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The First Great Awakening, from the 1730s to about 1755, targeted colonists already in church pews, replacing dense Calvinist lectures with preaching that demanded inner conviction from figures such as Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent. The British evangelist George Whitefield, called the Grand Itinerant, arrived in 1738 and in 1739 toured from Philadelphia through New York and the South, preaching without notes to open-field crowds of thousands. The movement split churches into Old Lights and New Lights, weakened state-sponsored churches, encouraged challenges to authority and a free press, and brought large numbers of African Americans to Christianity for the first time. The Second Great Awakening, from about 1790 to 1840, moved to the frontier through camp meetings and centered on western New York’s Burned Over District, unsettled by construction of the Erie Canal. Its reformers took up temperance, abolition and, through female abolitionists, women’s rights.

The Third Great Awakening, from the 1850s to 1930, was organized and institutional, built around the YMCA, the Chautauquas and the social gospel. Dwight L. Moody carried it into the Civil War armies alongside the U.S. Christian Commission, the Sanitary Commission and freedmen’s societies. A disputed Fourth Great Awakening, argued by economist Robert Fogel, began in the late 1960s with the Jesus movement, as mainline Protestant churches declined and conservative denominations such as the Southern Baptists grew and organized politically through direct mail and television.

• Benjamin Franklin, a skeptic, emptied his pockets into the collection after hearing Whitefield preach in Philadelphia.
• A trustee pulled former slave and preacher Absalom Jones off his knees during prayer in a white Philadelphia church.
• Richard Allen, who had faced the same treatment, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
• The term awakening comes from evangelical Christians and implies that the periods between revivals were a kind of sleep.
• In the late 2010s and 2020s promoters of the QAnon conspiracy theory adopted the phrase great awakening for their own beliefs.