The Great Awakening!!!

During the !8th century, religious excitement went down hill from the time the Pilgrims came. Many people needed something new to excite them about religion, they needed a revival. This religious revival was known as the Great Awakening.

When Pilgrims first came over they were very bound to their religion, but as time wore on more and more people started to get less interested in going to services and listening to sermons for hours. The people wanted to be doing something fun and active like making money. As less and less showed up for service, churches had to do anything in their power to get these people to be just as excited as their ancestors were. Churches decided to loosen the "qualifications" people had to have to become a member. But as the church thought about it, they would be losing their spiritualism towards the church itself.

The Great Awakening helped people come back to church, and it started with Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was a very powerful preacher, most of his sermons were about hell and how you could be sent to damnation, but you could "save" yourself by your good works. The people listening to him were now "God-fearing" people. After Edwards George Whitefield came along. Whitefield went through the colonies telling people about how if we are helpless people we need God's divine mercy. People soon used church as a place of fun and entertainment (because there was nothing else to do).


When religion started to grow more part of society again, people for some reason started to think about the separation of church and state; even though their ancestral laws were based on religious morals. When the Great Awakening came around, religion pretty much was just about emotion, nothing else. I bet the converts started to get a little to attached to religion and did not want to share it. So, people liked the idea of church and state being separate because they did not want to share their personal religious emotions. All this shows how the Great Awakening began the idea of the separation of church and state.