The Great Awakening: Are You Scared? Maybe You Should Be

Fear: the greatest social motivator. You can see it in newspaper headlines, the CNN anchors on T.V., and on the posters of your favorite horror movie. In the United States’ earliest English colonies, a religious revival rocked mid-eighteenth-century America: the Great Awakening. As shown by the Great Awakening, society weaponizes fear as the motor of social movement—from the eighteenth century and through today.

George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, pastors and preachers of Calvinist Christianity, toured eighteenth-century North America to evangelize. Fear was embedded in their sermons. Descriptors like “vengeance...wicked...punishment…[and]wrath” became commonplace, and they evoked strong and intrinsic crowd reactions. As noted by historian James West Davidson, the pastors theatrically “combined moving descriptions of God’s Grace with terrifying portrayals of eternal damnation.” Often, churchgoers wept and repented in the very pews they sat in. “[M]uch as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire,” Edwards once preached, “God’s hand has held you up.” By the late 1730s, churches were filled far past capacity; wherever Whitefield and Edwards went, people clamored to join the Awakened bandwagon.

In contrast to the Enlightenment movement, The Great Awakening functioned on the belief of total and irredeemable damnation; all souls, its believers proclaimed, were destined for hell—it was just a matter of when. In Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), Edwards sermonized that “[everyone is] already under a sentence of condemnation.” With a sense of impending doom, Edwards added that those condemned “are...in this congregation.” Those in attendance might have looked at their neighbor, perhaps wondering if they could be next. In conjunction with fear-provoking language, the Great Awakenings’ belief of imminent damnation was effective. The masses clung to its teachings, and the movement reverberated around America (and as far as Europe). All in all, the Great Awakening went down in history as one of the most influential movements of all time.

In the modern-day, fear is still the media’s strongest tool. Negative headlines, captions, and graphics often attract the most public attention. Online, conspiracy theories accumulate and gain traction. Although in different eras, fear repeats itself throughout history. It’s infiltrating and manipulative, yet it often goes unnoticed. In many ways, it’s our most silent—but strongest—influencer. So, the next time you open the News app on your phone, remember the media functions on fear, but you don’t have to.