Great Awakening religious revival spreads ideas of equality

In 1734, Jonathan Edwards began a revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, that became one of the earliest flashpoints of the First Great Awakening in British America. On July 8, 1741, Edwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" at Enfield, Connecticut, and George Whitefield drew enormous outdoor crowds during his colonial tour of 1739 to 1741 from Georgia to New England. These revivals were not a single meeting but a connected wave of Protestant preaching, mass response, and reported conversions that swept the colonies chiefly between 1734 and 1745.

The First Great Awakening intensified a religious conflict between New Light ministers who welcomed emotional conversion and Old Light clergy who distrusted revival enthusiasm. Congregations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas argued over who possessed proper ministerial authority and whether learned churches or dramatic itinerant preaching better served the gospel. The revival also weakened older social deference inside many churches because Whitefield, Edwards, and other revival leaders insisted that inward conversion mattered more than inherited status or formal membership.

The revival helped produce the College of New Jersey in 1746, later Princeton University, because New Light Presbyterians wanted an institution to train ministers shaped by revival religion. The same revival culture later contributed to the chartering of Dartmouth College in 1769, extending the educational and evangelical consequences of the First Great Awakening well beyond the 1740s.