Christianity's Impact on America, Part 2

The approaching Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of the United States of America provides an opportunity for this column to give an overview of the influence Christianity has had on the founding of the nation. This month’s article will look at the events leading up to the American Revolution and the Christians who had an influence on these events.

Religious Decline

Religious beliefs and practices—specifically Christian beliefs and practices—influenced the settlement of the New World. Yet, most areas of settlement in the Western Hemisphere were not colonized with the sole or express idea of creating a Christian colony. Only the New England Puritans seemed to have the notion of establishing a theocratic society that they hoped would impact England and the entire world as a “City Upon a Hill” that would be seen and emulated around the globe. After the first few generations of the Puritan settlers in New England, however, a series of crises weakened both their political and religious authority, leading to a period of diminished religious influence.

Between 1675 and 1676, New England was engaged in a violent period of military conflict known as King Philip’s War. While relationships with Native Americans were amicable in the early years of settlement, the New England settlers (not all staunchly Puritan) raised tensions as they continued to expand into Native territories. King Philip, the English name given to the Wampanoag tribe’s leader, Metacom, united several tribes to oppose the infiltration of the Puritan settlers. The result was one of the deadliest wars (per capita) in American history. The severity of the war caused Puritans to question whether they truly were the covenant people of God, and it weakened their religious resolve.

An additional crisis was the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter in 1684, which further weakened the Puritan control of New England by returning political authority in the colony to the monarchy. Under the colony’s charter, the Puritans were largely a self-governing entity, but everything changed when their charter was rescinded. This action overturned the Puritan hope to develop a theocratic commonwealth that was governed by the Bible (as interpreted by the Puritan ministers). Although a new charter was granted in 1691, the Puritans would never again have the same degree of authoritative control as they had under their initial charter.

The final crisis that impacted Puritan New England was the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693. The tragic events that transpired in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) resulted in over 200 people being accused of witchcraft and nineteen being executed as witches. When the frenzy finally subsided, it had a significant impact on attitudes toward religion in the colony and the roles of religious leaders. Before the trials, ministers were often viewed as the gatekeepers to a Christian moral society. Afterward, however, many began to question both the authority of the Puritan leaders and any religious views deemed extreme.

As these events unfolded throughout the latter quarter of the seventeenth century, they led to a spiritual depression throughout the English colonies in America at the dawn of the eighteenth century. In fact, by 1700, colonial interests turned more toward profiteering from the vast resources available in America, which supplanted the religious motivations that influenced earlier generations of New World settlers. While many remained church members (as was expected), it was largely a formality with little meaning or spiritual significance.

The Great Awakening

With religious influence in the colonies at a low point, the first hints at a potential revival arrived with the 1720 immigration of Theodor Frelinghuysen (c.1691-c.1747), a German minister who served among the Dutch Reformed Churches of New Jersey. To combat religious formalism and disinterest, Frelinghuysen introduced an evangelistic style of preaching that infused passion and intensity into his sermons while calling for a heartfelt, personal conversion. His ministry in New Jersey laid the groundwork for a far greater spiritual awakening that emerged soon afterward and reached its pinnacle through the evangelistic crusades of George Whitefield (1714-1770).

Before he came to America in 1738, Whitefield had become a leading figure, along with brothers John (1703-1791) and Charles Wesley (1707-1788), in the Methodist Movement. His evangelistic style of preaching, which was very similar to that of Frelinghuysen, helped spark the great evangelical revival of early eighteenth-century England. Whitefield became the first “celebrity” preacher in the English-speaking world, and his reputation preceded him when he made his way to the colonies.

Whitefield initially came to America at the invitation of James Oglethorpe (1696-1785), the founder of Georgia, to help establish and raise support for the Bethesda Orphan House near Savannah, GA. He used his position, however, to become a missionary-evangelist to the British colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America. Soon after his arrival, Whitefield embarked upon a series of preaching tours throughout the colonies and was greeted by massive crowds—often exceeding 10,000 people—that gathered to hear “the grand itinerant.”  His dramatic evangelistic preaching, often in open-air settings due to a lack of suitable meeting facilities for such large gatherings, along with the establishment of a network of supporting ministers, resulted in the emergence of a period of colonial revival widely identified as the Great Awakening.

