members, but in the 1730s and 1740s, congregations throughout the British colonies, together with congregations across the Atlantic, in Scotland and England, reported a sustained increase of God’s grace (and church attendance). This transatlantic groundswell of evangelical activity originated in Northampton, Massachusetts, during the winter of 1733–1734, when Jonathan Edwards’s affective preaching and the untimely deaths of several residents caused many of the unconverted to fear for the state of their souls. Edwards recounted the religious excitement and conversion of his congregants in a personal letter that he eventually expanded for publication in London, which provided a template of successful, community-wide religious revival for English preachers, such as John Wesley and George Whitefield. Both became famous for preaching in the open air, where crowds numbering in the thousands would come to hear them speak. Many of the converts in those crowds experienced the emotional roller coaster of the new birth and sanctification by the Holy Spirit physiologically; these new believers moaned, shrieked, and shook their limbs uncontrollably. Social groups at the margins of colonial religious culture, including youth, women, impoverished families, and people of color, embraced this form of Christianity, in which they could participate with fewer restrictions. Critics of the revivals, commonly known as Old Lights, verbally attacked supporters of the revivals, or New Lights, for these emotional excesses. The most radical revivalists—men like James Davenport and Andrew Croswell—justified their defiance of social and religious conventions by appealing to the Holy Spirit, claiming that it caused and, therefore, excused the unusual behavior of their congregants. By the mid-1740s, thanks in part to Davenport’s inflammatory accusations that Old Light ministers, and even moderate evangelical preachers, were “carnal unconverted men,” the tide of public opinion had begun to turn against the excesses characteristic of radical revivals. Prominent preachers, such as Edwards and Whitefield, denounced the behavior of Davenport and other radicals, aligning themselves with moderate revivalists, such as Benjamin Colman and Jonathan Dickinson. In response, many radical evangelicals left the coalition of Congregational and Presbyterian churches at the crux of the North American revivals to become Baptists. This schism both marked and, in part, caused the end of the First Great Awakening. The Second Great Awakening commenced in Kentucky, with the 1801 Cane Ridge revival, and wound to a close shortly after William Miller’s failed prediction that Jesus Christ would return to the earth before 21 March 1844. This period of revival launched several major new religious denominations, including the Miller-inspired Seventh-Day Adventist Church, the “Mormon” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the Disciples of Christ. The Third Great Awakening began with the 1857–1858 holiness revival and was characterized by the social gospel movement, a push to combat social problems, such as poverty, racism, substance abuse, and crime, with Christian activism. No clear end point has been identified for the Third Great Awakening, but Dwight L. Moody, the period’s most famous preacher, died in 1899, and most scholars agree that the revivals diminished significantly in the early 1900s. The Fourth Great Awakening is a period whose dates are still contested. Some scholars, however, have pointed to a sustained period of elevated evangelical conversion rates between 1970 and 1990 as empirical grounds for identifying beginning and end points for the Fourth Great Awakening. Others have identified the early 20th-century ministries of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson as an earlier, fifth period of awakening.

Although many books addressing one of the four commonly identified Great Awakenings have appeared, relatively few writers have attempted a comprehensive account of the three-hundred-year history of these recurring religious revivals. Sweet 1944 is one of the earliest attempts and predates the late-20th-century revivals some have identified as a Fourth Great Awakening. Balmer 1999 is a history of evangelicalism, not an account of the Awakenings, but the two topics overlap so frequently that this text is a suitable introduction for the general reader. Hardman 1983 approaches the topic biographically. Ahlstrom 2004 , McLoughlin 1978 , and McClymond 2004 provide the best scholarly overviews; McClymond’s introductory, bibliographic essay is the place that every scholar interested in awakenings and revivalism should start. Blumhofer and Balmer 1993 places the American Awakenings in an international context, whereas Taves 1999 examines 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century explanations for the physiological and supernatural excesses associated with revival.

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

A comprehensive history of American Christianity that provides a single narrative linking the first three Great Awakenings and situating these periods of revival with respect to other periods and movements in American religious history.

Balmer, Randall. Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America . Boston: Beacon, 1999.

Balmer, a religious historian, provides a history of the American evangelical movement that combines intellectual rigor and brevity; the ideal introductory text for students, despite several historical divergences between evangelicalism and Christian revivals in America.

Blumhofer, Edith L., and Randall Balmer, eds. Modern Christian Revivals . Papers presented at the conference “Modern Christian Revivals, a Comparative Perspective,” Wheaton College, 30 March–1 April 1989. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

A collection of essays on various periods of revival in colonial North America, Britain, Norway, China, Latin America, Canada, and the United States; these essays place American Awakenings in a global context.

Hardman, Keith J. The Spiritual Awakeners: American Revivalists from Solomon Stoddard to D. L. Moody . Chicago: Moody Press, 1983.

Brief cultural biographies of more than a dozen influential preachers emphasize the role that individuals played in promoting the Awakenings. Portraits of George Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley, and Samuel Mills situate the Awakenings in terms of an international evangelical movement.

McClymond, Michael J., ed. Embodying the Spirit: New Perspectives on North American Revivalism . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

McClymond, a professor of theology, extends McLoughlin’s foundational work and challenges several of his premises. McClymond’s introduction to this edited collection is the most comprehensive survey of the field in the early 21st century, and the essays offer new perspectives on revivals from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 . Chicago History of American Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

An essential text for any serious student of the awakening as a recurring religious phenomenon in American history. McLoughlin’s accounts of the Third and Fourth Great Awakenings continue to shape much of the subsequent scholarly discourse.

Sweet, William Warren. Revivalism in America: Its Origin, Growth, and Decline . New York: Scribner’s, 1944.

Sweet’s history of the Awakenings and revival culture is notable because it was one of the first to forecast an end to the Awakenings, predicting that a surge of secularism and science would forever discredit the emotional religion at the heart of evangelicalism.

Taves, Anne. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

A history of the involuntary physiological behavior and supernatural phenomena associated with revivals, focusing on ecclesiastical, scientific, and psychological attempts to explain them.

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Rule Britannia! The English Empire, 1660–1763

Great Awakening and Enlightenment

OpenStaxCollege

[latexpage]

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the significance of the Great Awakening
• Describe the genesis, central ideas, and effects of the Enlightenment in British North America

Two major cultural movements further strengthened Anglo-American colonists’ connection to Great Britain: the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. Both movements began in Europe, but they advocated very different ideas: the Great Awakening promoted a fervent, emotional religiosity, while the Enlightenment encouraged the pursuit of reason in all things. On both sides of the Atlantic, British subjects grappled with these new ideas.

THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING

During the eighteenth century, the British Atlantic experienced an outburst of Protestant revivalism known as the First Great Awakening . (A Second Great Awakening would take place in the 1800s.) During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the ranks of several Protestant denominations: Congregationalists, Anglicans (members of the Church of England), and Presbyterians. They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a vigorous emotional religiosity. Whereas Martin Luther and John Calvin had preached a doctrine of predestination and close reading of scripture, new evangelical ministers spread a message of personal and experiential faith that rose above mere book learning. Individuals could bring about their own salvation by accepting Christ, an especially welcome message for those who had felt excluded by traditional Protestantism: women, the young, and people at the lower end of the social spectrum.

The Great Awakening caused a split between those who followed the evangelical message (the “New Lights”) and those who rejected it (the “Old Lights”). The elite ministers in British America were firmly Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos. Indeed, the revivals did sometimes lead to excess. In one notorious incident in 1743, an influential New Light minister named James Davenport urged his listeners to burn books. The next day, he told them to burn their clothes as a sign of their casting off the sinful trappings of the world. He then took off his own pants and threw them into the fire, but a woman saved them and tossed them back to Davenport, telling him he had gone too far.

Another outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey, led by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen. Frelinghuysen’s example inspired other ministers, including Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. Tennant helped to spark a Presbyterian revival in the Middle Colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), in part by founding a seminary to train other evangelical clergyman. New Lights also founded colleges in Rhode Island and New Hampshire that would later become Brown University and Dartmouth College.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still another explosion of evangelical fervor. Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” used powerful word imagery to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding damnation by personal conversion ( [link] ). One passage reads: “The wrath of God burns against them [sinners], their damnation don’t slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth under them.” Edwards’s revival spread along the Connecticut River Valley, and news of the event spread rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his famous sermon.

The foremost evangelical of the Great Awakening was an Anglican minister named George Whitefield. Like many evangelical ministers, Whitefield was itinerant, traveling the countryside instead of having his own church and congregation. Between 1739 and 1740, he electrified colonial listeners with his brilliant oratory.

Not everyone embraced George Whitefield and other New Lights. Many established Old Lights decried the way the new evangelical religions appealed to people’s passions, rather than to traditional religious values. The two illustrations below present two very different visions of George Whitefield ( [link] ).

Compare the two images above. On the left is an illustration for Whitefield’s memoirs, while on the right is a cartoon satirizing the circus-like atmosphere that his preaching seemed to attract (Dr. Squintum was a nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed). How do these two artists portray the same man? What emotions are the illustration for his memoirs intended to evoke? What details can you find in the cartoon that indicate the artist’s distaste for the preacher?

The Great Awakening saw the rise of several Protestant denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists (who emphasized adult baptism of converted Christians rather than infant baptism). These new churches gained converts and competed with older Protestant groups like Anglicans (members of the Church of England), Congregationalists (the heirs of Puritanism in America), and Quakers. The influence of these older Protestant groups, such as the New England Congregationalists, declined because of the Great Awakening. Nonetheless, the Great Awakening touched the lives of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and provided a shared experience in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment , or the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas. Many consider the Enlightenment a major turning point in Western civilization, an age of light replacing an age of darkness.

Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including rationalism, empiricism, progressivism, and cosmopolitanism. Rationalism is the idea that humans are capable of using their faculty of reason to gain knowledge. This was a sharp turn away from the prevailing idea that people needed to rely on scripture or church authorities for knowledge. Empiricism promotes the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation of the world. Progressivism is the belief that through their powers of reason and observation, humans could make unlimited, linear progress over time; this belief was especially important as a response to the carnage and upheaval of the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century. Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers’ view of themselves as citizens of the world and actively engaged in it, as opposed to being provincial and close-minded. In all, Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.

The Freemasons were a fraternal society that advocated Enlightenment principles of inquiry and tolerance. Freemasonry originated in London coffeehouses in the early eighteenth century, and Masonic lodges (local units) soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies. One prominent Freemason, Benjamin Franklin, stands as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in British America ( [link] ). Born in Boston in 1706 to a large Puritan family, Franklin loved to read, although he found little beyond religious publications in his father’s house. In 1718 he was apprenticed to his brother to work in a print shop, where he learned how to be a good writer by copying the style he found in the Spectator , which his brother printed. At the age of seventeen, the independent-minded Franklin ran away, eventually ending up in Quaker Philadelphia. There he began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette in the late 1720s, and in 1732 he started his annual publication Poor Richard: An Almanack , in which he gave readers much practical advice, such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Franklin subscribed to deism , an Enlightenment-era belief in a God who created, but has no continuing involvement in, the world and the events within it. Deists also advanced the belief that personal morality—an individual’s moral compass, leading to good works and actions—is more important than strict church doctrines. Franklin’s deism guided his many philanthropic projects. In 1731, he established a reading library that became the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society to encourage the spirit of inquiry. In 1749, he provided the foundation for the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1751, he helped found Pennsylvania Hospital.

His career as a printer made Franklin wealthy and well-respected. When he retired in 1748, he devoted himself to politics and scientific experiments. His most famous work, on electricity, exemplified Enlightenment principles. Franklin observed that lightning strikes tended to hit metal objects and reasoned that he could therefore direct lightning through the placement of metal objects during an electrical storm. He used this knowledge to advocate the use of lightning rods: metal poles connected to wires directing lightning’s electrical charge into the ground and saving wooden homes in cities like Philadelphia from catastrophic fires. He published his findings in 1751, in Experiments and Observations on Electricity .

Franklin also wrote of his “rags to riches” tale, his Memoir , in the 1770s and 1780s. This story laid the foundation for the American Dream of upward social mobility.

Visit the Worldly Ways section of PBS’s Benjamin Franklin site to see an interactive map showing Franklin’s overseas travels and his influence around the world. His diplomatic, political, scientific, and business achievements had great effects in many countries.

THE FOUNDING OF GEORGIA

The reach of Enlightenment thought was both broad and deep. In the 1730s, it even prompted the founding of a new colony. Having witnessed the terrible conditions of debtors’ prison, as well as the results of releasing penniless debtors onto the streets of London, James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament and advocate of social reform, petitioned King George II for a charter to start a new colony. George II, understanding the strategic advantage of a British colony standing as a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, granted the charter to Oglethorpe and twenty like-minded proprietors in 1732. Oglethorpe led the settlement of the colony, which was called Georgia in honor of the king. In 1733, he and 113 immigrants arrived on the ship Anne . Over the next decade, Parliament funded the migration of twenty-five hundred settlers, making Georgia the only government-funded colonial project.

Oglethorpe’s vision for Georgia followed the ideals of the Age of Reason , seeing it as a place for England’s “worthy poor” to start anew. To encourage industry, he gave each male immigrant fifty acres of land, tools, and a year’s worth of supplies. In Savannah, the Oglethorpe Plan provided for a utopia: “an agrarian model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values holding all men as equal.”

Oglethorpe’s vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded these prohibitions. Despite its proprietors’ early vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of slavery, by the 1750s, Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by slaves.

Section Summary

The eighteenth century saw a host of social, religious, and intellectual changes across the British Empire. While the Great Awakening emphasized vigorously emotional religiosity, the Enlightenment promoted the power of reason and scientific observation. Both movements had lasting impacts on the colonies. The beliefs of the New Lights of the First Great Awakening competed with the religions of the first colonists, and the religious fervor in Great Britain and her North American colonies bound the eighteenth-century British Atlantic together in a shared, common experience. The British colonist Benjamin Franklin gained fame on both sides of the Atlantic as a printer, publisher, and scientist. He embodied Enlightenment ideals in the British Atlantic with his scientific experiments and philanthropic endeavors. Enlightenment principles even guided the founding of the colony of Georgia, although those principles could not stand up to the realities of colonial life, and slavery soon took hold in the colony.

Review Questions

What was the First Great Awakening?

Which of the following is not a tenet of the Enlightenment?

Who were the Freemasons, and why were they significant?

The Freemasons were a fraternal society that originated in London coffeehouses in the early eighteenth century. They advocated Enlightenment principles of inquiry and tolerance. Masonic lodges soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies, creating a shared experience on both sides of the Atlantic and spreading Enlightenment intellectual currents throughout the British Empire. Benjamin Franklin was a prominent Freemason.

Great Awakening and Enlightenment Copyright © 2014 by OpenStaxCollege is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

What was the Great Awakening? Key Figures and Events

The event that has become known as the Great Awakening actually began years earlier in the 1720s. And, although the most significant years were from 1740-1742, the revival continued until the 1760s.

