The Great Awakening: Evangelical Revival Both Challenges and Reinforces Slavery

The First Great Awakening, sweeping Britain and its American colonies from the 1730s into the 1740s, created profound contradictions around slavery. Evangelical theology's emphasis on direct personal experience of God's grace contained an implicit logic of spiritual equality that made some revivalists critical of slavery. George Whitefield, the era's greatest preacher, drew enslaved and free Black people to his enormous outdoor revivals — and then purchased a plantation in Georgia and owned enslaved people himself, lobbying to legalize slavery in Georgia. Jonathan Edwards, the era's leading theologian, also owned enslaved people. Many enslaved people embraced evangelical Christianity and its emotional, communal worship style — which resonated with African religious traditions — while using its language of freedom and spiritual dignity as a vocabulary of resistance. The Great Awakening seeded what would become the first major American anti-slavery movement while simultaneously providing theological cover for slavery's expansion.