What is the Great Awakening? Why did that happen?
As time went by, the vision of the “city on the hill,” that sort of shiny apocalyptic hope, fades, as it often does, and we see New England life falling into a kind of more conventional mode of farming and commercial activity, with periodic surges of religious energy trying to recover it. One such surge came in the 1730s and 40s and is called the Great Awakening. It was an outburst of religious revivalism, an attempt to recover authentic spiritual experience in the midst of the kind of routines of life. And it’s linked, I think, to that apocalyptic vision that had come at the very beginning of the Puritan settlements in New England. The first generation of Puritans are arriving, in effect, with a kind of red hot conviction that the end times may be near. It very much informs the first generation. The second generation comes. We’re still here. And history is still moving on. The second generation (and these are people like Increase Mather and Cotton Mather) are worried about the declens
