Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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The Great Awakening
Into this relaxing atmosphere came a great reaction, which has become
known in rather loaded terms as the Great Awakening. Since the Great
Awakening was certainly a peoples' movement, it has been dubbed as necessarily
a progressive force by Marxist and neo-Marxist historians. But it was
nothing of the sort. The Great Awakening was a profoundly reactionary
counterblow to the emergence of a liberal and more rational and cosmopolitan
religious atmosphere. It set itself determinedly against all that was enlightened,
and constituted an attempt to return to the pure Calvinism of the
previous century. This is particularly true of the form taken by the Great
Awakening in New England, where the religious revival had its most
eminent leader.
The founder of the Great Awakening in New England was the Reverend
Jonathan Edwards, minister of the important inland town of Northampton,
Massachusetts. Born in Connecticut, young Edwards, who came from a long
line of Puritan ministers on both his father's side and his mother's, was graduated
from and taught at Yale, the center of Puritan orthodoxy. He then took
up his post at Northampton in 1727. Edwards was horrified to find Northampton
happily filled with a most un-Puritan addiction to "mirth and jollity,"
including the frequenting of taverns. Edwards began to thunder at these
modern corruptions, and moved on to rail at the rising menace of Arminianism
and its "papist" view that salvation was a function of a man's free will
and his consequent good works. What was happening to the good old creed
of their fathers: of the depravity of man, of the predestination of the elect,
of reliance on faith and not on reason? Was the pervasive Calvinist fear of
hellfire and damnation to be replaced by the modern namby-pamby view that
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