The Revival that started Independence

                             

The Great Awakening was a phenomenal religious revival in Colonial America.  Oddly. it started through spiritual poverty.

            Unlike the French and Spanish who directed colonies in a planned format, with an omnipresent state, professional bureaucracy, and little local representation, the Brits had no money to spend. So they let adventurers and businessmen do it.  Colonies were established as charters by investors, or proprietary by important men of means.  Thus England got colonies largely for nothing but that meant colonies had to be self-supporting.  By the 1680s the crown began to wrest back control. 9 of 13 became crown colonies via revoked charters.  That failed. English meanness of appointed governors was matched by colonials demanding local parliaments.  Advisors, picked from the House of Lords never left England. American colonies had written constitutions which Britain never had.  British law only had precedents.  Constitutions inevitably made one think of rights, natural law, and absolutes.  British practicality, abhorred such things--“abstract stuff”. And so gradually common men of the lower houses began to take power in the colonies.  A bad royal proclamation would not stick.  A mob would oppose it, whose leaders were likely popular officials of the local government.

            Colonial government was kept very, very limited. Psalm 146:3 says “Trust not in princes.” Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” (i.e., some things don’t belong to Caesar.)  It was hard to collect from backwoodsmen. American colonies were the least taxed perhaps in all history.  A few colonies had no tax at all until 1760, raising all funds by criminal fines and a few small fees.  No taxes meant people had 100% disposable income.  The colonial economy grew by 500% from 1700 to 1750 as population doubled every generation. This 4% growth rate might seem logical.  After all it was free land with many resources.  But it was also extremely remote and 4000 miles to a cash market.  People were sparse and skilled craftsmen far more so. Frontiers were dangerous. These sorts of conditions are why places like New Zealand never had rapid growth. With the good economy, many grew rich and secular. A German immigrant remarked, “Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans and hell for preachers.” America was spiritually impoverished.  But it was among Penn’s German refugees from the Thirty Years War, who saw nothing but God’s grace at work.  In 1719, a Reformed German pastor Theodore Frelinghuysen, led a series of “revival meetings” in the Raritan valley.  The movement began not in cities, but in the countryside, where it was a rare treat to hear a sermon.  The few pastors were anxious to have the illiterate listeners read the Bible for themselves and so reading programs and Bible [printing] Societies boomed.  William Tennent, a NJ Presbyterian pastor in the 1720s, started travelling to remote areas where he and his son practiced “firey preaching and rip-roaring hymn-singing.” His Log College later moved and became Princeton. Jonathan Edwards of Massachusetts was intrigued by this.  But he de-emphasized preaching the Puritan message of “God chose some, not others” with hellfire sermons.  He added more Gospel to the Law and instructions on how to have a fruitful life.  Finally it was George Whitefield who caused a sensation. He was a Billy Graham-style preacher who went on the first continental tour stopping daily to tent preach two stirring sermons a day.

            The country exploded with faith. In 20 months, 1740-1742, church attendance tripled. In every church there seemed to be town drunks who found a new life of faith or known thieves who paid people back. Bibles abounded in homes.  This same Whitefield reaction happened in Catholic Maryland, Lutheran Delaware and Anglican Virginia.  People read it in the papers and began to say, ‘Look! We are all alike!’  “The United States” was uttered for the first time. America had become a country of religious tolerance where free will, moral purity, personal faith, help thy neighbor, and appreciation of God’s word superseded European wars. John Adams put it, “The Revolution was effected before the War…in the minds and hearts of people; and change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”