Many of the early Puritans and pilgrims arrived in America with a fervent faith and vision for establishing a godly nation. Within a century the ardor had cooled. The children of the original immigrants were more concerned with increasing wealth and comfortable living than furthering the Kingdom of God. The same spiritual malaise could be found throughout the American colonies. The philosophical rationalism of the Enlightenment was spreading its influence among the educated classes; others were preoccupied with the things of this world.

When Theodore Frelinghuysen , a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, came to begin his pastoral world in New Jersey during the 1720's, he was shocked by the deadness of the churches in America. He preached the need for conversion, a profound, life-changing commitment to Christ, not simply perfunctory participation in religious duties. Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent was heavily influenced by Frelinghuysen and brought revival to his denomination. Tennent believed the deadness of the churches was in part due to so many pastors having never been converted themselves. His book On the Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry caused quite a stir!

Origins of the Great Awakening 

Many of the early colonists had come to the new world to enjoy religious freedom, but as the land became tamed and prosperous they no longer relied on God for their daily bread. Wealth brought complacency toward God. As a result, church membership dropped. Wishing to make it easier to increase church attendance, the religious leaders had instituted the Halfway Covenant , which allowed membership without a public testimony of conversion. The churches were now attended largely by people who lacked a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Sadly, many of the ministers themselves did not know Christ and therefore could not lead their flocks to the true Shepherd. Then, suddenly, the Spirit of God awoke as though from an intense slumber and began to touch the population of the colonies. People from all walks of life, from poor farmers to rich merchants, began experiencing renewal and rebirth.

The faith and prayers of the righteous leaders were the foundation of the Great Awakening. Before a meeting, George Whitefield would spend hours--and sometimes all night--bathing an event in prayers. Fervent church members kept the fires of revival going through their genuine petitions for God's intervention in the lives of their communities.

The early rays of the Great Awakening began with Theodore Frelinghuysen of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Jersey. Through his ministry, the hearts of his church members were changed. It was the young people who responded first and experienced the regeneration of becoming new creations. They, in turn, spread the message to their elders. Thus began the first spark of the Great Awakening.

In 1727, about the time that Frelinghuysen and Tennent were seeing a revival in New Jersey, Jonathan Edwards went to Northampton, Massachusetts to become assistant minister to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard. Stoddard had ministered at Northampton almost sixty years and during that time had seen five periods of revivals or "harvests," as he called them. Stoddard recognized that a church goes through periods of spiritual refreshing and depression: There are some special Seasons wherein God doth in a remarkable Manner revive Religion among his People. God doth not always carry on his work in the church in the same proportion...there be times wherein there is a plentiful Effusion of the Spirit of God, and Religion is in a more flourishing Condition.

Jonathan Edwards, Father of the Great Awakening

Pictured Above: Portrait of Jonathan Edwards

The preacher's monotone voice filled the church in Northampton, Massachusetts. As the brilliant Jonathan Edwards spoke, he kept his eyes focused on the back wall of the church. Gently, Edwards' words began to sink into the hearts of the assembly, and although his method of speaking lacked enthusiasm, his words were powerful. Revival followed.

During the 1730s, the church in Northampton felt the stirring of the Holy Spirit, moving them from their lukewarm apathy to an awakening of their souls. Delivering his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," on July 8, 1741, in Enfield, Connecticut, Edwards helped spread the revival. A great commotion swept over the people and they began wailing, crying, and screeching loudly. Frequently Edwards asked the congregation to control themselves so he might finish his sermon. As a result of his preaching and the work of the Spirit, lives began to change and complete towns were transformed.

The most prominent theologian of the Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards. Not a powerful speaker, Edwards still managed to spread the revival. From his brilliant mind, he constructed one of the most impressive sermons ever preached. He also wrote many books and pamphlets describing the events he saw in his own church. The only son in a family of eleven children, Edwards was born on October 10, 1703. At the young age of thirteen, he entered Yale (not unusual during that era of history) and graduated in 1723. Four years later Jonathan married the remarkable and virtuous Sarah Pierpont. Faithfully Sarah helped Edwards in his ministry and personal endeavors. In 1727, Edwards became the assistant minister at the Northampton church. When his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, died, Jonathan became the minister and served in that church for nearly twenty-four years. He spoke boldly against the Halfway Covenant. Since many of the members who promoted the Halfway Covenant were merchants (or river gods, as Edwards called them), they were able to make most of the decisions for the community, thus giving them the power over the rest of the populace. Edwards did much to help alleviate the tyrannical practices that followed.

In the 1730's, when Jonathan Edwards became the minister at Northampton, he found only spiritual deadness in the church. He was concerned about the immorality of the young people and began visiting them in their homes. In 1734 he preached a series of sermons on justification by faith alone. "By December," wrote Edwards, "the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in. Revival grew, and souls did as it were come by floods to Christ." Over a six month period, Edwards recorded three hundred conversions. He wrote a book, Narratives of Surprising Conversions, describing the revival and its effects on the life of the town.

The Far-Reaching Revival 

In his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections , Edwards emphasized that true religion must affect the heart. In The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, Edwards taught from I John 4 what the evidence of a true revival and work of the Spirit would be. The individual would be confirmed in the truth of the gospel, that Jesus was the Son of God and the Savior of people (vs. 2-3). The convert would avoid sin and worldly lust (vs. 4-5). He would have a greater regard for the Holy Scriptures, accepting their truth and divine origins (v. 6). Finally, his life would evidence a love to God and his fellow man (vs. 6ff.) Edwards' printed works describing and analyzing the revival in Northampton were read throughout the American colonies and Britain. They stimulated ministers on both sides of the Atlantic to begin praying and looking for a revival.

Great Awakening Crowds - the people came  "en mass"

George Whitefield , an Anglican evangelist and friend of John and Charles Wesley, not only traveled throughout Britain bringing the gospel of Christ, but he also made seven trips to America between 1738 and 1770. He was probably the most well-traveled man in the colonies and drew large crowds wherever he spoke. A widespread revival was most clearly seen during his second journey (1739-1741). As he toured the colonies, he would daily preach to large crowds in the open air; the crowds were too large for the churches.

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Pictured Below: A Portrait of George Whitefield

Ben Frankin and George Whitefield

Benjamin Franklin was fascinated with Whitefield's speaking ability and the effects his teaching had on the people. Though Franklin never openly became a Christian himself, he did become a friend of Whitefield's and his publisher in America. He was impressed with the change Whitefield's gospel preaching brought on society. Franklin wrote that It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.

While Edwards was the most prominent theologian of the time, by far the most influential and famous evangelist of the Great Awakening was George Whitefield. He was born in England and educated at Oxford, where he met and became friends with John and Charles Wesley. During his spare time at college, he visited the poor and those in prison. On June 20, 1736, at the age of twenty-two, he became an ordained minister. God blessed him with an amazing ministry, and wherever he spoke revival accompanied him. At the Wesley brothers' request, he joined them in Georgia to continue his ministry. After a few months, he returned to England and again reached thousands through his preaching. He became well-known in both the Colonies and Great Britain. His preaching spread revival and a new birth to the hearts of those who listened.

Unfortunately, many ministers became jealous of his God-given ability. In Bristol, the churches refused to allow him the use of their buildings. Undeterred, Whitefield preached outside On more than on occasion he addressed 30,000 people. He spoke persuasively with a loud, commanding, and pleasant voice. With weighty emotion and dramatic power Whitefield presented the gospel message to the masses, spreading the light of Christ with vigor and enthusiasm. He also united the independent movements of the Great Awaking and bound the separate colonies into a unit. Breaking through denominational boundaries he once said, "Father Abraham, who have you in heaven? Any Episcopalians? No! Any Presbyterians? No! Any Independents or Methodist? No, no, no! Whom have you there, then Father Abraham? We don't know those names here! All who are here are Christians--believers in Christ, men who have overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of his testimony. Oh, is that the case? Then God help me, God help us all, to forget having names and to become Christians in deed and in truth!" During his life, he made seven tours of the colonies and preached 18,000 sermons! There was hardly a portion of the colonies that did not feel his influence and love.

Old Lights vs. New Lights

Not everyone welcomed the beliefs of the Great Awakening. One of the principal opinions of the opponents was Charles Chauncy, a minister in Boston. Chauncy was especially critical of Whitefield’s preaching and instead supported a more traditional, formal style of religion.

By about 1742, a debate over the Great Awakening had divided the New England ministry and many colonists into two factions.

Preachers and followers who embraced the new ideas brought forth by the Great Awakening became distinguished as “new lights.” Those who affirmed the old-fashioned, traditional church ways were designated “old lights.”

Effects and Results of the Great Awakening

The Great Awakening in America in the 1730s and 1740s had tremendous results. The number of people in the church multiplied, and the lives of the converted manifested true Christian piety. Denominational barriers broke down as Christians of all persuasions worked together in the cause of the gospel. There was a renewed concern with missions, and work among the Indians increased. As more young men prepared for service as Christian ministers, a concern for higher education grew. Princeton, Rutgers, Brown, and Dartmouth universities were all established as a direct result of the Great Awakening. Some have even seen a connection between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution --Christians enjoying spiritual liberty in Christ would come to crave political liberty. The Great Awakening not only revived the American church but reinvigorated American society as well.

The significant working of God during the Great Awakening was far-reaching. Truly converted members now filled the pews. In New England, during the time from 1740 to 1742, memberships increased from 25,000 to 50,000. Hundreds of new churches were formed to accommodate the growth in church-goers. For the first time, the individual colonies had a commonality with the other colonies. They were joined under the banner of Christ. Clearly, their unity gave them strength to face the impending danger of war with England. Not only did the Great Awakening unite the colonies religiously but also politically. After being freed from inner sin, the colonists also sought freedom from external tyrants. The motto of the Revolutionary War was, "No King but King Jesus!"

Excerpts provided form  Amy Puetz: The Great Awakening

Article Photo Credit: WikimediaCommons

Great Awakening, History.com

First Great Awakening, Wikipedia.org

The Great Awakening, Khanacademy.org

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The Great Awakening in America, also known as Evangelist Revival, had tremendous social and political results in the 30s and 40s. Read a summary including facts, causes, affects, and influential leaders.

"An Appraisal of the Great Awakening"

Author : King, Martin Luther, Jr. (Crozer Theological Seminary)

Date : November 17, 1950 ?

Location : Chester, Pa. ?

Genre : Essay

Topic : Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

King wrote this essay for American Christianity (Colonial Period) taught by Raymond J. Bean at Crozer Theological Seminary. 1  Bean lectured on the development of Christianity in the United States from the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century through the origins of religious liberalism in the early nineteenth century. King was given three options for his term paper topic: the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the colonies, the relationship between Baptists and the rise of democracy in America, and the Great Awakening in colonial America. His paper on the Great Awakening contains a detailed description of the lives of the ministers who led the movement and the various revivals that occurred between 1720 and 1775. King provides little analysis of either the social and political origins or the consequences of the Great Awakening and no discussion of its role in the development of African-American Christianity. He places great emphasis on the deep religious emotion involved in the revivals and the power of their evangelical preaching. Bean gave King an A for both the paper and the course.

The great spiritual revival of religion in the eighteenth century is usually termed the Great Awakening of 1740, because its chief intensity, in this country, culminated about that time. However it would be a mistake to confine this momentous movement to that year. It commenced more than a decade before that date and continued with power more than a decade after it. It would be well nigh impossible to set forth every single cause of this great religious revival, since social phenomena are usually tied up with a complexity of causes. But some of the causes are quite apparent. Probably the first factor that lead to colonial revivalism was the failure of organized religion to reach the masses. For years organized religion in the American colonies had been a matter of the few. During the early colonial period there were undoubtedly more unchurched people in America, in proportion to the population, than was to be found in any other country in Christendom.\[Footnote:] See Sweet, The Story of Religion in America, p. 5.\ Even in State Churches, as in New England and the Southern colonies, only a comparatively small proportion of the total population were members of the church. It was this situation which necessitated the development of new techniques to win people to the church, and this new method was revivalism. The Great Awakening was the first serious attempt to bring religion to the masses in the American Colonies.

The gradual decline of emotional fervor was also a factor which led to the Great Awakening. Religion had become unemotional, with a type of preaching unconducive to revivals and conversion. It was this situation which led to the necessity for the Half-Way Covenant. 2  More and more individuals came to feel that there were certain “means” which might be used in putting the soul in a position to receive the regenerating influence of the Spirit of God. Reliance on these “means” rather than the miraculous power of God led to a cold and unemotional religion.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 65\ 3  No wonder Jonathan Edwards came on the scene emphasizing justification by faith and the sovereignty of God. From the moment of his landing in America Theodore Frelinghuysen had noticed this lack of emotional fervor in religion, and he spent most of his time  preah  {preach}ing against the formality and dead orthodozy that had permeated the Dutch churches in America. Such was the general religious situation when the new and highly emotional reaction set in which we know as the Great Awakening.

A third factor which led to colonial revivalism was the awareness on the part of religious leaders of a breakdown in moral standards. During the latter years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century New England ministers on every hand were raising their voices against the immoral tendencies then existing. In 1688 Willian Stoughton stood before the Massachusetts legislature and said, “O what a sad metamorphasis hath of later years passed upon us in these churches and plantations! Alas! How is New England in danger to be buried in its own ruins.” Increase Mather observed ten years later that “clear, sound conversions are not frequent. Many of the rising generation are profane Drunkards, Swearers, Licentious and Scoffers at the power of Godliness.” 4

A survey of the subjects of sermons preached at this period also reveals the low state of religious life at that time. In 1700 Samuel Willard preached on “The Perils of the Times Displayed.” In 1711 Stephen Buchingham preached from the theme, “The Unreasonableness and Danger of a People’s Renouncing Their Subjection to God.” In 1730 William Russell’s theme was, “The Decay of Love to God in Churches, Offensive and Dangerous.”\[Footnote:] I am indebted to Sweet for this list of sermons. See his, Religion In Colonial America, p. 273.\ 5  These and many other subjects could be cited as examples of the uniform denunciation on the part of ministers of the religious conditions of their times. The times were ripe for a new emphasis in religion. 6

The Revival in the Middle Colonies

Colonial Revivalism began in the Middle Colonies under the dynamic preaching of Theodore J. Frelinghuysen. He may properly be called the first outstanding revivalist. Frelinghuysen came to America in 1720 at the call of three congregations which had been formed among the Dutch settlers in central New Jersey. Religiously he found the people cold and unemotional with little desire beyond outward formalism. Being educated under pietistic influences, he naturally revolted against this prevelant trend. His first sermon was a call to an inner religion in contrast to conformity to outward religious duties. This passionate preaching soon brought a cleavage among Frelinghuysen’s parishioners. On the one hand there were the well-to do whose only desire was to preserve the Dutch Church as a symbol of their Dutch nationality. On the other hand there were the poorer people and the younger generation who were quite in accord with the pietistic teachings of Frelinghuysen.

The conflict between these two parties became so intensified that there were even reverberations in Holland. The group opposing Frelinghuysen soon took their complaints to Domine Boel, one of the Dutch collegiate ministers of New York, who labeled Frelinghuysen a heretic. But this did not at all silence the young domine. He continued to preach and even publish sermons defending his views. Converts continued to streem in, and finally Frelinghuysen was able to reach many of his former opposers. The height of this revival came in 1726 when the ingathering of new converts was particularly large. Frelinghuysen eventually came to the point of gain gin {ing} the support of the majority of Dutch ministers, although the division thus created in the Dutch Church was not healed until toward the end of the colonial period.

