Some historians denominate essentially all revivalistic activity in Britain’s North American colonies between 1740 and 1790 as the “Great Awakening,” but the term more properly refers only to those revivals associated with the itinerant Anglican preacher George Whitefield that occurred between 1739 and 1745. Evangelicals in Britain as well as America attended to Whitefield’s perambulations on both sides of the Atlantic, giving the Awakening an international dimension; indeed, American events made up just one portion of a trans-European movement among eighteenth-century Protestants to exalt spiritual experience as faith’s hallmark as opposed to adherence to systematized creeds and catechisms.
The Awakening elaborated upon strains of revivalism that had been developing piecemeal within Reformed Protestant traditions. As far back as the 1680s, Solomon Stoddard had hosted “refreshings” within the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, elevating parishioners’ religious and moral commitment by heightening their fear of hell while emphasizing that salvation could be obtained only through conversion (the New Birth)—the Holy Spirit’s infusion of grace into the soul.
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