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/* Impact on American Revolution? */ Whitefield
==Impact on American Revolution?==
Historians in recent decades have disagreed sharply over the significance of the "Great Awakening.” In 1982, Jon Butler argued that it was largely the invention of later historians who misjudged the cohesiveness and the extent of the revivals. Joseph A. Conforti built on Butler's argument, suggesting that the first Great Awakening was actually invented by revival promoters during the second Great Awakening of the 1830s.
Whitefield's reconciliation of humility and power contributed much to the creation of democratic thought in the American colonies. The First Great Awakening democratized religion by redressing the balance of power between the minister and the congregation. Rather than listening demurely to preachers, people groaned and roared in enthusiastic emotion; new divinity schools opened to challenge the hegemony of Yale and Harvard; personal revelation became more important than formal education for preachers. Such concepts and habits were a necessary foundation for the American Revolution.<ref> Nancy Ruttenburg, "George Whitefield, Spectacular Conversion, and the Rise of Democratic Personality." ''American Literary History'' 1993 5(3): 429-458. 0896-7148 </ref>
Scholars especially have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the [[American Revolution]], which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) is the most controversial study; it argues that the evangelical Calvinism of the Awakening, not the religious liberalism of its opponents, laid the ideological foundation of the American Revolution.<ref> Heimert's work was attacked by Edmund S. Morgan and Sidney E. Mead, while Patricia U. Bonomi, Richard L. Bushman, Rhys Isaac, Gary B. Nash, and Harry S. Stout were more supportive. </ref> Heimert says that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom.
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"It was the marriage of the American elites touched by the Enlightenment with the spirit of the Great Awakening among the masses which enabled the popular enthusiasm thus aroused to be channeled into the political aims of the Revolution-itself soon identified as the coming eschatology event. Neither force could have succeeded without the other. The Revolution could not have taken place without this religious background. "
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==Old Lights and New Lights==