The Frelinghuysen revival among the Dutch in central New Jersey was highly significant in preparing the way for the next phase of the Middle Colony revival, that among the Scotch-Irish. The most influential figures in this phase of the revival were the graduates of William Tennent’s “Log College” at  Nosaming  {Neshaminy} in Pennsylvania.

The Tennent family consisted of the father, William, and four sons, Gilbert, John, William, and Charles, all five able ministers of the gospel. The senior Tennent, although a powerful preacher, received his chief fame as an educator of young men for the Presbyterian ministry. His school was established primarily for the education of his own sons, but later other young men were admitted. It was not long before this school was derisively called “Log College” by Tennent’s opponents, and as such it has passed into history. The classical training obtained at this institution was by no means of light quality. This fact is validated by the scholarly attainments of many of these men; but the chief distinction of these men was their evangelical zeal. Gradually Log College graduates were spreading over central Jersey, and they were preaching a militant revivalism which was sweeping the whole region. 7

Giblert Tennent, who was educated for the ministry by his father, was destined to be the heart and center of the revival movement among the Presbyterians. He was the most distinguished member of the noted Tennent family, and by all standards of measurement an able preacher. When he was called to the Presbyterian church at New Brunswick Domine Frelinghuysen was at the height of his revival, and the Dutch minister gave him a hearty welcome and encouraged his members to do the same.

The Scotch-Irish revival mounted high throughout the seventeen-thirites with new converts coming in on every hand. In 1738 the New Brunswick Presbytery was formed, made up of five evangelical ministers, three of whom were Log College men. The reason why these revivalists desired to be formed in a separate presbytery is not far to seek. It is to be noted that opposition to the revival began to manifest itself among the more conservative Presbyterian ministers who had received their training in Scottish universities. These men set out to block the progress of the revivalists by passing certain laws in the Synod requiring all candidates for ordination to present diplomas either from New England or European colleges. This law was obviously aimed at the revivalists, most of whom were Log College graduates. So it can now be seen that a separate presbytery was formed by the Log College men  of their own kind.  {in order that they might license and ordain men of their own kind.} John Rowland, a recent Log College graduate, was immediately licensed by the New Brunswick Presbytery, a challenge aimed at the conservatives. 8  Thus the Presbyterian ministers in New Jersey were soon divided into two parties, viz., “Old Side” and “New Side.”

Such was the general situation among the Presbyterians in the middle colonies when George Whitefield appeared on the American scene. 9  Landing at Lewes, Delaware, in August 1739, Whitefield immediately began his first American evangelistic tour. 10  One characteristic which he had on his arrival and which he retained throughout his life was a great catholic spirit. On his voyage to America he even lent his cabin to a Quaker preacher, who held meetings there.\[Footnote:] Whitefield, Journal, No. 5, p. 16.\ 11  Also Whitefield was quite tolerant toward the Baptists, though he himself held the Episcopal theory of ordination and of the real presence of Christ in the elements of the Lord’s Supper.\[Footnote:] Ibid., No. 4, pp. 7, 12, 24.\ In England he freely collected money for the Lutherans of Georgia\[Footnote:] Ibid., No. 3, p. 7.\ and enjoyed fellowship with the Moravians, though they were not in full accord with his Calvinism.\[Footnote:] Ibid., No. 3, p. 97.\ 12  On one occasion, preaching from the balcony of the courthouse in Philadelphia, it is said that Whitefield cried out: 13  “Father Abraham, whom have you in Heaven? Any Episcopalians?’ ‘No.’ ‘Any Presbyterians?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you any Independents or Seceders?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you any Methodists?’ ‘No!’ ‘no!’ no!!’ ‘Whom have you there?’ ‘We don’t know these names here. All who are here are Christians—believers in Christ—men who have overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of his testimony.’ ‘Oh, is this the case? Th us {en} God help us, God help us all, to forget party names, and to become Christians in deed, and in truth.”\[Footnote:] Quoted from Sweet, The Story of Religion in America, p. 142.\

The preaching ability of this moving spirit of the Great Awakening cannot be exaggerated. His reputation in this area had been established even before his appearance on the American shores. One of the colonial newspapers tells of the great concourse of people that filled the church of St. Mary Magdalene, London, long before the time of service and of several hundred persons in the street who in vain endeavored to force themselves into the church and past the constables stationed at the door to preserve the peace. Such was the mad desire to see and hear the eloquent youth who had volunteered to go to Georgia as a missionary.\[Footnote:] See Maxon, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, p. 42.\ 14  In speaking of the powerful delivery of Whitefield Tracy says, “Probably, in simply delivery, no man since Demosthenes, has ever surpassed Whitefield as a public orator.”\[Footnote:] Joseph Tracy, “The Great Awakening,” The Christian Review. September, 1844.\

Whitefield arrived in Pennsylvania in the winter months of 1739. This was his first visit to the Northern Colonies. Great multitudes flocked to hear him. No building being sufficiently large to accomodate the people, he frequently preached from the gallery of the court house on Market Street. It was said that “his voice was distinctly heard on the Jersey shore, and so distinct was his speech that every word was understood on board of a shallop at Market Steet wharf, a distance of upwards of four hundred feet from the court house. All the intermediate space was crowded with his hearers.”\[Footnote:] Quoted from F. G. Beardsley, A History of American Revivals, p. 36.\ During his visit at Philadelphia he had intercourse with members of the Society of Friends, and was treated very kindly by many of them. He speaks of them as honest, open-hearted, and true.\[Footnote:] Whitefield, Journal, No. 5, p. 47.\ The Presbyterian and Baptist ministers came to his lodgings to tell of their pleasure in hearing “Christ preached in the Church.”

The most cherished intercourse that young Whitefield had on his visit to Philadelphia was that with the old gray-headed William Tennent, of Neshaming. Whitefield says in his journal that Tennent was a great friend of the Erskines, and just as they were hated by the judicatories of the Church of Scotland, and as his Methodist associates were dispised by their brethren of the Church of England, so too were Tennent and his sons treated by the majority of the synod. But just as surely as Elijah overcame the prophets of Baal, so would the few evangelicals overcome their opposers, thought Whitefield.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 31.\ The aged founder of the Log College had made the journey of twenty miles from Neshaming to hear this great spiritual leader, and the result was an alliance between Whitefield and the New Brunswick Presbyterians.

After nine days at Philadelphia, Whitefield journeyed toward New York, preaching at Burlington, and at New Brunswick, the home of Gilbert Tennent. In New York Whitefield preached in the Presbysterian church, as well as in the fields where great throngs assembled. While in New York Whitefield had the opportunity of listening to a sermon preached by Gilbert Tennent in the Presbyterian church. Whitefield left convinced that he had never before heard such a searching discourse.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 35.\ So deeply was he moved by the truth presented by his new friend that his own method of preaching was sensibly changed by his intercourse with the Tennents.

Journeying back to Philadelphia Whitefield accepted the previously given invitation of Jonathan Dickinson, Presbyterian pastor at Elizabethtown. In his sermon Whitefield preached against both ministers and people who contented themselves with a bare, speculative knowledge of the doctrines of grace, “never experiencing the power of them in their hearts.”\[Footnote:]  Op. cit.  {Ibid.,} p. 40)\

Coming again to New Brunswick the evangelist met several of the leaders of the evangelical movement in the Middle colonies. Among them was Domine Frelinghuysen, whom Whitefield called, the “beginner of the great work in these parts.”\[Footnote:] Ibid., p. 41.\ Another was John Cross, Presbyterian pastor of Basking Ridge. Still another was James Campbell, of Newtown, Pennsylvania. These men were greatly moved by the evangelical zeal of Whitefield.

Finally Whitefield reached Philadelphia after triumphs in three provinces. The enthusiasm of the people mounted higher and higher. It is estimated that his farewell congregation at Philadelphia numbered ten thousand.\[Footnote:] Maxon, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, p. 52.\ 15  “After five stirring days he left Philadelphia, accompanied by one hundred and fifty horsemen, stopping and preaching at various points until he reached White Clay Creek, the home of Charles Tennent.”\[Footnote:] Ibid., p. 52.\

The year 1740 marks the high tide of the revival in the middle colonies. It was in this year that Gilbert Tennent preached his famous sermon on “Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.” It was a terrible arraignment of men who enter the ministry as a trade, with no dynamic religious experience. Unconverted themselves, they were unconcerned, though many years passed without a conversion in their congregations.\[Footnote:] Gilbert Tennent, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.\ Whitefield’s preaching had touched all classes of people, including the deistic Franklin who became a life long admirer of the evangelist. The revival became exceedingly popular with the common people. But from the beginning the revival had aroused criticism, and unfortunately the revivalists were partly responsible for it because of their tendency to be censorious of those who did not agree with them.

Opposition to the revival among the Presbyterians came to a head at the meeting of the synod in 1740, when the evangelicals were excluded from membership in the synod by the conservatives. The evangelicals attempted to undo the action taken in 1741, but when this failed they formed, in 1745, the New York Synod at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. From this year until 1758 the Presbyterians in the colonies were divided into two distinct bodies. The evangelical or New Side party grew with rapid proportions, while the conservative or Old Side party made very little progress. At the time of the separation the Old Side numbered twenty-five ministers, while the New Side numbered twenty-two. In 1758 when the schism was healed the Old Side had decreased to but twenty-two, while the New Side had grown by leaps and bounds numbering seventy-two.\[Footnote:] Sweet, The Story of Religion in America, p. 143.\ 16  “These years of separation mark the unmistakable triumph of the revival party within the Presbyterian Church.”\[Footnote:] Ibid., p. 143.\

The great revival in the middle colonies was quite influential in the rise of many educational institutions. Many graduates of William Tennent’s Log College went out and established log colleges, or private schools, modeled after that of their Alma Mater. One such school founded on the model of the Log College was that established by Samuel Blair at Fogg’s Manor in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Another such school was that established at Nottingham, Pennsylvania, by Samuel Finley. Of greater importance than both of these was the establishment by the New York Synod of the College of New Jersey. This college was established in 1746 with Jonathan Dickinson as its first president. As the years passed by this institution became stronger and stronger. As Sweet succinctly states, “The College of New Jersey, as Princeton was called in its early years, admirably served the purpose of its founding and poured a stream of zealous young men into the ministry of the Presbyterian Church.”\[Footnote:]  Op. cit.,  {Ibid.,} p. 145.\

The founding of the University of Pennyslvania came indirectly out of the Great Awakening. When Whitefield first came to Philadelphia he was permitted to preach in the Established Church of the city, but on his later visits this was denied him, and it became necessary for him to preach on the courthouse steps. Finally Whitefield’s friends conceived the idea of erecting a building to accommodate the great crowds who wished to hear him. 17  Benjamin Franklin, a great admirer of Whitefield, discribes the erection of the building thus: “Sufficient sums were soon received to procure the ground and erect the building, which was a hundred feet long, and seventy broad. Both house and ground were vested in trustees,” of whom Franklin was one, “expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion, who might desire to say something to the people of Philadelphia.”\[Footnote:] Ibid., p. 146.\ It was here that Whitefield preached when he visited the city, and it was here that the Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, of which Gilbert Tennent was pastor, worshiped for nine years. In 1753, largely through the efforts of Franklin, the building was chartered as the “College Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphis,” which finally (1791) became the University of Pennsylvania. 18  Today there stands in one of the quadrangles of that great university a life-size statue of George Whitefield.

The Great Awakening In New England

At the center of the Great New England Awakeni gn {ng} stands Jonathan Edwards, the minister of the church at Northampton. Edwards was called to the church at Northampton as a young man, fresh from graduate study and a tutorship at Yale, there he became the colleague and ultimately the successor of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. Northampton was a prosperous, intelligent and growing community of some two hundred families. The church was famed in New England for its long history of spiritual vigor. The church and the community at this time, however, was going through a state of religious and spiritual decline. Because of this it became Edward’s purpose to foster a warmer and deeper piety, and to redeem the community from its moral laxity. With a tremendous earnestness combined with “an almost oriental fertility of imagination, and intellectual acumen,” Edwards set out to do this job, and at the end of the winter of 1734–1735 “there was scarcely a single person in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.”\[Footnote:] Edwards “Works,” Vol. IV, p. 23.\ Beginning with a single young woman prominent  amont  {among} the “social company keepers” of the town, it overspread the community, until, when springtime came, this little village of two hundred families sheltered “three hundred souls savingly brought home to Christ.”\[Footnote:]  Op. cit.,  {Ibid.,} pp. 18, 28.\ From Northampton this movement spread like wild fire in all directions, to South Hadley, Suffield, Sunderland, Deerfield, Hatfield, West Springfield, Long-meadow, Enfield, Springfield and Hadley.\[Footnote:] Edwards, “Thoughts on Revivals,” p. 148.\

From the beginning Edwards preached sermons on justification by faith, the justice of God in the damnation of sinners, and the excellency of Christ. In these sermons the doctrine of the sovereignity of God was strongly emphasized. Through Adam’s fall man had lost the divine image and was therefore unable to make any move toward God; only God could make the move. Man has the rational power to turn to God, but he lacks the moral power. God is under no obligation to save anyone. However special grace is communicated to such as he has chosen to salvation; all others are left to die in their sins. Satisfaction must be made for the sins of those who are foreordained to salvation. Such satisfaction was made in the vicarious sacrifice on the cross by Jesus Christ. Such in brief were the elements of Edward’s theology. The influence of such doctrines upon the minds of those who had contented themselves with a barren morality can better be imagined than described.

Edwards’ method of arousing the sinner was quite different from that of most revivalists. He was never an extemporaneous preacher. He always took his entire manuscript into the pulpit, and his eye never seemed to rest upon his audience, but flashed continually from his manuscript to the opposite wall. However with these strange personal characteristics there was an extraordinary power of fascination in him. In speaking of the amazing power of Edwards Davenport says, “By dint of prodigious intellectual strength, by the wonderfully vivid imaging forth of premises which seem absurd to us but were as fundamental to his auditors as their own being, by the masterly marshalling of terrible argument, he wrought out an appeal to the fears of his hearers which stirred them to the very depths of their souls. They wept, they turned pale, they cried aloud. Some fainted, some fell into convulsions, some suffered thereafter from impaired health and some lost their reason.”\[Footnote:] Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, p. 108.\ Chapell has this to say of Edwards’ sermons: “Under the spell of those powerful sermons time and place were all swallowed up in the terrible realities of the eternal world. Once when he preached on the judgment some of his auditors really expected to see the Lord coming in the clouds as soon as the sermon closed. And when he preached at Enfield his famous sermon entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” from the graphic text, “Their feet shall slide in due time,” such was the influence upon the congregation, which had assembled in a careless mood, that some of them actually caught hold of the benches to save themselves from slipping into hell.”\[Footnote:] Chapell, The Great Awakening, p. 56.\ It was this powerful preaching which was responsible for more than three hundred professed conversions in the first year of the revival in Northampton. About May 1735 the excitement began to die down, probably because the “physical power to endure excitement was exhausted.” But in 1740 the revival reappeared, not only in the Northampton vicinity, but in almost every church throughout New England.

