It’s a good general rule in this world, that every action leads to some kind of reaction. By the start of the eighteenth century, religion was swiftly becoming less important to the day to day lives of many in the Thirteen Colonies. Mirroring a general trend back in Britain, the thought process today known as the Great Enlightenment was eroding away the power of the established Protestant faiths, leading people increasingly to alternative and less organized ways of seeing the world, such as deism, unitarianism, and universalism, which in essence were belief systems that saw God as real but not really all that interested in the day-to-day foibles of human kind, and even in some cases atheism. The people of the Thirteen Colonies, feeling less connection to the droning of their various reverends, pastors, and ministers, whose formalized routines and focus on doctrinal minutia did little to excite, increasingly found other ways to spend their time and focus.
Now as you can probably imagine, this was a pretty big fucking deal. At the time, many colonies had legally established religions, such as the Congregationalist church, which was just Puritanism rebranded, in the New England colonies and the Anglican church in the southern colonies, giving them significant political and cultural power in their respective areas. Only in the middle colonies was religion the chaotic mess we know today, with Dutch Reformists, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Lutherans all mashed together, though the latter three were beginning to spread increasingly into the southern colonies. However, as church attendance began to increasingly drop off and the colonial governments did away with the requirement that one had to be of a specific religion to vote or hold office, the old established religions began to lose power, which of course sparked all sorts of worries of what glue was going to hold communities together if they didn’t hold hands and say the exact same words in unison every Sunday. Though of course what exactly those words were varied greatly depending upon which church you belonged.
The issue of declining membership was something the existing leadership of the various churches was not well adapted to combat. For most denominations, an extreme inward focus made it difficult for them to see the big picture, which was fewer people saw any type of organized religion as being a needed major part of their lives. However, not all pastors took this decline laying down. Beginning in the 1720s, a number of younger ministers began espousing new ideas, focusing on the basics of spiritual salvation and being a good person rather than the penny ante rules of a specific church’s doctrine. It was a rather simple idea, to gain everlasting salvation, sinners simply had only to repent their sins and declare themselves wholly in league with God and his divine laws as laid out in the Bible. Preferring self-examination to recitation, they made impassioned and vigorous speeches which stirred the hearts and minds, creating intense physical and emotional reactions. Not content with just their own flocks, they began to travel, holding religious revivals and preaching to anyone who would listen, becoming known as evangelicals. So unique was the experience at the time that they became the rock stars of their era, drawing crowds of thousands and even tens of thousands, though they at times also had to face down or flee from violent mobs.
Starting in Britain, the evangelical movement spread to the Thirteen Colonies soon after, where the established churches reacted with horror and relief. The more conservative leadership felt that such showmanship and simplification of doctrine was sacrilegious. However, more liberal leaders noted that when evangelicals came through it resulted in more asses back in church, leading them to conclude that copying the evangelicals methods and simplified message was the only way to keep themselves relevant. As a result, many of the established churches split into competing denominations, deep schisms from which some, such as the Congregationalists and the Quakers, never healed, remaining split to this day. Others, such as the Presbyterian and Anglican churches, split but later rejoined with a much greater evangelical influence. The infighting also led to significant growth in the established Baptist church, which early on embraced evangelism, and the new Methodist church, which was founded by evangelicals.
Petering out by the 1760s, what became known as the Great Awakening led to a significant interest in spiritualism and an increase in church attendance, acting as a counterpoint to the Great Enlightenment, leading to the establishment of new religious educational institutions, and leading to a greater sense of unity and acceptance across the various Protestant faiths. Beyond that it also had a strong influence on the lives of both women and African slaves. Evangelical enthusiasm combined with its focus on introspection led to a significant increase in women keeping diaries and writing memoirs. Though barred from taking leadership positions in the movement, they were encouraged to form women’s groups to discuss and share their thoughts and feelings. At the same time, eager for new converts, both Baptist and Methodist evangelicals preached an appealing message of spiritual equality to slaves, leading to mass conversions and the effective end of what African religious traditions remained amongst them. Under the auspices of spiritual egalitarianism, slave owners were encouraged to allow their slaves to become literate and to even free their slaves upon the death of their owners. Though far from universally accepted, such ideals resulted in a small, but growing, population of free and educated former slaves living in the southern colonies, with some even forming Baptist churches specifically for the Black population, both free and enslaved.
