The American Enlightenment and the Great Awakening were two very important motivators that changed the colonial society in America through religious beliefs, educational values, and the right to live one’s life according to each individual’s preference.
The Great Awakening and the American Enlightenment movements were two events in history that signaled a grand distinction to the teachings among religious believers. New beliefs of how a person should worship in order to be considered in “God’s good graces” soon became an enormous discussion among colonists across the land. “Men of the cloth,” such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards were well respected and closely followed when preaching about the love of God and damnation. Followers, who had once felt unfulfilled and disheartened during sermons, suddenly felt and experienced the spiritual connection to God that they had each been longing for after attending preachings from these two men. The Great Awakening brought about religious freedom and free will (Smith, 2011) that would grant all
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Those who were considered as general leaders of the Enlightenment years were thought to be very intellectual and were held by most people in the highest regard throughout the colonial society. Some of the more common names spoken back then were of men such as “John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison” (Sage, 2013, para. 3). Jean-Jacques Rousseau was another prominent thinker as well. He believed that all “individuals had natural rights to life, liberty, and property, which even a king or pope could not deny” (Schultz, 2010, p. 69). Rousseau, along with countless others fought for the rights of the people while insisting that each person is afforded the lawful right to live their own life and to cast aside the authoritativeness of others if they saw fit in doing