Whitefield arrived on the shores of New England in this heated year, 1740. He was accepted with a deal of enthusiasm. Newport and Boston gave him an immense hearing. The students at Harvard heard him gladly “and under the spell of his matchless oratory men wept, women fainted and hundreds professed conversion.”\[Footnote:] Sweet, The Story of Religion in America, p. 132.\ 19  Leaving Boston in October, Whitefield journeyed toward Northampton, and there he met Jonathon Edwards. Edwards was delighted to have him visit Northampton, and himself sat in his own pulpit weeping like a child, as that matchless preacher swayed with his burning pathos the numerous auditors.

Gilbert Tennent also came up from New Jersey and preached with great emotional fervor throughout southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Later came James Davenport of Long Island, who “more than any other man … embodied in himself and promoted in others, all the unsafe extravagances into which the revival was running,” and who declared “that most of the ministers of the town of Boston and of the country are unconverted, and are leading their people blindfold to hell.” 20

The New England revival ended with great success in numerical terms. During the years from 1740 to 1742 there were between 25,000 to 50,000 out of a total population of 300,000 added to the church.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 133.\ Testimonies of moral changes were heard throughout the colonies and there is no doubt but that the whole moral and religious life of New England was raised to a higher plane. 21

The Revival In The Southern Colonies

In the south the revival did not commence until 1743, and in Virginia the work was carried on principally by laymen in the face of more or less opposition from the Established Church. Here and there throughout the province were to be found men and women hungering for the bread of life, who had become dissatisfied with the abuses of the church.

At Hanover there were a group of such who had been moved greatly by the preaching of Whitefield at Williamsburg in 1740. During the year 1743, Mr. Samuel Morris, one of their number came into possession of a small volume of Whitefield’s sermons and a few of Luther’s books. Morris invited his neighbors to his home and read them in their hearing. Week after week they met together in one another’s houses where these books were read. Finally, the group grew so large that no ordinary house could accommodate them, and special houses were built, the first such building being called Morris’s Reading House.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 148.\ Thus the revival was propagated with spiritual quickening throughout the region. At length there were visits made by Rev. William Robinson, a graduate of the “Log College,” who devoted his labors to the neglected districts among the new settlements of Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina. Under his ministrations many were converted and the revival was given a fresh impetus.

This in brief is the rise of Presbyterianism in Virginia. From time to time brief visits were made to this region by other outstanding ministers, among whom were Revs. Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Finley, William Tennent, Samuel Blair, and finally the noted evangelist George Whitefield.\[Footnote:] F. G. Beardsley, A History of American Revivals, p. 46.\ These men were highly accepted and their coming was followed by many converts. But persecutions and seasons awaited them. They were brought into conflict with civil authority and harassed in many ways. In the face of all this embarrassment, the feeble companies of believers grew and churches multiplied, until at length Samuel Davies came to them to minister permanently. Within a short time, through his influence, the churches grew by leaps and bounds. The people were very happy to see Mr. Davies come to their colony, and with tones of joy they exclaimed: “How joyfully were we surprised before the next Sabbath, when we unexpectedly heard that Mr. Davis was come to preach so long among us; and especially, that he had qualified himself according to law, and obtained the licensure of four meetinghous{es} among us, which had never been done before! Thus, when our hopes were expiring, and our liberties more precarious than ever, we were suddenly advanced to a more secure situation. Man’s extremity is the Lord’s opportunity. For this seasonable instance of this interposition of divine providence, we desire to offer our grateful praises; and we importune the friends of Zion generously to concur in the delightful employ.”\[Footnote:] Quoted in Tracy, The Great Awakening, p. 384.\

Such was the rise of Presbyterianism in Virginia. Notwithstanding many troubles from the partisans of the Church of England, who had the government of the colony in their hands, Presbyterianism continued to gain strength, and the work went forward with uninterrupted success until the commencement of the Revolutionary struggle.

Just five years previous to Samuel Davies’ departure from Virginia two separate Baptist preachers, Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall, had come down from Connecticut with their families and had settled in Berkeley county (in what is now West Virginia). Both had been converted by Whitefield’s preaching and they brought with them the spiritual fervor of the master revivalist. Both had been congregationalists, but soon became convinced of the validity of the Baptist view. Although neither of these revivalist had had a formal education, they were men of great natural ability and good common sense. There were already several congregations of Regular Baptists in Virginia, but they were by no means sympathetic with the revivalistic tendencies of Stearns and Marshall. However the coming of these two separate Baptists into the Southern Colonies marks the beginning of a new phase in the development of the Great Awakening. 22

Sandy Creek became the living center of the Separate Baptist as Hanover had become the center of Presbytarianism in the Southern Colonies. From a church of sixteen members formed by Stearns and Marshell families at Sandy Creek, the congregation grew within a relative short time to more than six hundred.\[Footnote:] Sweet, Religion In Colonial America, p. 303.\ 23  One of the things that made the Separate Baptist so popular with the masses was their novel type of preaching, appealing primarily to the emotions. The Presbyterians with their educated ministry had failed to reach the great mass of people, but the Separate Baptist with their uneducated and unsalaried ministry were well suited to the needs of the lower social and economic classes. Extreme emotional revivalism has always been more successful among people of little education than among people of higher educational attainments. The presence of even a few people of high educational attainments will tend to restrain emotionalism to a great degree. 24  This is why Presbyterians were always less overtly emotional than Baptists.\[Footnote:] This is the thesis of F. M. Davenport. See his, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, Chapter I\ 25

From the beginning the revivalistic Baptists were a despised people. “The strange mannerisms of their preachers, their odd whoops and whinning tones together with their emotional extravagances aroused digust and contempt.”\[Footnote:] Sweet, Religion In Colonial America, p. 304.\ One man is reported to have said that, “he had rather go to hell than be obliged to hear a Baptist in order to go to heaven.” But all of this did not stop the growth of the Baptist. After 1770 the growth of Separate Baptist was astounding. In 1771 at the first Baptist Association in Virginia there were fourteen churches and 1335 members. Two years later the number of churches had increased and the total membership had increased to more than four thousand.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 304.\

Another phase of southern revivalism was the Methodist phase. This phase gained impetue mainly through Devereux Jarratt and lay preachers sent to America by Wesley. Because of Jarratt’s cooperation with the Methodist lay preachers Methodism grew more rapidly in Virginia than anywhere else in America. In 1775 Jarratt accompanied Thomas Rankin, Wesley’s assistant in America, on a preaching tour of the southern colonies and into North Carolina. They preached to great crowds of people under trees and in “preaching houses. So great was the demand for preaching that Rankin speaks of preaching almost to the point of exhaustion. Jesse Lee, who was an eye witness to many of the revival scenes states: “In almost every assembly might be seen signal instances of divine power; more especially in the meetings of the classes … Many who had long neglected the means of grece now flocked to hear … This outpouring of the spirit extended itself more or less, through most of the circuits, which takes in a circumference of between four and five hundred miles.”\[Footnote:] Jesse Lee, A Short History of the Methodists, pp. 55, 56.\

The results of the revival are reflected in the statistics of the Virginia and North Carolina circuits. In 1774 there were only two circuits in the region, with a combined membership of 291; in 1776 the number of circuits had increased tremendously, with one circuit alone reporting 1,611 members. The following year there were six circuits with a combined membership of 4,379. In this same year the number of Methodists throughout all America was 6,968, which meant that two-thirds of all the Methodists in the colonies were found in Devereux Jarratt’s parish.\[Footnote:] Sweet, The Story of Religion in America, p. 154.\ 26  Such was the rise of Methodism in Virginia.

The Results of The Great Awakening

Having given a brief outling of the facts of the Great Awakening it now remains for me to sum up the results of this great movement. The chief value of a revival of religion is seen in its permanent results, that which lives on long after the first excitement has passed away. Bearing this in mind, let us see what were the results of the Great Awakening.

First it must be admitted that Church membership was greatly increased with the coming of the Great Awakening. Moreover, the practical influence of Christianity upon colonial society was greatly strengthened. To give an exact figure of the number of individuals converted during the revival would be quite impossible. However various estimates have been made. Careful historians have estimated that from 25,000 to 50,000 were added to the churches of New England in consequence of the Awakening.\[Footnote:] Tracy, op. cit., p. 388\ Now the population of the New England colonies in 1750 was 340,000. Assuming the smaller number of additions, which is a conservative estimate, to be correct, more than seven per cent of the entire population of these colonies would have been gathered into the churches as a direct result of the revival. A national awakening of similar power at the present time would result in the ingathering of more than nine million souls.

The increase in the Presbyterian and Baptist churches was proportionately larger. From 1740 to 1760 the number of Presbyterian ministers in American Colonies had increased from 45 to over 100. During this same period the Baptist churches in New England alone increased from 21 to 79.\[Footnote:] Beardsley, op. cit., p. 64.\ These and many other figures could be cited to show the numerical results of the Great Awakening. This movement, like a tidal wave swept over the colonies, and gathered multitudes into the church of God.

A second result of the Great Awakening was a Quickening along Missionary and Educational Lines. At this time there came a great concern for Indians and Negroes and underprivileged people in general. Out of this movement was forged the framework of the first anti-slavery impulse in America.\[Footnote:] Sweet, Religion in Colonial America, p. 317.\

The Great Awakening was conducted chiefly by men of education, “and it has left its decided record and invaluable monuments in the way of institutions of learning and religious literature.” We have shown above how the College of New Jersey and the Theological Seminary at Princeton grew out of Tennent’s Log College at Neshaming. Harvard and Yale received a great impulse from the revival, though they at first set themselves against it. Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, was a direct outgrowth of the Great Awakening. Brown University, at Providence, the parent of Baptist colleges, was founded during the Great Awakening. Rev. Chapell was quite right when he stated, “many of the colleges and seminaries of the present day largely owe their existence, or their influence as healthful fountains of truth, directly to the Great Awakening.”\[Footnote:] Chapell, op. cit., p. 135.\

A third Result of the Great Awakening was its influence upon Religious and Political Liberty. In New England, excepting the colony of Rhode Island, Congregationalism was established by law. In New York, Virginia and the South, Episcopalianism was the established religion. With the coming of the Awakening and the expansion of newer denominations the way was paved for the tolerance of conflicting opinions and a broader conception of liberty of conscience.

Only indirectly did the Great Awakening affect the political liberties of the colonies. But this indirect influence cannot be overlooked. As Dr. Beardsley has laconically stated: “The religious convictions of the American people, which so largely were called into being through the revival, served as a balance to the political revolution which resulted in independence and prevented it from being hurled into the vortex of anarchy and ruin, in which the French Revolution was swallowed up.”\[Footnote:] Beardsley, op. cit., p. 69.\

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. G. Beardsley, A History of American Revivals, (New York, 1904).

Warren A Candler, Great Revivals and the Great Republic, (Nashville, 1904).

F. L. Chapell, The Great Awakening of 1740, American Baptist Publication Society, 1903.

F. M. Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revival (New York, 1906).

Serens E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, (New York, 1830).

Jesse Lee, A Short History of the Methodists, in the United States of America, etc. (Baltimore, 1810).

Charles H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago, 1920).

W. W. Sweet, Religion In Colonial America (New York, 1949).

W. W. Sweet, The Story of Religion in America (New York, 1930).

Joseph Tracy, A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston, 1842).

George Whitefield, Journals

1.  Raymond Joseph Bean (1917–1982) received a B.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1941, a B.D. from Andover-Newton Theological School in 1944, and a Th.D. from Boston in 1949. He replaced Reuben Elmore Ernest Harkness as Crozer’s professor of church history during King’s last year at the seminary. Bean remained at Crozer until 1959, when he became minister of the First Baptist Church in East Orange, New Jersey. In 1966, he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Manchester, New Hampshire.

2.  Half-Way Covenant: adopted at the Synod of 1662 in Massachusetts, the covenant stated that children whose parents had been baptised into the Congregational church but not yet had the conversional experience necessary to become full members—that is, “visible saints”—could be baptised by virtue of their parents’ “half-way” status. The covenant engendered great theological debate. While adoption of the covenant undermined the “purity” of the community of visible saints, it also increased the size of congregations. The covenant also allowed church fathers to continue to exert ecclesiastical control over the majority of the Puritan community.

3.  William Warren Sweet,  The Story of Religion in America  (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), p. 65: “Thus there came to be more and more reliance upon the use of ‘means’ and less and less upon the miraculous power of God, which led to a cold and unemotional religion.”

4.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America  (New York: Scribner, 1942), pp. 272–273: “A third factor which helped set the stage for colonial revivalism was the growing awareness on the part of the religious leaders of the decline of religion throughout the colonies. The sermons of the New England ministers during the latter years of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth centuries are full of gloomy forebodings as to the future because of the low state of religion and public morals. ‘O what a sad metamorphosis hath of later years passed upon us in these churches and plantations! Alas! How is New England in danger to be buried in its own ruins,’ is the plaint of William Stoughton before the Massachusetts Legislature in 1668. Ten years later Increase Mather observed that ‘Clear, sound conversions are not frequent. Many of the rising generation are profane Drunkards, Swearers, Licentious and scoffers at the power of Godliness.’”

5.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 273: “A random survey of the subjects of the election sermons preached at this period show that almost all are of a piece in this respect—they were uniformly denunciatory of the religious conditions of their times. In 1700 Samuel Willard preached on ‘The Perils of the Times Displayed’; in 1711 Stephen Buckingham’s theme was ‘The Unreasonableness and Danger of a People’s Renouncing Their Subjection to God’; William Russell’s subject in 1730 was ‘The Decay of Love to God in Churches, Offensive and Dangerous.’”

6.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 273: “Times were ripe for some new emphasis in religion as well as a new type of religious leadership to meet the peculiar situation which the American colonies represented.”

7.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 276: “Gradually a group of Log College men came to be settled over churches in central New Jersey, and under their preaching developed a militant revivalism which swept the whole region.”

8.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 276: “Throughout the seventeen-thirties the Scotch-Irish revival mounted higher and higher, and new congregations were formed as converts increased and new communities were reached. In 1738 the New Brunswick Presbytery was erected, made up of five evangelical ministers, three of whom were Log College men. The principal reason why the revivalists desired to be formed into a separate presbytery was that they might license and ordain men of their own kind. Meanwhile opposition to the revival began to manifest itself among the older ministers who had received their training in the Scottish universities. These men now sought to control the situation by the enactment of laws in the Synod requiring all candidates for ordination to present diplomas either from New England or European colleges. This enactment was obviously aimed at the revivalists. But at the very time this was happening, John Rowland, a recent Log College graduate, was licensed by the New Brunswick Presbytery, a challenge aimed at the conservatives.”

9.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 276: “Such was the situation in central New Jersey when George Whitefield appeared on the American religious scene.”

10.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 277: “Landing at Lewes, Delaware, in August 1739, Whitefield immediately began his first American evangelistic tour.”

11.  Charles Hartshorn Maxson,  The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920), p. 45: “On his voyage to America in 1739 he even lent his cabin to a Quaker preacher, who held meetings there.”

