Talk:First Great Awakening/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive of discussions for all discussions from September 2004 through May 2013. Note: discusssions may be refactored.

Sense?

SO, what is this all about? So far it doesn't make on cents worth of cents! User:66.82.9.36 15:47, 20 September 2004

Cause

It would be nice if this article would go into more detail about the causes of the First Great Awakening. Does anyone know if John Edward's speeches were the actual cause of the First Great Awakening, or were they just markers for its beginning? User:65.11.67.201 19:28, 25 October 2004

More importantly - is the claim that JE's most notable sermon was the "Prisoner of Zelda" with a link to the game.....is anybody watching this site? User:68.97.54.228 22:48, 29 August 2006

Mark Noll (A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada) claims that the first vestiges appear just prior to 1737 as a result of a series of sermons from Edwards on justification. The evidence for this is Edwards own treatise, "A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work..." pub. in 1737.

Whitfield goes on his first preaching tour in 1740; he, more than Edwards, popularizes the FGA.

--jrcagle 17:46, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

comments

1) The article seems to imply that the issue at stake in the FGA was heart-vs.-head. That's not really accurate. If you look at Edwards' writings (e.g., http://www.ccel.org/e/edwards/affections/religious_affections.html), the controversy surrounding the FGA had to do with outward expressions of religious belief: Are testimonies, ecstatic utterances, etc. a proof of genuine religion (New Lights) or a proof of *lack* of genuine religion (Old Lights)? This is important for accuracy reasons AND for NPOV reasons. Many want to argue that the FGA was a rebellion against rational thought ... but Edwards was nothing if not well-reasoned.

2) In a similar vein, the "Sinners in the Hands..." reference needs to be highly qualified. First, it was highly atypical of Edwards' sermons in its negative tone. Second, it came after the FGA was underway (1741). Thus, the connection with "reawakening the fear of God" in the article is misplaced -- Edwards was seeking to reawaken a love for Christ (which is the tenor of most of his sermons).

3) The article needs a timeline of events.

4) I've added a link to the Religious Affections article and to Whitfield's sermons.

--jrcagle 17:13, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Pilgrims

What we mean to say is Puritans, right? 128.186.118.106 15:18, 18 October 2005

The Puritans and Pilgrims are two seperate groups. User:68.37.229.165 16:45, 28 October 2006

Powerful speaker?

I've read that Jonathan Edwards had a high-pitched voice and read all his sermons from a candlelight in an extremely non-flamboyant manner. Whatever "power" there was i his sermons must not have been from his eloquence or rethoric. Whitefield on the other hand was a very powerful speaker, but many times he had to repeat himself in three directions just to be heard by the great crowds, to whom he preached outdoors. Comments?--itpastorn 10:32, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I'd say if people fainted and get into convulsions at his sermons then, regardless of his manner of speaking, you must admit the whole act to be 'powerful'? Jasiok 12:48, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

As I understand it, Edwards was not a powerful speaker at all--he talked in a quiet, monotone voice. It was only his speeches themselves that were powerful. Whitefield, on the other hand, was the eloquent preacher. --70.134.62.42 02:48, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Our opinions here, as editors, is largely irrelevant. "powerful speaker" is a subjective phrase. Was he considered powerful by his contemporaries or by significant scholars after the fact? These are the questions that mater. --Lord Matt (talk) 15:32, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Edwards was considered a very powerful speaker by any account that you read about him. It had nothing to do with his style - which would not be advocated by many, if any, American preachers today. However, his impact was obvious both in his day and in any decent Church History book you pick up. Marcus Constantine (talk) 23:09, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Deletion of generations table

Why is Rjensen deleting the Generations table? It is relevant to the generations of the U.S. and those born during that time period. If you cannot give me a better reason as to why it shouldn't be included then I believe it should be added. Piecraft 04:02, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I keep deleting it because it has nothing to do with releigion or the great awakening or anything else. It's a newspaper publicity stunt that has not won acceptance by historians, and does not belong anywhere in Wiki. There is in fact a large serious literature on "generations" and this tavle does not grapple with the serious issues involved. Furthermore no biographer or historian has found it in the least bit useful for historical topics like this one. Rjensen 04:54, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

You are either ignorant or foolish, please refer to Awakening Generation which was named after the ERA of The First Great Awakening. And sorry to burst your bubble but yes these awakenings do in fact have a lot to do with American history and the generations that presided within them. Your belief that "historians reject this notion of generations" is purely speculation and has no factual relevance or sources. These articles are not according to your perspective but a general NPOV reference for the reader, and these tables help the reader identitfy these time-periods and the geenrations prevalent of the historical improtance that each initiated. Piecraft 20:56, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