The American spirit of revival during the Great Awakening, which can roughly be dated between 1740 and 1755, influenced nearly every aspect of colonial life in America. In addition to raising a renewed awareness of faith within the general population of the colonies, the Great Awakening also managed to convert vast majorities of both free and enslaved African Americans within the colonies from their ancestral African religious ideas to Christianity. Furthermore, the ideological influence of the Great Awakening profoundly impacted the events that emerged as the Revolutionary Era in the years that immediately followed the awakening.

Fuel For the Revolution

It would be erroneous to suggest that the revivalists of the Great Awakening had hatched a plan for inciting a revolution or creating a new American nation. Nevertheless, Whitefield and his associate evangelists (i.e., Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Davies, Gilbert Tennent, etc.) opened the door for the colonial revolution against the British monarchy and the eventual establishment of the United States in at least four unique ways.

The Awakening Prompted Americans to Challenge Traditional Authorities and Think for Themselves. The preachers connected with the Great Awakening believed that every individual could have a direct relationship with God that was not mediated by a church or the clergy. As a result, they consistently emphasized the need for individuals to question their traditional religious authorities and make their own decisions about faith and the “new birth.” This weakening of respect for a centralized religious authority eventually bled over into a questioning of Britain’s political authority. Moreover, as the colonists developed the habit of thinking about religious issues on their own, they soon began to assume that they could just as easily make personal decisions regarding political governance, individual rights, and colonial liberties.

The Revivals Promoted Individual Equality. Whitefield and his associates expressed a belief that all people are spiritually equal (though perhaps not socially or economically equal) before God and worthy of hearing the gospel message. It was due to this belief that the awakening’s evangelists preached simple, mission-oriented sermons that petitioned both the common people and those within eighteenth-century outsider groups (e.g., women, Native Americans, African Americans, etc.) to respond to God’s offer of salvation. These appeals were not only successful efforts to reach previously ignored segments of their colonial society (such as the slave community), but they also subtly undermined the social hierarchies that existed within colonial America. Furthermore, principles like individual liberty, equality, and natural rights became not only acceptable concepts by the time of the Revolutionary Era, but expectations within society. Thus, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he included these ideas as expressions of human dignity that are “self-evident” truths and “unalienable Rights” that have been “endowed” by the Creator.

The Itinerant Evangelistic Methods of the Awakening’s Preachers Established a Social Cohesiveness Within the Colonies. Before the Great Awakening, most colonies functioned autonomously, tended to think locally, and had few dealings with people from other colonies. As the revivals unfolded and the awakening’s itinerant evangelists (especially Whitefield) traveled from colony to colony, however, a sense of social unity within the colonies began to emerge. Not only did the formerly isolated colonies begin to interact with one another, but a shared recognition of American identity that distinguished the colonists from Britain developed. Without this cohesiveness, the issues that brought about the American Revolution would have been perceived as merely local affairs and would not have brought colonial leaders together to air their grievances and later to declare themselves independent from England. Moreover, the Revolutionary War could not have been fought without a united colonial army to oppose the British military. Had any individual colony’s army stood against the mighty British army, it would have been obliterated very quickly. Without colonial unity, the revolution was an impossibility.

The Great Awakening Expanded Colonial Communication Networks. In 1739, soon after Whitefield held his first revival campaign in Philadelphia, a young printer from that city who would later become a notable American statesman, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), recognized the mass public appeal of the evangelist. As a shrewd businessman, Franklin seized upon the opportunity to form a mutually beneficial partnership with Whitefield in which his Philadelphia press began publishing the preacher’s sermons, journals, and promotional materials. The profit of the partnership to Whitefield was that a media network was formed to both promote his evangelistic efforts and provide coverage of his activities. This network helped spread Whitefield’s revival messages more widely than ever before and draw even larger crowds to his events. During the Revolutionary Era, these same communication channels were used to promote the ideas associated with the revolution and to mobilize American resistance to Britain.

Conclusion

While the Great Awakening was not the cause of the American Revolution, it was an essential prologue that made the revolution a possibility. Had Whitefield lived beyond his untimely death in 1770, he most likely would be recognized widely today as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His contributions to the revolution, as well as those of other revival preachers from the Great Awakening, cannot be overlooked regarding the formation of the United States.

Dr. Rick Cherok serves as Managing Editor for Christian Standard, Executive Director of Celtic Christian Mission, and Director of Men's Services at Kentucky Christian University. He may be contacted by email at rick.cherok@gmail.com.