12.  Maxson,  Great Awakening , p. 45: “… with Baptists, though he himself held the Episcopal theory of ordination and of the real presence of Christ in the elements of the Lord’s Supper. In England he had collected money for the Lutherans of Georgia and enjoyed fellowship with the Moravians, but his Calvinism was a barrier to the fullest intercourse with them.”

13.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 141: “On one occasion, preaching from the balcony of the courthouse in Philadelphia, Whitefield cried out: …”

14.  Maxson,  Great Awakening , pp. 41–42: “The  Virginia Gazette  tells of the great concourse of people that filled the church of St. Mary Magdalene, London, long before the time of service, and of several hundred persons in the street who in vain endeavored to force themselves into the church and past the constables stationed at the door to preserve the peace. Such was the mad desire to see and hear the eloquent youth who had volunteered to go to Georgia as a missionary.”

15.  Maxson,  Great Awakening , p. 52: “After these triumphs in three provinces Whitefield returned to Philadelphia. The enthusiasm of the people mounted higher and higher. It was estimated that his congregation at Germantown numbered five thousand people, and that his farewell sermon at Philadelphia had ten thousand hearers.”

16.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 143: “In 1758 at the time of the reunion the Old Side had decreased and numbered but twenty-two, while the New Side had grown by leaps and bounds and numbered seventy-two.”

17.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 145: “The founding of the University of Pennsylvania came indirectly out of the Great Awakening.… At first [Whitefield] was permitted to preach in the Established Church in that city, but on his later visits this was denied him, and it became necessary for him to preach in the fields or from the courthouse steps. Finally Whitefield’s Philadelphia friends conceived the idea of erecting a building to accommodate the great crowds who wished to hear him.”

18.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 146: “In 1751, largely through the efforts of Franklin, the building was used for an academy, and two years later it was chartered as the ‘College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia,’ which finally (1791) grew into the University of Pennsylvania.”

19.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 132: “Everywhere he was received with enthusiasm. Newport and Boston gave him an immense hearing. The students at Harvard heard him and under the spell of his matchless oratory men wept, women fainted and hundreds professed conversion.”

20.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 133: “Such a minister was James Davenport of Long Island, who ‘more than any other man … embodied in himself and promoted in others, all the unsafe extravagances into which the revival was running,’ and who declared ‘that most of the ministers of the town of Boston and of the country are unconverted, and are leading their people blindfold to hell” (ellipses in original).

21.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 133: “During the years from 1740 to 1742 there was a wonderful ingathering of members into the New England churches. Out of a population of 300,000, from 25,000 to 50,000 were added.… Similar testimonies of moral changes in other communities are numerous and there is no doubt but that the whole moral and religious life of New England was raised to a higher plane.”

22.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , pp. 301–302: “Just five years previous to Samuel Davies’ departure from Virginia two Separate Baptist preachers from Connecticut, Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall, settled with their families on Opeguoin Creek in Berkeley county, in what is now West Virginia. Both had been converted under Whitefield’s preaching and they brought with them the fervor and spirit of that master revivalist. Both originally had been Congregationalists, but having become convinced of the futility of infant baptism they withdrew and joined the Baptists. Neither had had the advantage of a formal education, but they were men of superior natural ability and sound judgment. There were already several congregations of  Regular  Baptists in Virginia, but Stearns and Marshall soon found that they were out of sympathy with their revivalistic preaching.… The coming of these representatives of the revivalistic Baptists into the Southern Colonies marks the beginning of a new phase in the development of the Great Awakening.”

23.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 303: “As Hanover county was the center of an expanding Presbyterianism in the Southern Colonies, so Sandy Creek became the living center of the Separate Baptists. From a church of sixteen members formed by the Stearns and Marshall families at Sandy Creek, the congregation grew within a relatively short time to more than six hundred.”

24.  Sweet,  Religion in Colonial America , p. 302: “The Presbyterians with their educated ministry and elaborate creedal demands had failed to reach the great mass of the plain people. The  Separate  Baptists, however, with their uneducated and unsalaried ministry, their novel type of preaching, appealing primarily to the emotions, were well suited to the needs and mental capacities of the lower social and economic classes. Extreme emotional revivalism always has succeeded best among people of little education. But the presence of even a few people of higher educational attainments will tend to restrain the emotionalism of a large concourse of the less educated.”

25.  Sweet cited the source of this argument to “F. M. Davenport,  Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, A Study in Mental and Social Evolution , New York: 1905, Chapter I.”

26.  Sweet,  Story of Religion , p. 154: “The results of the revival are reflected in the statistics of the Virginia and North Carolina circuits. In 1774 there were but two circuits in the region, with a combined membership of 291; the following year there were 3 circuits with a membership of 935; in 1776 the number of circuits had increased, the Brunswich circuit alone reporting 1,611 members. The following year there were 6 circuits with a combined membership of 4,379. In this year the number of Methodists in America totaled 6,968, which meant two-thirds of all the Methodists in the colonies were found in the vicinity of Devereux Jarratt’s parish, a fact which would seem to indicate that this region was the cradle of American Methodism.”

Source: MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival and Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.

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The ‘Me’ Decade

The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self..

Editor’s note:  This story first appeared in the August 23, 1976, issue of  New York . It was also featured in  Reread , New York’s subscriber-only archives newsletter. Click  here  to read the newsletter this appeared in.

I. Me and My Hemorrhoids

The trainer said, “Take your finger off the repress button.” Everybody was supposed to let go, let all the vile stuff come up and gush out. They even provided vomit bags, like the ones on a 747, in case you literally let it gush out! Then the trainer told everybody to think of “the one thing you would most like to eliminate from your life.” And so what does our girl blurt over the microphone?

“Hemorrhoids!”

That was how she ended up in her present state … stretched out on the wall-to-wall carpet of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with her eyes closed and her face pressed into the stubble of the carpet, which is a thick commercial weave and feels like clothes-brush bristles against her face and smells a bit high from cleaning solvent. That was how she ended up lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids.

Eyes shut! deep in her own space! her hemorrhoids! the grisly peanut—

Many others are stretched out on the carpet all around her; some 249 other souls, in fact. They’re all strewn across the floor of the banquet hall with their eyes closed, just as she is. But Christ, the others are concentrating on things that sound serious and deep when you talk about them. And how they had talked about them! They had all marched right up to the microphone and “shared,” as the trainer called it. What did they want to eliminate from their lives? Why, they took their fingers right off the old repress button and told the whole room. My husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destructiveness, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and then it had been her turn, and she had said, “Hemorrhoids.”

You can imagine what that sounded like. That broke the place up. The trainer looked like a cocky little bastard up there on the podium with his deep tan, white tennis shirt, and peach-colored sweater, a dynamite color combination, all very casual and spontaneous—after about two hours of trying on different outfits in front of a mirror, that kind of casual and spontaneous, if her guess was right. And yet she found him attractive. Commanding was the word. He probably wondered if she were playing the wiseacre, with her “hemorrhoids,” but he rolled with it. Maybe she was being playful. Just looking at him made her feel mischievous. In any event, hemorrhoids was what had bubbled up into her brain.

Then the trainer had told them to stack their folding chairs in the back of the banquet hall and lie down on the floor and close their eyes and get deep into their own spaces and concentrate on that one item they wanted to get rid of the most—and really feel it and let the feeling gush out.

So now she’s lying here concentrating on her hemorrhoids. The strange thing is … it’s no joke after all! She begins to feel her hemorrhoids in all their morbid presence. She can actually feel them. The sieges always began with her having the sensation that a peanut was caught in her anal sphincter. That meant a section of swollen varicose vein had pushed its way out of her intestines and was actually coming out of her bottom. It was as hard as a peanut and felt bigger and grislier than a peanut. Well—for God’s sake!—in her daily life, even at work, especially at work, and she works for a movie distributor, her whole picture of herself was of her … seductive physical presence. She was not the most successful businesswoman in Los Angeles, but she was certainly successful enough, and quite in addition to that, she was … the main sexual presence in the office. When she walked into the office each morning, everyone, women as well as men, checked her out. She knew that. She could feel her sexual presence go through the place like an invisible chemical, like a hormone, a scent, a universal solvent.

The most beautiful moments came when she would be in her office or in a conference room or at Mr. Chow’s taking a meeting—nobody “had” meetings anymore, they “took” them—with two or three men, men she had never met before or barely knew. The overt subject was, inevitably, eternally, “the deal.” She always said there should be only one credit line up on the screen for any movie: “Deal by… .” But the meeting would also have a subplot. The overt plot would be “The Deal.” The subplot would be “The Men Get Turned On by Me.” Pretty soon, even though the conversation had not strayed overtly from “The Deal,” the men would be swaying in unison like dune grass at the beach. And she was the wind, of course. And then one of the men would say something and smile and at the same time reach over and touch her … on top of the hand or on the side of the arm … as if it meant nothing … as if it were just a gesture for emphasis … but in fact a man is usually deathly afraid of reaching out and touching a woman he doesn’t know … and she knew it meant she had hypnotized him sexually… .

Well—for God’s sake!—at just that sublime moment, likely as not, the goddam peanut would be popping out of her tail! As she smiled sublimely at her conquest, she also had to sit in her chair lopsided, with one cheek of her buttocks higher than the other, as if she were about to crepitate, because it hurt to sit squarely on the peanut. If for any reason she had to stand up at that point and walk, she would have to walk as if her hip joints were rusted out, as if she were 65 years old, because a normal stride pressed the peanut, and the pain would start up, and the bleeding, too, very likely. Or if she couldn’t get up and had to sit there for a while and keep her smile and her hot hormonal squinted eyes pinned on the men before her, the peanut would start itching or burning, and she would start double-tracking, as if her mind were a tape deck with two channels going at once. In one she’s the sexual princess, the Circe, taking a meeting and clouding men’s minds … and in the other she’s a poor bitch who wants nothing more in this world than to go down the corridor to the ladies’ room and get some Kleenex and some Vaseline and push the peanut back up into her intestines with her finger.

And even if she’s able to get away and do that, she will spend the rest of that day and the next, and the next, with a deep worry in the back of her brain, the sort of worry that always stays on the edge of your consciousness, no matter how hard you think of something else. She will be wondering at all times what the next bowel movement will be like, how solid and compact the bolus will be, trying to think back and remember if she’s had any milk, cream, chocolate, or any other binding substance in the last 24 hours, or any nuts or fibrous vegetables like broccoli. Is she really in for it this time—

The Sexual Princess! On the outside she has on her fireproof grin and her Fiorio scarf as if to say she lives in a world of Sevilles and 450SL’s and dinner last night at Dominick’s, a movie-business restaurant on Beverly Boulevard that’s so exclusive, Dominick keeps his neon sign (DOMINICK’S) turned off to make the wimps think it’s closed, but she (Hi, Dominick!) can get a table—but inside her it’s all the battle between the bolus and the peanut—

—and is it too late to leave the office and go get some mineral oil and let some of that vile glop roll down her gullet or get a refill on the softener tablets or eat some prunes or drink some coffee or do something else to avoid one of those horrible hard-clay boluses that will come grinding out of her, crushing the peanut and starting not only the bleeding but … the pain! … a horrible humiliating pain that feels like she’s getting a paper cut in her anus, like the pain you feel when the edge of a piece of bond paper slices your finger, plus a horrible hellish purple bloody varicose pressure, but lasting not for an instant, like a paper cut, but for an eternity, prolonged until the tears are rolling down her face as she sits in the cubicle, and she wants to cry out, to scream until it’s over, to make the screams of fear, fury, and humiliation obliterate the pain. But someone would hear! No doubt they’d come bursting right into the ladies’ room to save her! and feed their morbid curiosities! And what could she possibly say? And so she had simply held that feeling in all these years, with her eyes on fire and her entire pelvic saddle a great purple tub of pain. She had repressed the whole squalid horror of it— the searing peanut—

—until now. The trainer had said, “Take your finger off the repress button!” Let it gush up and pour out!

And now, as she lies here on the floor of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel with 249 other souls, she knows exactly what he meant. She can feel it all, all of the pain, and on top of the pain all the humiliation, and for the first time in her life she has permission from the Management, from herself, and from everyone around her to let the feeling gush forth. So she starts moaning.

“Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh!”

And when she starts moaning, the most incredible and exhilarating thing begins to happen. A wave of moans spreads through the people lying around her, as if her energy were radiating out like a radar pulse.

So she lets her moan rise into a keening sound.

“Oooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

And when she begins to keen, the souls near her begin keening, even while the moans are still spreading to the prostrate folks farther from her, on the edges of the room.

“Eeeeeeeeeooooooohhhhhhhhheeeeeooooooooh!”

So she lets her keening sound rise up into a real scream.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!”

And this rolls out in a wave, too, first through those near her, and then toward the far edges.

“Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeohhhhhhhhhheeeeeeaiaiai!”

And so she turns it all the way up, into a scream such as she has never allowed herself in her entire life.

“AiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

And her full scream spreads from soul to soul, over top of the keens and fading moans . . .

“AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeooooohhheeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!”

…until at last the entire room is consumed in her scream, as if there are no longer 250 separate souls but one noosphere of souls united in some incorporeal way by her scream. . .

“AAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

Which is not simply her scream any longer … but the world’s! Each soul is concentrated on its own burning item … my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other until there is but one piercing moment of release and liberation at last—a whole world of anguish set free by . . .

My hemorrhoids.

“Me and My Hemorrhoids Star at the Ambassador” … during a three-day Erhard Seminars Training (est) course in the hotel banquet hall. The truly odd part, however, is yet to come. In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970s, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade.

II. The Holy Roll

In 1972 a farsighted caricaturist did a drawing of Teddy Kennedy captioned “President Kennedy campaigning for re-election in 1980 … courting the so-called Awakened vote.”

The picture shows Kennedy ostentatiously wearing not only a crucifix but also (if one looks just above the cross) a pendant of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus. The crucifix is the symbol of Christianity in general, but the Bleeding Heart is the symbol of some of Christianity’s most ecstatic, nonrational, holy-rolling cults. I should point out that the artist’s prediction lacked certain refinements. For one thing, Kennedy may be campaigning to be president in 1980, but he is not terribly likely to be the incumbent. For another, the odd spectacle of politicians using ecstatic, nonrational, holy-rolling religion in presidential campaigning was to appear first not in 1980 but in 1976.

The two most popular new figures in the 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, are men who rose up from state politics … absolutely aglow with mystical religious streaks. Carter turned out to be an evangelical Baptist who had recently been “born again” and “saved,” who had “accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior”—i.e., he was of the Missionary lectern-pounding amen ten-finger C-major-chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha-keyboard loblolly piny-woods Baptist faith in which the members of the congregation stand up and “give witness” and “share it. Brother” and “share it, Sister” and “Praise God!” during the service. Jerry Brown turned out to be the Zen Jesuit, a former Jesuit seminarian who went about like a hair-shirt Catholic monk, but one who happened to believe also in the Gautama Buddha, and who got off koans in an offhand but confident manner, even on political issues, as to how it is not the right answer that matters but the right question, and so forth.

