The New Ideas During The Great Awakening

In America today, we have many ideals and societal norms that we interact with on a daily basis, and yet we never stop to think where they might have come from. As it turns out, many most likely began to form in a period of new ideas and thinking in the colonies called the Great Awakening. The great awakening began around the 1730’s and lasted until around the 1770’s. During the great awakening, preachers traveled the colonies, preaching new ideas of equality and individualism. These preachers believed that the church and the clergy had too much power, and that people should begin taking their religiousness into their own hands. The idea that all people are able to have a direct connection to God and that religion shouldn’t be formal and institutionalized,

During the great awakening, there was a divide between the “New Lights” and “Old Lights.” The New Lights were the people who supported the great awakening, and they believed in ideas such as “every person can have a direct and emotional connection with God,” and that religion shouldn’t be organized and institutional, but rather more personal and casual. The Old Lights, on the other hand, disliked the great awakening and the new ideas that came with it. Old Lights believed religion should remain how it was, with the clergy having more power rather than individual people. This divide can still be seen in modern-day America. It manifests itself in debates between conservatives, who, like the Old Lights, think things should stay how they are, and progressives, people who, much like the New Lights, believe that there are better ways of doing things. In the modern world, many people regard America as a place of equal opportunity, freedom, individualism,

The colonials liked this new idea because it meant that the church and the clergy didn’t control who got into heaven, instead, everyone could put in their own work to get into heaven. These ideas of individuality and not needing to rely on others are ingrained in American society today, and they originated from preachers of the great awakening like Gilbert Tennent. We can all agree that the revolutionary war is a huge part of American history that shaped how our country is today, but we might not realize that many of the revolutionary ideas that started the revolutionary war came from the preachers of the great awakening. For example, the egalitarian and individualist ideas spread by the aforementioned Gilbert Tennent. Tennent once said, in his famous sermon, “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,” that “The old Pharisees, for all their long prayers and other pious pretences, had their eyes, with Judas, fixed upon the bag. In this sentence, Tennent speaks about the corruption of the church and the