Great Awakening

‘Great Awakening’ is a term religious historians use to describe various periods of religious revivals in American society. The three key waves of the Great Awakening were led by evangelical Protestant ministers who were motivated by a profound sense of conviction and motivation.

First Awakening
The First Awakening was a Christian revitalization movement that that swept Protestant Europe and the American colonies (~1730-1740).  While downplaying traditional ritual and ceremony, the First Awakening gave listeners a sense of personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ.  It encouraged a commitment to a new standard of personal morality and spiritual conviction. It brought Christianity to African slaves and was a monumental event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between old traditionalists who insisted on the continuing importance of ritual and doctrine, and the new revivalists, who encouraged emotional involvement, personal commitment and an intense love for God. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denomination, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations.

Second Awakening
 

The Second Awakening reached out to the unchurched population (~1800-1870).  It stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  New denominations included the Churches of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Evangelical Christian Church in Canada.

It expressed an Arminian theology, by which every person could be saved through revivals, and the desire to restore a purer form of Christianity. To the early 19th-century immigrants America seems to be a perfect place to recover a pure, uncorrupted and original Christianity.  They saw the tradition-bound European churches to be out of place in the new country.

The Second Awakening also influenced the Restoration Movement led by Thomas and Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone.

Third Awakening
The Third Awakening was a period of religious activism in American history from the late 1850s to the early 1900s. It affected pietistic Protestant denominations and had a strong sense of social activism. It preached postmillennial theology that the Second Coming of Christ would come after mankind had reformed the entire earth. A major component was the Social Gospel Movement, which applied Christianity to social issues (ie, Jane Addams’s Hull House, Chicago). New groupings emerged, such as the Holiness and Nazarene movements, and Christian Science, introduced by Mary Baker Eddy, which gained a national following.  The Salvation Army denomination began in 1880 whose mission was to assist the poor.