Newspaper columnists and newsmagazine writers continually referred to the two men’s “enigmatic appeal.” Which is to say, they couldn’t explain it. Nevertheless, they tried. They theorized that the war in Vietnam, Watergate, the FBI and CIA scandals, had left the electorate shell-shocked and disillusioned and that in their despair the citizens were groping no longer for specific remedies but for sheer faith, something, anything (even holy rolling), to believe in. This was in keeping with the current fashion of interpreting all new political phenomena in terms of recent disasters, frustration, protest, the decline of civilization … the Grim Slide. But when the New York Times and CBS employed a polling organization to try to find out just what great gusher of “frustration” and “protest” Carter had hit, the results were baffling. A Harvard political scientist, William Schneider, concluded for the L.A. Times that “the Carter protest” was a new kind of protest, “a protest of good feelings.” That was a new kind, sure enough—a protest that wasn’t a protest.

In fact, both Carter and Brown had stumbled upon a fabulous terrain for which there are no words in current political language. A couple of politicians had finally wandered into the Me Decade.

III. Him? — The New Man?

The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that is so big and so obvious (like the Big Dipper), no one ever comments on it anymore. Namely: the 30-year boom. Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940s touched off a boom that has continued for more than 30 years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in Compton, California, today it is possible for a family at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as “on welfare,” to draw an income of $8,000 a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much money—$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommon—that the word proletarian can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says lower middle class. One can’t even call workingmen blue collar any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath’s or Johnny Bench’s or Walt Frazier’s. They all have on $35 Superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940s Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes and Seashell designs all over them.

Well, my God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth century—such as Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Marx— lived for the day of the liberated workingman. They foresaw a day when industrialism (Saint-Simon coined the word) would give the common man the things he needed in order to realize his potential as a human being: surplus (discretionary) income, political freedom, free time (leisure), and freedom from grinding drudgery. Some of them, notably Owen and Fourier, thought all this might come to pass first in the United States. So they set up communes here: Owen’s New Harmony commune in Indiana and 34 Fourier-style “phalanx” settlements—socialist communes, because the new freedom was supposed to be possible only under socialism. The old boys never dreamed that the new freedom would come to pass instead as the result of a Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom such as began in the United States in the 1940s. Nor would they have liked it if they had seen it. For one thing, the homo novus , the new man, the liberated man, the first common man in the history of the world with the much-dreamed-of combination of money, free time, and personal freedom—this American workingman didn’t look right. The Joe Namath-Johnny Bench—Walt Frazier-Superstar Qiana Wallpaper sport shirt, for a start.

He didn’t look right, and he wouldn’t … do right! I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for the common man in the early 1950s. (They actually used the term “common man.”) They had brought the utopian socialist dream forward into the twentieth century. They had things figured out for the workingman down to truly minute details such as lamp switches. The new liberated workingman would live as the Cultivated Ascetic. He would be modeled on the B.A.-degree Greenwich Village bohemian of the late 1940s—dark wool Hudson Bay shirts, tweed jackets, flannel trousers, briarwood pipes, good books, sandals and simplicity—except that he would live in a Worker Housing project. All Yale and Harvard architects worshiped Bauhaus principles and had the Bauhaus vision of Worker Housing. The Bauhaus movement absolutely hypnotized American architects, once its leaders, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Miës van der Rohe, came to the United States from Germany in the 1930s. Worker Housing in America would have pure beige rooms, stripped, freed, purged of all moldings, cornices, and overhangs—which Gropius regarded as symbolic “crowns” and therefore loathsome. Worker Housing would be liberated from all wallpaper, “drapes,” Wilton rugs with flowers on them, lamps with fringed shades and bases that looked like vases or Greek columns. It would be cleansed of all doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, and radiator covers. Radiator coils would be left bare as honest, abstract sculptural objects.

But somehow the workers, incurable slobs that they were, avoided Worker Housing, better known as “the projects,” as if it had a smell. They were heading out instead to the suburbs—the suburbs! —to places like Islip, Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles—and buying houses with clapboard siding and a high-pitched roof and shingles and gaslight-style front-porch lamps and mailboxes set up on top of lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity and all sorts of other unbelievably cute or antiquey touches, and they loaded these houses up with “drapes” such as baffled all description and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in, and they put barbecue pits and fish ponds with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back, and they parked 25-foot-long cars out front and Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway.

By the 1960s the common man was also getting quite interested in this business of “realizing his potential as a human being.” But once again he crossed everybody up! Once more he took his money and ran—determined to do-it-himself!

IV. Lemon Sessions

In 1971 I made a lecture tour of Italy, talking (at the request of my Italian hosts) about “contemporary American life.” Everywhere I went, from Turin to Palermo, Italian students were interested in just one question: Was it really true that young people in America, no older than themselves, actually left home, and lived communally according to their own rules and created their own dress styles and vocabulary and had free sex and took dope? They were talking, of course, about the hippie or psychedelic movement that had begun flowering about 1965. What fascinated them the most, however, was the first item on the list: that the hippies actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules.

To Italian students this seemed positively amazing. Several of the students I met lived wild enough lives during daylight hours. They were in radical organizations and had fought pitched battles with police, on the barricades, as it were. But by 8:30 P.M. they were back home, obediently washing their hands before dinner with Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis&theMaidenAunt. Their counterparts in America, the New Left students of the late sixties, lived in communes that were much like the hippies’, except that the costumery tended to be semimilitary: the noncom officers’ shirts, combat boots, commando berets—worn in combination with blue jeans or a turtleneck jersey, however, to show that one was not a uniform freak.

That people so young could go off on their own, without taking jobs, and live a life completely of their own design—to Europeans it was astounding. That ordinary factory workers could go off to the suburbs and buy homes and create their own dream houses—this, too, was astounding. And yet the new life of old people in America in the 1960s was still more astounding. Throughout European history and in the United States up to the Second World War, old age was a time when you had to cling to your children or other kinfolk, and to their sufferance and mercy, if any. The Old Folks at Home happily mingling in the old manse with the generations that followed? The little ones learning at grandpa’s and grandma’s bony knees? These are largely the myths of nostalgia. The beloved old folks were often exiled to the attic or the outbuildings, and the servants brought them their meals. They were not considered decorative in the dining room or the parlor.

In the 1960s, old people in America began doing something that was more extraordinary than it ever seemed at the time. They cut through the whole dreary humiliation of old age by heading off to “retirement villages” and “leisure developments”—which quickly became Old Folks communes. Some of the old parties managed to take this to a somewhat psychedelic extreme, joining trailer caravans … and rolling … creating some of the most amazing sights of the modern American landscape … such as 30, 40, 50 Airstream trailers, the ones that are silver and have rounded corners and ends and look like silver bullets … 30, 40, 50 of these silver bullets in a line, in a caravan, hauling down the highway in the late afternoon with the sun at a low angle and exploding off the silver surfaces of the Airstreams until the whole convoy looks like some gigantic and improbable string of jewelry, each jewel ablaze with a highlight, rolling over the face of the earth—the million-volt billion-horsepower bijoux of America! The Trailer Sailors!

Ignored or else held in contempt by working people, Bauhaus design eventually triumphed as a symbol of wealth and privilege, attuned chiefly to the tastes of businessmen’s wives. For example, Miës’s most famous piece of furniture design, the Barcelona chair, now sells for $1.680 and is available only through one’s decorator. The high price is due in no small part to the chair’s Worker Housing Honest Materials: stainless steel and leather. No chromed iron is allowed, and customers are refused if they want to have the chair upholstered in material of their own choice. Only leather is allowed, and only six shades of that: Seagram’s Building Lobby Palomino, Monsanto Company Lobby Antelope, Architectural Digest Pecan, Transamerica Building Ebony, Bank of America Building Walnut, and Embarcadero Center Mink.

It was remarkable enough that ordinary folks now had enough money to take it and run off and alter the circumstances of their lives and create new roles for themselves, such as Trailer Sailor or Gerontoid Cowboy. But, simultaneously, still others decided to go … all the way. They plunged straight toward what has become the alchemical dream of the Me Decade.

The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.

Much of the satisfaction well-born people got from what is known historically as the “chivalric tradition” was precisely that: dwelling upon Me and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality. At Versailles, Louis XIV founded a school for the daughters of impoverished noblemen, called L’Ecole Saint-Cyr. At the time most schools for girls were in convents. Louis had quite something else in mind, a secular school that would develop womenfolk suitable for the superior race guerrière that he believed himself to be creating in France. Saint-Cyr was the forerunner of what was known up until a few years ago as the finishing school . And what was the finishing school? Why, a school in which the personality was to be shaped and buffed like a piece of high-class psychological cabinetry. For centuries most of upper-class college education in France and England has been fashioned in the same manner: with an eye toward sculpting the personality as carefully as the intellectual faculties.

At Yale the students on the outside wondered for 80 years what went on inside the fabled secret senior societies, such as Skull and Bones. On Thursday nights one would see the secret-society members walking silently and single file, in black flannel suits, white shirts, and black knit ties with gold pins on them, toward their great Greek Revival temples on the campus, buildings whose mystery was doubled by the fact that they had no windows. What in the name of God or Mammon went on in those 30-odd Thursday nights during the senior years of these happy few? What went on was … lemon sessions! —a regularly scheduled series of lemon sessions, just like the ones that occurred informally in girls’ finishing schools.

In the girls’ schools these lemon sessions tended to take place at random on nights when a dozen or so girls might end up in someone’s dormitory room. One girl would become “it,” and the others would light into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect … her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality. Likewise, in the secret societies: They held lemon sessions for boys. Is masturbation your problem? Out with the truth, you ridiculous weenie! And Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions. Yes! I do it! I whack whack whack it! I’m afraid of women! I’m afraid of you! And I get my shirts at Rosenberg’s instead of Press! (Oh, you dreary turkey, you wet smack, you little shit!) … But out of the fire and the heap of ashes would come a better man, a brother, of good blood and good bone, for the American race guerrière. And what was more … they loved it. No matter how dreary the soap opera, the star was Me.

By the mid-1960s this service, this luxury, had become available for one and all, i.e., the middle classes. Lemon Session Central was the Esalen Institute, a lodge perched on a cliff over-looking the Pacific in Big Sur, California, Esalen’s specialty was lube jobs for the personality. Businessmen, businesswomen, housewives—anyone who could afford it, and by now many could—paid $220 a week to come to Esalen to learn about themselves and loosen themselves up and wiggle their fannies a bit, in keeping with methods developed by William C. Schutz and Frederick Perls. Fritz Perls, as he was known, was a remarkable figure, a psychologist who had a gray beard and went about in a blue terry-cloth jump suit and looked like a great blue grizzled father bear. His lemon sessions sprang not out of the manly virtues and cold showers Protestant-prep-school tradition of Yale but out of psychoanalysis. His sessions were a variety of the “marathon encounter.” He put the various candidates for personality change in groups, and they met in close quarters day after day. They were encouraged to bare their own souls and to strip away one another’s defensive facades. Everyone was to face his own emotions squarely for the first time.

Encounter sessions, particularly of the Schutz variety, were often wild events. Such aggression! such sobs! tears! moans, hysteria, vile recriminations, shocking revelations, such explosions of hostility between husbands and wives, such mud balls of profanity from previously mousy mommies and workadaddies, such red-mad attacks! Only physical assault was prohibited. The encounter session became a standard approach in many other movements, such as Scientology, Arica, the Mel Lyman movement, Synanon, Daytop Village, and Primal Scream. Synanon had started out as a drug rehabilitation program, but by the late 1960s the organization was recruiting “lay members,” a lay member being someone who had never been addicted to heroin … but was ready for the lemon-session life.

Outsiders, hearing of these sessions, wondered what on earth their appeal was. Yet the appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: “Let’s talk about Me. ” No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me. Not only that, you also put Me up on stage before a live audience. The popular “est” movement has managed to do that with great refinement. Just imagine … Me and My Hemorrhoids … moving an entire hall to the most profound outpouring of emotion! Just imagine … my life becoming a drama with universal significance … analyzed, like Hamlet’s, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind… .

The encounter session—although it was not called that—was also a staple practice in psychedelic communes and, for that matter, in New Left communes. In fact, the analysis of the self, and of one another, was unceasing. But in these groups and at Esalen and in movements such as Arica there were two common assumptions that distinguished them from the aristocratic lemon sessions and personality finishings of yore. The first was: I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

And with that … the Me movements were about to turn righteous.

V. Young Faith, Aging Groupies

By the early 1970s so many of the Me movements had reached this Gnostic religious stage, they now amounted to a new religious wave. Synanon, Arica, and the Scientology movement had become religions. The much-publicized psychedelic or hipple communes of the 1960s, although no longer big items in the press, were spreading widely and becoming more and more frankly religious. The huge Steve Gaskin commune in the Tennessee scrublands was a prime example. A New York Times survey concluded that there were at least two thousand communes in the United States by 1970, barely five years after the idea first caught on in California. Both the Esalen-style and Primal Therapy or Primal Scream encounter movements were becoming progressively less psychoanalytical and more mystical in their approach. The Oriental “meditation” religions—which had existed in the United States mainly in the form of rather intellectual and bohemian Zen and yoga circles—experienced a spectacular boom. Groups such as the Hare Krishna, the Sufi, and the Maharaj Ji communes began to discover that they could enroll thousands of new members and (in some cases) make small fortunes in real estate to finance the expansion. Many members of the New Left communes of the 1960s began to turn up in Me movements in the 1970s, including two of the celebrated “Chicago Seven.” Rennie Davis became a follower of the Maharaj Ji. Jerry Rubin enrolled in both est and Arica. Barbara Garson, who with the help of her husband, Marvin, wrote the great agitprop drama of the New Left, MacBird, would later observe, with considerable bitterness: “My husband Marvin forsook everything (me included) to find peace. For three years he wandered without shoes or money or glasses. Now he is in Israel with some glasses and possibly with some peace.” And not just him, she said, but so many other New Lefters as well: “Some follow a guru, some are into Primal Scream, some seek a rest from the diaspora—a home in Zion.” It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.

Meanwhile the ESP or “psychic phenomena” movement began to grow very rapidly in the new religious atmosphere, ESP devotees had always believed that there was an other order that ran the universe, one that revealed itself occasionally through telepathy, déjà vu experiences, psychokinesis, dematerialization, and the like. It was but a small step from there to the assumption that all men possess a conscious energy paralleling the world of physical energy and that this mysterious energy can unite the universe (after the fashion of the light of God). A former astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, who has a doctor-of-science degree from MIT, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in an attempt to channel the work of all the ESP groups. “Noetic” is an adjective derived from the same root as that of “the Noosphere”—the name that Teilhard de Chardin gave his dream of a cosmic union of all souls. Even the Flying Saucer cults began to reveal their essentially religious nature at about this time. The Flying Saucer folk quite literally believed in an other order : It was under the command of superior beings from other planets or solar systems who had spaceships. A physician named Andrija Puharich wrote a book ( Uri ) in which he published the name of the God of the UFO’s: Hoova. He said Hoova had a herald messenger named Spectra, and Hoova’s and Spectra’s agent on earth, the human connection, as it were, was Uri Geller, the famous Israeli psychic and showman. Geller’s powers were also of great interest to people in the ESP movement, and there were many who wished that Puharich and the UFO people would keep their hands off him.