No historians has acknowledged any value to this "generations" scheme designed by pop writers who have no tyraining in history or religion. This article is about religion and I recommend Piecraft cite actual religious studies before claiming verifiable information about the Great awakenings. Rjensen 23:35, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

By the way: Strauss and Howe are promoting their generations model as part of their commercial business. see [[1]] They help people predict the future--a worthy endeavor but NOT Wikipedia's mission which is to present reliable noncommercial verifiable information. Rjensen 23:43, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Seconding this deletion and enacting it again. Strauss and Howe have NO standing among US Historians. They primarily are promoting their own consulting firm. Have fun with Strauss and Howe, but please don't litter wikipedia with it. --Dylanfly 16:56, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

A Tale of Two Cities???

I don't think it really is a sermon by Jonathan Edwards - could someone please check? Maybe it was meant to be "The City upon a Hill", but that is not his either, and from a different epoch altogether. Jasiok 12:46, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Wow, that was quick - a few minutes after this post someone has removed the false reference - that is really amazing! Jasiok 12:54, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Similairities/differences between the great awakening and the Elightenment

yeah I was wondering where I could go to find the sim/diff between the great awakening and the elightenment User:70.62.46.218 09:21, 18 September 2006

Formatting problem?

Hi, just a quick note to ask if anyone else has a problem with this specific article page, with regards to the fact that a number of linked works, using the double-square-bracket wiki linking seem to be lacking the space between the link work and the following word. Am I going insane? Is anyone else seeing that?

It seems to only apply to that specific page (well, the article's page, not this page), and it seems to consistant across browers and machines, for me. I can edit the page and "fix" it, but only by adding extraneous spaces in weird places, so I thought I'd mention it here first. Dragonbeast 20:30, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

yes, this whole page is very very screwed up. we should do something about it. RiseRobotRise 03:37, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree we have a format problem--how did that happen? Rjensen 04:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I think I found the problem. It's introduced by the {Great awakenings} template. I fixed it by moving down the template in the code, but that's just a kludge. It doesn't affect where the infobox is on the page, because that was down and messed up to begin with. I also reversed the comma hotfix, which was.. innovative :) Dragonbeast 06:50, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem with the template has been fixed.  ∴ Therefore  talk   17:33, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

American Revolution

Could someone expand the part about the American Revolution? Surely, it's important. Plus, the blurb about the Revolution reads like a loose string as is. It needs to be fleshed out, or excised. Jack 04:04, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Edwards / Whitefield

This article imples that Edwards was somehow the magical creator of the Great Awakening. You need to realize that small revivals were a common occurance in 18th century New England - Edwards presided over his own, as did his father. The Great Awakening didn't pick up steam until Whitefield toured - it was THIS that made the GA important. It made revivalism intercolonial/international, and it wasn't until Whitefield toured that the cleavage between New Lights and Old Lights even appeared. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.180.242.96 (talk) 04:30, 21 April 2007 (UTC).

Pilgrims

Pilgrims and Puritans were both Calvinists and congregationalists. Their difference was how they viewed their place in religion - as separatists (former) or reformers (latter). User:128.180.242.96 00:31, 21 April 2007

POV?

I'm just a wandering lurker here, but there seems to be a POV issue in the article. It describes its subject in fairly glowing terms, most egregiously in sentences like "Participants became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner." Aside from the obvious value judgements here, it implies things about the religion of the era and of the nature of intellectual discourse that I somehow suspect are drawn from highly selective impressions. It seems to me that such sentences ought to be prefixed by "Supporters of the movement felt that...." followed by another sentence to the effect that "Critics, however, felt....." Etc and so forth. User:69.151.153.141 01:11, 31 May 2007

Yes, this reads in a very biased way. Emotionalism is good, while others are "passive." "breathed life into" ... as if things had been dead before. The very name "AWAKENING" implies that prior time was ASLEEP or that secularism is passive, stale, unconscious. As an American who firmly believes in both God and the separation of church and state, I bitterly resent this tone. The idea of an "awakening" lacks scholarly substance, and has become the domain of the Christian right-wing. I think the POV of this thing needs to be up front. --Dylanfly 16:44, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

That's not the only issue. The passage that starts "This brief period of revivalism brought Christianity to the slave..." differs vastly in tone and seems to be aimed only at pointing out the evils of "white man". I strongly dispute the neutrality of that section. --Lord Matt (talk) 15:26, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

The current bit on "The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution", aside from some repetitiveness and contradictions (just what did Franklin believe?), seems to make some errors about who Enlightenment thinkers were and what they thought. The major contradiction seems to be an implication that due to the First Awakening the American Revolution *rejected* the hierarchy model, when in fact they implemented it through the limitation of voting rights and the Electoral College. Akiracee (talk) 19:44, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Problems with "Debate" section.

