What Was the First Great Awakening? A Plain-English Guide for Homeschool Families

The First Great Awakening was a wave of religious revival that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Led by preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, it filled churches, drew thousands to open-air meetings, and left a mark on American life that still shows up today, in how we worship, how we think about authority, and even how we understand what it means to be American.

If you are teaching colonial history at home, this is one of those topics that looks small on the syllabus and turns out to explain a great deal. Here is what it was, why it mattered, and how to teach it in a way that sticks.

A free market of faith

To understand the Awakening, start with what made religion in the colonies different from religion in England.

The Church of England was formal, orderly, and controlled from the top down. The colonies were the opposite. Religion here was varied, unregulated, and enthusiastic. Denominations split apart, formed new sects, and split again, partly because of the Puritan emphasis on reading the Bible for yourself, and partly because colonial churches governed themselves.

There is a simple truth underneath all of it: in America, if you did not like a church, you could find another one. That freedom to choose, what we might now call a free market of ideas in religion, made colonial faith impossible to control from any central authority. Baptist ministers needed no formal training or divinity degree to preach. They considered themselves called by God to the pulpit, and so did the early Methodists and many others. Preaching became less about polished written lectures and more about plain, direct, down-home talk. Traveling preachers roamed New England, western Pennsylvania, and the frontier, spreading the word to anyone who would gather.

Into that landscape came the revival.

Jonathan Edwards and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

The first name to know is Jonathan Edwards. Born in Connecticut in 1703, a third-generation Puritan, Edwards was a brilliant and deep-thinking theologian. He graduated from Yale in 1720 (worth remembering that in this era every college in the colonies was founded by a religious denomination), and he paired a careful, rational defense of biblical doctrine with a teaching style his congregation found gripping.

Edwards gave American Christianity one of its most enduring images. His most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," delivered in 1741, is the classic example of what came to be called a fire-and-brimstone sermon. That phrase itself is an American invention; you will not find it in European religious circles. The idea was to preach people under conviction, to describe hell so vividly that a listener would recoil and turn toward salvation. In the sermon, Edwards told his listeners that God held them over the pit of hell much as someone might hold a spider or a loathsome insect over a flame. Edwards himself called the approach "salutary terror."

George Whitefield, the preacher as showman

If Edwards brought the intellect, George Whitefield brought the theater.

Whitefield was an English Methodist who arrived on American shores in 1741, by which point American ministers had already prepared the ground. He was as much a showman as a preacher. He acted out biblical stories on stage, playing each of the major parts himself. His impersonation of Satan and his descriptions of the horrors of hell genuinely frightened his audiences, and they gave people a great deal to think about.

As the revival spread up and down the Eastern seaboard, church attendance soared. Edwards, Whitefield, and others held open-air camp meetings (another American term) where thousands gathered to hear the call to accept the Lord and turn from sin. Throughout the Connecticut River Valley, people flocked to what was called the "new light" Christianity, camping in the open air and enjoying the fellowship of other believers. It was the first great surge of religious enthusiasm since the original Puritan migration a century before.

The climax of any Edwards or Whitefield sermon was salvation itself. People came forward in tears, confessing their sins and swearing to begin life anew. Out of the old Calvinist tradition of saving grace came something newer and distinctly American: a public, emotional, almost theatrical outpouring of faith.

The detail that makes it stick: Franklin and Whitefield

Here is the story to tell your students, because it captures the whole strange, very American character of the Awakening.

George Whitefield's great friend and financial backer was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a Deist, not an evangelical, and probably the richest man in North America at the time. He did not share Whitefield's theology at all. But he supported him anyway, both directly and by printing Whitefield's sermons in his newspaper, which carried the revival far beyond the reach of any single preacher's voice.

Think about that. The most famous skeptic in the colonies helped spread the most famous revival in the colonies, because he liked and respected the man. That is the free market of ideas at work, and it is the kind of detail that makes history feel real to a teenager.

Why the First Great Awakening still matters

More than anything, the Awakening changed the character of American faith itself. Religion shifted from something institutional and impersonal, handed down through dogma and formal authority, to something individual and emotional, felt personally and understood as the direct work of the Holy Spirit in a believer's life. That shift, from the church as an institution you belonged to toward faith as a personal experience you lived, is the Awakening's deepest legacy, and it still shapes how millions of Americans worship today.

The revival faded by the late 1740s. Even Edwards fell out of favor and withdrew to a small congregation of pioneers and Native Americans in western Massachusetts. But the First Great Awakening left a legacy that outlasted it by centuries.

It scattered and decentralized church authority even further. It gave rise to new Protestant movements: Baptists, Methodists, and new-light Presbyterians. It elevated the role of the independent traveling preacher. Clergy became less academic and more practical; saving souls mattered more than defending fine points of doctrine, and formal theological training became optional.

And it carried a political charge. All of this fed the deep anti-authoritarian streak already running through colonial America. A faith that came up from the people rather than down from a bishop trained colonists to resist top-down control, in the pulpit and, before long, in politics too. The practice of publicly coming forward to profess faith, made famous much later by preachers like Billy Graham, traces back to these early revivalists, who believed a private decision deserved a public act of courage.

The Awakening also planted a seed. It foreshadowed the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, and that later revival gave birth to the abolitionist movement, as its believers came to count slavery among the gravest of sins.

How to teach the First Great Awakening at home

Start with the why, not the what. Do not open with dates and names. Open with the human situation: colonists spread across a vast land, free to choose their own churches, hungry for something that felt alive. Then let Edwards and Whitefield walk onto that stage.

A few ways to make it land:

Read a short passage from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" out loud. Even a few lines give students the flavor of what an eighteenth-century listener actually heard, and it opens a good discussion about persuasion, fear, and faith.

Use the Franklin and Whitefield friendship to spark a conversation. Why would a Deist fund a revival preacher? What does that say about the colonies?

Connect it forward. Have students trace the line from the First Great Awakening to the Revolution's anti-authoritarian spirit, and then to the Second Great Awakening and abolition. The Awakening is not an isolated event; it is a link in a chain.

In our American History course, we cover the First Great Awakening as part of the colonial era, with video lessons that put the people and the moment in context, plus a teacher guide, student guide, and tests so you are not building the lesson from scratch. If you want a colonial history unit that treats faith as a serious force in the American story rather than a footnote, that is exactly how the course is built.

Wild World of History offers full homeschool history curricula taught by Professor Larry Schweikart, a tenured professor who taught at the University of Dayton for more than 30 years. Explore the American History course and more at wildworldofhistory.com.