By the early 1970s a quite surprising movement, tagged as the Jesus People, had spread throughout the country. At the outset practically all the Jesus People were young acid heads, i.e., LSD users, who had sworn off drugs (except, occasionally, in “organic form,” meaning marijuana and peyote) but still wanted the ecstatic spiritualism of the psychedelic or hippie life. This they found in Fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity of a sort that ten years before would have seemed utterly impossible to revive in America. The Jesus People, such as the Children of God, the Fresno God Squad, the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation, the Sun Myung Moon sect, lived communally and took an ecstatic or “charismatic” (literally: “God-imbued”) approach to Christianity, after the manner of the Oneida, Shaker, and Mormon communes of the nineteenth century … and, for the matter, after the manner of the early Christians themselves, including the Gnostics.

There was considerable irony here. Ever since the late 1950s both the Catholic Church and the leading Protestant denominations had been aware that young people, particularly in the cities, were drifting away from the faith. At every church conference and convocation and finance-committee meeting the cry went up: We must reach the urban young people. It became an obsession, this business of “the urban young people.” The key—one and all decided—was to “modernize” and “update” Christianity. So the Catholics gave the nuns outfits that made them look like World War II Wacs. The Protestants set up “beatnik coffee-houses” in church basements for poetry reading and bongo playing. They had the preacher put on a turtleneck sweater and sing “Joe Hill” and “Frankie and Johnny” during the hootenanny at the Sunday vespers. Both the priests and the preachers carried placards in civil rights marches, gay rights marches, women’s rights marches, prisoners’ rights marches, bondage lovers’ rights marches, or any other marches, so long as they might appear hip to the urban young people.

In fact, all these strenuous gestures merely made the churches look like rather awkward and senile groupies of secular movements. The much-sought-after Urban Young People found the Hip Churchman to be an embarrassment, if they noticed him at all. What finally started attracting young people to Christianity was something the churches had absolutely nothing to do with: namely, the psychedelic or hippie movement. The hippies had suddenly made religion look hip. Very few people went into the hippie life with religious intentions, but many came out of it absolutely righteous. The sheer power of the drug LSD is not to be underestimated. It was quite easy for an LSD experience to take the form of a religious vision, particularly if one were among people already so inclined. You would come across someone you had known for years, a pal, only now he was jacked up on LSD and sitting in the middle of the street saying. “I’m in the Pudding at last! I’ve met the Manager!” Without knowing it, many heads were reliving the religious fervor of their grandparents or great-grandparents … the Bible-Belting lectern-pounding amen ten-finger C-majorchord Sister-Martha-at-the-keyboard tent-meeting loblolly piny-woods share-it-brother believers of the nineteenth century. The hippies were religious and incontrovertibly hip at the same time.

Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions—all the brave, forward-looking Ethical Culture, Unitarian, and Swedenborgian movements of only yesterday—that are finished, gasping, breathing their last. What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little Hallelujah! … and talking in tongues! … Praise God! Precisely that! In the most prestigious divinity schools today, Catholic. Presbyterian, and Episcopal, the avant-garde movement, the leading edge, is “charismatic Christianity” … featuring talking in tongues, ululation, visions, holy rolling, and other nonrational, even antirational, practices. Some of the most respectable old-line Protestant congregations, in the most placid suburban settings, have begun to split into the Charismatics and the Easter Christians (“All they care about is being seen in church on Easter”). The Easter Christians still usually control the main Sunday-morning service—but the Charismatics take over on Sunday evening and do the holy roll.

This curious development has breathed new life into the existing Fundamentalists, theosophists, and older salvation seekers of all sorts. Ten years ago, if anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly “announced for Christ,” people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils. Today it happens regularly … Harold Hughes resigns from the U.S. Senate to become an evangelist … Jim Irwin, the astronaut, teams up with a Baptist evangelist in an organization called High Flight … singers like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant announce for Jesus … Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon administration, announces for Jesus, and the man who is likely to be the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, announces for Jesus. Oh Jesus People.

VI. Only One Life

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman —as Me —becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora … or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr.

Among men the formula becomes: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a … Casanova or a Henry VIII” … instead of a humdrum workadaddy, eternally faithful, except perhaps for a mean little skulking episode here and there, to a woman who now looks old enough to be your aunt and has atrophied calves, and is an embarrassment to be seen with when you take her on trips. The right to shuck overripe wives and take on fresh ones was once seen as the prerogative of kings only, and even then it was scandalous. In the 1950s and 1960s it began to be seen as the prerogative of the rich, the powerful, and the celebrated (Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and show-business figures), although it retained the odor of scandal. Wife-shucking damaged Adlai Stevenson’s chances of becoming president in 1952 and Rockefeller’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and 1968. Until the 1970s, wife-shucking made it impossible for an astronaut to be chosen to go into space. Today, in the Me Decade, it becomes normal behavior, one of the factors that have pushed the divorce rate above 50 percent.

When Eugene McCarthy filled in the blank in 1972 and shucked his wife, it was hardly noticed. Likewise in the case of several astronauts. When Wayne Hays filled in the blank in 1976 and shucked his wife of 38 years, it did not hurt his career in the slightest, although copulating with the girl in the office was still regarded as scandalous. (Elizabeth Ray filled in the blank in another popular fashion: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a … Celebrity!” As did Arthur Bremer, who kept a diary during his stalking of Nixon and, later, George Wallace … with an eye toward the book contract. Which he got.) Some wiseacre has remarked, supposedly with levity, that the federal government may in time have to create reservations for women over 35, to take care of the swarms of shucked wives and widows. In fact, women in precisely those categories have begun setting up communes or “extended families” to provide one another support and companionship in a world without workadaddies. (“If I’ve only one life, why live it as an anachronism?”)

Much of what is now known as “the sexual revolution” has consisted of both women and men filling in the blank this way: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a Swinger!” (Instead of a frustrated, bored monogamist.) In “swinging,” a husband and wife give each other license to copulate with other people. There are no statistics on the subject that mean anything, but I do know that it pops up in conversation today in the most unexpected corners of the country. It is an odd experience to be in De Kalb, Illinois, in the very corncrib of America,* and have some conventional-looking housewife (not housewife, damn it!) come up to you and ask: “Is there much tripling going on in New York?”

“Tripling?”

Tripling turns out to be a practice, in De Kalb, anyway, in which a husband and wife invite a third party—male or female, but more often female—over for an evening of whatever, including polymorphous perversity, even the practices written of in the one-hand magazines, all the things involving tubes and hoses and tourniquets and cups and double-jointed sailors.

One of the satisfactions of this sort of life, quite in addition to the groin spasms, is talk: Let’s talk about Me. Sexual adventurers are given to the most relentless and deadly serious talk… about Me. They quickly succeed in placing themselves onstage in the sexual drama whose outlines were sketched by Freud and then elaborated upon by Wilhelm Reich. Men and women of all sorts, not merely swingers, are given just now to the most earnest sort of talk about the Sexual Me.

A key drama of our own day is Ingmar Bergman’s movie Scenes From a Marriage. In it we see a husband and wife who have good jobs and a well-furnished home but who are unable to “communicate”—to cite one of the signature words of the Me Decade. Then they begin to communicate, and there upon their marriage breaks up and they start divorce proceedings. For the rest of the picture they communicate endlessly, with great candor, but the “relationship”—another signature word—remains doomed. Ironically, the lesson that people seem to draw from this movie has to do with … “the need to communicate.” Scenes From a Marriage is one of those rare works of art, like The Sun Also Rises, that not only succeed in capturing a certain mental atmosphere in fictional form … but also turn around and help radiate it throughout real life. I personally know of two instances in which couples, after years of marriage, went to see Scenes From a Marriage and came home convinced of the “need to communicate.” The discussions began with one of the two saying. Let’s try to be completely candid for once. You tell me exactly what you don’t like about me, and I’ll do the same for you. At this, the starting point, the whole notion is exciting. We’re going to talk about Me! (And I can take it.) I’m going to find out what he (or she) really thinks about me! (Of course, I have my faults, but they’re minor, or else exciting.)

She says. “Go ahead. What don’t you like about me?”

They’re both under the Bergman spell. Nevertheless, a certain sixth sense tells him that they’re on dangerous ground. So he decides to pick something that doesn’t seem too terrible.

“Well,” he says, “one thing that bothers me is that when we meet people for the first time, you never know what to say. Or else you get nervous and start babbling away, and it’s all so banal, it makes me look bad.”

Consciously she’s still telling herself, “I can take it.” But what he has just said begins to seep through her brain like scalding water. What’s he talking about? … makes him look bad? He’s saying I’m unsophisticated, a social liability, and an embarrassment. All those times we’ve gone out, he’s been ashamed of me! (And what makes it worse—it’s the sort of disease for which there’s no cure!) She always knew she was awkward. His crime is: He noticed! He’s known it, too, all along. He’s had contempt for me.

Out loud she says. “Well, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that.”

He detects the petulant note. “Look,” he says. “you’re the one who said to be candid.”

She says, “I know. I want you to be.”

He says, “Well, it’s your turn.”

“Well,” she says, “I’ll tell you something about when we meet people and when we go places. You never clean yourself properly—you don’t know how to wipe yourself. Sometimes we’re standing there talking to people, and there’s … a smell. And I’ll tell you something else. People can tell it’s you.”

And he’s still telling himself, “I can take it”—but what inna namea Christ is this?

He says, “But you’ve never said anything—about anything like that.”

She says, “But I tried to. How many times have I told you about your dirty drawers when you were taking them off at night?”

Somehow this really makes him angry… . All those times … and his mind immediately fastens on Harley Thatcher and his wife, whom he has always wanted to impress… . From underneath my $250 suits—I smelled of shit! What infuriates him is that this is a humiliation from which there’s no recovery. How often have they sniggered about it later?—or not invited me places? Is it something people say every time my name comes up? And all at once he is intensely annoyed with his wife, not because she never told him all these years—but simply because she knows about his disgrace—and she was the one who brought him the bad news!

From that moment on they’re ready to get the skewers in. It’s only a few minutes before they’ve begun trying to sting each other with confessions about their little affairs, their little slipping around, their little coitus on the sly—“Remember that time I told you my flight from Buffalo was canceled?”—and at that juncture the ranks of those who can take it become very thin, indeed. So they communicate with great candor! and break up! and keep on communicating! and then find the relationship hopelessly doomed.

One couple went into group therapy. The other went to a marriage counselor. Both types of therapy are very popular forms, currently, of Let’s talk about Me. This phase of the breakup always provides a rush of exhilaration, for what more exhilarating topic is there than … Me? Through group therapy, marriage counseling, and other forms of “psychological consultation” they can enjoy that same Me euphoria that the very rich have enjoyed for years in psychoanalysis. The cost of the new Me sessions is only $10 to $30 an hour, whereas psychoanalysis runs from $50 to $125. The woman’s exhilaration, however, is soon complicated by the fact that she is (in the typical case) near or beyond the cutoff age of 35 and will have to retire to the reservation.

Well, my dear Mature Moderns … Ingmar never promised you a rose garden!

VII. How You Do It, My Boys!

In September of 1969, in London, on the King’s Road, in a restaurant called Alexander’s, I happened to have dinner with a group of people that included a young American named Jim Haynes and an Australian woman named Germaine Greer. Neither name meant anything to me at the time, although I never forgot Germaine Greer. She was a thin, hard-looking woman with a tremendous curly electric hairdo and the most outrageous Naugahyde mouth I had ever heard on a woman. (I was shocked.) After a while she got bored and set fire to her hair with a match. Two waiters ran over and began beating the flames out with napkins. This made a noise like pigeons taking off in the park. Germaine Greer sat there with a sublime smile on her face, as if to say: “How you do it, my boys!”

Jim Haynes and Germaine Greer had just published the first issue of a newspaper that All London was talking about. It was called Suck. It was founded shortly after Screw in New York, and was one of the progenitors of the sex newspapers that today are so numerous that in Los Angeles it is not uncommon to see fifteen coin-operated newspaper racks in a row on the sidewalk. One will be for the Los Angeles Times, a second for the Herald-Examiner, and the other thirteen for the sex papers. Suck was full of pictures of gaping thighs, moist lips, stiffened giblets, glistening nodules, dirty stories, dirty poems, essays on sexual freedom, and a gossip column detailing the sexual habits of people whose names I assumed were fictitious. Then I came to an item that said, “Anyone who wants group sex in New York and likes fat girls, contact L——— R———,” except that it gave her full name. She was a friend of mine.

Even while Germaine Greer’s hair blazed away, the young American, Jim Haynes, went on with a discourse about the aims of Suck. To put it in a few words, the aim was sexual liberation and, through sexual liberation, the liberation of the spirit of man. If you were listening, to this speech and had read Suck, or even if you hadn’t, you were likely to be watching Jim Haynes’s face for the beginnings of a campy grin, a smirk, a wink, a roll of the eyeballs—something to indicate that he was just having his little joke. But it soon became clear that he was one of those people who exist on a plane quite … Beyond Irony. Whatever it had been for him once, sex had now become a religion, and he had developed a theology in which the orgasm had become a form of spiritual ecstasy.

The same curious journey—from sexology to theology—has become a feature of swinging in the United States. At the Sandstone sex farm in the Santa Monica Mountains, people of all class levels gather for weekends in the nude, and copulate in the living room, on the lawn, out by the pool, on the tennis courts, with the same open, free, liberated spirit as dogs in the park or baboons in a tree. In conversation, however, the atmosphere is quite different. The air becomes humid with solemnity. Close your eyes and you think you’re at a nineteenth-century Wesleyan summer encampment and tent-meeting lecture series. It’s the soul that gets a workout here, brethren. And yet this is not a hypocritical cover-up. It is merely an example of how people in even the most secular manifestation of the Me Decade—free-lance spread-‘em, ziggy-zag rutting—are likely to go through the usual stages… . Let’s talk about Me… . Let’s find the Real Me… . Let’s get rid of all the hypocrisies and impedimenta and false modesties that obscure the Real Me… . Ah! At the apex of my soul is a spark of the Divine … which I perceive in the pure moment of ecstasy (which your textbooks call “the orgasm,” but which I know to be Heaven)… .

This notion even has a pedigree. Many sects, such as the Left-handed Shakti and the Gnostic onanists, have construed the orgasm to be the kairos, the magic moment, the divine ecstasy. There is evidence that the early Mormons and the Oneida movement did likewise. In fact, the notion of some sort of divine ecstasy runs throughout the religious history of the past 2,500 years. As Max Weber and Joachim Wach have illustrated in detail, every major modern religion, as well as countless long-gone minor ones, has originated not with a theology or a set of values or a social goal or even a vague hope of a life hereafter. They have all originated, instead, with a small circle of people who have shared some over-whelming ecstasy or seizure, a “vision,” a “trance,” a hallucination—an actual neurological event, in fact, a dramatic change in metabolism, something that has seemed to light up the entire central nervous system. The Mohammedan movement (Islam) originated in hallucinations, apparently the result of fasting, meditation, and isolation in the darkness of caves, which can induce sensory deprivation. Some of the same practices were common with many types of Buddhists. The early Hindus and Zoroastrians seem to have been animated by a hallucinogenic drug known as soma in India and haoma in Persia. The origins of Christianity are replete with “visions.” The early Christians used wine for ecstatic purposes, to the point where the Apostle Paul (whose conversion on the road to Damascus began with a “vision”) complained that it was degenerating into sheer drunkenness at the services. These great drafts of wine survive in minute quantities in the ritual of Communion. The Bacchic orders, the Sufi, Voodooists, Shakers, and many others used feasts (the bacchanals), ecstatic dancing (“the whirling dervishes”), and other forms of frenzy to achieve the kairos … the moment … here and now! … the feeling! … In every case the believers took the feeling of ecstasy to be the sensation of the light of God flooding into their souls. They felt like vessels of the Divine, of the All-in-One. Only afterward did they try to interpret the experience in the form of theologies, earthly reforms, moral codes, liturgies.