Certainly there needs to be a "Debate" section on this article, but I have radically altered the one that was there. First, the term "debate" suggests that there are at least two points of view, but the section before amendment flatly stated that the debate had been settled—that scholars no longer support the idea of a "Great Awakening." The substantiation for this? A footnote to Frank Lambert. With all due props to Dr. Lambert, he does not speak for all scholars. I have rewritten the section to reflect a more neutral point of view, I hope.

Before editing, the section listed in opposition to Frank Lambert solely President George W. Bush—ostensibly a debate between rational scholars like Frank Lambert on one side and politicians or blinded religious zealots on the other. IMHO, the inclusion of President Bush introduces more heat than light into the discussion. I have removed that material.

I have tried to strengthen the footnotes in this section as well. revbart 14:21, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Your modifications really enhance the quality of this article, Revbart! A job well done. Still, I think we're dealing with, as Lambert shows, an idea promoted first and foremost by evangelical preachers in the 18th century. I.e., they wanted to promote the idea of a massive change, a revolution, a Rubicon crossed: the sleeping nation awakes! And lo! It "awakens" to our own version of Christianity, how 'bout that? It's a nice sales pitch for a certain kind of X-tian thought, but I think it's crucial to highlight that these preachers had a vested interest in exaggerating their own importance and exaggerating the scope of the "awakening." Indeed, the very word "awakening" casts prior times into a secular or inadequately religious slumber. So we have to be careful not to broadcast this narrow and biased view as if it were historical fact. Finally, when extremists like George W. Bush embrace the term, we can see its ideological content more clearly: this is not a neutral historical descriptor, but an evangelical point of view. So let's work to keep the biased qualities inherent in "awakenings" front and center. --Dylanfly 16:16, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

As a preacher myself (as well as an historian), I can assure you that all preachers anywhere have "a vested interest in exaggerating their own importance and exaggerating the scope of [their ministerial endeavors]." ;-) Perhaps it would resolve the issue to speak of an "evangelical awakening"? One would face the problem of defining "evangelical" (which meant something different then than it means today), but at least it would, without abandoning widespread parlance, specify precisely what was awakening (viz., an evangelical sort of Christianity).revbart 22:30, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Strange comment

In the last paragraph of the section on George Whitefield, there is the sentence

I am stupid because I only do Copy Paste

. After reading this article, I came across another article in which part of the text indeed reminded me a lot of the section in question, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find it again. Via text search, I found that the phrase

did not subscribe to Whitefield’s theology, but he admired Whitefield for exhorting people to worship God through good works

immediately after that comment really appears in the section "Virtue, religion, and personal beliefs" in the article on Benjamin Franklin.

80.145.13.109 (talk) 17:54, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Claimed geographic scope of event

There is no significant evidence (beyond a brief mention cited to Ahlstrom) presented here that this event took place in non-English-speaking countries. This means the asserted scope of the event (the Atlantic World) is incorrect unless evidence is presented that it also had effects in "Atlantic" places like (Catholic) Spain, France, Portugal, and (Protestant) the Netherlands. Ahlstrom seems to suggest other parts of Protestant Europe experienced some of this revival (giving it an "international" scope), but that is not necessarily "Atlantic", and it's not documented here. I've accordingly reduced the scope described to reflect this. Magic♪piano 13:16, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

The Great Awakenings - an American affair?

I think it should be made clear in articles about the First and Second Great Awakenings that these are American terms for North American phenomena. I have never come across them in the writings of European historians dealing with Europe. No doubt American scholars can find parallels between what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic in terms of evangelical revivals, but there's a danger here of rewriting European history by using American terminology that had no currency in Europe until the advent of Wikipedia! I lack specialist knowledge but am inclined to agree with the judgement that the terms are "vague and exaggerated", certainly as far as Europe is concerned. Kim Traynor 11:02, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. There is an general lack of citation in the article too. Not one reference in the first three paragraphs! Panama1958 (talk) 22:04, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Whitefield area needs some editing

I'm not qualified to comment on content, but the Whitefield text is awkward and needs revision: the fourth sentence is a better-written restatement of the first, and the use of "probably" in the first sentence is inauthoritative. Halfway through, the paragraph shifts to talk about Edwards instead of Whitefield. The paragraph could also use a reference to the assertions of Whitefield's centrality. 207.231.93.109 (talk) 17:03, 24 April 2012 (UTC)