The Great Awakenings — revival, and what it changed

The Reformation recovered the gospel as doctrine. Two centuries later, large parts of the Protestant world held that doctrine correctly and were dead. The Awakenings are what happened next.

The state of things

By 1700 Protestant Europe had confessions, catechisms and state churches. It also had, in many places, a clergy appointed for political reasons, congregations who attended because attendance was compulsory, and no expectation that anything would happen.

Two reactions came out of that. In Germany, Philipp Jakob Spener published Pia Desideria in 1675 — small groups meeting to read Scripture, lay participation, ministry training reformed around godliness as well as learning. This is Pietism, and its child was Herrnhut, the Moravian community on Zinzendorf's estate that in 1727 began a round-the-clock prayer meeting which ran for a century and sent out missionaries before any Protestant body had a missionary society.

In the English-speaking world the reaction took the form of preaching.

Aldersgate and the fields

John Wesley was an ordained Church of England clergyman, an Oxford tutor, the leader of a Holy Club of disciplined students — and, by his own account, not a Christian. He had gone as a missionary to Georgia and come back a failure. On the ship out he had met Moravians who sang through a storm that terrified him, and he could not forget it.

On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street where someone was reading Luther's preface to Romans aloud, he wrote:

I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.— John Wesley, journal, 24 May 1738

George Whitefield, from the same Oxford circle, was already preaching, and already being shut out of pulpits for saying that respectable churchgoers needed to be born again. In 1739 he went to the colliers of Kingswood, who did not attend church, and preached in a field. Thousands came. He asked Wesley to take it over; Wesley, who found the irregularity distasteful, went, and then spent fifty years riding perhaps 250,000 miles doing it.

Edwards, and the test of it

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards — the most formidable mind the American church has produced — had watched a local awakening begin in 1734. His Faithful Narrative of it was read across the Atlantic and helped connect the movements into one.

Edwards is most useful now for what he did next. When the awakening produced fainting, crying out, trembling and visions, and when critics said the whole thing was hysteria and defenders said the intensity proved it was God, Edwards refused both. In The Religious Affections he argued that the intensity proves nothing either way. Real religious affection shows itself in a changed appetite: a love for God for who he is rather than for what he gives, humility, tenderness toward others, and a life that continues to change afterwards.

The second wave, and the machine

The Second Great Awakening ran from around 1795 into the 1840s, and it was bigger, rougher and more American. At Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, perhaps twenty thousand people gathered for a camp meeting lasting days. Frontier Methodism and the Baptists grew enormously; the circuit rider became an institution.

Then came Charles Finney, a lawyer turned evangelist, who said the quiet part out loud. A revival, he wrote, "is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means." He developed those means: meetings held night after night until something broke, the "anxious bench" at the front for those under conviction, the direct call for a decision now.

The results were real and the inheritance is double-edged. Almost every evangelical practice around how a service ends comes from Finney. So does the assumption, which he would have denied, that a sufficiently well-run event produces conversions. Edwards prayed and waited; Finney engineered. The argument between them is still running in every church that wonders whether its Sunday morning is worship or production.

What came out of it

This is the part that answers the charge of mere emotion, and it is remarkable.

Abolition. The Clapham Sect — Wilberforce, Thornton, Macaulay, Hannah More and others, all evangelicals shaped by the revival — committed themselves in 1787 to two objects: the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. The trade fell in 1807, slavery itself in 1833, three days before Wilberforce died. Wesley's last letter, written six days before his death in 1791, urged Wilberforce not to be worn down "by opposition of men and devils" in fighting "that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature."

Literacy. Robert Raikes started Sunday schools in Gloucester in 1780 to teach the children of factory workers to read, since they worked six days a week. Within fifty years they were teaching a large fraction of England's children, and for many of the poor they were the only schooling available.

Bibles. The British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in 1804 after a Welsh girl, Mary Jones, walked twenty-six miles to buy a Bible and found none for sale. The society exists to this day, and its founding logic — that everyone should be able to buy Scripture in their own language, cheaply — drove much of the century's translation work.

Missions. The missionary movement of the next century comes directly out of these awakenings, and has its own article.

Prison reform, factory acts, orphanages. Elizabeth Fry, Shaftesbury, Muller. The list is long.

The reckoning

There is no reading of this that leaves them clean, and the attempt to balance it against their good works misses what is actually interesting about it: the same movement, preaching the same message, produced the people who ended the trade. Wesley saw it. The enslaved converts saw it — and the independent Black churches of America, founded from the 1770s onwards, came out of these revivals and then made the argument their preachers had refused to make.

The gospel they preached was better than the men preaching it. That is not an excuse for them. It is the reason the movement could be corrected from inside.

What revival meant, and did not

In these accounts revival is not an event you schedule. It is a season in which a church that had the truth and had gone cold becomes alive to it again — and the invariable pattern in the sources is that a small number of people prayed for years first, usually without seeing anything.

"O Lord, revive your work in the midst of the years" (Habakkuk 3:2). That is the prayer. It was prayed for a long time before it was answered.