Nor have these been merely the strange practices of the Orient and the Middle East. Every major religious wave that has developed in America has started out the same way: with a flood of ecstatic experiences. The First Great Awakening, as it is known to historians, came in the 1740s and was led by preachers of “the New Light” such as Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, and George Whitefield. They and their followers were known as “enthusiasts” and “come-outers,” terms of derision that referred to the frenzied, holy-rolling, pentecostal shout tempo of their services and to their visions, trances, shrieks, and agonies, which are preserved in great Rabelaisian detail in the writings of their detractors.

The Second Great Awakening came in the period from 1825 to 1850 and took the form of a still wilder hoe-down camp-meeting revivalism, of ceremonies in which people barked, bayed, fell down in fits and swoons, rolled on the ground, talked in tongues, and even added a touch of orgy. The Second Awakening originated in western New York State, where so many evangelical movements caught fire it became known as “the Burned-Over District.” Many new seets, such as Oneida and the Shakers, were involved. But so were older ones, such as the evangelical Baptists. The fervor spread throughout the American frontier (and elsewhere) before the Civil War. The most famous sect of the Second Great Awakening was the Mormon movement, founded by a 24-year-old. Joseph Smith, and a small group of youthful comrades. This bunch was regarded as wilder, crazier, more obscene, more of a threat, than the entire lot of hippie communes of the 1960s put together. Smith was shot to death by a lynch mob in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, which was why the Mormons, now with Brigham Young at the helm, emigrated to Utah. A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power. Once the Mormons settled, built, and ruled Utah, Mormonism became a religion sure enough … and eventually wound down to the slow, firm beat of respectability… .

We are now—in the Me Decade—seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of “psi phenomena” and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?

The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies’ religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O’Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as “bleak” on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as “fascist.” The hippie movement was often attacked as “fascist” in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and “the Moonies” (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.

Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize—but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating!—to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan—“If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”—seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope ( antanaclasis ) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name—they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide “a better future” for their children … the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for “his people” that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community—for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of Nature. Hence the wicked feeling—the excitement!—of “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a ———!” Fill in the blank, if you dare.

And now many dare it! In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about … Let’s talk about Me!

Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes … Me … Me … . Me … Me . . .

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Ted Bundy ‘s Influence on the Family

This essay about the multifaceted impact of Ted Bundy on family dynamics explores how his notorious crimes shattered trust, sparked denial, and prompted reflections on gender dynamics within society. It discusses the erosion of trust within families, the struggle to reconcile Bundy’s persona with his actions, and the awakening to the pervasive threat of violence against women. Through examining these themes, the essay highlights the profound influence of individual behavior on familial relationships and societal norms, offering insights into the complexities of addressing and understanding the aftermath of Bundy’s reign of terror.

How it works

The name Ted Bundy evokes images of a notorious serial killer, but his influence extends beyond his heinous crimes to impact familial structures and perceptions. Bundy’s case offers a unique lens through which to examine the intricate interplay between individual behavior and its ripple effects on family life. While his actions tore apart the lives of his victims and their families, the aftermath of his crimes also sparked discussions and reflections on familial relationships, societal norms, and the nature of evil itself.

One aspect of Bundy’s influence on the family lies in the realm of trust and suspicion. His ability to blend seamlessly into society, appearing charming and trustworthy, shattered conventional notions of whom to trust. Families, previously reliant on societal norms to identify potential threats, found themselves questioning their ability to discern danger. This erosion of trust within families led to heightened vigilance and a sense of vulnerability, as loved ones grappled with the realization that evil could lurk behind even the most charismatic facade.

Moreover, Bundy’s case prompted conversations about the dynamics of family support and denial. Many of his family members and acquaintances struggled to reconcile the charming persona they knew with the gruesome acts he committed. This cognitive dissonance often manifested in denial, with loved ones refusing to believe Bundy capable of such atrocities. The resulting rifts within families, torn between loyalty and horror, underscored the complexity of familial bonds and the challenges of confronting uncomfortable truths.

Additionally, Bundy’s crimes forced society to confront uncomfortable truths about violence against women and the prevalence of misogyny. His targeting of young, attractive women highlighted the dangers faced by women in a society that often downplays or ignores the pervasive threat of violence. Families grappled with the realization that their daughters, sisters, and friends were not safe simply because they adhered to societal norms of femininity and propriety. This awakening sparked conversations about gender dynamics within families and society at large, as individuals sought to understand and address the systemic factors that enabled Bundy’s reign of terror.

In conclusion, Ted Bundy’s influence on the family extends far beyond the immediate impact of his crimes. His case serves as a catalyst for discussions about trust, denial, and gender dynamics within familial and societal contexts. By examining the complex interplay between individual behavior and its broader ramifications, we gain insight into the ways in which one individual can disrupt the fabric of family life and prompt broader societal reflection.

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The Morning

Saving time.

The advice to live each day to its fullest can seem like a cliché, but figuring out how to actually do that can be pretty challenging.

By Melissa Kirsch

Any advice I’ve ever been given that’s actually resonated has boiled down to a variation on the same basic theme: Life is short. Stop wasting it.

It comes packaged in varying poetic guises, each profound or corny, depending on how receptive or cynical one is feeling. “Don’t borrow trouble” is my favorite, a solid distillation of “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” from the Gospels. The poet Andrew Marvell addressed himself to his mistress with the persuasive “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.” A million memes have bloomed from the Mary Oliver line “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” The message is consistent and irrefutable: Memento mori. Remember you’re going to die. Or, if you prefer, YOLO.

I find all of these exhortations urgent and moving and also difficult to absorb. So I’m always grateful to hear the message again, to be reminded to be intentional about how I’m spending or wasting time. I had just such a reminder recently listening to a conversation between The Times’s David Marchese and the actress Anne Hathaway . David asks her about turning 40 and entering middle age. She said she was hesitant to mark this time in her life as the middle because she could get hit by a car later today. “We don’t know if this is middle age,” she says. “We don’t know anything.”

I myself am approaching a milestone birthday, one I’m trying not to think of as some kind of deadline or reckoning, and I welcomed Hathaway’s perspective on how we consider time. It’s easy to default into picturing one’s life as a timeline, to chart our progress along that line, certain we know where the beginning, middle and end are. Hathaway recalled a moment of awakening when, lost in stress, she realized: “You are taking your life for granted. You have no idea. Something could fall through the sky and that would be lights out for you.” Here you are, burning daylight and borrowing trouble and going gentle into that good night. Memento mori. Something could, at any moment, fall through the sky. If we really and truly understood that, how would today be different?

There are good books that dig into this: Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death,” Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks,” Stephen Levine’s “A Year to Live.” I’ve read them each more than once, periodic efforts to keep the fire under myself ablaze. Sometimes it burns so brightly I find myself hurrying through my life, another way of wasting time. On a recent revisiting of Levine’s book I found myself resentful of the time it was taking to read it: What if I was spending too much time considering how I’m spending my time? At that point, I probably was.

As David says in the interview, we know we can’t take for granted how much time we have left, but “internalizing that so that we can treat each day and moment of our lives like it could be the last, which would be the most powerful change we could make in our lives, is also maybe the hardest thing to actually do.” It’s one thing to intellectually understand the finitude of our lives and another to actually live it out. Whatever it takes to truly get it is worthwhile, whether it’s reading and rereading the same books, or talking it out with friends; whether it’s a meditation practice or a sticky note on your monitor or just paying close and compassionate attention to how you’re spending your time.

It can be tempting to dismiss easily commodified inspiration. I’m skeptical of “seize the day”-style wisdom that I can picture painted in splashy cursive on a piece of shiplap and sold in a home décor store. But maybe that’s the point: Reminders of our mortality have broad appeal because their implications are relevant for literally everyone. We don’t need to wait until we see something falling through the sky, headed our way, to live as if something might. As Levine writes in “A Year to Live,” “Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same.”

David Marchese’s talk with Anne Hathaway is part of a new Times series called “The Interview,” which will come out each week as both a podcast and an article. You can get the podcast here , or read the interview here .

“Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified.” On the 50th anniversary of “ Denial of Death .”

Meet the nun who wants you to remember you will die .

“ Pretending death can be indefinitely evaded with hot yoga or a gluten-free diet or antioxidants or just by refusing to look is craven denial.” From 2013, Tim Kreider on watching a parent get old.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

“The Tortured Poets Department,” Taylor Swift’s latest album, is not universally loved. The Times’s pop music team discussed its lukewarm reception .

Beyoncé shared her hair-care routine on Instagram to promote her new line of products. In it, she rejected the idea that “people who wear wigs don’t have long and healthy hair.”

RZA, the leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, spoke to The Times about his veganism and the connection between masculinity and meat.

The estate of Tupac Shakur threatened to sue Drake over his use of the rapper’s voice — likely generated by A.I. — in a diss tracked aimed at Kendrick Lamar, Pitchfork reports.

The Spice Girls reunited at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party . A video of them singing their 1997 song “Stop” was posted on Instagram by David Beckham.

Film and TV

Read The Times’s critics on the films that are worth seeing — or at least knowing about — this week, including Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” and “Boy Kills World,” starring Bill Skarsgard.

The rom-com “Anyone but You,” which is led by Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, beat box-office odds to become a hit. The actors discussed its success and leaning into on-set romance rumors.

Other Big Stories

New York City’s improv scene took a hit during the pandemic. Now, a new energy can be seen in performances throughout the city, our comedy columnist writes .

In the latest Fashion Chatter column, Ruth La Ferla spoke to the activist Gloria Steinem, who was tapped to promote a campaign about self-acceptance, about her beauty ideals .

The nominees for the Turner Prize, the prestigious British art award, were announced. The four chosen artists draw on personal history and identity in their work.

Here are 10 highlights from the Venice Biennale , which opened last week.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles will return an ancient bronze head to Turkey . An antiquities dealer sold the work in 1971, but it was later found to have been looted.

THE LATEST NEWS

Donald Trump’s lawyer tried to find inconsistencies in testimony given by David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial . Pecker responded defiantly, saying he had been “truthful to the best of my recollection.”

The Biden administration delayed a decision on whether to ban menthol cigarettes . Tobacco companies and some Black supporters of President Biden oppose a ban.

Biden said in an interview with Howard Stern that he would be “happy” to debate Trump and criticized the Supreme Court as “maybe the most conservative in modern history.”

The Times’s Charles Homans attended seven Trump rallies and was stunned by how different the former president sounded compared to his 2016 campaign.

The U.S. said it would not suspend aid to Israeli military units accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank, so long as Israel holds them accountable.

Columbia University barred from its campus a student leader of the pro-Palestinian protests who said on video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” The student apologized.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation remained stubbornly elevated last month. That could prompt Fed officials to keep interest rates high for longer.

King Charles III will return to public duties next week , an encouraging sign of recovery about three months after he disclosed that he had cancer.

Congestion pricing, which charges drivers more to enter certain parts of New York City in an effort to ease traffic, will take effect June 30 . It’s the first such program in the country.

CULTURE CALENDAR

By Alexis Soloski

📺 Hacks (Thursday): Can’t you take a joke? This HBO comedy, starring Jean Smart in her career best as a legacy comic and Hannah Einbinder as a gawky millennial upstart, returns for a third season. The show has laughs to burn, many of them from its terrific supporting cast, which includes Megan Stalter and Poppy Liu. But “Hacks” is at its best totaling the high cost that celebrity and comedy exact.

🎥 The Fall Guy (Friday): Ryan Gosling, America’s boyfriend, stars opposite Emily Blunt in this reboot of the 1980s TV series. Stunt casting? Exactly. In this giddy ode to movies and the people who make them, Gosling plays Colt Seavers, an injured stuntman hired for a movie directed by Jody (Blunt), his snappish ex. David Leitch, a veteran stuntman, directs.

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

By Genevieve Ko

Matzo Pizza

Gluten-free pizza options may abound now, but nothing beats the crackle of a matzo crust, especially during Passover. In her matzo pizza, Melissa Clark brilliantly starts by toasting olive oil-slicked matzo on its own so it stays crisp. (Using a thicker pizza sauce, like this one , also helps.) It’s great on its own or with more toppings.

REAL ESTATE

The hunt: A mother and daughter wanted a home outside Atlanta with enough room for some privacy. Which one did they choose? Play our game .

What you get for $700,000: A 1926 brick house in Lexington, Ky.; a two-bedroom condo in Lyme, N.H.; or a Tudor Revival home in Minneapolis .

Rebuilding: A writer lost nearly everything in a fire. She reflects on what she learned .

Normcore: Members of The Times’s Styles desk have feelings about the fashion in the tennis-slash-love triangle movie “Challengers.”

Easy listening: Podcasts like “The Happiness Lab,” hosted by the academic Dr. Laurie Santos, can help soothe the anxious mind .

London: In a few years, you could be eating dinner, going to fashion shows and walking through gardens in tunnels below the city.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

The easiest mother’s day gift of them all.

As a parent of young children, all I want for Mother’s Day is a couple hours without them. Conversely, my older sister, a parent of teenagers, is thirsty for any scraps of time with her kiddos, phones down. Where we’re aligned: Save your flowers and skip the gift certificate. If you’re in a position to give time on May 12, apart or together, do that! But as Wirecutter’s gift editor, I’ve got a front-row seat to dozens of inexpensive gifts I’d graciously receive. Every pick combines delight, beauty and utility, and ideally serves as a joyful reminder of your appreciation. (All that for under $50!) Our advice is to do both: Save your money, give your time. That’s what moms really want. — Hannah Morrill

GAME OF THE WEEK

Boston Bruins vs. Toronto Maple Leafs, N.H.L. playoffs: One of hockey’s oldest rivalries gets another installment. How old? These two first played one another a century ago, in 1924. Toronto hasn’t beaten Boston in a playoff series since 1959, and it’s currently down two games to one. But don’t count the Leafs out: They still have the best player on the ice in Auston Matthews, the N.H.L.’s leader in goals this season, who is among the favorites to win M.V.P. 8 p.m. Eastern on TBS

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was pothead .

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku and Connections .

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox . Reach our team at [email protected] .

P.S. For anybody who wants to reflect on yesterday’s Times crossword puzzle, David Leonhardt was the guest columnist for Wordplay .

Melissa Kirsch is the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle at The Times and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays. More about Melissa Kirsch