Two broad sets of ideas largely determined worldview in 18^th century America prior to the American Revolution.  While it is true that the Enlightenment more thoroughly influenced the Colonial elite, and the Great Awakening was most influential amongst common people, both found their nexus in America.  Both influenced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Early Republican period.  The phenomenon was not inevitable, since the two sets of ideas were often antagonistic in Europe—particularly during the French Revolution.  In America, piety and political philosophy mixed, Reason and Revelation married. 

The Enlightenment was centered in Europe but came to the Colonies in books and from the travel of wealthy and influential citizens.  It began in the 1690s but had its heyday between 1720 and 1780.  Locke, Newton and Blackstone figured prominently in England; Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland; Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Descartes in France; and Kant in Germany.  Clearly all these folks in the same room would not produce agreement on much.  Nevertheless, the Enlightenment held to a central tenet: the power of human reason to understand laws of nature, society, government, etc., and to direct progress in those areas.  New assumptions dawned upon man’s consciousness: that man had the ability to control his environment; that man possessed immense rational faculty or cognitive ability; that objective Truth existed and that man could approach, if not actually know it completely.  The Enlightenment naturally propelled men towards invention and the scientific method.  Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were leading proponents of Enlightenment ideas and lifestyle in the Colonies and after Independence. 

The Great Awakening was centered in America.  Indeed, except for the involvement by British evangels in the Colonies, the Great Awakening was an American phenomenon—arguably the first to provide some common experience amongst all Colonies.  It began in the 1720s and peaked between 1740 and 1775.  The Great Awakening affected most church denominations and helped knit the Eastern seaboard together socially.  It witnessed the resurgence of old school Calvinism, so it had doctrinal affinity to earlier Puritanism.  But what distinguished the Great Awakening were its new technique of revivalism, and its emphasis on itinerant preaching to backcountry areas and slave communities.  This is what brought Christianity to the slaves and to backwoods pioneers.  This is what challenged the staid Anglicanism of Virginia and gave rise to the Baptists.  Indeed, the challenge posed to established churches by new preachers had the positive effect of reinvigorating faith in old churches too.

When preachers like George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards came to town or to the countryside, a 20-mile radius might be cleared completely of people.  By word of mouth, the news spread and farmers dropped their implements and packed their families into wagons to go hear the Gospel!  Thousands heard the Word for the first time; or else, they let it penetrate their hearts fully.  America steeled its character, a character of righteousness for the Revolution to come.  Although Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale had been founded by Congregationalists before the Great Awakening, Old and “New Lights” of New England, as well as Old and “New Sides” of the Middle Colonies, proceeded to found Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769).  They did it to produce clergy, as well as learned men of faith and faithful men of learning. 

The Enlightenment and Great Awakening reinforced each other in America.  The cooperation between them produced some of America’s greatest institutions of higher learning.  That’s why it is so unfortunate that many universities today incline towards a studied hostility to religion and to the religious impulse.  In our Founders’ day, we were likely to conclude that man’s ability to control his environment (and to properly steward it) depended on his ability to discover and to understand God’s laws—His laws of physics and math and history, as much as His law of Love.  Truth and the Laws of Nature and God’s Law all came together.  Men might well reason, and reason well.  But God sets the standards we seek and defines Reason “out of the amplitude of His pure affection.”

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he serves as State Director of the Republican Freedom Coalition (RFC).  This article is from his newly released book, Horse Sense for the New Millennium  available on-line at www.WesRiddle.net and from fine bookstores everywhere.  Email: Wes@WesRiddle.com.